Food, Culture, and Survival in an African City (review)

Karen Coen Flynn's study of day-to-day activities of food vendors, producers, and consumers in Mwanza, Tanzania, on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, is based on fieldwork conducted in the early to mid-1990s, after the Tanzanian government had moved away from a centrally controlled economic system. At that time Mwanza had a population of about 280,000, mostly ethnic Africans with a significant Asian-African community. The discussion of her interview-based methodology is followed by seven substantial chapters which form the main body of the monograph. Chapter 3 describes broad patterns of consumption, which are explored in the context of the impact of local, regional, and national factors ranging from pricing, to government policies, to religion, and to taste. This sets the stage for chapters 4–7, which focus on the household, the key site for the provisioning processes that Flynn aims to unravel. Extensive interviews show how differences in migration history, in gender-based access to wage labor, and in declining support from rural relatives are linked to the ways that male and female incomes are used within households to obtain food. These differences are also linked to variation in household composition and household responsibilities. Economic factors also account for the greater participation of wealthier households in urban agriculture as a supplementary source for food.

Chapters 8 and 9 constitute an unusually important contribution to African urban ethnography and studies of food provisioning. Here Flynn provides an account of persons outside the normative domestic units: the homeless street people, both adults and children. For the destitute, hunger is addressed through "exchange entitlement" with individuals and organizations. These exchanges are carried out within various "food-supply groups" in which an individual may participate, depending on age, health or disfigurement, and/or gender. The groups parallel the various household organizational structures resulting from the differential access to food described in earlier chapters. These chapters not only underscore the precarious day-to-day struggles of the poor and destitute but also suggest the significance of charity as a source of food to this segment of the urban population.

Throughout her work, Flynn goes beyond ethnographic documentation to address the nature of food exchanges and issues in "food-acquisition theory." Of central concern is a clarification of the work of Amartya Sen, the economist whose research on famine introduced the notion of food "entitlement," the relationships with others that allow one to procure food through exchange. Through the life histories she constructs from her interviews, Flynn documents a wide range of forms of entitlement for Mwanza residents, and connects those forms not only to sociological and economic factors but also to cultural beliefs and local norms of propriety in behavior. In so doing, she refines some of Sen's notions. Most significant, perhaps, is her argument for a concept of charity as reciprocal exchange, rather than a one-way transaction, with emphasis on the prestige and/or moral satisfaction realized by donors.

Food, Culture, and Survival is a densely packed study, both ethnographically and theoretically. The reliance on interviews, while providing rich content, means that participant-observation–based data are somewhat overshadowed. This is not unusual in urban studies, but one wonders about the rest of the lives of individuals beyond their food provisioning efforts, as well as the extent to which the lives within and among the households described here might be connected with one another. And although the study is anthropological in its aspirations, its anthropological character disappears a bit in the context of the complex interdisciplinary literature on food-provisioning. Neither limitation, however, detracts significantly from a carefully designed and well-argued study that sheds significant new light on key aspects of the African urban condition.