Category: Africa

Layers of compounding pressure: the gendered experiences of rural migrant youth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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鈥淚 have lived everything there is to be lived in this city. Now I need to leave because all that is left for me here is misery and I want a better life for my child.鈥�

It is with these words that Tizita, a 21-year-old mother-of-one from Gojjam in northern Ethiopia, described her dismay at life in Addis Ababa when I interviewed her in 2022. After living in the Ethiopian capital for eight years, she had had enough. Tizita was set on moving to one of the Gulf States, a part of the world from where many of the women she met on the street had returned from and were planning to re-migrate to. Having previously worked as a domestic worker in Addis Ababa, and having learnt that sex work was the only way to make 鈥�real money鈥� in the city, the young woman remained focused on meeting the fundamental purpose of her migration project: transforming her life. 聽

For Fikadu, a 27-year-old man from Wollega in western Ethiopia, the strain of life in the city is similar, yet different. Unlike for young women like Tizita, whose income-earning activities are overwhelmingly limited to domestic work, petty street work, commercial sex work and begging, the fractions of the informal economy available to migrant men are slightly wider. Nevertheless, this is not to say that times have not been hard. Having previously worked as a street vendor selling second-hand clothes, Fikadu has had to downscale his work and is struggling to meet the rising costs of food, rent, sending money to his family of origin, and realising his plans for the future:  

鈥�Our supplies disappeared and when they were back, the price went up by more than double. That was the end of it. Now I pay for my life here by selling socks, but I don鈥檛 let that dismay me. I remain focused on my plans of transforming my life here, and once things improve I will start saving for my own metalwork shop.鈥� 

The testimonies of Tizita and Fikadu form part of a longitudinal qualitative research project that maps the livelihood strategies of a sample of migrant youth in Addis Ababa at two points in time between 2018 and 2022. Drawing on these findings, this blog outlines some of the ways in which rural-urban migrant youth between the ages of 15-27 experience and counteract pressure. Through an exploration of migrants鈥� everyday strategies of navigating the city, findings presented here show how dealing with the intricacies of urban life relates intimately to the lives rural youth left behind and the imaginary futures they aspire towards, the ways in which youth relate to the social and economic responsibilities they carry, and the manner in which subjective pressure experienced by women and men has a compounding effect that further exacerbates the challenges migrant youth face.

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The pressure to provide and perform: Anti-feminism, masculinity consultants, and the threat of male expendability in contemporary Nairobi

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Women are the reason why men have changed because women are hard on men. [鈥 The expectations they come with into a relationship, and generally how they have been brought up, or the life they live, that is what gives some men stress. [鈥 When someone is living with a woman in the house, you find that issues are many because money is little.

Wellington Ochieng, 36-year old labor migrant from western Kenya

During almost three years of ethnographic fieldwork among male migrants in , I heard complaints like Wellington鈥檚 almost daily. Migrant men, in my case predominantly Luo from western Kenya who came to Nairobi with high expectations of a better future, bemoaned a life full of pressure caused by the romantic, sexual, and economic expectations of their girlfriends, wives, and rural kin. The blame often lay on 鈥榗ity girls鈥� who were portrayed as materialistic 鈥榮lay queens鈥檞ho 鈥榝inish鈥� men by leaving them bankrupt only to suck away the after grabbing him with their 鈥楤eelzebub nails鈥� as Wellington called the colorful nails sported by many Nairobi women. Soon, so a fear expressed repeatedly by my interlocutors, most men would no longer be needed at all and Kenya鈥檚 economy would be ruled by economically powerful women who raise chaotic boys brought up . Such fears of male expendability also manifested in imaginations about a future in which more and more men and women would live in or 鈥榗ontract marriages鈥� that replace trust and love with contractual agreements. When my flat mate Samuel, a student of economics divorced from the mother of his baby son, returned to our apartment after passing the neighbor鈥檚 house where a group of women celebrated a birthday, for instance, he just shook his head and sighed: 鈥榃e live like animals in the jungle. Women and men separately. We only meet for mating and making babies. Maybe that鈥檚 where we鈥檙e heading to.鈥� Overwhelmed by their wives鈥� and girlfriends鈥� expectations, many migrant men who spoke to me in Pipeline decided to spend as little time as possible in their marital houses. Instead, they evaded pressure by lifting weights in gyms, , , gulping down a cold beer in a Wines & Spirits, playing the videogame FIFA, or catcalling 鈥榖rown-skinned鈥� Kamba women on the roads. Some men who could no longer cope took even more drastic measures involving murder and . One man, for instance, cut the throat of his girlfriend only to try to kill himself, while another tried to poison himself, later quoting the wife鈥檚 actions and character as the cause. Anything appeared better than spending time with the 鈥榙aughters of Jezebel鈥� who were waiting for them in the cramped houses of Pipeline, sometimes demanding migrant men to engage in romantic and sexual practices they were unfamiliar with as expounded upon by Wellington:

When you come to Nairobi, our girls want that you hold her hand when you are going to buy chips, you hug her when you are going to the house, I hear there is something called cuddling, she wants that you cuddle, at what time will you cuddle and tomorrow you want to go to work early? [鈥 you don鈥檛 go to meet your friends so that you show her you love her, you just sleep on the sofa and caress her hair, to me, this is nonsense because that is not romantic love, I think that romantic love, so long as I provide the things I provide, and we sire children, I think that鈥檚 enough romance. [鈥 Another girl told me to lick her, and I asked her 鈥榃hy do you want me to lick you?鈥� She said that she wanted me to lick her private parts. Are those places licked? [鈥 Those things are things that people see on TV, let us leave them to the people on TV.

Figure 1: Pipeline

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Epistemicides vs Epistuicides: What are we missing in the decolonial movement?

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Academia has always been political. On some occasions, it has been appropriated and deployed to meet political ends while in other occasions it has modelled itself to challenge politicisation. In their study of curriculum framework governing economics teaching in Brazilian higher education, Guizzo, et al (2021: 258) show how the idea of a pluralist education system is under threat from a 鈥渟trong disciplinary, institutional and wider political pressures with both domestic and global roots鈥�. Indeed, the threats towards education systems in the global South often have global as well as local origins. These days, the threat of epistemicides – that is the killing of a people鈥檚 knowledge – has displaced and suffocated academic spaces in the global South (de Sousa Santos 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). This killing has taken both subtle and unsubtle forms. One way this has happened has been through dominant and domineering western oriented knowledge production institutions and systems which disregard approaches and writings from the global South.

In this discussion, however, I will use the case of the University of Zimbabwe to show how domestic roots have also contributed towards the suffocation of academic spaces. I argue in this piece that epistemicides work together with epistuicides (see Kufakurinani 2022) – a process where a people kill their own knowledge systems. The twin evils of epistuicides and epistemicides have suffocated knowledge production in the global south. Indeed, the problem of a dominant western centric gaze has been a subject of examination by decolonial thinkers. Mainstream journals in many disciplines have been known to promote certain perspectives and specific research approaches at the expense of others.  It is in this context that there has been a huge global movement to decolonise and decentre knowledge systems and knowledge production in many disciplines. Admittedly, decolonisation has become a buzz word over the years to the point of losing meaning. For me, decolonisation is simply about elevating alternative and at times rare voices and perspectives, particularly those from the global south. These voices and perspectives may be parallel or even contradictory to dominant perspectives and voices.

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A value perspective of price and currency stability in Zimbabwe

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In his , Zimbabwe鈥檚 Finance and Economic Development Minister, Hon. Prof. Mthuli Ncube identified rising inflation and currency depreciation as the major challenges requiring 鈥渢he support of all stakeholders and citizens鈥�.  Zimbabwe is failing to ward off persistent inflation. According to Ncube鈥檚 mid-term budget report, headline inflation increased from 60.7% in January to 191.6% in June 2022.

In this post, I will argue that whilst price and the exchange rate have some importance, preoccupation with them can constrain economic development. I start off by giving a brief background of inflation in Zimbabwe as well as inflation targeting policies, before arguing that sheepishly pursuing currency and price stability equates to commodity fetishism. I then look at the real beneficiaries of price and currency stabilisation policies. Finally, I attempt to demystify value and price in Zimbabwe鈥檚 context.

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The Malformation of West Africa

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In 1927, Ladipo Solanke 鈥� co-founder of the West African Students Union (WASU) 鈥� published a book in which he argued that 鈥淚t took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.鈥� (Solanke, 1927: 58). All that would be needed to achieve this, for Solanke, would be 鈥渁 strong self-determination to take up and money to back up,鈥� as well as active cooperation among West Africans. Sir Henry J. Lightfoot-Boston, in an article titled Fifty Years Hence, prophesied a federation of West African territories by 1976 (Boahen, 1982: 40).

The fulfilment of such grand visions has continued to elude the region for decades. West Africans, and indeed many from outside the region, have not only underestimated the difficulty of development in general and in the region in particular, but have understated how crucial it is to examine the difficulties within a regional framework.

Developmental and Regional Difficulties

In the case of the former, the worldwide development experience since the 1960s and the multitude of crises in West Africa have demonstrated that development and stability are not merely matters of 鈥減olitical will鈥� or 鈥渟trong self-determination鈥�. Particularly for West Africa, there is a reason why the great empires and societies of the interior (the Western Sudan) which had the highest levels of integration with the rest of the world, elite Arabo-literacy rates and the largest empires in the pre-Atlantic period now rank the highest in poverty rates and the lowest in economic production, anglo-literacy rates, and many other measures of human development.

There is a reason why West Africa had the highest incidence of military coups in Africa following political independence (McGowan, 2003: 355); why the region is a major center of diffusive terrorism on the continent; and why it is experiencing a current climate of violence between farmers and pastoralists that is 鈥渦nprecedented in modern times鈥� (Brottem, 2021: 2). There is a reason why West Africa, along with Central Africa, has the highest transport costs and lowest transport quality in a continent which has the highest transport costs in the world (Teravaninthorn and Raballand, 2009: 17).

There is a reason why, according to the latest attempt to quantify political settlements of developing countries (Schulz and Kelsall, 2020), West Africa ranks the lowest in Africa in terms of virtually all the variables identified by Whitfield et al. (2015) as critical for industrial policy success. Yet presidential elections and development discourse within nations in West Africa continue to be dominated by simplistic narratives of 鈥済ood governance鈥�, 鈥渃orruption鈥� and 鈥減olitical will鈥�.

With regard to understating the importance of adopting a regional lens, this has been the case since the late colonial period when self-government began to be extended to the colonies on a territorial rather than regional basis. The movements for West African cooperation fostered by the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), its eventual rival, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and student organizations such as the West African Students Union (WASU) and the F茅d茅ration des 茅tudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF) (Black African Students Federation in France) went into decline in West Africa as nationalist territorialism spread across the region in response to the expanded opportunities for legislative engagement which followed colonial acquiescence to some degree of self-rule (Boahen, 1982: 15). Efforts at creating regional federations, as pre-eminently envisaged by Kwame Nkrumah, did not succeed, and faded away after the fall of Nkrumah in 1966 (Serra, 2014: 21-22). Since then, 鈥淎lthough rhetorical support for integration exists, there is no dominant personality to articulate a vision and turn it into a crusade the way Nkrumah once did.鈥� (Lavergne and Daddieh, 1997: 105). There is also an absence of an 鈥渋ntegration culture鈥� in the region, among governments, business communities and ordinary people (Bundu, 1997: 38).

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Feminist political economy, land, and decolonisation: Rama Salla Dieng in conversation with Lyn Ossome

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By Lyn Ossome and

In this interview, Rama Salla Dieng shares her thoughts on methods, feminist political economy, land questions in the Global South, radically reclaiming parenting as a political terrain of subversion and resistance, commitments to decolonisation while located in the western academy, radical acts of self-care, and African feminism.

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Exploring the Platform Political Economy of Self-Help in Africa

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Informal savings group in Tarime district, Tanzania. Photo: Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Self-help groups can be found in many areas of Africa鈥攊ncluding the chama groups of Kenya, isusu of Nigeria, and stokvels of South Africa (Ardener and Burman 1995). Their customary rotating credit arrangement is also popular among African diaspora communities (Hossein 2018; Ardener 2010). A significant rise has occurred in these groups at the wake of the neoliberal restructuring reforms of the 1980s-90s, with a decline in formal sector employment and state-funded producer cooperatives. At present, these mutual support groups are targeted by FinTech platforms as well as conventional banks with various financial products and software apps. My recent research explores of the contentious interplay between the formal and informal finance in these emerging digital interfaces in Africa. It studies the intersection of FinTech with the social economies of African mutual help groups in Kenya and South Africa, situating this dynamic in longer-term colonial legacies and present-day policies of extractive financialization (Rodima-Taylor 2022).

Informal mutual support groups with their saving-credit patterns have long served as an inspiration for the development industry. The initially successful micro-finance model drew on pre-existing reciprocities and mutually negotiated liability in largely informal contexts. However, as the microfinance formula shifted from socially situated lending towards 鈥榝ast-scaling鈥� and universalizing group lending in an expanding range of localities, the industry was faced with repayment crisis (see Haldar and Stiglitz 2016). The recent conceptual shift from microfinance to digital financial inclusion foregrounds mobile payments and fee-based service delivery, with payment industry also experimenting with new sources of value such as customer data (Maurer 2015). Microloans have remained an important part of the digital financial inclusion enterprise, with poorly regulated lending apps fueling over-indebtedness. As informal savings groups and mutual support associations have become central in the livelihoods in many low-income communities, I suggest that more attention is needed to the intersection between the self-help groups and FinTech initiatives in the global South.

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Remembering Ian Taylor

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Last year in February, of the University of St Andrews passed away after a short struggle with cancer. Ian was a world-renowned scholar in the fields of African Studies, International Relations and Global Political Economy. Besides his remarkable academic achievements, Ian was an extremely passionate educator as well as a kind, humorous and supportive colleague and friend to many of us. This is a modest attempt to pay tribute to an inspiring intellectual and true friend of Africa.

Together with his twin brother Eric, Ian grew up on the Isle of Man, before the family relocated to West London where he spent his teens and would become a die-hard Brentford FC supporter 鈥� in his words a 鈥�100% local club鈥�. Whilst there were few points of contact to Africa on the small Crown dependency in the Irish Sea, Ian, early on, developed an interest in Africa, as he heard stories from his grandmother whose parents had lived in South Africa, and where a large network of relatives still live.

After reading History and Politics at what was then the Leicester Polytechnic, Ian used a gap year in 1991-92 for his first travel to southern Africa 鈥� obviously at quite a formative time for the region. This trip clearly left a firm impression on him, as he would return to the region throughout his life. However, first he joined Jo, the love of his life whom he met in South Africa, when she took up Ph.D studies at the University of Hong Kong in 1994. Ian enrolled himself for a Master鈥檚 there. His 368-pages M.Phil thesis on China鈥檚 foreign policy vis-脿-vis Africa laid the cornerstone for one of his research specialisations and arguably also for a new sub-discipline, China-Africa studies. One of his first academic articles, an output from his M.Phil research, was published in the Journal of Modern African Studies and has since been cited 357 times (Taylor ). Exactly 18 years later, Ian became co-editor-in-chief of this prestigious journal, together with Ebenezer Obadare.

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