African Markets and the Utu-ubuntu Business Model: a perspective on economic informality in Nairobi by Mary Njeri Kinyanjui (review)

Felwine Sarr has recently called for African societies to turn to the articulations between culture and economy in order to produce 'new metaphors' for their own possible futures.¹⁰ Here, Kinyanjui responds with the 'utu-ubuntu business model', an Afrocentric business philosophy that combines the Swahili word for the state of being human (utu) with the Nguni Bantu conception of interconnected humanity (ubuntu). Incubated in the markets of Nairobi, the utu-ubuntu model understands all economic activity to be embedded in three domains: the individual, the community and the divine. Personal challenges, such as the task of negotiating a livelihood, thus become collective challenges, tackled by social and spiritual communities. Interactions within these communities are guided by a spirit of 'solidarity entrepreneurship' that prioritizes collaboration and reciprocation over individual accumulation. Rather than the policies of governments or proscriptions of business schools, the utu-ubuntu model is reproduced through the songs and stories of traders and artisans.

This is a book I wish I'd written. It captures so much of what is distinctive about African marketplaces – the music, the collections, the engagements with the divine – and incorporates them into a framework that upends much conventional thinking on urban theory and planning. By eschewing the paradigms of modernization and urbanization, Kinyanjui redescribes marketplaces as indigenous spatial formations, or 'nests', which nurture collaborative business ventures while extending access to food, livelihoods and education to the urban majority. Much more than spaces of economy, markets emerge here as hubs of urban cognition and conviviality; as places in which people learn how to incorporate difference and live and work alongside one another in the city.

I see three key contributions of the book. First, the author brings a narrative and an auditory perspective to the study of marketplaces, which demonstrates the role of songs and fables – from the whistles of porters to the melodies of born-again vendors – in the social reproduction of the market. Stories serve as vehicles for the transfer of norms and values between generations, reminding traders of the perils of stealing customers and the benefits of collective over individual wealth. Second, the book contributes an African cultural perspective to urban theory by sketching a counter-history of Nairobi centred on the evolution of indigenous modes of economy. By suspending state-centric and capitalcentric readings of the city, the author is able to demonstrate the continued significance of precolonial socio-spatial formations to the evolution of the city, captured through the concept of the 'cultural village'. Third, the book contributes a spiritual perspective to the literature on entrepreneurship through its illustration of the role of the divine in providing a moral order against which business exchanges and misgivings are situated and understood.

These contributions also give rise to two sets of questions that have remained with me since reading the book, the first of which concerns the historical evolution of the utu-ubuntu model. The model appears to arrive in the present remarkably unscathed by 120 years of colonial and postcolonial history. The author's reliance on a dualistic account of Nairobi's economy (as 'two economic systems' that 'operate in parallel' (p. 163)) forecloses questions about the historical interaction of different modes of economy in the region. For example, what is the precolonial history of markets and the utu-ubuntu model? How were Agikuyu systems of ngwatio (labour pools) and mate (resource pools) reconfigured under British colonial rule? To what extent have utu-ubuntu norms and values co-evolved with neoliberal norms and values (when did solidarity become 'entrepreneurial solidarity')? To what extent are they also present in the contemporary 'hustle economy'¹¹ described in this issue? Here, I am reminded of Daniel Miller's argument that market economy and non-market reciprocation are not mutually exclusive but co-dependent.¹²

My second set of questions concerns the limitations of utu-ubuntu...