The notion of “informality” is one of the most widespread and at the same time most controversial concepts in the social scientific literatures about and produced in the Global South. How do we conceptualize specific forms of capitalism that have developed in the gaps left by unequal development, dependency, and perpetual crisis? These forms do not map easily onto western concepts of capital-labor relations—a much-discussed issue in African Studies.Footnote 1 The “informal economy” is, in this sense, a stopgap notion that recognizes and marks an area of socioeconomic life with specific characteristics observed at a given time, whether in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South. But this neatly separates informality into a section that, especially when the term was coined, was thought of as a temporary phenomenon, extraneous to the “formal” economy, geographically specific to the global South, and distinct from the form that capital-labor relations and markets took in the West after the Second World War. Even today, as discussions abound in the social sciences about new forms of capitalist regulation in the “post-Fordist” or “neoliberal” era, and even as labor has become increasingly precarious in the global North, too, the informal economy is still often conceptualized as something geographically and economically separate—that is, as a way for people who have been excluded from the “normal” system of global capitalism to survive. It is thought of as “outside the norms,” where “norms” are conjectured to be those of global, western-dominated capitalism.Footnote 2
The problems with such a concept are obvious: aside from setting a Eurocentric notion of capitalist regulation as the standard, it also draws much too neat a line between the “formal” and “informal” sectors of the economy, which are, and historically have been, closely entwined.Footnote 3 It subsumes a dizzying variety of financial flows, employment, company management schemas, working conditions, and sociability under a single umbrella with relatively little explanatory power. Of course, it also runs the danger of continuing representations of the Global South as “Other,” socially and culturally distinct from the West/North. However, informal or “shadow” economies are not only a phenomenon of crisis-ridden economies in the global South or Eastern societies in “transformation”; they are also a major way for ordinary people to subsist in deindustrializing regions of the West.Footnote 4
Still, the concept has persisted despite the many efforts at establishing alternative terms. This points to the dilemma at the heart of the informal economy: it is a totalizing assemblage of infrastructures, economic networks, interpersonal and social relations, bureaucratic practices, and policy interventions that takes very different local forms while also maintaining distinguishable characteristics: ease of entry, precarity, absence of enforceable contractual labor relations, organic bottom-up (instead of centrally planned and controlled) infrastructures, and a conflictual relationship with the state.Footnote 5 For many, if not the majority, of people globally, the “informal economy” is capitalism and has been for quite some time. “Dismissing the distinction between formal and informal too quickly,” writes Daniel Jordan Smith, “risks discarding a crucial analytical […] insight.”Footnote 6 In Labor Studies, in particular, “precarious and informal labor” now serves to distinguish “unprotected occupations in a broader sense, or jobs lacking security and social provisions,” but importantly, these conditions also persist “even when performed within a legally ‘formal’ sector or in a subordinate relationship toward certified enterprises.”Footnote 7
The informal economy challenges our understanding of labor. As Sidy Cissokho points out in his study of drivers in Senegal (referring to Matteo Rizzo’s work on drivers in Tanzania), the idea of the informal as being outside of norms has “transformed […] the entirety of workers labelled informal into entrepreneurs.” In the course of this “invisibilization,” the concept of informality has substituted “an analysis of the economy based on the place of individuals in the production apparatus with another, which relies essentially on the supposed relation they have toward the state.”Footnote 8 The “informal” moniker, in other words, came to signify only one relation: that between market actors and the state. Workers became entrepreneurs.Footnote 9 This mashed together a huge variety of capital and labor relations. From the 2000s, the social sciences started to question this fixation on the state and to develop socially embedded notions of “informality” based on the fact that informal economies relied on social, rather than economic, contractual, or administrative networks to stabilize and perform bottom-up economic activity. While this remained focused on entrepreneurial agency, political scientists and NGO reports in the 2000s also conceptualized informal labor more concretely as non-contractual forms of labor.Footnote 10
A good method for dealing with such conceptual tensions is to focus on empirical analysis and see what the “informal economy” concretely entails. “Informal” transport—also called paratransit, popular transport, or artisanal transport—is a particularly interesting case study to follow the informal economy’s trappings, especially as they pertain to labor. Together with street trade, transport is a backbone of the informal economy. Despite this, it has taken a long time for social scientists to open up to it as a worthwhile area of study. Several developments needed to come together for this to change: a renewed interest in infrastructures in general, and their interaction with the body politic in particular, often called “infrastructural citizenship”;Footnote 11 a concern with African urbanism as a specific form not defined by a lack of planning, order, or regulation but rather by its own logics;Footnote 12 and a conceptual turn toward mobility as a fait social total in the “new mobilities paradigm.”Footnote 13 Most importantly, the social sciences in the late 2010s rediscovered labor as an important topic in the study of African societies.Footnote 14 Although interest in labor in African contexts had been high among sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, their work had until the 1980s been hampered by a narrower focus on “classic” wage labor.Footnote 15 As the debt crises pushed these forms of labor out and as the academy turned away from materialist toward more culturalist approaches, labor issues were relegated to the background of research.Footnote 16 Similar to new approaches to the history of technology and infrastructure, a renewed interest in work engages critically with its predecessors and looks into forms of labor that were excluded from a lens shaped by expectations of industrialization and proletarianization. Meanwhile, labor history has taken up the challenge to tackle the diverse forms of labor persistent in the history of Africa beyond colonialism.Footnote 17
Answering the challenge of “informality”
In the literature on informal transport, these different research strands come together, but are also transformed, by empirical work that complicates our narrative about informal transport workers. Nevertheless, some commonalities and common problems emerge. Microhistories of transport labor contribute to the global history of capitalism in the twentieth century, in particular enduring discussions of neoliberalism. But the approach to labor in informal transport is necessarily interdisciplinary. While it is difficult to understand a phenomenon that is by definition unregulated (and thus largely undocumented) using traditional archives, practitioners—especially urban planners, sociologists, and geographers—have undertaken studies of informal transport for a long time, such that a gray literature exists to trace the history of the “informal economy,” both as a concept and a concrete infrastructure. Similarly, current sociological and anthropological studies are informed by a sensitivity to the historical process which determines existing infrastructures of transport. Most importantly, they answer to the challenges posed by the notion of “informality” in different ways.
Taking up Cissokho’s and Rizzo’s critique of viewing transport workers as entrepreneurs means taking informal labor seriously without falling into the trap of victimizing and “depriv[ing] people in the informal economy of agency.”Footnote 18 Recent books do this by approaching workers through infrastructural spaces of transport such as bus stations, garages, and workshops, as well as through their own social organizations. What they reveal is that the conflicts and divisions in the informal economy are not reducible to a binary of state vs. informal actors. They are also more complicated than divisions between owners of capital—i.e. buses—and workers. Rather, these conflicts can only be understood in historical perspective.
In his book on Senegalese drivers and their organizations, Le transport a le dos large: Les gares routières, les chauffeurs et l’État au Sénégal (1968-2014), Sidy Cissokho argues for the important role organized informal transport plays in the Senegalese “social contract,” which sociologists usually regard as being comprised by specific relations between the state and religious groups. He identifies several groups of owners and workers, which are historically fluid and fought for influence in the Senegalese transport syndicats (labor unions). These include established owners, whose companies go back to French-owned colonial enterprises taken over by upper class évolués (Senegalese individuals who had been “Europeanized” by the French) as well as “self-made” vehicle owners, who emerged in the late colonial period from driver-owners expanding their operations. This separation was mirrored in independent Senegal, depending on closeness to the networks of the ruling party. The diverging interests of the two groups shaped organization of transport operators and resulted in a division between associations of “educated” and “uneducated” owners. The latter’s association, comprised mostly of small operators and driver-owners, was seen as closer to the drivers. It called itself a syndicat, or union, to emphasize this proximity. Although in theory it admitted drivers as members, it remained an association of owners. Senegalese drivers themselves first organized in the 1970s through mutual assistance groups, which grew into representative organizations. But both the owners’ and drivers’ associations were shaped by a “multi-class composition” typical for organizations in the informal economy.Footnote 19 This reproduced in new ways the cleavage between the owners of the means of production—that is, the vehicles—and workers. In the case of Senegal, this separation was not necessarily defined by different class positions, but rather by access and presence at the terminals, especially after more drivers moved up the socioeconomic ladder to become driver-owners during a period of deregulation in the 1990s.
Transportation terminals, which Michael Stasik explores in Bus Station Hustle: Transport Work in Urban Ghana, his anthropological field study of transport work in West Africa, are infrastructural nodes. They are central to the economic and social life of transport workers and the main spaces for transport workers’ organization. Taking a cue from science and technology studies, as well as the history of technology, infrastructures related to informal transport can be understood as sociotechnical assemblages in which technological and economic materiality interacts with social organization to create key spaces for the delivery of important services, in this case inter- and intra-urban mobility. For labor, they also serve as sites of social and political organization. Stasik, in conjunction with much of the current literature on African cities, invokes the notion of “social infrastructure” to discuss the ways that people navigate, (re)construct, use, and network around the often insufficient and failing material infrastructures of roads, terminals, and car parks. To quote Stasik, analyzing this infrastructure throws into “relief the different types of practices and relationships that people draw on for expanding and utilizing both social and material networks, for making their engagements productive and reproducing them, and, ultimately, for making ends meet.”Footnote 20
Stasik is quite right in focusing on bus stations as the nodes in this social, political, bureaucratic, technological, and economic infrastructure. Historically, lorry parks, bus stations, and terminals were places where colonial and postcolonial administrations established control and regulated a notoriously unruly industry. But they also became spaces of self-organization—places where owners and drivers formed associations, welfare societies, and unions, as Cissokho also shows.Footnote 21 At these infrastructural nodes, layers of material and organizational structure intersect in what Stasik describes as “overlapping and often competing” ways.Footnote 22 Going beyond the prevalent dichotomy of “creativity” and “chaos” in analyses of informal economies, Stasik posits that “[w]hile each of these structures conforms to its own, often quite rigid, norms and codes of conduct, their close interrelation and proximity inside the station’s space mean that they regularly erupt into frictional encounters.”Footnote 23
The material and spatial infrastructures overlap with bureaucratic and social ones. Labor in these infrastructures is organized in increasingly complex ways, speaking to the “involution” of “niche economies.”Footnote 24 The informal transport industry generates huge revenues, which other players try to seize. This capture is carried out by state agencies, the police, political parties, private actors, and/or unions and street-level mafia-like organizations, which can be closely entwined with unions or the police. Drivers feel the pressure from these different groups the most, as police extort bribes and unions, gangs, or the youth organizations of major parties control bus stops, routes, and terminals, demanding “fees” which fuel whole parasitic economies. Depending on the city and the historical period, drivers have had to pay commissions to owners, pay for fuel and smaller repairs, bribe police at checkpoints, pay user fees at terminals, pay touts (boys and young men loading passengers onto buses at the terminals), and pay dues to unions that are more interested in collecting said dues than representing transport workers in any significant way. Cissokho writes about a driver who recounts a typical workday not by referencing his use of time (waiting, driving, taking care of the car, etc.), but instead by calculating his expenses for fuel, meals, and payments for the coxeurs, who load the vehicle at the terminals, and the conductor, who accompanies the driver and collects the fares.Footnote 25
In They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria, Daniel Agbiboa, writing about danfo (minibus) and okada (motorcycle taxi) drivers in Lagos, Nigeria, calls this the “corruption complex.”Footnote 26 He argues that this complex is co-constructed by different social actors on the ground rather than being a feature of state failure. Unions can play an ambivalent role in the informal transport industry; while Cissokho describes the multiple syndicats in Senegalese transport as an essential, if conflictual, part of the social contract, the Nigerian National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) that is part of Agiboa’s narrative has been co-opted by the state. At the same time, the union has increasingly used agbero, young urban men that are often recruited from “area boys” (petty criminals local to some quarters) to act as touts. However, they mostly extort all kinds of fees from drivers to climb the union hierarchy. In turn, the union has become a mafia-like organization that fuels the endemic corruption upon which the social and political infrastructure of the industry is built.
Everyday bureaucratization and organizing
Labor organization at the bus stations is a complex process that is not reducible to unionization or the emergence of “official” organizations managing such spaces. Work in the informal transport industry is, by definition, unregulated. Generally speaking, operators have no formal contracts. Thus, workers organize where they gather—in particular, at bus stations. Waiting, as Amiel Bize and Basil Ibrahim have emphasized, is an important part of transport work. This time represents a major opportunity for organizing.Footnote 27 At bus stations, the “hustle,” to use Stasik’s term, does not contradict the fact that many workers, especially drivers, do so while waiting. “Waiting times,” remarks Cissokho, “are beneficial to the formation of a common subjectivity.”Footnote 28 More concretely, these are periods in which social relations are forged, and administered, by different groups and organizations. Buses need to wait in line for their turn to be “loaded” with passengers and luggage. The complexity of line management is a central aspect of station administration and a core of labor organizing in stations. Access to routes might be restricted to members of an association, which is done at the spots reserved for specific routes in the station. Cissokho describes this as a form of bureaucratization “from below.”Footnote 29 At specific route terminals, wooden boards are used to determine the sequence of departures. This is doubly documented in the offices of the route associations, which use this documentation for the collection of fees and payouts to the coxeurs, which collect fees, load luggage, and organize the lines. At the same time, a close familiarity with the space, the vehicles, and the persons belonging to a route is necessary to prevent drivers from trying to game the system by pre-registering their vehicles or registering at several terminals at the same time. In the bus stations, assemblies are organized, the membership of unions is managed and institutionalized, elections are held, and conflicts between different groups inside the organization are settled.Footnote 30
Historically, bus stations developed through a precarious interaction with states. At times, they were officially established by administrations. At other times they emerged through occupation or were negotiated into acceptance by the operators. In still other moments, they were bought and reserved by larger transport enterprises or given to either unions or parties by the state to manage and exploit. In all cases, the stations are the central nodes from which the organization of whole local, regional, and/or national bus networks is controlled. In times of conflict, this has also made stations focal points of violence.Footnote 31 But above all, they are places where bureaucratic practices, even when dominated by criminal organizations, are developed in everyday practice so as to manage the ambivalent combination of competition and cooperation. While not an unusual feature of capitalism, Stasik explains that competition entwined with cooperation in the “hustle” seems more pronounced in this industry.Footnote 32
At the large terminals, private and public life blend together. Many drivers sleep in their vehicles because they live on the outskirts of cities. Trading, eating, socializing, joking around, the undertaking of creative work (such as decorating vehicles), and repairing and maintaining vehicles are all done at the terminal in a fashion that is reminiscent of how the German historian of the everyday, Alf Lüdtke, described early-twentieth-century factory life.Footnote 33 For workers, “downtime,” waiting times, and times of dysfunction or stoppage have always been important as opportunities to socialize, establish bonds, and lay the groundwork for labor organizing. A social infrastructure, such as the one Cissokho describes for the stations in Senegal, provides legitimacy: here, the fees drawn from cooperatives, which took over stations earlier managed by vehicle owners, are seen as justified because there is a sense of shared community that unites drivers and coxeurs. In sharp contrast, Agbiboa describes the two groups as in conflict, because the NRUTW union, which uses agberos to collect all kinds of exorbitant fees, is seen as an exploitative and parasitic racket—what Kenyans, who suffered through a period of similarly criminal control of the stations in the 1990s, call a cartel.Footnote 34
Transient workspaces
There is still a dearth of literature about the material and technological underpinnings of transport work in Africa. The vehicles used are often determined by the specific ways local economies are integrated into world markets and trade routes. For example, after the company’s realization in the early 1980s that informal transport in Asia and beyond was a promising market, Toyota developed its new twelve-seater “Hi-Ace” model geared toward operators in this industry. It supplied East African countries, in particular, to the extent that the Hi-Ace became the near standard for the matatu or dalla dalla (local names for informal transport in Kenya and Tanzania), and for minibus operators throughout the region. In West Africa, used cars are imported through diasporic links and specialized traders in Europe. While this leads to a visual hodge-podge of vehicles on the road and at stations, specific models are preferred, sometimes for practical reasons and sometimes for historical reasons (for example, Mali’s SOTRAMA buses are usually retrofitted Mercedes-Benz Sprinter models). These imported vehicles are retrofitted, repaired, and maintained through a complex local economy of garages and workshops, which are often situated at the very same bus terminals. The workshops exist in a symbiotic relationship with the transport sector by, for example, offering specialized refitting services that transform a twelve-seater Hi-Ace into a fourteen-seater matatu.
When analyzing informal labor, the question of skill development is rarely addressed, since, by definition, the sector is seen as open to and mostly consisting of “unskilled” labor. While the idea of “unskilled” labor has been problematized by many scholars, in the case of informal transport it leads to a blindness about qualitative differences in labor conditions, worker organization, and the role of skill.Footnote 35 The concept also frequently neglects how “skill” is negotiated among workers and between workers and other actors, such as passengers, vehicle owners, and the state.
One approach to this issue of “skilled labor” can be found in Joshua Grace’s monumental history of Tanzanian car mechanics, African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development. Grace develops a deep historical ethnography of tinkering, working on cars, professionalization beyond institutionalized education, and the construction of masculinities around cars more generally. His study can be used as a template for developing an analysis of work—and especially “skill”—in the informal transport sector. Like other authors discussed here, Grace uses emic terms to assess the specificity of local practices. But he goes further by conducting a linguistic exploration of such terms, unlocking the very practices they designate and their history. There is, argues Grace (echoing Clapperton Mavhunga’s argument for an African history of African technology), a genuinely African history of cars, one that cannot be reduced to adaptation and appropriation. It occurred in workshops which, through the “hard materialities of car use” (instead of formal education, certificates, or books), formed spaces that can be described using Mavhunga’s term “transient workspaces.”Footnote 36 Garages could be improvised, often situated on a plot of land that may or may not have a roof, and with changing personnel. Skills were transferred in these spaces—in fact, mechanics preferred them to the “formal” education given in schools. This was especially true during colonial times when formal education entailed a significant investment of time and money, when state garages employed harsh racial hierarchies, and when books rarely prepared people for what they confronted within those “muted garages” (gereji bubu), called “muted” because they were improvised and not immediately recognizable as workshops.
Grace’s work questions the distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, especially since the concept was used in colonial times to control and divide workers, to enforce racial hierarchies, and to establish a racialized idea of technology and what it meant to work with technology. The emphasis on “formal” education and licensing was continued in postcolonial Tanzania. Training and the development of skills, Grace emphasizes in great detail, did not only happen “on the spot.” It was much more in tune with the actual needs of African car owners and drivers, as well as a growing community of mechanics tinkering with cars to fundamentally change them. In the process, they developed new technological practices. He traces this conflict between “school” and “street” through Tanzanian history, a conflict that was variably expressed in racial, social, or socialist terms: was mtaani (the street) an expression of social ills like criminality, poverty, and drugs, and thus the opposite of “self-reliance”? Or, to the contrary, were street garages “spaces that turned young boys into respectable men capable of supporting themselves and their family,” places where boys could be supervised and trained by experienced mechanics and where “cutting edge” innovation happened?Footnote 37 This is a discussion that echoes Kenda Mutongis’s snappier condensation of Kenyan discourses about Matatu drivers: “Thugs or Entrepreneurs?”Footnote 38
Grace shows how problematic a notion like “unskilled” is, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts that devalue “informal” education and work “on the spot.” He also argues that Tanzanians tried to show that informal economies, far from being an expression of individualist capitalism, as the government saw it, were an answer to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere’s call to be “unorthodox and innovative” in order to “fix socialism.” Thumni-thumni, as the Tanzanian minibuses were called at the time, filled in for failing public transport companies in times of crisis, ensuring a much-needed public service. They “made a public case for the socialist qualities of private vehicles,” writes Grace.Footnote 39 The ambivalence flowing through all discussions of informal transport remains: capitalist or socialist, private enterprise or public service, entrepreneurialism or labor, precarity or survival, exploitation or opportunity? The list goes on. But this isn’t necessarily unusual for discussions about capitalism. It is helpful, therefore, to look at the material conditions, the different groups and their interests, and conflicts in the informal transport sector itself.
Labor or enterprise?
To varying degrees, informal economies are still associated with neoliberalism. I will discuss the problem with periodization in the next section of this essay, but this association brings with it another, which is that work in the sector is shaped by an entrepreneurialism that makes it different from other forms of labor. Workers in informal economies are often seen as self-employed. However, their status might be closer to what German law refers to as Scheinselbständigkeit (bogus self-employment)—that is, workers in conditions of de facto dependent employment being legally employed as “self-employed subcontractors” in order to circumvent labor laws. (This was practiced for a long time in different sectors, such as construction and hospitality, but has become endemic in the era of Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo). Of course, in African informal economies no such circumvention is needed, but on an analytical level, the fact that the driver of a matatu works on commission and is de facto dependent on the owner can be described in precisely this way. This helps to counter the notion that workers are actually entrepreneurs, which goes back to one of the more infamous analysts of the informal economy, Hernando de Soto, whose work, while largely disavowed today, still haunts current debates on African cities in this way, including through an emphasis on agency over structure.Footnote 40
This idea, that transport workers are entrepreneurs, can breed confusion about the nature of labor relations in the informal economy. Ironically, it is often those who criticize the concept of informality itself who fall into this entrepreneurialism, while unions, such as the International Transport Federation, now speak of “informal and precarious transport workers” to connect the conditions of Uber and Deliveroo drivers in the global North to those of informal transport workers in the South.Footnote 41 (This concept also helps in uniting Uber and taxi drivers in Kenya, for example, who have begun to realize their shared interests instead of competing for passengers.) But it is also an effect of a sector that still lives off the, at least historically very real, possibility of social advancement—of starting as a conductor but eventually becoming an owner. In her seminal history of the Kenyan matatus, Kenda Mutongi describes this process. In the 1950s, African taxi drivers in Nairobi and Mombasa owned their own vehicles. They were driven into operating without a license because the Kenyan Transport Licensing Board favored taxi companies that employed drivers. These companies were usually owned by Europeans or Asians. The self-employed African owner-drivers protested and organized, establishing the first matatu association in the 1960s.Footnote 42 The overcrowding of the sector in the wake of the oil and debt crises, the increasing urbanization, growing unemployment, and the failure of public transport services led to a dramatic shrinking of this window of opportunity. In any case, the difference between the interests of the owners and those of drivers and conductors always diverged. Cissokho’s history of unions in Senegal shows that this divergence of interests went even further—between veteran drivers and newcomers, between drivers and coxeurs, between people from a middle-class background entering the sector as established owners of vehicles and those that had started as drivers and then socially advanced, between politically connected union leaders and populist ones. Divisions and distinctions expressed themselves in the fragmentation of the unions themselves. In Agbiboa’s conflictual history of Lagos, the union itself became an exploitative administrator of the transport infrastructure, a development that is mirrored in other West African states, like Mali.
But the works considered here insert themselves into the new labor history of Africa in ways that go beyond earlier histories focused on proletarianization.Footnote 43 Workers in informal transport were early on confronted with organized labor. In Kenya, the powerful and politically influential Transport and Allied Workers Union saw unlicensed taxi drivers as undue competition and did not admit them. In fact, they mobilized against them. Only recently has TAWU, now a shadow of its former importance, started to open up, while matatu drivers prefer to try and unionize themselves. The conflicts and fragmentations described complicate the history of labor in the transport sector, as solidarity and precariousness play out on different planes. This has led many to see informal transport—and the informal economy as a whole—as a phenomenon of neoliberalism, shaped by and advancing the fragmentation of workers, the destruction of their organizing power, and the deregulation of labor laws.
Periodizing transport: Toward a Moyenne Durée of transport history in Africa
Since its “discovery” in the early 1970s, the informal economy has been seen as an expression and embodiment of neoliberalism.Footnote 44 The anthropologist Keith Hart, who launched the idea (which was then coined as a concept by an International Labor Organization report), points to this close connection in critical reviews.Footnote 45 While current, urban, informal transport networks can be traced back to the late colonial period, different forms of transport labor, from forced labor to African self-organized (and often resistant) labor have existed far longer. In his history of early motorized transport in Africa, Andrew Denning argues that like the maritime and railway empires that came before, and the U.S. air empire after the Second World War, the infrastructure and practice of imperial mobility, from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period, was shaped by an automotive empire.Footnote 46 Denning, however, avoids falling into the “tools of empire” pattern described in Daniel Headrick’s influential history of railways as instruments of imperial territorial domination.Footnote 47 Instead, Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads fueled European Colonialism in Africa describes the contradictions, failures, and tensions of imperial road construction, the power structures it was supposed to achieve, and the ones that were finally shaped in a dialectic of infrastructural domination and resistance.
Motorized transport developed in close collaboration between metropolitan and colonial states, militaries, and private actors, including car manufacturers and transport companies. This combination would often prove inadequate as colonial administrations were more interested in developing road networks that allowed them to control a territory rather than serve the purpose of mobility for colonial subjects. Meanwhile, companies were more interested in pitching administrations on “dramatic (and expensive) infrastructural innovations,” neglecting the more mundane, but sustainable, tasks of investment in and maintenance of existing networks.Footnote 48 In fact, public transport in colonial Africa never satisfied a demand that grew exponentially once urbanization processes took off. Most public transport networks were organized in some form of public–private partnership, with colonial administrations granting monopolies to private, metropolitan transport providers for long periods of time in exchange for some control over routes and fares.Footnote 49 But route networks continued to be lacking, and fares were too high for many Africans. In turn, public transport companies struggled to run profitable businesses.Footnote 50
Africans, however, had quickly adapted to the car as a technology for transport. This allowed them to circumvent tightly controlled railways and develop alternative, more profitable trade routes.Footnote 51 While colonial administrators discussed different forms of mobility as more or less mutually exclusive alternatives, Africans used them in conjunction, developing integrated networks of motorized, railway, and maritime transport and porterage.Footnote 52 More than adaptation, Africans early on developed their own skills and innovated localized forms of automobility and technological skills. While colonial states relied on forced labor and strongly hierarchical employment, Africans developed “informal” (self-employed, circumventing regulatory control, entrepreneurial) forms of labor, often in combination with such employment to resist colonial power.
This background forms the “prehistory” of informal transport as we see it today. While in some cities, Black-owned taxi industries developed as early as the 1930s (and were suppressed quickly), in other regions lorry drivers picked up passengers on the side of the road to generate extra income.Footnote 53 In Ghana, Africans took over the road transport of goods to avoid the unsatisfactory, expensive, and tightly controlled railway network.Footnote 54 When informal transport systems appeared after the Second World War, they already had an emic social and epistemological infrastructure to rely on. They also integrated quickly with existing forms of public transport.
Similarly, the history of informal transport shows that it is not necessarily a history of deregulation; rather, different actors—workers, owners, associations, unions, and states—struggle over what to regulate and how to regulate it. This provides an important corrective to the idea that informal transport, like informal economies, emerged as a result of crises of decolonization and global capitalism. It also complicates the dichotomy of labor vs. enterprise, since political and economic power move across this supposed divide.
Conclusion
The described literature on transport emphasizes complexity and fragmentation. Michael Stasik makes the point succinctly, describing how “increased degrees of complexity yield new ways of engaging with that complexity and, supposedly, of mediating and taming its confusion, which in effect generates further degrees of complexity.”Footnote 55 While Stasik’s work presents a snapshot of a bus station in a specific moment, his observation can be enlarged to the history of motorized transport labor in Africa as a whole. Varying degrees of informality, fragmentation of transport industries, multiplication of actors in the industry, and contradictory state regulations make it difficult to neatly fit the history of transport labor in Africa into conventional periodizations and typologies. The dialectic of exploited work and self-exploiting entrepreneurialism, and of solidarity and competition, is expressed by Stasik with the emic term “hustle,” which is used by the Ghanaian workers at Neoplan station. This is a dialectic that the Argentinian sociologist Veronica Gago, in analyzing an informal market in Buenos Aires, has described as “neoliberalism from below.” “Neoliberalism exploits and takes advantage of the economy’s new (micro)scale,” writes Gago, but the popular classes, the city’s poor, also challenge the city and often struggle to produce situations of urban justice, conquering the city and defining a new “right to the city.”Footnote 56 Actors in the informal market reproduce the system which exploits them at the same time they use it to subsist in precarious conditions.
This is not exclusively tied to the neoliberal era, however. Transport workers in Africa have historically resisted the economic, political, and regulatory systems that their work was necessary to uphold. Work in informal transport has always meant low wages, extremely long working hours, stress, and dangerous working conditions. Entrepreneurialism is part and parcel of the exploitative character of the sector, even while it developed in resistance to colonial labor hierarchies that disadvantaged Africans. Cars were an important technology, enabling Africans to branch off, to innovate, to carve out own existences, and to subvert colonial infrastructure as a means of control. At the same time, their own infrastructures served to stabilize systems that ensured continued exploitation. Emphasizing this dialectic of individual and collective agency, on the one hand, and political-economical structure, on the other, allows us to develop new approaches to analyze labor and capital in post-colonial Africa.Footnote 57
Robert Heinze is a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Paris. He finished his Ph.D. thesis on radio in African decolonization processes in 2012. Currently, he is working on a book about the history of informal transport networks in African cities.
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