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

In this engaging, sensitive and insightful book, Marco Di Nunzio opens an ethnographic window onto the contradictions that beset contemporary urban development in the fast-changing city of Addis Ababa and the wider Ethiopian 'success story'. Hustling – 'making do' through improvisation, and through cultivating attitudes and practices of 'smartness' and 'toughness' – is at the heart of Di Nunzio's account of how poverty and marginality are reproduced in the city. A source of pride and a 'moral code' (p. 132), the ability to hustle depends on the practice of inqisiqase (moving around) in order to gain exposure to the kinds of chances that might help fulfil aspirations for a better life – a mode of living that is founded on action and hope, despite conditions of exclusion and subjugation. Here, Di Nunzio challenges prevalent characterizations of the static and 'stuck' lives of African youth – in Ethiopia, especially in the work of Daniel Mains – resonating with my own work among government workers in rural Amhara region, whose frequent movement was also a future-oriented means of combating their version of social exclusion. Neither thwarted by low horizons nor pawns in a system designed only to crush them, the hustlers of Arada expose the weaknesses of both liberal accounts that see capacity as the key issue affecting aspiration and structural accounts that see individual agency as a cruel illusion, contributing to rather than overcoming exclusion. Echoing recent work on the generative possibilities of uncertainty,¹ Di Nunzio posits hustling as a productive way of positioning oneself between past and present; rather than hoping and dreaming, hustlers embrace open-endedness and employ inqisiqase as an active means of embracing chance.

The world of inner-city Arada is evoked with richness and immediacy, and Di Nunzio's particular focus on the life journeys of two men adds a valuable level of depth and historical perspective. Tourist guides are surprisingly well documented in the recent anthropology of Ethiopia; this book adds to that work by showing how street life and 'being Arada' covers a whole panoply of legal and illegal activities. Di Nunzio steers a skilful path in showing the agency of his interlocutors in their own 'act of living' within and beyond their resources, while also providing – in a particularly strong chapter – an account of the 'red line' beyond which street life and politics become too dangerously entangled. Unlike elsewhere in Africa, Di Nunzio shows how political activism rather than deviant criminality is seen by the state as the primary threat embodied in urban youth, as well as the means by which they seek to control street life. He describes how, following contested and violent elections in 2005, hustlers found themselves drawn into the state's developmental apparatus, and how this political quiescence has had serious consequences for their ability to profit from the visible economic development that Addis Ababa has experienced in recent years. Government programmes that purport to provide young people with entrepreneurial alternatives to precarious and informal work instead function as a means by which existing forms of exclusion are replicated with a veneer of political legitimacy.

Rather than the familiar refrain of development actors, reprised here by government officials – that the failure of small businesses is due to individual lack of skill or commitment – Di Nunzio shows how lack of access to social networks was critical to his interlocutors' inability to overcome marginality. The book's account of how urban hustlers experience being and becoming as a relational rather than an individual endeavour, a 'social trajectory' (p. 91), is a valuable addition to the wider literature on hustling. This is not, however, a romantic tale of solidarity in the face of exclusion, leading to the emergence of modes of collective action. Rather than heroic outlaw figures resisting oppression by forming bonds of comradeship, hustling in Arada encompasses both...