Life at the Crossroads: Transportation Infrastructure in African Cities

Mundane rituals such as daily commutes often are overlooked or portrayed as backdrop in works of scholarship. It was therefore refreshing to read three new works by Africanist scholars deeply investigating the historical and economic factors impacting the owners, workers, and passengers of urban transportation sectors in African cities, from the colonial era to the present: Jennifer Hart's, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation; Kenda Mutongi's, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi; and Matteo Rizzo's, Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour and Public Transport in an African Metropolis. Each offers important contributions to the literature on African cities, informal economies, mobility, regulatory landscapes, and urban infrastructures.

Scholars across disciplines increasingly ground social theory in the materiality of infrastructures, especially in urban areas where complex layers of sociality provide unique challenges to research and analysis. Infrastructures constitute "the architecture for circulation, literally producing the undergirding of modern society" while generating "the ambient environment in everyday life," according to anthropologist Brian Larkin (2013:327). Mutongi, Hart, and Rizzo document this circulatory architecture through colonial railways, road building projects, duct-taped pick-up trucks, and "pimped-out" minibuses, using transportation to explore broader topics and anchor theoretical debates. For Rizzo, daladala minibuses in Tanzania highlight a complex economic sector where heterogeneity of the informal economy can be theoretically grounded, challenging mainstream research and policy assumptions that celebrate the role of small-scale entrepreneurs as a short-hand for work in the informal sector, while underplaying the daily lives of multiple hierarchies of wage labor operating in the informal economy. Basing her study in Kenya, Mutongi offers an alternative analytical angle, using the matatu sector to highlight the success of African-run business without assistance from government or development agencies. Hart examines the "vehicular history" of Ghana's "mammy trucks," "boneshakers," and trotros to illustrate how African entrepreneurs used colonial technology for their own purposes, and with relative autonomy, for nearly thirty years in the early twentieth century.

Although each of the texts documents historical patterns from slightly different angles and time frames, the authors chronologically cross paths in the 1970s, Hart and Mutongi as social historians and Rizzo from a development studies perspective. This era, characterized by Rizzo as "roll-back" neoliberalism, was a time when popular transportation was liberalized across the continent, and daladalas in Tanzania, matatus in Kenya, and the trotros in Ghana, like many other informal transportation sectors around the world, emerged as local, bottom-up responses to the national governments' failure to provide basic services for their citizens. Another important thread these books share is their attention to how the initial process of driving professionalization has, in the past several decades, given way to widespread, and often violent, criminalization of workers and owners in informal transportation sectors. More recently, these transportation sectors, and their work force, have witnessed massive urban policies referring to the negative reputation of the sector as a legitimizing device to facilitate and justify urban megaprojects promoted by the World Bank, such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems, currently operational in Lagos, in advanced planning stages in Dar es Salam, and in early planning stages in Nairobi and Accra.

Jennifer Hart's sweeping social history of drivers, Ghana on the Go, traces the impacts of automobility on social, political, and economic possibilities for African entrepreneurs throughout the twentieth century. Hart is especially careful to populate her discussions of infrastructure and mobility with a variety of voices, including public discourse...