Wolfgang Zeller
(University of Edinburgh)
Peer Schouten
(Danish Institute for International Studies)
Send message to Convenors
Chair:
Wolfgang Zeller
(University of Edinburgh)
Discussants:
Hugh Lamarque
(The University of Edinburgh)
Jose-Maria Munoz
(University of Edinburgh)
Stream:
Social Anthropology
Location:
Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 3
Sessions:
Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Making a living on & off the road - trucking and the politics of movement and stoppage in Africa.
Panel Anth21 at conference ECAS 2019 Africa: Connections and Disruptions.
This panel examines the daily realities of truckers and others making a living from road transport across Africa. We will exchange and theorise on the politics of logistics and infrastructure, movement and stoppage, by entering the world of the African foot soldiers of supply chain capitalism.
Long Abstract:
This interdisciplinary double panel will include empirical and conceptual contributions that explore the lived realities and political agency of some of the foot soldiers of supply chain capitalism in Africa: truckers and others who make a living on and off the road.
In many parts of Africa road transport is the essential means by which goods circulate within countries, across borders, and in and out of the continent's sea ports. Referring to the crucial role they play in keeping their country's mineral export-driven economy moving, Zambian truckers routinely claim that they are "driving the nation". Increasing volumes of valuable cargo and equipment are shipped down regular roads and designated high-priority 'transport corridors', often cutting across areas of Africa where economic opportunities are scarce. The stakes are high to keep the wheels spinning and truck drivers are often at the frontlines of intense, sometimes violent contestations over the conditions, costs and control of their movement. Out on the road, truckers have to be 'heterogeneous engineers', negotiating physical as well as political friction on a daily basis. They have often long-standing relations and arguments with supervisors and customers, border and checkpoint personnel, fellow drivers, sex workers and mechanics. While some of the men and women on and off the road make their living from keeping things moving, others cash in, extract rents, or force their agendas of collective action in periods of stoppage or through blockades.
This paper reflects on the gendered employment practices that characterise road transport operations across Africa. It references rare examples of women daring to disrupt this masculinist enterprise and presents ongoing research with women in three cities (Tunis, Abuja, Cape Town).
Paper long abstract:
The strong link between male identity and motor-mobility in Africa is ubiquitous and rarely questioned by transport sector actors. This paper reflects on the gendered employment practices that to date have characterised road transport operations across sub-Saharan Africa and considers the potential for significant disruption.
Women have been largely absent from the road story. Constrained by hegemonic norms of femininity that shape women's self-understandings and help relegate them to peripheral interstices, women merely service the foot soldiers in the transport sector as sex workers, suppliers of cooked food, or porters. But occasionally women are daring to disrupt this masculinist enterprise. Examples are women recruited as drivers in the South African trucking industry (despite expressed concerns about their potential to upset the 'workplace dynamic'), and Uber women operators providing female-only services in Nairobi. Mobile phone technology appears to play a significant role in these incursions as women navigate the security constraints that, hitherto, have often militated against them taking an active role as transport operators. The paper reflects on ongoing research with women in three African cities (Abuja, Tunis, Cape Town) about the constraints and opportunities that shape their potential for a more satisfactory life on the road.
Taxi and lorry drivers in Ghana have been facing profound changes of their business recently, both from within and outside the transport sector. This ethnography explores how drivers react differently to these developments and how they impact on their income strategies.
Paper long abstract:
Lorry and taxi drivers are a prime mover of the local economy of Kintampo, a medium-sized town and transport hub in central Ghana. Drivers move goods, people and money between markets, villages and the city. They also connect Kintampo to the bigger cities in the North and South. Recently, drivers in and around Kintampo have been facing profound changes and disruptions of their business, both from within the transport sector itself and from outside. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork my paper will explore how drivers react differently to these developments and how they impact their income possibilities, future aspirations and financial strategies.
While some blame recently introduced motorbike taxis (okadas) for "spoiling their business", others argue the new government is responsible for fuel price increases. Still others claim that the collapses of microfinance institutions in Kintampo threw them into a personal financial crisis.
I will show how drivers navigate through these changes and disruptions and through the complex and risky financial landscape of their locality, displaying a variety of individual and creative financial strategies and imaginaries. While some see themselves at the mercy of these changes and their reaction to it can rather be characterised by contingencies, others find new opportunities by becoming promoted from a taxi to a lorry driver or even manage to make a better living outside the transport sector.
This exploratory paper offers glimpses into frontline trenches of supply chain capitalism in Southern Africa. Life in cross-border transport corridors reeks of diesel, dust and body fluids. The boss is tracking you on satellite. A roadblock, death and the end of your airtime bundle is always near.
Paper long abstract:
I am still kicking ideas around about what exactly I want to do with the rich ethnographic material I have gathered from the time I have spent since late 2015, on the road, in offices and online, with cross-border transport corridor truckers and those who manage and regulate their work in Southern Africa. This paper is a first attempted write-up of some of the thematic clusters that emerge from that material and that, I think, merit further exploration and analysis.
Although the managers and regulators play a role in this paper, it is the truckers I would like to focus on. Beck et al. write: "the African road emerges as a co-production of different communities of practice (…) constituted by the specific interactions of travel and roadside communities" (Beck, Klaeger and Stasik 2017). Because being on the road is a constant back and forth between phases of movement and stoppage, cross-border truckers are both a closely integrated travel community as well as (at least part-time) members of multiple roadside communities. Cross-border truckers, through their regular interaction on the road an online, are also a transnational community of practice. Within this larger community, there is a very strong sense of shared purpose, experience, identity and solidarity that is routinely expressed and reaffirmed in conversations by the roadside and online. But although it is often verbally invoked by the drivers, there is not one happy "trucking fraternity" across Southern Africa.
"Odysseus trucks" is a conceptual metaphor to introduce the temporalities of progress in the trucking industry. I will describe these temporalities in relation to the ethnographic data gathered among Tanzania's trucks drivers to introduce the politics of acceleration and deceleration.
Paper long abstract:
Transport infrastructures and logistics are national and international vectors of capitalist progress and accumulation. The temporalities of what I call "Odysseus trucks" are made of necessary and calculated routes and timings. Further, the future appears continuously delayed (Guyer 2007) in the circularity of constant departures and arrivals. Presenting the ethnographic experiences of the workers in the trucking industry of Tanzania, I argue that these workers engage in a necessary quest towards progress and its temporalities, but with nuances that can be conceptualized as the politics of acceleration and deceleration.
To speculate on these nuances, rather than reading the temporalities of stoppage and movement as a lingering between waiting and doing, between unemployment and work (Ralph 2008), I propose to focus on a particular kind of woven time (Millar 2015) and its politics, a time that emerges from a context of constant movement and that is essentially made solely of accelerations and decelerations.
This paper examines the agency and everyday struggles for socioeconomic survival of Nigeria's Informal Road Menders (IRMs), and the micropolitics of road maintenance.
Paper long abstract:
The Nigerian road transport infrastructure is arguably among the worst maintained on the continent. This has led to the emergence of Informal Road Menders (IRMs) who employ crude implements to cushion the effects of potholes on inter-state roads in exchange for monetary gifts from road users.
This paper examines the agency and everyday struggles for socioeconomic survival of Nigeria's IRMs, and the micropolitics of road maintenance. It argues that risks and uncertainties are serving as a socioeconomic resource through which IRMs and road users leverage the precarious road transport infrastructure in the country.
The study draws on interview of IRMs, commercial transport operators and private vehicle owners, officials of the Nigerian Police Force, the Federal Ministry of Transportation, the Federal Road Maintenance Agency, and members of roadside communities. These are complimented by informal conversations about the activities of the IRMs witnessed and initiated by the researcher while commuting in public interstate buses on several occasions within the last quarter of 2018.
This paper examines the nocturnal practices of waiting truck drivers in transit in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Suddenly motionless, they employ various tactics to use their ephemeral stay to their own ends, both socio-economically and sexually, particularly through the appropriation of the night.
Paper long abstract:
Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso: The night falls and in the darkness of the city hundreds of trucks are parked along paved roads and the international parking lot. Small groups of apprentices guarding the trucks gather around pots of tea, while the drivers navigate the urban night. On the road to Abidjan, Lomé or Accra, truck drivers must go through and often stop for hours or days at this prominent dry port located at the crossroad of the major paths that connect landlocked Burkina Faso to Niger, Mali and the coastal countries Ivory Coast, Ghana and Togo. This paper asks: How do long-distance drivers spend the night during more or less ephemeral stops?
Very mobile and flexible transnational actors, drivers must continuously negotiate along the way and face administrative obligations, breakdowns and pressure from proprietors and clients. Burdensome bureaucracy and delays during loading and unloading result in transitory immobility, during which drivers get involved in small side business activities, satisfy sexual desires, or relax with some alcohol and sleep. I argue that transnational transient drivers own great spatial and social knowledge and build affective networks to grasp local opportunities.
This paper in based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted with truck drivers and sex workers in Bobo-Dioulasso during 2018-19.
Kenya's border posts are major passage points along regional trade routes. This paper focuses on border communities and customs officers making a living from the crossing trucks. The actors are affected by the implementation of new infrastructures, but at times actively disrupt cargo mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Kenya is a transit zone for trade in East Africa. Several infrastructure projects (e.g. LAPSET corridor, One Stop Border Posts) target a "smooth flow of goods" across the region, meaning faster and more efficient mobility of cargo through international borders on the one hand, and more state control on the other.
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork at Kenyan border posts. It focuses on border communities and customs officers making a living from crossing trucks, and asks what effects new infrastructures have on the ground. Many actors are affected, and the new developments do not favour everyone. Truck drivers deliver faster but face new risks because they receive less and often insufficient fuel by their companies. Individual customs officers used to generate "pocket money" during formerly slow manual processes, and now complain about increased state control. Many border communities economically rely on transit roads. But since truck drivers stopped parking in border towns for longer periods, local businesses suffer. Long-time border town residents are cut off from new border structures where mostly non-locals are employed.
Mostly, the supply chain continues unaffected by local circumstances. But at times, mobility is disrupted. Custom officers might claim system outages and purposely delay trucks. Moreover, the effect on local businesses has led to protests and roadblocks across the country. In the case of Moyale on the Kenya-Ethiopia border, the new border post remains deserted while trade routes are redirected through alternative passages where goods are taxed by local militia.
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