The Act of Living: street life, marginality, and development in urban Ethiopia by Marco Di Nunzio (review)

Despite the ubiquity of the hustler in contemporary accounts of Africa's urban life and cities, few ethnographic accounts take hustlers seriously, as people who want to not only make a livelihood but live meaningfully, and few take the streets they occupy as dynamic terrains of action that are socially and historically produced. This is what Marco Di Nunzio does in his book The Act of Living, showing how Arada (the inner city of Addis Ababa) is more than a place but also the embodiment of a mode of urban living characterized by 'street smartness'. Such street smartness is central to how street hustlers describe themselves, make sense of their condition of marginality, and give meaning to their everyday actions and practices.

The book revolves around the stories of two men called Ibrahim and Haile. It follows them as they grow up in Addis Ababa and in their multiple engagements with the street economy, low-wage labour and government-supported cooperatives in search of a better life, showing how Ethiopia's recent economic growth and poverty-alleviation policies did not provide them with avenues to improve their lives. In noting the 'multiplicity of lives' Ibrahim and Haile have lived, Di Nunzio demonstrates the futility of the notion of 'waithood'. Di Nunzio's hustlers do not have the luxury of 'waiting', nor did they think it made sense to wait, in part because they do not expect their condition of marginality to change in the future. They are instead engaged in a continuous hustle to get by, which involves constantly moving about to find new avenues to improve their lives.

Di Nunzio insists that 'the act of living' through marginality involves 'embracing uncertainty', which implies a particular way of experiencing the present and its relation to the future. The future is a source of anxiety and stress for men like Ibrahim and Haile. It is, therefore, only by staying grounded in the present that these men have options for action and hope. Di Nunzio demonstrates how the 'open-endedness' of living in the present enables his interlocutors to see their lives through the lens of the possible. In doing so, the book challenges the idea that being stuck in the present (or 'still youth') is all abjection and precariousness, showing instead how living through marginality involves a distinct mode of 'living with others' (p. 131) and moments of enjoyment (such as chewing khat) in the 'here and now'.

Nevertheless, Di Nunzio's hustlers are deeply sceptical about Ethiopia's newfound growth and development. They feel that they have been cut out of the deal and 'left with nothing' (p. 173). Their continued marginality and exclusion in the face of the promise of abundance is what leads them to question the foundation of this wealth and the moral authenticity of those who benefit from it. This (moral) critique of power, wealth and success shapes his interlocutors' understanding of their marginality as a 'shared predicament', but this critique, Di Nunzio tells us, does not constitute a collective consciousness or resistance. Nor does it challenge the status quo. Instead, he shows how this critique provides the (moral) ground to justify his interlocutors' economic practices – with the criminal activities involved in hustling seen to be nothing compared with the big cheating of the rich – while also recapturing their sense of self-worth.

It is here where several theoretical concerns that frame Di Nunzio's rich ethnography come into view, in particular his concern with how, in academic debates, the agency of the oppressed is either celebrated for its capacity to resist or seen to reproduce marginality. The emphasis on resistance, defiance and protest, he argues, limits our capacity to understand resistance as something more ambiguous and limited, such as the everyday practice of maintaining self-worth and respect in the face...