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On Broker Exploitation and Violence: From Madalali to Cartel Bosses in the Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps

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It is a poorly kept humanitarian secret that wherever food aid is given, it is also sold, as recipients seek to vary their diets to include culturally desired food, start businesses, or deal with economic shocks. This holds true in Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania, the site of this research. While this article addresses the supply side of the World Food Programme resale system, its main focus is the demand side, providing one of the first in‐depth studies on what happens after the sale. Engaging with the political and development anthropology literature on brokers, the author introduces the intermediaries who make up this system, including low‐level madalali brokers and refugee and Tanzanian ‘bosses’. There is agreement within brokerage research of the moral ‘ambiguity’ or ‘ambivalence’ of these figures, a nebulous quality that is heightened by the seemingly innumerable different types of brokers. This article contends that a Marxian conceptualization of social class, beyond Bourdieu's widely applied social capital theory, is productive in understanding the threat of violence that a small cartel of bosses has set up in collusion with Tanzanian police to maintain the exploitative food aid resale pyramid. Members of this elite class are, in turn, ‘products and producers’ of a structurally violent encampment and aid system.
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On Broker Exploitation and Violence: From Madalali to
Cartel Bosses in the Food Aid Resale Economy of
Tanzanian Refugee Camps
Clayton Boeyink
ABSTRACT
It is a poorly kept humanitarian secret that wherever food aid is given, it
is also sold, as recipients seek to vary their diets to include culturally de-
sired food, start businesses, or deal with economic shocks. This holds true in
Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania, the site of this research. While this art-
icle addresses the supply side of the World Food Programme resale system,
its main focus is the demand side, providing one of the first in-depth studies
on what happens after the sale. Engaging with the political and development
anthropology literature on brokers, the author introduces the intermediaries
who make up this system, including low-level madalali brokers and refugee
and Tanzanian ‘bosses’. There is agreement within brokerage research of
the moral ‘ambiguity’ or ‘ambivalence’ of these figures, a nebulous quality
that is heightened by the seemingly innumerable different types of brokers.
This article contends that a Marxian conceptualization of social class, be-
yond Bourdieu’s widely applied social capital theory, is productive in under-
standing the threat of violence that a small cartel of bosses has set up in
collusion with Tanzanian police to maintain the exploitative food aid resale
pyramid. Members of this elite class are, in turn, ‘products and producers’
of a structurally violent encampment and aid system.
INTRODUCTION
In August 2017, at a food distribution centre in Nyarugusu refugee camp
in north-western Tanzania, I saw a World Food Programme (WFP) field
manager step out of a WFP-branded car, yell and shake his finger at three
I would like first to thank my research assistants; unfortunately, I cannot thank them by name
because of government crackdowns on researchers and the camp space in general (for more on
this, see Boeyink and Falisse, 2021). I would also like to thank the camp resident interlocutors
who openly shared their knowledge of this secretive and unjust food aid system. I am grateful to
the anonymous reviewers and to colleague Kirsten Campbell; their detailed and valuable insights
significantly shifted and improved the arguments of the paper. Thank you to the Leverhulme
Trust Perfect Storm Scholarship for funding this research.
Development and Change 0(0): 1–25. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12697
© 2021 International Institute of Social Studies.
2Clayton Boeyink
Burundian refugee women trading food rations. The women explained that
the officer said, ‘it is illegal to buy and sell aid’, and if continued, ‘they would
take the food away and put them in jail’. A lower-ranking WFP officer later
confirmed that it was illegal and it was the responsibility of Tanzanian police
to control it, but conceded that ‘it is hard to stop people’.
Four years later, in 2021, I was told a story about a Tanzanian from
a neighbouring village who entered the camp seeking brokers, known in
Swahili as madalali,1to whom he could advance cash to collect food aid to
resell outside the camp. This would-be entrant to the resale economy, who
was offering to buy at significantly higher prices, was brought to the atten-
tion of the dalalis financier, a prominent refugee trader known locally as
a ‘boss’. Quickly the police arrived and arrested the Tanzanian man on the
charge of illegally buying and selling food rations.2
Building on the two stories above, this article offers a close look at the
system of food ration resale, long known to be part and parcel of human-
itarian aid.3In Nyarugusu, every resident I asked has sold rations at some
time, and most do it regularly. While I briefly explain the supply side motiv-
ations for selling food aid, the main focus of the article is the demand side
of buyer and seller brokers who redistribute this food across East Africa.
The participation of brokers in exploitation reproduces humanitarian vio-
lence inseparable from encampment (Branch, 2009). This state violence is
instrumentalized by elite traders who use the police as a cudgel to maintain
the highly stratified food aid resale pyramid, which both reflects and evolves
from the agrarian markets surrounding the camps. This bolsters and enriches
the police who are ‘digging aid’ and functioning as military-style occupiers
(Brankamp, 2019).
I begin with a brief background on the strict and violent encampment
milieu in Tanzania, which raises methodological and ethical sensitivities
around precarious ‘invisible’ livelihoods. Next, I preview the anthropology
literature on brokerage, arguing that it is a nebulous concept due to the seem-
ingly boundless forms of brokerage in market societies. I argue that concep-
tualizations of brokerage benefit from a pairing with Marxian class theory to
account for exploitation and violence which sustain elite accumulation. The
article goes on to describe the rationales of sellers on the supply side of the
1. Madalali is the plural form, dalali is singular.
2. Interview, Burundian dalali, Nyarugusu camp, 10 November 2021.
3. When asked their opinions of WFP and of the NGO subcontracted to distribute food aid,
the most common response from my interlocutors in the camp is that they consider them
‘thieves’ or ‘burglars’ who steal their aid. Many people reported that their ration measures
were significantly below what was recorded on the receipts. One informant claimed that
their neighbour was a worker for the NGO and that he always had large WFP-branded sacks
of food at his home. While I am unable to substantiate these claims, it is not uncommon
in displacement settings to find collusion between authorities, implementing partners and
WFP to divert and profit from aid (Jaspars et al., 2020; Pottier, 1996). This is, however,
beyond the scope of this article.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 3
system before examining the logistics and individual stories of madalali and
bosses across the socio-economic spectrum. Close scrutiny of these resale
networks, which is mostly absent from humanitarian and forced migration
literature, reveals the system of police bribes that enables and stratifies the
unequal pyramid structure. The final section synthesizes the study with con-
cluding thoughts on the possibilities of class consciousness and resistance
in Tanzanian camps.
Background
Victor4was the first person who alerted me to the scale of the resale econ-
omy early in my research in 2017. In 2015, he fled to Tanzania with nearly
200,000 other Burundians to escape the political crisis that resulted in
widescale protests, an attempted coup and state-sponsored repression when
Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza overstayed his two-term limit es-
tablished after the Burundian civil war. Victor, like most others, had al-
ready lived as a refugee in Tanzania during the war but struggled to rein-
tegrate upon returning to Burundi without safe access to land or livelihoods
(Falisse and Niyonkuru, 2015; Purdeková, 2017; Schwartz, 2019). Dalia is
a Congolese woman who fled South Kivu province in 1996 due to violence
during the First Congolese War. Unlike Victor, she is wealthy enough to
own a car that she keeps stored outside the camp, but her income and influ-
ence are dwarfed by elite refugee ‘bosses’ such as Baraka and Paul, intro-
duced below. Congolese refugees make up just over half of Nyarugusu’s
population of nearly 140,000 people and have built a strong economy as
a result of living in the camp for more than 20 years. Most Burundians
arrived with very little in Nyarugusu and two other nearby camps, Nduta
and Mtendeli, and had to rebuild their livelihoods from scratch (Boeyink,
2020).
Despite the impressive scale of the camp economy, since the 1990s, Tan-
zania has had one of the most restrictive refugee policies in the world, which
requires refugees to live in camps without rights to movement or employ-
ment outside the camp. The policy of encampment was enacted because
of the convergence of a severe reduction in state capacity resulting from
economic crisis and Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and the mas-
sive displacements of hundreds of thousands of Burundians, Rwandans and
Congolese to Tanzania.5Since the 2015 election of President John Magu-
fuli, assaults on refugee livelihoods have accompanied constant directives
for Burundian refugees to leave. Key moments include the sudden shutdown
of a popular and effective cash transfer programme in August 2017, which
4. All names in this article are pseudonyms to protect the identities of the informants.
5. For more extensive histories of Tanzanian refugee and migration policies since colonialism,
see Brankamp and Daley (2020); Chaulia (2003).
4Clayton Boeyink
was replaced by the current food aid system (Boeyink, 2019); the closure of
vital camp wholesale and retail markets shared by surrounding Tanzanian
communities; and the cancellation of a UN-led transition away from en-
campment policy (Rudolf, 2019). The past two years (2020 and 2021) have
brought a harrowing escalation of terror with even small-scale businesses
inside the camp being destroyed by the police, accompanied by alarming
reports of Burundian refugees being kidnapped, ransomed, starved and tor-
tured in police stations, and illegally repatriated and imprisoned through
cooperation between Tanzanian and Burundian security and intelligence of-
ficers (Boeyink and Falisse, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2020).
In addition to Victor and Dalia, this article also introduces archetypal
actors in the system such as Burundian madalali, Didier and Pascal, two
non-camp residents who cross the borderland to buy and sell aid; Baraka
and Paul, whose wealth and power inside the food aid resale cartel make
them ‘famous’ across the camp; Félicien, a Burundian teacher who defies
the cartel’s control of trade at his own risk under the cover of night; and
Julia and Ernest, two Tanzanian bosses who sit securely at the top of the
pyramid.
Methodology and Ethical Considerations
During an initial seven months of fieldwork beginning in July 2017, I met
Dalia, Victor and Félicien through research based on the financial diar-
ies methodology inspired by the book, Portfolios of the Poor (Collins et al.,
2011). My research assistants (RAs), who were camp residents, recruited
77 Congolese and Burundian households at cash distribution sites, at ran-
domized households sampled from walking different zones, and at the
facilities housing newly arrived refugees. The selection is admittedly some-
what biased, particularly among Congolese, as the Bembe ethnicity (the
same as the lead RA) was overrepresented, leaving Banyamulenge Con-
golese notably absent. While neither entirely random nor statistically rep-
resentative of the camp, the sample covered a wide range of wealth and
income representing socio-economic strata similar to Omata’s (2017) re-
search on stratification in Buduburam camp in Ghana. My RAs and I
met with the households every two weeks to record their sources of in-
come, expenses, debts and movements over the course of a year. Beyond
gathering financial data, these repeat meetings helped us build strong re-
lationships and rapport, which allowed for open conversations about our
interlocutors’ displacement histories, their perspectives on events in the
camp, and sensitive topics such as illicit livelihood activities. Victor and
Dalia introduced us to other madalali and bosses who described their roles
in the system.
From 2017 onwards, we interviewed refugees, Tanzanian host commu-
nity members, humanitarian workers and Tanzanian officials. In 2018, I
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 5
conducted two UN consultancies researching the socio-economic conditions
and agricultural systems in the three camps (Nyarugusu, Nduta and Mten-
deli) and host communities. Between August and October 2019, the RAs
interviewed nine refugee and Tanzanian bosses about their roles and his-
tories in the trade networks, using snowball sampling. In November–
December 2020, we surveyed 35 of the financial diary households about
their ration resale practices and their perceptions of madalali, bosses and
the food aid system as a whole. In total the fieldwork included more than
400 interviews, surveys and focus group discussions with refugees, Tanza-
nian hosts and humanitarian actors, in which aid and livelihoods were often
topics of discussion, feeding into this research.
The nature of the research requires significant ethical sensitivities be-
cause I am exposing a clandestine economy and reporting substantial
levels of bribery and exploitation. In an important article — part of a
special issue — in the Journal of Refugee Studies, Polzer and Hammond
sound a note of caution about researching ‘invisible displacements’: ‘aca-
demics who lift this veil in the name of illuminating “creative livelihood
strategies” or “flexible identities” may inadvertently be alerting powerful
states, the UN, or NGOs to the ways in which their rules are circum-
vented, and thereby reduce the space for life-saving creativity and flexi-
bility in remaining invisible’ (Polzer and Hammond, 2008: 418). As the
authors point out, ‘invisibility is … fundamentally relational; its impacts
depend on the power relations and interests connecting those who see and
those who are to be seen (or not)’ (ibid.: 417). In a more recent edited
volume with a similar focus, Invisibility in African Displacements (Bjar-
nesen and Turner, 2020), Loren Landau recognizes the ethical dilemma
of people’s research being used against their informants. However, he
argues:
Such (in)visibilization weakens scholarship, ironically excluding from the frame the dis-
placed in their full humanity less [sic] their faults be used against them. This book moves
beyond such self-silencing. Its authors situate visibility within an overt recognition of the
politics surrounding displacement and knowledge produced about it. This means at once ac-
knowledging the legal frameworks and their impact on the construction of socio-political
realities, without reifying them or allowing them to structure the narrative. It explicitly rec-
ognizes that the social categories produced by laws and policies are potentially oppressive,
but also offer opportunities. (Landau, 2020: 254)
Taking up this argument, I aim to analyse and critique the exploitative and
violent politics of encampment and food aid. As I contend throughout this
article, those with the most power — the bosses and the police protecting
their cartel — are gaining the most from the system. Their actions cause
people who are unprotected by the cartel — such as Félicien, whose story
we will come to later — to dangerously invisibilize themselves outside of
the camp to earn a profit. This article is uncovering a structurally violent
food system, which causes malnutrition and exacerbates poverty through the
institutional violence wrought by the criminalization and delegitimization of
6Clayton Boeyink
food aid resale. And last, but by no means least, my RAs and interlocutors
were insistent that I should tell of the unjust system.
ON (REFUGEE) BROKERAGE
‘The study of these “brokers” will prove increasingly rewarding, as anthro-
pologists shift their attention from the internal organization of communities
to the manner of their integration into larger systems. For they stand guard
over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the lo-
cal system to the larger whole’ (Wolf, 1956: 1075). This quote by Eric Wolf
comes from the heyday of brokerage research in political anthropology, the
1950s and 1960s. More than 50 years later, Deborah James announced ‘the
return of the broker’, after Marxian structural critiques of global inequal-
ity from the 1970s onward had replaced the focus of Wolf and others on
brokers. James ultimately settles on a dialectic position between a narrow
focus on the individual level of the broker and a recognition that ‘the broker
creates and perpetuates such conditions, and indeed embodies the contra-
dictions which ensue’ (James, 2011: 336). I fully support her call to study
brokers, but add a modification. While brokers are indeed shaped by and
shapers of a given society, the sheer ubiquity and seemingly infinite typolo-
gies of brokers in the world broadly, and in refugee situations particularly, re-
quires a recalibration of brokerage research. I argue that a Marxian approach
can aid in adding specificity to widely varying levels of power amongst
brokers.
The earliest work on brokerage focused on colonial contexts where tax-
ation, labour and resources were extracted from indigenous populations.
Through indirect rule, chiefs acted and benefited as interfaces between the
colonialists and indigenous populations. The common attribute for all types
of brokers is the sense of ‘moral ambiguity’ (James, 2011: 319) or ‘am-
bivalence’ (Bierschenk et al., 2002) between their communities and colonial
powers. According to Bierschenk et al. (2002), the first account of brokerage
in political anthropology was by Gluckman et al. (1949), who analysed the
village chief mediating between kinship and the colonial state. Mahmood
Mamdani (1996) noted the continuity of indirect rule or what he calls the
‘bifurcated state’ long after colonialism, where customary leaders or ‘de-
centralized despots’ retain their power after independence.
Following formal decolonization, anthropologists widened the scope be-
yond chiefs and other political mediators. Bierschenk et al. (2002) note that
strong central states were retreating due to economic crises in the 1970s
and SAPs in the 1980s and 1990s. This reduced the state’s ability to extend
power and administration. Aid previously distributed to the state now passed
through intermediary NGOs and opened the space for ‘development bro-
kers’ who ‘can be found wherever decentralised aid is present’ (Bierschenk
et al., 2002: 8). James’s article focuses on the rapid political and societal
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 7
transformation following apartheid in South Africa, which has spawned new
types of brokers or ‘hustlers’ who creatively channel resources to and from
poor and disenfranchised people through bureaucratically complex land re-
form and redistribution programmes (James, 2011: 319).
With the augmented focus on brokerage beyond the rural chief, the focus
has expanded for what may be considered a development or humanitarian
broker. In the globalized development and humanitarian apparatus, struc-
tures of aid are increasingly devolved, from donor to UN organizations such
as WFP, large NGOs like the International Rescue Committee, and addi-
tional subcontracted national and local organizations and private businesses.
The sheer number of broker types risks theoretical opacity. Refugee studies
literature offers multiple examples. Riva and Hoffstaedter’s (2021) research
on NGOs in US detention centres and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, presents
brokers as ‘helping refugees gain their legal status’ (ibid.: 6). Cindy Horst
partially explores Somali mukhalis in Kenya who profit by assisting people
to attain resettlement to North America or Europe or to attain documents
and cross regional borders (Horst, 2006: 190–94). Vancluysen and Ingelaere
(2020) examine elected, customary and religious ‘cultural brokers’ in Ugan-
dan refugee settlements who resolve disputes in the Uganda–South Sudan
borderlands. A study among Burmese refugee camps in Thailand illumi-
nates refugee ‘power brokers’ who determine refugee status of new arrivals
(Saltsman, 2014). My point here is not to critique what I consider excellent
research, nor to disparage studies of brokers generally, but rather to point
to the dizzying array of actors who can be considered brokers. If brokerage
is to be a productive concept, I argue it needs to be paired with additional
theory to make sense of the variance.
Simon Turner (2006) and Bram Jansen (2018) more thoroughly analyse
the role of middlemen in Tanzanian and Kenyan refugee camps. Turner of-
fers three types of Burundian ‘liminal experts’ in Lukole camp in Tanza-
nia, known in the camp as ‘big men’. They are the elected street or vil-
lage leaders who are the mediators recognized by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); incentive workers employed by hu-
manitarian organizations; and successful businessmen. According to Turner,
elected leaders keep Burundian politics alive in exile despite UNHCR’s at-
tempt to create an apolitical space of exception. NGO employees, known as
‘incentive workers’, are more educated and speak English or French. Finally,
prominent businessmen engage less in camp or Burundian politics and have
little contact with camp authorities or NGOs yet offer a different kind of
authority through independence from the humanitarian apparatus. Engaging
with Turner’s work and building on Dorothea Hilhorst’s (2003) conceptu-
alization of ‘interface experts’, Jansen creates a typology of brokers who
possess ‘campital’, which is a combination of status (such as elites, elders,
traditional, political and religious leaders), financial wealth (through busi-
nesses or remittances), and the characteristic of being ‘campwise’ — which
is similar to Turner’s understanding of liminal experts who skilfully and
8Clayton Boeyink
creatively manage the humanitarian system (Jansen, 2018: 114–15). These
brokers find interstitial spaces where they may have limited influence with
humanitarians, but ‘their power in their own communities is considerable’
(ibid.: 69–70).
Turner (2006: 769) recognizes that protracted displacement erodes previ-
ous markers of status, creating new hierarchies of class. Moreover, implicit
in Jansen’s clever campital formation is a Bourdieusian understanding of
social capital, which reproduces social class. However, neither scholar
engages with the tomes of class theory; their definition and theory of
class is assumed. Zooming out more broadly, where class is used in forced
migration literature, Bourdieu’s social class theory is the go-to option for
explaining socio-economic stratification (Omata, 2017; Van Hear, 2004).
Mostly absent from these understandings of brokerage, class and inequality
in camps is an analysis of the role of exploitation, which is fundamental
to Marxian conceptualizations of class (Boeyink and Falisse, forthcom-
ing). While Karl Marx’s work does not neatly apply to Africa generally
(Kroeker et al., 2018), his work has been constantly debated and adapted.
His understanding of ‘primitive accumulation’ or violent dispossession
through feudalism or slavery as a precursor to capitalist development is
an important example (Marx, 1867/1990). David Harvey, in conversation
with Rosa Luxemburg, argues that violent or ‘predatory’ accumulation
never fully ended, but is in dialectic relationship with the reproduction and
expansion of global capital. This process, which he famously terms ‘accu-
mulation by dispossession’, is often characterized by finance capital and
credit backed by state violence. Another influential neo-Marxist, Erik Olin
Wright, expands Marx’s binary views on the proletariat and bourgeoisie to
point out that certain groups can be both exploiter and exploited (Wright,
1985), which is directly applicable to the intermediary role of brokers. The
work above offers macro histories in the longue durée;however,asEric
Wolf — an innovator in the anthropology of brokerage — argues: ‘used as
discovery procedures, and not as fixed assemblies of postulates, [Marxian
approaches] direct attention to the forces that generate the social fields in
which people engage one another’ (Wolf, 2001: 61).
My focus here is to offer an empirical study of encampment and human-
itarian aid. Admittedly, I barely scratch the surface of Marxian literature;
however, I posit that the focus of Marx and others on class exploitation
is productive in understanding the gulf in power between a dalali broker
like Victor, struggling to find a viable livelihood, and the elite class of the
refugee cartel. Those in a ‘middle class’ like Félicien are trying to circum-
vent the cartel’s control but their position is precarious. A view of class
exploitation and violence could be applied to displacement intermediaries
generally to further the brokerage discussion. In the following section, I
explore the supply side of the food aid system, which creates the impera-
tive for ration recipients to sell at a loss, which consolidates the wealth of
the elite.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 9
‘AGENTIVE CONSUMPTION’
It has long been known that food aid in refugee and humanitarian settings
gets sold back into local and regional economies. Nearly 30 years ago, K.B.
Wilson acknowledged that food rations were insufficient for refugee diets
and that they sold rations to vary their diets, obtain other goods, or start
businesses (Wilson, 1992). In Tanzania, Johan Pottier noted many reasons
for Rwandan refugees to sell their rations including the lack of cultural ap-
propriateness of the food, the high costs of food preparation and adverse
health effects. In the camps, rural Rwandans preferred root crops such as
cassava to WFP-distributed maize, which many claimed caused diarrhoea
and other health issues (Pottier, 1996: 327–30). Along these lines, evidence
was given that selling WFP food by refugees was a sign of distress rather
than surplus (Reed and Habicht, 1998). More recent studies tell similar sto-
ries in Kakuma camp in Kenya (Oka, 2014), as well as in Kasulu district
in Tanzania where Nyarugusu is located (Landau, 2002: 277–78). Indeed,
every camp resident I asked — men and women, young and old, Burundian
and Congolese — have at one time or another sold food; most do so rou-
tinely. Oka calls these practices ‘agentive consumption’: ‘The purchase and
consumption of foods that are desired and familiar, unlike the passively re-
ceived, largely unpalatable, and culturally and logistically unsuitable relief
food, generate a counter-narrative of the refugee as an agent as opposed to a
perpetual recipient of global largesse’ (Oka, 2014: 24). Agentive consump-
tion is why refugees, even poor households, decide to sell food rations at a
loss to purchase more expensive, but desirable, foods from nearby markets.
Food Aid Realities in Nyarugusu
Every month or month and a half, depending on funding levels, camp res-
idents in Nyarugusu are given maize flour, Super Cereal (a fortified food
blend), pulses (most commonly beans or split peas), vegetable oil and salt.
Since I began research in 2017, the Tanzanian refugee situation has faced
‘chronic underfunding’ and in that year WFP was only able to provide on
average 62 per cent of the recommended 2,100 kilocalories of food per per-
son per day, with ration quantities fluctuating frequently (UNHCR, 2019).
The humanitarian assemblage has decided to automatically make women the
head of the household, and the vast majority of households I spoke with say
it is the woman’s responsibility to make decisions concerning ration sales.
This adds to a long list of unpaid labour for women and girls including fire-
wood collection, ration collection, cooking and most care responsibilities.
Of the 35 households we surveyed regarding their ration-selling practices,
only eight reported that they do not sell food (except on rare occasions). The
latter explained that they have no other income and ration reductions mean
that, if they sell at a loss, the food will not last until the next distribution.
10 Clayton Boeyink
For the others, the decades-old research on ration consumption and sales
mentioned above still rings true in Nyarugusu. A Congolese woman, Ber-
nice, explains a common logic: ‘people sell [maize] flour because of a lack
of food variety. It doesn’t mean that they are getting enough food’.6To put
it more bluntly, Julien, a Burundian man exclaims: ‘WFP food helps us not
to die directly but it seems we are dying slowly. It is not suitable for a hu-
man being to eat the same food for five years’.7Most people keep the Super
Cereal, salt and, to a lesser extent, the vegetable oil, whereas maize flour
and split peas were often sold because they cause diarrhoea and indigestion
for many. People often sell all of the food that causes health issues and keep
various portions of other foods. More culturally desired foods such as dagaa
(anchovies and sardines) transported from Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria,
or locally grown cassava flour, palm oil, and local fruits and vegetables are
coveted by those who can afford them.
Some people sell greater quantities when rations are funded at higher lev-
els whereas others sell even when aid is cut, because of the previously men-
tioned ill health effects of maize and split peas. When beans are distributed
rather than split peas, people have a dilemma about whether to sell or not
because beans are more popular to eat but also fetch higher prices on the
market due to demand. Households are also forced to sell more when expe-
riencing economic shocks such as medical expenses. Some use the sales to
fund small businesses: one Congolese woman, Florence, explained that for
her household of seven, the rations of five members are adequate to feed the
household. The remaining two ration portions are used as business capital.8
On the other hand, a Burundian woman, Lucy, explained, ‘I kept my chil-
dren and myself hungry for three months so we could eat more later after
Istartedabusiness.
9Most commonly, however, people are selling larger
portions of rations because of the poor camp economy, which is the result of
the increasing assaults on markets and livelihoods by the Tanzanian state.
Three decades ago, Wilson summarized the plight of food aid in Tanza-
nian camps: ‘at present refugees experience the worst kind of institution-
alization: one which both restrains their ability to meet their own needs,
and yet is itself starved of adequate resources to meet their needs and
too politically emasculated to secure their rights’ (Wilson, 1992: 232). He
convincingly argued that donors should substitute food aid with cash —
an idea which is unanimously favoured by the camp residents I asked. I
will not labour this point further, because, unlike the humanitarian zeit-
geist of Wilson’s time, there is now a humanitarian consensus, especially
within UNHCR and WFP, of the value of cash over in-kind food donations
(ODI, 2015). Moreover, every aid worker I spoke with in the camp was
6. Interview, Congolese woman, Bernice, Nyarugusu camp, 17 October 2017.
7. Interview, Burundian man, Julien, Nyarugusu camp, 19 November 2020.
8. Interview, Congolese woman, Florence, Nyarugusu camp, 18 August 2017.
9. Interview, Burundian woman, Lucy, Nyarugusu camp, 9 November 2017.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 11
Figure 1. Food Aid Black Market (Kakuma Camp, Turkana)
Source: Oka (2014: 30)
disappointed by the withdrawal of cash transfers that took place in August
2017 and, behind the scenes, the WFP country director was attempting to
lobby the government to reinstate cash or at least to allow vouchers in the
camps.10 It is the Tanzanian state that needs to be convinced of the merits
of cash. However, I am afraid that presenting the argument for the efficacy
and efficiency of this modality would backfire and convince the state that
withdrawing cash is an effective weapon to further impel refugee repatria-
tions, which is its priority. Instead of cash, which largely bypasses the need
for logistical middlemen, food aid feeds a substantial industry of brokers at
the back end of distribution.
FOOD AID RESALE NETWORKS
In his study of refugee camp consumption, Oka lingers only briefly on what
happens after residents in Kakuma camp, Turkana, sell rations: ‘According
to the research participants (refugees, traders, and relief workers), around
80 to 90 per cent of the refugees sell part or most of their food package on
the black market’ (Oka, 2014: 29). The author offers a useful illustration,
reproduced here in Figure 1. However, both in the figure and throughout the
article, he refers to an opaque and mystified ‘black market’ where food aid is
sold, without expanding further on the characteristics of this market.11 What
was surprising to me was not the existence of such markets, but rather the
scale and levels of organization required to maintain these enterprises. To
10. More information about the circumstances of the cash transfer shutdown can be found in
Boeyink (2019).
11. I refrain from using the term ‘black market’ unless referring to others’ use of it due to the
pejorative connotation, which only further criminalizes these markets.
12 Clayton Boeyink
my knowledge, apart from work by Susanne Jaspars (2018: 131–32) and her
colleagues (Jaspars et al., 2020), ration-trading networks in displacement
situations have not been a subject of significant research.
Kigoma Agrarian Economy
Agrarian trade in Tanzania has a history of tight state control from colo-
nialism until the 1980s (excluding a brief six-year lull beginning in 1957).
Bryceson (1993: 1) notes the negative history of traders in Tanzania: ‘For
decades, traders have been pariahs in Tanzania, accused at best of being
unproductive and at worst being super-exploitative’. How traders — who
function as brokers — are perceived by the state depends on the state’s
orientation toward the market. Until economic liberalization, the state was
seen as ‘declaring war’ and criminalizing ‘black marketeers’ or walanguzi
through fines, imprisonment and seizure of their products (Bryceson, 1993:
99; Maliyamkono and Bagachwa, 1990: 31). This war ultimately failed: be-
cause informal trading ‘was done ubiquitously on a part-time basis in rel-
atively small amounts, such an amorphous, moving target was not readily
incorporated in the campaign’ (Bryceson, 1993: 100). Agricultural policy
today remains mostly liberalized and ‘amorphous’ trading continues to be
the modus operandi of agrarian markets, which are mirrored and simultan-
eously mutated in the food aid resale out of camps.
Kigoma region, which hosts the remaining three camps,12 has long been
the poorest in Tanzania (United Nations Tanzania, 2019). The vast major-
ity of people in Kigoma practise subsistence farming and are caught in a
cycle of low crop productivity and low incomes due to lack of access to
capital, credit, inputs and storage facilities. Most cannot afford to transport
their crops to more lucrative markets, which makes them reliant on madalali
within their villages who have connections to buyers with capital from larger
towns and cities in Tanzania, as well as Burundi and Rwanda.13 Madalali at
the village level purchase crops with their own capital or through advances
provided by traders who have financial capital and connections to markets
across Tanzania and eastern and southern Africa. Since madalali are their
only link to markets, farmers are forced to sell at lower prices than they
would achieve in larger markets. For this reason, the farmers I interviewed
resent and distrust madalali, who they believe do not offer fair prices. I heard
many claims that madalali do not pay on time and deliberately use inaccurate
12. Before 2012 there were additional camps in Kigoma and neighbouring regions. Nyaru-
gusu, Nduta and Mtendeli are considered refugee camps whereas in central Tanzania,
Ulyankulu, Mishamo and Katumba are considered ‘settlements’, where the residents are
former refugees from Burundi who have been naturalized as Tanzanian citizens.
13. For a robust overview of madalali in Tanzania, see van Donge (1992) and Molony (2008).
Wegerif (2017) offers an in-depth analysis of staple food distribution from across the coun-
try to Dar es Salaam.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 13
crop scales. This agricultural brokerage system is not only replicated in the
food resale markets, but many of the madalali also run crossover businesses
in the camps as bosses.
Madalali
The majority of refugee madalali operate on a small scale and have more in
common with Victor than with relatively well-off Dalia. Some people sell to
neighbours; for example, Bernice purchases maize flour near the WFP food
distribution centre and, for convenience, sells it at the market which is clos-
est to her home inside the camp.14 Before it was shut down, camp residents
would also take their rations to the Common Market at the entrance of the
camp, which was accessible to both refugees and neighbouring Tanzanians,
and sell to brokers like Lydia, a Burundian woman who buys and resells
WFP vegetable oil.15
Tanzanian and Burundian madalali also come from outside the camp
seeking brokerage livelihoods. Tanzanians from neighbouring villages pay
a bribe or sneak into the camp to gather food on the Congolese side of the
camp to sell as retail in small local markets. Burundian madalali, such as Di-
dier and Pascal, cross over by bicycle from Makamba province. Didier had
long traded food in Tanzania and learned that, compared to Tanzanian bor-
derland communities, maize flour in Nyarugusu is far cheaper and already
milled. He makes the trip twice a week; he sells what he can to Tanzanian
bosses and transports the rest of the rations back to Burundi.16 Pascal brings
his goods back to Makamba province where he has found an enthusiastic
market. Much of the overhead cost is incurred by the necessary bribes to
soldiers at the border, the police station in the nearby village, and the police
at the camp entrance.17 Didier says these expenses take around 40 per cent
of his profits. This trek is not always successful, however: ‘Sometimes the
police accept that we pay something, sometimes no. If they do not accept
then we return back, but we can find paths to escape the police. If you are
caught it is a very dangerous issue because you cannot get the time to dis-
cuss bribes, they are so furious and send you to jail’.18 Pascal, who has on
occasion been arrested and had to pay out all of his earnings, is more force-
ful in describing the risks of encountering the police: ‘To work on Tanzanian
land is very dangerous, it is a suicide job because we use so much effort just
to make a living’.19 For refugee madalali, there is some insulation from the
police due to a system of protective bribes, described below.
14. Interview, Congolese woman, Bernice, Nyarugusu camp, 17 October 2017.
15. Interview, Burundian woman, Lydia, Nyarugusu camp, 17 August 2017.
16. Interview, Burundian migrant, Didier, Nyarugusu camp, 14 August 2019.
17. Interview, Burundian migrant, Pascal, Nyarugusu camp, 26 October 2019.
18. Interview, Burundian migrant, Didier, Nyarugusu camp, 14 August 2019.
19. Interview, Burundian migrant, Pascal, Nyarugusu camp, 26 October 2019.
14 Clayton Boeyink
When Victor arrived in Nyarugusu, he had no access to capital to start
a business, nor did he have the human capital or skills to be employed by
international organizations or other refugees. At 56, he felt he was too old
and in too poor health to take the risk of leaving the camp to be an agricul-
tural labourer, as many with no access to capital do (Boeyink, 2020). His
solution was simply to ask for a job from a Congolese camp dalali in a simi-
lar position to Dalia: ‘I found I did not have enough money for business,
so without even knowing her, I asked for help’. The dalali would advance
him TZS 50,000 (US$ 21.72) each food distribution to buy as many food
rations from his neighbours as he could and then sell back to her. Whatever
he earned above the original cash advance he kept as profit, which he says
ranged from TZS 3,000 to 80,000 (US$ 1.30 to 34.74). Victor describes his
relationship with the dalali financier: ‘I depend on this woman for my busi-
ness, but each time I sell to her she is easy to negotiate with. I trust her even
though she is Congolese, and I am Burundian’.20
This notion of trust within madalali employment networks is an impor-
tant and recurring theme among madalali. Whereas most people sell to any
of the innumerable madalali seeking food, to find a decent price, others have
relationships with friends and neighbours to whom they sell exclusively. Of-
ten there is a patron–client relationship as these madalali can loan cash to
their sellers as reward for their loyalty. Sarah, a Congolese woman, is trusted
to such a degree that customers go directly to her home with their products,
rather than shopping around. She is in a less precarious position than Vic-
tor because she has multiple businesses, so she is not dependent on others’
capital. Once she has gathered food, she sells it to four Congolese bosses.21
Victor and Sarah represent varied ranges of success among madalali, which
is also true of refugee bosses.
Refugee Bosses
Bosses are the vital link between refugees and markets outside the camp.
Beyond just bringing needed cash liquidity to the camp, they also function
as employers for people like Victor. Like madalali, bosses are an amorphous
and relational category with businesses of varying size and scale, which
blur together the different chains in the system. Refugee bosses like Dalia,
Baraka and Paul, introduced in this section, have differential levels of wealth
and power relative to each other, yet they are all labelled bosses by madalali
and the camp community. However, refugee bosses do not have the resources
of Tanzanian bosses, who instead call them madalali, denoting their position
as suppliers on a rung lower on the pyramid.
20. Interviews, Burundian dalali, Victor, Nyarugusu camp 25 July 2017; 22 August 2017; 13
October 2017.
21. Interviews, Congolese dalali, Sarah, Nyarugusu camp 4 November 2017.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 15
Dalia, the most successful of all the financial diary households, first be-
gan as a dalali like Victor and Sarah. She used to sell maandazi (small fried
doughnuts) in exchange for food rations until one of her customers, a promi-
nent boss, ‘got used to me and he saw that I was trustworthy, so he started
giving me some money to buy food for him’, according to Dalia. As she was
successful, he entrusted her with larger cash advances. In 2016, Dalia’s boss
was resettled to Canada. Before leaving, ‘he connected me with Tanzanian
and Burundian bosses’, which raised her rank from dalali to boss. Now she
employs six madalali. While some bosses take advances from larger bosses,
Dalia usually spends her own money to purchase food: ‘It is better to use
your own capital than take an order because once you have someone else’s
money, anytime the boss can show up for the food you have collected, even
if you’re not ready’.22
One of these larger bosses, Baraka, a ‘campwise’ Congolese man, started
his business upon arrival in Nyarugusu in 1996: ‘when we arrived, Tanza-
nians came to the camp looking for businesses, so we made acquaintances
with them’. Now he works at all three WFP distribution centres in Nyaru-
gusu and employs many Congolese and Burundian madalali. ‘Because we
are famous, people can come to give us their products. I am known to most
people’. Baraka has become so successful that he purchased Tanzanian land
in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, the two largest cities in the country, and
reported being in the process of resettlement to the United States when in-
terviewed in 2017.23
Scale and Logistics
The scale of the food redistribution system is staggering. Baraka claims
there are around ten Congolese and 15 Burundian bosses in Nyarugusu.24
Dalia estimates that camp-wide 1,000–1,500 tonnes of food rations are sold
and leave Nyarugusu monthly.25 The process of procuring these items is
heavily layered with profits being gleaned at each level. For example, a
dalali may buy a bowl of split peas for TZS 800 (US$ 0.34) or a bucket
(15 bowls) for TZS 12,000 (US$ 5.17). They can sell a sack (six buckets) to
a boss for around TZS 78,000 (US$ 33.89). A refugee boss sells to a Tanza-
nian boss by the sack, which is typically sold to other Tanzanian bosses in
nearby villages for TZS 10,000 (US$ 4.34) above the price paid to the dalali.
When enough sacks have been accumulated by the bosses, they will pay a
cyclist a fee of TZS 2,400–3,000 (US$ 1.04–1.30) to transport them and, if
22. Interviews, Congolese boss, Dalia, Nyarugusu camp, 15 August 2017; 18 October 2017; 7
November 2018.
23. Interview, Congolese boss, Baraka, Nyarugusu camp, 25 July 2017.
24. Interview, Congolese boss, Baraka, Nyarugusu camp, 25 July 2017.
25. Interview, Congolese boss, Dalia, Nyarugusu camp, 25 July 2017.
16 Clayton Boeyink
Figure 2. Food Aid Resale Value Chain
Source: author’s own design
necessary, a warehouse fee of TZS 500 (US$ 0.22) per sack to store them in
the neighbouring village. The cyclist will likely be part of a transportation
collective and will be required to pay a transport manager a fee of TZS 800
(US$ 0.34) for organizing the trip.26 Figure 2 illustrates the value chain of
these networks in diagram form.
26. Ibid.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 17
Paul, who is an even more prominent refugee boss than Baraka, claims to
sell around 350 sacks (weighing 150–250 kg) each distribution cycle. Af-
ter paying transport and warehousing fees, he makes profits of around TZS
6,000 (US$ 2.59) for each sack, which amounts to TZS 2,100,000 (US$
905) in monthly profit. At each food distribution in the camp, Paul gives out
advances to around 10 other bosses like Baraka and Dalia: ‘I give them little
by little, TZS 2,000,000 [US$ 868] sometimes TZS 3,000,000 [US$ 1,302],
other times more. This money can be finished in one or two days. When they
are finished, I give more. Each distribution I can give TZS 8,000,000 (US$
3,474)’.27 Paul says there is another Burundian collector in the camp who
is even more successful than him, whom we were unable to interview. De-
spite these massive amounts of wealth relative to the average camp resident,
however, Tanzanian bosses extract even more.
Tanzanian Bosses
Baraka summed up the centrality of Tanzanian bosses: ‘if bosses don’t give
money, the camp is in a bad mood. All the money given to us spreads through
the camp’.28 Tanzanian bosses are simultaneously the primary financiers of
the food ration trade and its largest beneficiaries. These traders sit atop the
WFP resale pyramid and embody the most morally ambivalent position of
all the brokers in this system. They gain the most from the system because
they do not live in the camp and therefore do not share the costs and risks
of the refugees’ precarious legal and economic position. They do not hold
social loyalties to certain bosses but follow a market-based logic to seek out
the best price they can get. Moreover, given that Kigoma has the highest
rates of poverty in the country, they are far wealthier than the vast majority
of their Tanzanian neighbours.
Julia has been capitalizing on the trade since the creation of Nyarugusu in
1996. Already established as a farmer and financier of Tanzanian madalali,
she began exchanging her grains for WFP rations. Today, she has expanded
operations to all three Kigoma refugee camps. In Nyarugusu alone, she fi-
nances 10 bosses with TZS 2,000,000–5,000,000 (US$ 868–2,171) for each
distribution. Refugee bosses whom Julia finances use the Swahili expres-
sion ‘ana hela ndefu’, which translates to ‘she has long money’ to describe
the financial clout she wields.29 Ernest does not have the same amount of
capital but is still a significant player in Nyarugusu’s resale economy. His
most important link to this livelihood was through his aunt — herself a boss
— who had mentored him as a farmer and trader since 2009. In 2012, he
was employed with the NGO that was subcontracted by WFP to unload and
27. Interview, Burundian boss, Paul, Nyarugusu camp, 9 November 2017.
28. Interview, Congolese boss, Baraka, Nyarugusu camp, 7 November 2017.
29. Interview, Tanzanian boss, Julia, Makere village, 11 October 2019.
18 Clayton Boeyink
distribute food shipments in Nyarugusu where he was able to network with
madalali in the camp. With these contacts and his aunt’s support, he used
money saved from farming and his camp job to become a boss when Burun-
dian refugees began arriving in 2015.30
Bosses set the prices at which they buy, based on the prices at the destina-
tion markets in Tanzanian cities such as Kahama, Mwanza, Dar es Salaam
and further across East Africa, including Uganda.31 Advancing financing
options to refugee bosses gives them leverage to demand faster and more
favourable returns: Ernest explains this process:
When there is a high soaring price, my dalali can change his mind and say that he has no
product for you. You can wait until next time. Meanwhile, he will have sold it to another boss
who rose the price higher than the money advance you gave him. You [can] either be patient
until the dalali gets your other products or ask for your money back. Usually, I am patient.
In 2018, it happened to me and I asked for my money back.32
Julia is more explicit about her power over price setting: ‘We set the price of
buying a sack after considering the profit I will make in the market. There
are no negotiations. I buy the product on the price I set because it all de-
pends on me and the place where I will bring my products like in Uganda
or where the market is available’.33 Interestingly, the refugee bosses I spoke
with all recognize that they do not get a fair rate for selling their rations,
but they do not feel preyed on by Tanzanian bosses as Tanzanian farmers do
vis-à-vis brokers in their villages. Baraka describes this sentiment: ‘I know
we are getting a small, small rate for our products, and we have no room to
negotiate, but I am grateful to the bosses. What would I do without them?
The food we collect would rot. I would have to struggle with a different busi-
ness. These bosses let me and my fellow refugees eat. I say, thank you!’.34
It is worth noting, however, that this sentiment is not shared by most of the
financial diary households who are exploited by this system.
Tanzanians also have a freedom of movement that Burundian traders and
refugees do not enjoy due to encampment policies. Julia uses her own ve-
hicles to transport the food to markets or shares lorries with other bosses.
They are also insulated from arrest and exorbitant bribes because they have
licences to operate their business. Refugees and undocumented Burundian
migrants must operate clandestinely. Julia acknowledges this imbalance:
‘We don’t usually meet the police. Our madalali meet them and defend their
causes relative to their hard life and starvation in the camp when they are
collecting the food for us’.35 The police act as gatekeepers and at times
30. Interview, Tanzanian boss, Ernest, Makere village, 12 October 2019.
31. I was unable to access the traders and markets beyond Kigoma, a subject which would
benefit from further research.
32. Interview, Tanzanian boss, Ernest, Makere village, 12 October 2019.
33. Interview, Tanzanian boss, Julia, Makere village, 11 October 2019.
34. Interview, Congolese boss, Baraka, Nyarugusu camp, 25 July 2017.
35. Interview, Tanzanian boss, Julia, Makere village, 11 October 2019.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 19
‘muscle’ for the cartels of the WFP food resale system. They hold the power
to shut down the lucrative networks or to allow and profit from these mar-
kets.
The Aid Resale Cartel and the Police
The police and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) officers assigned to man-
age and control the camps are the personification of the country’s violent
encampment policy and are responsible for enforcing the containment of
people and goods. As the introductory vignette of the angry field manager
suggests, secondary markets are delegitimized and criminalized. Despite
this prohibition, people sell these rations openly at WFP distribution cen-
tres, at the Common Market before it was shut down, and throughout the
camp. Apart from random performative harassments or scattering of sellers,
the police allow this system to continue because it is lucrative for them to do
so, much like the policing of illicit ‘displacement agriculture’ whereby mi-
grants and refugees rent and work on farms near the camp (Boeyink, 2020:
71–72). Unlike patrols on nearby farms, where police are looking to extract
bribes from cultivators, the secondary ration market is enabled by a coor-
dinated system of rent collection in which the police and a group of some
five to eight individuals, who call themselves ‘supervisors’, collude. Dalia
explains the payoff system:
Each boss pays. I paid yesterday. There’s a supervisor who keeps names of all bosses in the
camp. Each pay TZS 65,000 [US$ 28] to the supervisor, who pays the police. The police
then give us the freedom to send sacks to Makere [the nearby village on the main road].
Each sack that goes to Makere pays [TZS] 1,000 to police. Every six months we pay another
TZS 65,000 [US$ 28].36
Félicien is a teacher who earns only TZS 55,000 (US$ 23) each month.
Dissatisfied with this salary, he has tried to break into the system. He blurs
the line between dalali and boss: he purchases and gathers food across the
camp, but unlike most, he does not take an advance from a boss and he
transports the products to Makere himself. Because Félicien circumvents
selling to larger refugee bosses like Baraka or Paul, he does not pay the
TZS 65,000 (US$ 28) police rent that Dalia does. However, he is also not
afforded permission to bypass the gatekeeping police with a small fee. If
the cartel found out about his business, they would report him to the police.
Consequently, he must transport his sacks through footpaths and under the
cover of darkness to avoid police detection. Police capture would result in a
loss of his products and his earnings, through a sizable bribe demanded to
avoid a six-month jail term, a fine, and probable physical violence through
beatings.37
36. Interview, Congolese boss, Dalia, Nyarugusu camp, 7 November 2018.
37. Interview, Congolese dalali, Félicien, Nyarugusu camp, 10 November 2020.
20 Clayton Boeyink
Unlike drug cartels or mafia who contest or control the state’s monopoly
on violence, members of the WFP food cartel could be said to be leasing
this violence from the state through the wealth they have extracted. As such,
they are still subject to periodic police shakedowns. Dalia recalled a time in
April 2016 when police followed her home after collecting food:
The police came to my home and found the children at home and asked, ‘where is your
mother? What is your family size? Where does she keep the food?’. The children showed the
police where we keep the products. My boss gave TZS 50,000 [US$ 21] to the police and I
haven’t had problems since. Any time new police arrive, we have to explain our problems to
them to be able to continue.38
In a more serious breach of the financial arrangement, in February 2019
as camp restrictions were tightening, a high-ranking member of the cartel
was arrested and sent to jail on the way to a resettlement interview with
UNHCR. This had a chilling effect on the madalali and bosses. All WFP
resale business in the camp ceased until furtive negotiations had taken place
between MHA, the police and cartel supervisors. People with knowledge of
this meeting said that a large fee was paid, and the madalali were directed
to do their business less openly and to transport materials more discreetly.
This shows that the police have the power to stop the system if desired but
continued collusion with the cartel is more beneficial to them. Moreover, it
was a clear reminder that the state sets the terms of engagement and holds
ultimate power in the camp.
CONCLUSION
The space of asylum in Tanzania, which already implements one of the
strictest encampment policies in the world, is rapidly eroding under Presi-
dent Magufuli. Pressure on the camps has included assaults on the camp
economy through market and cash programme shutdowns, and more recent
reports of abductions, torture and forced repatriations, which are causing
wealthy Burundians who have been targeted for ransom to leave the coun-
try (Boeyink and Falisse, 2021). This, paired with volatile levels of food
aid, creates an environment of economic depression in which capital is hard
to come by, and forces aid recipients like Lucy to go hungry and sell ra-
tions to start a business. However, it is well established in humanitarian food
aid circles that people sell during both good times and bad (Pottier, 1996;
Reed and Habicht, 1998; Wilson, 1992). Through ‘agentive consumption’
(Oka, 2014), people sell to avoid ill health effects of items like maize flour
and split peas, to avoid laborious and expensive preparation and cooking,
and to eat more culturally appealing foods like dagaa and cassava flour.
Each household has its own logic for when and how much of its food aid
38. Interview, Congolese boss, Dalia, Nyarugusu camp, 7 November 2018.
The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 21
portion it sells. The ubiquity of these practices in camps produces a lucra-
tive market.
This pyramid-shaped food resale system has three somewhat amorphous
layers. The bottom layer of the pyramid is comprised of madalali, which in-
cludes refugees like Victor and Sarah, Burundian undocumented migrants
like Didier and Pascal, as well as neighbouring Tanzanians who sneak into
the camp. Madalali take advances from or sell to refugee bosses, of which
Dalia, Baraka and Paul are examples. These three have differing financial
outlays, but all pay to receive protection from the police, controlled by a
small committee of supervisors. This cartel structure gives rise to the threat
of police violence against individuals like Félicien who attempt to bypass
the rents and price fixing of the system to sell straight to Tanzanian bosses
such as Ernest, Julia or other large Tanzanian or Burundian traders. Like
smallholder farmers in the region surrounding the camps, refugee food sell-
ers find little local demand for their products, because they are all selling the
same things and have no access to markets where there is greater demand.
This is especially true after the government’s closure of the Common Mar-
ket. This means the sellers at the bottom of the pyramid have no leverage
over prices, enabling those higher up the value chain to set prices which are
favourable to them.
Refugee studies research has uncovered a wide variety of brokers carry-
ing out many different functions. Turner (2006) and Jansen (2018) offer a
more thorough conceptualization of brokerage and argue that the authority
of refugee intermediaries in Tanzanian and Kenyan camps is derived from,
and simultaneously circumvents, humanitarian actors. These scholars im-
plicitly apply a Bourdieusian theory of capital, or ‘campital’, to explain how
these brokers disrupted and attained higher classes in exile. While Bour-
dieu’s social capital theory is helpful in understanding how social class is
attained, I argue that Marxian theory is productive in explaining how social
class is maintained through exploitation in a camp setting where the major-
ity are struggling to subsist. Marx’s introduction of the concept of ‘hybrid
subsumption’, which equates to exploitation through usury or advances by
‘merchant capitalists’, is applicable here (Marx, 1867/1990: 665). Refugee
and Tanzanian bosses at the top of the food pyramid act in a similar man-
ner to Marx’s ‘merchants’, while the ‘weaver and the spinner’ functions are
filled by camp resident ration sellers and madalali:
It is clear that the capitalist has prepared neither the raw material, nor the instrument, nor
the means of subsistence for the weaver and the spinner. All that he has done is to restrict
them little by little to one kind of work in which they become dependent on selling, on
the buyer, the merchant, and ultimately produce only for and through him. (Marx, 1973:
510)
These camp ‘merchants’ give advances to financially control people like
Victor who would otherwise be unable to find a livelihood as a dalali,
and extract high profit margins to the detriment of all camp ration sellers.
22 Clayton Boeyink
Disruption of the system or upward mobility into the upper levels of the
pyramid by camp residents like Félicien is blocked. The dependencies of the
sellers on the buyers, protected by police violence or the threat thereof, can
best be understood as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003).
Marx’s work was in part a political project to spark class consciousness
amongst the working class. This begs the question, what would such an
undertaking look like in Nyarugusu? Based on financial diary households’
opinions of madalali, refugee and Tanzanian bosses, there is a clear under-
standing of class interests in the camp. Unlike in rural Tanzanian villages
where madalali were tolerated but mistrusted, people were grateful for the
services of refugee madalali like Victor, who were their socio-economic
peers. Despite the unfavourable prices, they appreciated the desperately
needed service to liquidate food to cash. Although Baraka boasted of be-
ing ‘famous’ in the camp, refugee and Tanzanian bosses were despised for
the system they had built. A Burundian man, Jean-Pierre, expressed a sen-
timent shared by many: ‘the bosses are profiting from our weakness to fill
their families’ stomachs’.39
But a worker’s revolution, or even small gains, are unlikely in the increas-
ingly precarious and violent camp space. In August 2017, I spoke to leaders
of a movement who were planning to organize a food strike immediately
following the cash programme cancellation and deep ration cuts. Before the
strike even took place, the government issued threats to end resettlement
programmes and rations for any participants of the strike.40 At the same
time, protests in nearby Nduta camp were violently put down using tear
gas and arrests. This brought an immediate end to any revolutionary plans.
James (2011: 336) was correct in noting that brokers are characterized by
moral ambiguity and ‘are both product and producers of a new kind of soci-
ety’. A Marxian view of the food aid system shines a light on an exploitative
and violent society embodied by the cartel bosses.
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The Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps 25
Clayton Boeyink (cboeyink@ed.ac.uk) is a Research Fellow (Social An-
thropology/Centre of African Studies) at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
He interrogates the politics, practices and coloniality of refugee self-reliance
in Tanzania. He works on the DiSoCo project focusing on healthcare and
gender among displaced Somalis and Congolese in Somalia, DRC, Kenya
and South Africa.
... While most Burundian refugees were repatriated after the peace agreements in the early 2000s, renewed political unrest and violence resulted in a new influx in 2015. In recent years, the Tanzanian state has made life in the camps much harder, with the explicit aim to force Burundians to repatriate (Boeyink 2021;Fellesson 2021;Milner 2019). Due to the harsh living conditions in the camps, many refugees leave the camps and work for Tanzanians in neighbouring villages (Msoka and Kweka 2022), settle in fishing communities along the coast of Lake Tanganyika or hide in Kigoma town. ...
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