Introduction
I first met DeeFootnote 1 in the studio he occupied in a Bulawayo art gallery. Dee's works were subtle, complex, and evidently time-consuming to make. He began each piece by sketching the contours of an image on a section of white poster board. He then used a box-cutter to outline and excise small geometric shapes from within that image, removing the shiny top layer of the board and exposing a second layer beneath – darker and matte. To my eyes, the contrast between shiny brightness and matte darkness gave the resulting images both texture and depth. They appeared to vibrate with energy. While he was actively working on his art, tracing the edges of the geometric shapes, Dee seemed to vibrate with potential energy as well. When tourists stopped by his studio, all his energy burst forth – into smiles, exclamations and enthusiastic nods. In Dee's experience, visitors to the gallery were especially interested in his methods. How long did his work take him? Did he start with a photograph or produce the sketched image from scratch? He was flattered by their interest, but he also suspected that these questions were designed to help tourists judge the fairness of his prices. Tourists, Dee told me, hardly ever asked him what he intended his artworks to mean.
Dee had a detailed explanation for the significance of his art. The tiny geometric shapes that seemed to bring his images to life were discrete puzzle pieces that, in his view, represented the fragmentation of human experience. He explained the meaning of his work this way: at one point in the distant past, people lived in isolation from each other. Then, the Creator thrust everyone together into a single shared world in which human beings needed to find ways to live together. For Dee, this search amounted to putting together the pieces of the puzzle of individualized experience and, in doing so, producing a shared unity. He approached his work with this unity, not the tourist market, in mind. ‘I work for the future,’ he said, ‘not for money.’
Dee was not alone in imagining his artistic works as opportunities (for him and for others) to engage creatively with notions of unity, cohabitation and experience; other artists who worked in the gallery had similar views. One artist, who painted with ink, explored these themes in his production process. The ink gave his completed works a polished, almost untouched quality, but this coherence belied the interpretive labour that the ink required of him. Because ink dries more rapidly than paint, he told me, he brought his paintings to unity by negotiating with his materials. He layered colours, spread them around, waited and watched, until the ink gave him an image he found satisfactory. For another artist, John, these themes appeared in the content of his art. He painted ghostly faces and added scraps of newsprint to his artwork. John intended these elements to produce gaps and fissures in the narrative of the work, and he included them because he wanted his viewers to hone their interpretive skills by identifying and explaining the erasures for themselves.
In my experience in Bulawayo, these themes also appeared in a somewhat less expected place: in the work of quasi-unregulated natural gas retailers. Like the artists in the gallery, these dealers aspired to unity and coherence. Although these men operated within fragmented and contingent networks of social relationships (including customers and collaborators, wholesalers and border guards, regulatory inspectors and police officers), they sought to knit these relationships together in order to deliver gas reliably and produce sustainable profits. Like artists, too, these dealers used the openness that marked the pursuit of coherence as an opportunity to creatively reshape the world around them. They bribed inspectors, borrowed import licences and invested in houses for the purposes of hiding their profits from the Zimbabwean government. It is with these relationships and strategies in mind that I characterize this work (with admitted clumsiness) as ‘quasi-unregulated’. The terms ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ are simply too static and binary to account for either the mutability of the networks in which dealers participate or the complex roles that the state plays in the formation of those networks (cf. Roitman Reference Roitman1990).
This article teases out and examines the connections between making art and working with natural gas. Stopping short of collapsing these forms of work into a single category, it analyses the experiences of a collection of actors who make art and/or distribute gas, demonstrating that these actors mobilize an overlapping set of strategies to navigate the everyday political conditions of life in Bulawayo. These political conditions are unpredictable, insofar as they change frequently and crystallize only temporarily and in unexpected ways, and artists and natural gas retailers learn to operate within these conditions by building what a number of scholars have termed ‘assemblages’ – emergent arrangements of human actors, non-human objects, affect and time. In keeping with the theory of ‘emergence’ that motivates this part issue, I argue that this approach allows these social actors to leave interpretive possibilities unresolved and to feel their way into the future, in continual negotiation with the environments, situations and things that surround them. Although in many respects this approach bears similarities to those adopted by actors who work elsewhere in Zimbabwe's unregulated markets (cf. Chagonda Reference Chagonda2016; Jones Reference Jones2010b; Mawowa and Matongo Reference Mawowa and Matongo2010; Musoni Reference Musoni2010), artists and natural gas dealers also pursue their labours with a special awareness of the material properties of the substances with which they work. This awareness equips these actors to recognize both the skill required to manage these recalcitrant substances (and, by extension, the wider assemblages these actors seek to build) and the limitations of intentionality that this skill implies.
Furthermore, with its emphasis on the similarities between artistic production and gas distribution, this article resists the temptation to posit straightforward distinctions between artistic labour and other forms of work. In Bulawayo, as in many places, such distinctions are both unhelpful and inaccurate, even in their barest outlines. Artists in the gallery did more than render aesthetically a world that natural gas dealers navigated economically; they were also economic actors, in that they procured raw materials and shaped their works to meet the needs of a tourist market. Natural gas retailers, for their part, constructed dynamic representations of their worlds with and through the gas they circulated. Those representations might have been codified as the price of gas on a given day, but they were no less aesthetic for their economic value. One dealer in gas even coordinated his own community arts programme from within a studio in the gallery. Framing these practices as cultivated assemblages accounts for the categorical fluidity of these forms of work. It also situates the people who engage in this work within a shared social world that includes not only the material and affective resources they employ, but also the demands imposed on them by a predatory state.
The state, the sun, and emergence in Bulawayo's LPG market
Dee had little interest in catering to the tastes of the tourist art market. Although he found the questions that tourists asked to be superficial, and the themes they desired uninspiring, his strongest objection to the tourist market was aesthetic in nature. Dee considered a ‘true work of art’ to be one that provided ‘a journey for everyone’ and, in the context of his work, the richness of that journey was easily measured. The more geometric shapes his works contained, the more complex their puzzles and the more robust the journeys to piece those puzzles together. If tourists were more interested in the time it took to make a work than they were in the meaning behind it, they had little reason to wait patiently while he added the necessary detail. Tourists might visit his studio only once during their trip, and if he had no baobab trees or majestic lions’ heads ready when they arrived, they would find those images elsewhere. While he tried to fill his tourist art with the same geometric shapes that appeared in the projects he was passionate about, the pressure to work quickly prompted him to compromise his artistic vision. He made the shapes larger – tracing, for example, the flank of an elephant in just a few pieces – so that they would be easier to execute, and the resulting works therefore lacked the complex puzzles and deep significance that he so valued. As Dee was explaining his frustrations, his friend Edward arrived. Edward listened for a moment and, when he chimed in, he was even more disdainful of tourists and their tastes than Dee had been. ‘I could dash off three or four pictures of women with pots on their heads in five minutes and sell them to a European for a thousand bucks a pop,’ Edward said. ‘We call that stuff isinkwa sabantwana – bread for the children.’
Edward also occupied studio space in the gallery. Rather than using it to produce his own artwork, however, he ran a small arts education programme out of it. In addition to this art programme – which I discuss below – Edward was involved in a range of moneymaking ventures. At the time of my fieldwork, his primary interest was liquid petroleum gas (LPG) – a mixture of butane and propane gas that is pressurized and stored in tanks in liquid form. Having conducted his own independent research, Edward had good reason to think that his interest in LPG was justified. Zimbabwe had no domestic sources of LPG,Footnote 2 and large multinational companies had been slow to establish footholds in the country because of concerns about economic instability and political malfeasance. This lack of foreign and domestic investment had led Edward to believe that people who regularly turned to LPG to heat their water and cook their food (in his estimation, roughly 8 per cent of Zimbabwean households) were chronically underserved.Footnote 3
Edward further suspected that Zimbabwe's LPG market had significant potential for growth and cited the country's crumbling electrical infrastructure as the source of his confidence. The Zimbabwe Electric Supply Authority (ZESA), the national power utility, is at best struggling – and at worst failing – to meet the electricity needs of the country. A 2015 article by Ndakaziva Majaka in the Daily News reported that large portions of Zimbabwe were spending upwards of sixteen hours per day without power. The cause of the blackouts was a significant production shortfall. Zimbabwe's two major power stations, Hwange Thermal Power Station and Kariba Hydro Station, account for 95 per cent of Zimbabwe's 1,095 megawatt (MW) daily output in a country that typically requires double that amount (2,200 MW per day). To make matters worse, Majaka noted, Hwange Thermal Power Station was due to undergo repairs shortly after my fieldwork, in late 2015 (Majaka Reference Majaka2015). As one of my informants, another dealer in LPG, put it: ‘You know things are bad when ZESA is asking people to consider offsetting their electricity usage with gas!’
Edward saw an opportunity in this situation, but he was far from the only person to notice it. Tendai Makaripe, writing for The Financial Gazette, observed that the unreliability of Zimbabwe's electrical grid, coupled with the country's high rate of unemployment following its economic collapse in 2008, had produced a whole class of entrepreneurs who were eager to profit from the unregulated sale of alternative energy sources such as LPG (Makaripe Reference Makaripe2015). Another man I knew, Zu, belonged to this category. Zu became acquainted with LPG in 2013, selling and pumping gas on the street and in the sun, and it wasn't long after he got his start that he was able to use his profits to build himself a metal garage-like structure behind a restaurant. By the time I met Zu, he had hired a couple of men to accept cash and pump gas while he busied himself with the unpredictable and occasionally maddening work of making sure that there was enough LPG at his fuelling station for his customers to buy.
Dealers such as Edward and Zu operate within convoluted webs of relationships and interactions, and each nodal point in those webs has the potential to affect the fate of those that surround it. A cross-border trader, carrying gas, could be delayed by confused paperwork or a sceptical official. Or a new player could enter the gas market and make a name for himself by flooding the market with gas and driving down prices. If an unscrupulous partner spends or pockets money that was meant to go towards procuring more gas, the flow of LPG will be interrupted and the retailer will have no legal recourse. Even further down the line, a foreign refinery might temporarily halt production (as one did for the first few days of my fieldwork) and cause a retailer's pipeline of fuel to collapse. Under such circumstances, prices can increase from US$2 to US$3 per kilogram to US$5 or even US$6 as one dealer after another runs out of supply.Footnote 4 In the quasi-unregulated LPG market, liquidity can freeze at a moment's notice.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to represent these retailers as the authoritative subjects of their labours. Other humans (such as border officials and traders) have an impact on the circulation of LPG, but so too can non-human objects such as gas itself,Footnote 5 the valves and generators that pump it, the vehicles that transport it, and the stoves, bathrooms and kitchens in which it is ultimately deployed (cf. Bennett Reference Bennett2010). The sun is an active participant in the circulation of LPG: as one dealer explained to me, sun exposure can raise the pressure in the tanks, damaging them and increasing the likelihood of an explosion. The gas tanks themselves are notably active, too. They are recycled from Southern Africa's formal gas marketFootnote 6 and they leak fuel as they are filled and emptied. Although state regulations stipulate that leaky tanks are too dangerous to use, dealers will fill them anyway and their open-air stations are suffused with the acrid smell of gas. The consequences of a station filling slowly with gas can be predictably dangerous.Footnote 7 As these complexities and avenues of potential failure demonstrate, LPG distribution in Zimbabwe can be derailed for reasons that have no direct connection to a retailer's own actions and decisions. This being the case, the quasi-unregulated distribution of LPG is perhaps best understood as an emergent process.
As the statements from the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) might suggest, the Zimbabwean state participates actively in this emergent market. Notably capricious in its engagement with other similar markets (cf. Bratton and Masunungure Reference Bratton and Masunungure2006; Fontein Reference Fontein2009), the state has only recently sought to regulate the sale of LPG. Justifying its actions as a response to a spate of explosions that it blamed on negligent dealers, the state produced the Petroleum (LPG) Regulations of 2014 (Statutory Instrument 57). These regulations require sellers to undergo site and safety inspections and purchase retail licences. Retailers in Bulawayo are now officially answerable to the ZERA and its equipment standards, the city council, the fire brigade, the Environmental Management Agency (EMA), and the police. Should they fail to comply with the state's regulatory standards, they are subject to fines, both large and small.
Although it may appear that these regulations are designed to address the safety concerns that attend the use of a dangerous substance, and to inject a measure of stability into a volatile market in the process, Zu and other sellers of gas are (perhaps unsurprisingly) extremely wary of this reading. For one thing, retailers allege that a man who serves as an adviser to the ZERA owns his own petroleum company (and perhaps multiple ‘competing’ companies). Given that the ZERA has the power to determine whether a company will receive a licence to sell LPG, and given that at least one of this man's companies was preparing to enter the LPG market, his conflicting interests belied the legitimacy of Zimbabwe's ‘formal’ LPG market. Dealers were therefore not particularly optimistic that the ZERA and its agents would assess their operations fairly. For another thing, retailers know that they can avoid the fines that come with failed inspections if they are willing to bribe the inspecting officers. Zu estimated that he paid out between US$80 and US$100 in bribes each month, or between 13 per cent and 16 per cent of his expected monthly profits (US$600), depending on which organizations inspected him and how much clout they had. The greater the clout, the higher the fines; the higher the fines, the higher the bribes to avoid them.
Whatever the original goal of inspections and licences might have been, it would seem in practice that they do not so much stabilize LPG distribution in the interests of promoting safety as provide opportunities for state officials to strategically regulate the gas market and, in doing so, to find profit in its emergence.Footnote 8 Zu's experience with the ZERA and other regulatory bodies supports this interpretation. He finds his operation under nearly constant scrutiny. In 2015 alone, he told me, his retail site was inspected once by the ZERA, four times by the EMA, and ten times each by the Bulawayo City Council and the fire brigade. Given that each inspection presented another opportunity for a fine and a bribe, the frequency of these visits hardly seemed coincidental. The police, in particular, was suspected of using the public reports composed by the ZERA as a way to time its own inspections; the implication was that if the ZERA had recently inspected a retailer's site, the retailer would not be expecting another. Zu, for his part, was relieved that the police's involvement in LPG seemed limited to surprise inspections and bribes. ‘Emergency taxis’ – regular cars driven by citizens for extra cash – often become objects of special police interest. The police, Zu explained, have a stake in Bulawayo's kombi taxi industry, and they will ‘regulate’ emergency taxis to control competition. ‘The minute the cops get into gas,’ he said with a laugh, ‘we will have all kinds of problems.’
As Zu's speculative final remarks indicate, dealers who wish to be successful in the unpredictable conditions of Bulawayo's LPG market need to have a working understanding of emergence. They need to be able to anticipate the forms that this market might take and to respond by linking human actors – including bribed police and emergency taxis – and non-human objects – including foreign refineries, tanks, pumps and fuel itself – in flexible and situational networks. Zu, for example, sometimes used cross-border traders to bring his gas into Zimbabwe, but he also occasionally transported the gas himself. Unwilling to apply for his own import licence, wait for it to be processed and risk becoming legible to the state as a result (cf. Ndlela Reference Ndlela2006: 29), Zu rented licences from an already registered importer and bribed border guards whenever the discrepancy was discovered.Footnote 9 Because arrangements like these are so contingent on the vagaries of state interventions and interpersonal relationships (not to mention, in a broader sense, the challenges of moving currency across international borders and the possibility of refinery closures), they do not amount to anything so stable as systems upon which dealers can reliably depend. Instead, they are better understood as ‘assemblages’ in the sense used by Deleuze, Guattari and others – as formations of human and non-human actors, which pull themselves together in particular moments in time (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2011; Deleuze and Parnet Reference Deleuze and Parnet2007: 69–70; Massumi Reference Massumi1992).Footnote 10
Assemblages and affect in Zimbabwe
Perhaps the clearest example of an assemblage that I encountered in my fieldwork came not from Zu or Edward or from any of the other gas retailers that I met. It came instead from an artist who worked down the hall from Dee. This artist painted small works with sweeping swathes of colour that lay like glass on the surface of the canvas. The effect stemmed from his chosen medium – ink. This man said that he found ink to be challenging to work with, because it dries extremely quickly and settles into unexpected colours as it does so. Faced with a stubborn and fluid entity, which insisted on settling itself when and how it pleased, this artist chose to collaborate with it rather than resist it. He would deposit the wet ink where and in what colours he chose, and he would guide the ink carefully around the canvas to shape its distribution as it dried. This strategy provided him with a measure of control over the finished product, but the works themselves were congealed assemblages, combining medium with artistic intervention and time, that revealed themselves to him in the drying process. Although he was clearly an active participant in his assemblages, this artist was well aware of the limits of his ability and his dependence on the ink and its qualities. He was, he told me, ‘blind’ to the work until the work had finished.Footnote 11
Gas dealer assemblages, though far riskier and broader in scale, are similarly contingent on circumstance. Suspended between cross-border traders and border guards, foreign refineries and domestic regulations, financial liquidity and insolvency, and always only partially regulated by the state, dealers produced gas and profits by linking actors together in creative – and always situational – ways. To help me understand the scope of his set of relationships, Zu mapped them for me in an elaborate diagram. The diagram began at his retail station, and it immediately branched outwards to include his rivals and partners, border guards and smugglers, foreign refineries, and the organizations he could expect to bribe. It also included his preferred wholesaler and the emergency taxis he took to visit them. The wholesaler in question was especially noteworthy because they were willing to offer Zu one-day loans of gas at a reasonable interest rate (US$0.05 per kilogram). Although he was frequently in debt to this wholesaler (who had their own mysterious ways of procuring gas), Zu prized this relationship because it afforded him greater financial liquidity. If he kept careful track of his debt, he could purchase gas in one part of Bulawayo and repair canisters in another. His money could be in two places at once.
As this wholesaler–dealer relationship demonstrates, assemblages are more than conglomerations of human and non-human actors. They also contain an ineluctable affective dimension (Massumi Reference Massumi2015). Affect, which differs from ‘emotion’ in that it can float free of human bodies (Amin and Thrift Reference Amin and Thrift2013: 46–7; Grossberg Reference Grossberg2009), contributes to the formation of assemblages in a variety of ways. In some cases, it can accelerate their unification or hold them together. Trust, in this sense, can be understood as an affective bond that is developed over time and sustained through material and immaterial linkages, and that joins social actors in a shared assemblage (cf. Hart Reference Hart1973; Reference Hart and Gambetta2000). In other instances, though, affect can cause assemblages to take unexpected forms or derail them entirely. Bribery and inspections can culminate in these less desirable outcomes. Inspections, after all, are more than checklists to be completed, and bribes are more than mere payments of cash. With every illicit payment to a police officer or a safety inspector comes a moment of hesitation and a question: will the official play along or not? ‘The system works,’ Zu remarked, ‘but people can delay you just because they want to. It's a system within a system.’ Zu was speaking here of the affective dimensions of bribery, but he might have been describing the affective dimensions of his whole web of relations, insofar as negotiations with wholesalers, border crossings, speculations about police interest in LPG, bribery exchanges and inspections all constitute affective systems within systems and each informs how tanks of LPG are ultimately distributed. And this distribution will inevitably take emergent forms, because no dealer can know with absolute confidence how a state official (or even a trusted associate, as shown below) is going to act until the ink finally dries.
If affect can be felt with particular intensity in the moment when an assemblage is ‘thrown together’ (cf. Stewart Reference Stewart2007: 30), both Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant2011) have observed that this intensity is never wholly produced within the moment itself. Instead, it too must be assembled – out of a wider ‘affective atmosphere’ (Stewart Reference Stewart2007: 15), which colours the unpredictability of emergent encounters and gives them a recognizably situated and even dreadfully familiar appearance. In Zimbabwe, this atmosphere is structured in large part by the state. From its policies before and during the country's extended economic crisis (Chagonda Reference Chagonda2016; Jones Reference Jones2010a) to its campaigns against unregulated labour and settlements (Bratton and Masunungure Reference Bratton and Masunungure2006; Fontein Reference Fontein2009; Musoni Reference Musoni2010), the Zimbabwean state has made itself a felt presence in the lives of the populations it governs – both intentionally and unintentionally.Footnote 12 Other scholars, working elsewhere, have come to similar conclusions about states and affect (Jeganathan Reference Jeganathan, Das and Poole2004; Kernaghan Reference Kernaghan2015; Masco Reference Masco2014). As these theorists demonstrate, ‘affective atmospheres’ can be productively differentiated from specific encounters, negotiations or policies. Although specific state-generated initiatives carry affective consequences of their own, those consequences become ‘atmospheric’ as they become layered on top of each other, over time and across different bodies and spaces.
If the affective dimensions of trust or bribery are especially recognizable because they can be felt so strongly in particular moments, then the amorphous and unactualized qualities of affective atmospheres can make them somewhat harder to detect. Even so, both artists and LPG dealers are attentive to the atmosphere that surrounds them, just as they are to the material contexts out of which their assemblages emerge, and they represent this to themselves in a variety of ways. Dealers, for example, encounter state actors directly during inspections, border crossings and the payment of bribes and fines, but they also deal with the state as an affective force in their problems with hard currency. As is the case with many borderline-illicit industries, successful LPG retailers struggle to deal with the cash that their businesses generate. The dealers with whom I spoke were uniformly adamant that they could not deposit their profits in Zimbabwean banks. They believed that the state would take notice of their success and – appropriately, in the context of this article – conduct more frequent inspections of their operations. To avoid this situation, dealers deployed a range of strategies. Some deposited their money in foreign banks. Others held their wealth in property. One retailer told me that he owned several houses around Bulawayo and was prepared to sell them for cash if the need ever arose.Footnote 13 Zu had his own solution. In an approach that was reminiscent of the one adopted by traders who dealt in scarce commodities during Zimbabwe's economic crisis (Chagonda Reference Chagonda2016), Zu sometimes sent animal skins to South Africa with experienced cross-border traders. He instructed these traders to sell the skins, buy LPG from South African refineries, and carry the gas canisters back across the border.
The effectiveness of this strategy hinges on Zu's awareness of the affective atmosphere in which he constructs his assemblages. While one might think of animal skins, gas and currency as distinct components within an economic system or – in a Marxian sense – as two commodities and the abstraction of value that allows them to be exchanged, Zu conceptualized these components by means of an approach that Degani, following Guyer (Reference Guyer2004) and Verran (Reference Verran2001), has called ‘modal reasoning’ – a learned appreciation for how things can and should be modified in practice (Degani Reference Degani2017: 301). For Zu, skins, gas and currency constituted a single unified form that could take different shapes according to the context in which, and the perspectives from which, they were viewed. Excess hard currency became animal skins, which became material objects on the border and skins-turned-cash-turned-gas in South Africa; the whole amalgamation cut across straightforward distinctions between material and immaterial forms of value, and between formal and informal market transactions (cf. Bolt Reference Bolt2012: 114), as it moved from situation to situation. Because he invested in animal skins, therefore, Zu could both conceal his wealth and avoid the issues associated with transporting large amounts of cash across international borders. The retailer who bought houses with his profits demonstrates this approach even more explicitly. From one perspective – that of the always inquisitive state – the house was merely a house. From another – his – the house could be either a house or cash, depending on the situation and need. Whether a house appeared as a house or as cash was contingent upon the dealer's needs and the requirements of the assemblage in which he happened to be participating. While the Zimbabwean state serves to structure the affective atmosphere in which these strategies develop, the actual utilization of these strategies contains an affective dimension of its own. Even as Zu was speaking with me, he was on and off the phone with a buyer of skins in South Africa who had changed his purchase price after a consignment of skins had been delivered. Zu's frustration with this man stemmed from the fact that a lower purchase price in South Africa meant less cash to use for the purchase of gas, but it was also traceable to the man's failure to adhere to his end of the bargain. Zu found to his chagrin that he had, in Degani's terms, crossed a threshold of modification (Degani Reference Degani2017: 302). He had overextended himself by committing too definitively to skins too far from home, and the man had responded by betraying his bond of trust.
Artists in the gallery were similarly attentive to affect and its contexts. In Dee's case, the fact that humans now occupy a single shared world required them to ‘seek out ways to live together’ – that is, to form durable affective bonds with each other. Another artist, John, also put affect at the centre of his work. He was a painter who worked with oil, and his works were characterized by the depiction of ghostly, faceless figures and the inclusion of scraps of newsprint (some that were legible and others that were not). In John's opinion, the faceless images and the newsprint worked together to produce works that encouraged viewers to activate their own powers of creative interpretation. He wanted viewers of his paintings to puzzle over the faceless figures and imagine the faces that they themselves might include; to scrutinize not only the legible newsprint for its statements about Zimbabwe, but also the illegible pieces and speculate about what they might say. In one notable work, John used small pieces of newspaper and charcoal to portray the figures in the painting as zombies. These zombie figures captured and sought to address one of John's major concerns about the world he saw around him: people in Zimbabwe, he said, could become so invested in a single received perspective that they began to lose the capacity to perceive in other ways. ‘You become blinded to stuff going on in Zimbabwe,’ he explained. ‘You don't see what's in front of you.’ John hastened to tell me that his works do not always address politics so explicitly, but this one certainly did. The received perspective he wanted viewers to identify in his paintings, to scrutinize and to escape was the one that was propagated by state-run news organizations.
Affect, labour, and Bulawayo's ‘artistic entrepreneurs’
These readings of affect are arguably representative of the affective atmosphere of much of life in contemporary Zimbabwe, insofar as they speak to a distrust of the state, its discourses and its policies. Other interpretations are much more localized. The city of Bulawayo is, after all, located in Matabeleland, a region of the country in which people who identify ethnically as Ndebele – a national minority that has historically encountered both violence and political and economic marginalization at the hands of the Shona-dominated Zimbabwean state (cf. Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2012) – represent a majority of the population. This legacy of exclusion and violence informed and shaped nearly every aspect of LPG distribution and artistic production. At the most general level, it designated the capital city of Harare as ‘Shona’ and Bulawayo as ‘Ndebele’, effectively mapping ethnicity onto geographical space. Within this context, it became easy, though certainly reductive (cf. Musoni Reference Musoni2014), to code any feeling of economic precarity as a consequence of the state's preference for Harare over Bulawayo and Shona over Ndebele.
LPG dealers are certainly not the only unregulated operators in Bulawayo, quasi or otherwise, who frame their work in ethnic terms (Nyamunda Reference Nyamunda2014), but the state's recent interest in LPG brings the ethnic coding of that market into especially stark relief. Given the frequency with which they were inspected by the police, for example, it was hardly surprising that dealers accused the state of importing Shona police officers into Matabeleland for the purposes of discriminating against Ndebele persons and their businesses. Nor was it surprising, given that dealers expressed serious doubts about the state's willingness to grant licences to sellers of gas, that they attributed the preponderance of Ndebele-identifying people in Zimbabwe's unregulated economic sectors to the fact that Shona controlled the regulated ones. When unlicensed dealers (many of whom, as noted above, began to pump LPG during Zimbabwe's economic crisis) filled old and leaky tanks and were subsequently blamed by the ZERA for any explosions that resulted when those tanks were used in people's homes, the full scope of the politicization of LPG came into view. Every aspect of the distribution process – from licensing to sale and use, and including, of course, the very accessibility of gas itself or its necessity as a result of Zimbabwe's crumbling electrical grid – could be read through the lens of ethnic and regional politics.
This affective environment shaped the interpretations produced in the gallery as well. In keeping with a broader sentiment (expressed in the phrase bamba zonke – meaning ‘take all’ or ‘grab everything’) that everything good goes to Harare, Edward accused the state of systematically underfunding the gallery. It was a regional gallery with its main office in Harare, and Edward complained that resources that were meant to go to the Bulawayo branch (and particularly resources that might come to the programme he ran) would arrive at the Harare gallery and get ‘lost’ there. These material grievances, when mapped onto a remembered history of ethnic violence, emerged within the gallery as deep and ethnically marked suspicion. During my research, this suspicion targeted one man with particular intensity. This man identified as Shona, and was identified as such by his name, and he (like Dee, Edward, and the man who painted with ink) occupied a studio in the gallery. While other studios opened their doors to the public, in order to be social and to attract tourists, his was invariably closed. The reason for this was simple: he had won a contract from a large multinational corporation to produce artwork, and his studio was therefore more of an office than an exhibition space. Although he was undoubtedly an artist, others in the gallery assumed that he had been tasked by the state to monitor them and to make sure they produced no work that was explicitly political in nature.Footnote 14 They justified their position on the basis of his reclusiveness, but the clearest evidence of all was his apparent success. No ordinary person (and especially no Ndebele person) in Bulawayo could have won such a lucrative and prestigious contract. He had to be working with the government, and his Shona identity further increased the likelihood of his collaboration.
Edward's community arts programme took shape within the context of these suspicions, too. So sceptical was he of the gallery's Harare office that he refused to formally affiliate his programme with the gallery even though it occupied one of the gallery's studios. The programme was therefore ‘quasi-unregulated’ in its own way, and it recovered in flexibility what it may have lost in security and stability. In this sense, Edward felt that keeping the programme formally separate from the gallery afforded him more freedom to design his curriculum as he saw fit. Although he remained suspicious of his Shona gallerymate, and was convinced that the man was informing the government about everything he did, his courses proceeded without any input from Harare. And any donations his programme received were kept for its own use.
Staffed primarily by Edward and his spouse, this arts programme resisted strict categorical definitions. For schoolchildren, its goals were mostly (but not entirely) aesthetic. During school holidays, it offered an introduction to the creative possibilities of art through origami projects and exercises in telling stories with drawn images. At the end of the programme I observed, student art was put on display in the gallery and made available for sale to families, friends and casual attendees. For young adults, its goals were less aesthetic than economic and social. Edward regularly taught classes on the basics of figure drawing so that young people could learn to draw or paint the realistic nature scenes that Edward believed tourists would want to buy. These classes, he further believed, would inspire these young adults to develop a passion for art and would keep them out of trouble. For Bulawayo as a whole, Edward felt that his programme offered an injection of creative energy. Art and artistic communities, he argued, mobilized the city's population: they educated it, socialized it, and transformed it into a community of what he termed ‘artistic entrepreneurs’.
Edward's phrase, considered in the context of this article, helps put a name to the shared set of strategies that artists and natural gas distributors use to navigate their city. It can describe the work of a young adult who learns to assemble isinkwa sabantwana that will cater to Bulawayo's tourist market, or even a child who makes an artwork and sells it to a family member. It is also an apt characterization of the work of LPG dealers such as Zu, in that they approach the distribution of LPG in a manner that requires them to think inventively about how to circulate fuel under unpredictable social conditions. Ultimately, though, it was clear to me that Edward saw himself as the model for the hybrid identity of the ‘artistic entrepreneur’. Not only did he encourage the students on his programme to consider their art from an entrepreneurial perspective, but he approached his own entrepreneurial work with an artistic eye as well. He constructed mental representations of the assemblages in which he participated, much as Zu did, but the scope of his plans set him apart from his peers. Edward planned to standardize the distribution of LPG by importing gas in large shipments and delivering it directly to people's homes. Once his business was profitable, he intended to build his own refinery in Zimbabwe.
Assemblages, emergence, and the limits of transcendental theory in Bulawayo
As Edward outlined his vision to me, I couldn't help but notice the parallels between his project and that of Dee, a few studios away. Like Edward and the LPG dealers with whom I spoke, Dee recognized in his poster board shapes the fragmentation of social relationships. But Edward and Dee also evidently believed that these fragmented relationships could be – even should be – repaired. For Dee, this amounted to adopting a transcendental perspective that called all the puzzle pieces equally into view. This transcendental perspective, for Edward, was that of the perfect ‘artistic entrepreneur’ – a person who saw through the short-term benefits of international collaborators and dangerous border crossings, trusted wholesalers and foreign refineries in favour of a distant dream of a system that would remove all ambiguity. This transcendental entrepreneur would not pay any bribes either. Edward himself, unsurprisingly, hated bribes and he condemned them for precisely the reason we might suppose: bribes, he said, made the payer dependent on the recipient and vulnerable to their whims. They undermined the stability of the system he hoped to institute. By rejecting this path, Edward would transcend political conditions in Bulawayo once and for all and fit all the pieces of the LPG puzzle together in a single unified system.
In theory, this transcendental position distinguishes the aesthetic perspective we find in Dee's work (and Edward's) from the one we find in Zu's. Like the other LPG dealers with whom I spoke, Zu was constantly assembling his gas distribution networks. Gas entered and left his control by means of a complex network of social relationships that was always contingent on circumstance, and he navigated these relations by utilizing a mode of theorizing that Kathleen Stewart (Reference Stewart2008) has called ‘weak theory’ – theory that abandons the pursuit of a completed ‘puzzle of being’ in favour of an approach that familiarizes itself with always emergent processes of becoming.Footnote 15 While Dee remained optimistic that the larger puzzle of human experience might one day be fully assembled, Zu diagrammed – and, in his mind, continually re-diagrammed – his small corner of that puzzle in the hope of better understanding the processes that acted upon it.
In practice, though, Dee and Edward were less transcendental in their work than they would have liked. Because Edward refused to pay any bribes, he exposed himself to all manner of problems. Zu could proactively and productively manage his distribution system by deploying illicit cross-border traders and bribing border guards, and he could avoid inspections by bribing the city council or the police, but Edward's dream had been slow to take shape. Zimbabwe had made him suffer so much in pursuit of his vision for Bulawayo's LPG market, he told me, that Dee had given him a nickname. He called him Moses.
Dee's poster board artworks were restructured by social conditions in Bulawayo as well. After all, many of Dee's works were produced with the tourist market in mind, and those works reflected a touristic perspective more than his own. If we take Dee's artistic vision seriously, we must recognize that his isinkwa sabantwana was not just a simplistic (and therefore adulterated) representation of the world and its fragmentation. In its flawed transcendence, each work became a kind of testament (or, in other words, an aesthetic of ‘imminence’ (cf. Canclini Reference Canclini2014: 185)) to the obligations placed on Dee and his work – obligations that brought together tourism (with all of its colonial and postcolonial connotations), economic dependence, artistic production and the time devoted to it, and Dee's own affective annoyance with the compromises he made to accommodate this situated assemblage. In this sense, these tourist works were more precise depictions of life in Bulawayo than were his passion projects. If Dee's favoured works depicted the world as Dee hoped it might become, his isinkwa sabantwana (like Edward's fragile vision) was a more than fair representation of the world as it was.
Conclusion
Markets may always be emergent, in that the valuation and circulation of commodities are never prefigured, but the full scope of that emergence is not always recognized. Regulated markets, in this sense, acquire a measure of their stability from the fact that they conceal emergence in contracts and law (cf. Hart Reference Hart2005). However, for a range of reasons outlined in this article (including the climate of suspicion in which they operate, their everyday negotiations with state officials about newly created policies, their reliance on foreign sources of fuel, and all the aspects of their work – from relations of trust to dealing in cash – that make their work only quasi-regulated), LPG dealers are well aware that the gas market is always taking forms they cannot anticipate, for reasons that are often beyond their control. They might reject that unpredictability, as Edward does, or try to diagram it and produce assemblages within it, but in practice they remain just one category of participant among many.
Theorizing networks of LPG distribution as assemblages accounts for the conditions in which they are cultivated. Dealers are shown to be enmeshed in interactions, which they share with emergency taxis and wholesalers, customers and the police. Those interactions, in turn, stretch outwards in time and space, connecting dealers with unreliable infrastructure and foreign refineries, cross-border traders and bribes, economic crises, leaky LPG tanks, welding torches and flames, explosions, state policies, inspections and bribes, and animal skins and houses. Although none of these relationships are particularly stable, dealers work within emergence to pull them together into assemblages that can be used to create a specific kind of coherence – profit.
If assemblages call attention to the forms of creativity that LPG dealers exhibit, they also demonstrate that the artistic works produced in the gallery are more than disinterested exercises or products of the artist's own mind. Instead, these artworks are emergent relationships of humans and objects that are imbued with affect. Dee joins together with his box-cutter to carefully feel his way into pieces of poster board. He also creates simpler works that he hopes will lure tourists into his studio. The artist who painted with ink is obliged to build his work in dialogue with his medium. Although the end result of that process appeared to be a static painting, each moment of the process of production was interpretive and fundamentally open. This negotiation with ink, in turn, was connected to the broader assemblages in which he participated. Despite his appreciation for the unique material properties of his medium, this artist told me that he had originally adopted ink for pragmatic reasons. Oil paints were scarce and expensive in Bulawayo; ink, however, was cheap and readily available. John, for his part, seeks to incorporate the viewers of his artwork into the assembly of that work by encouraging them to deploy their own creative powers of interpretation.
John's newest project shows clearly that these assemblages extend beyond the subjectivity of the artist; they even extend beyond the encounters with materials and media, the negotiations with potential purchasers of art, and the walls of the gallery. For this project, John has decided to walk through the streets of Bulawayo and record the ambient sounds of the city. In doing so, he hopes to capture some of the sensory richness that makes Bulawayo and Zimbabwe different from other cities and countries. He then intends to pair these audio recordings with illustrative paintings, which will add a measure of visual complexity to the soundscape that he provides for his audience. Should this project come to fruition, the resulting works will link colour, paint and texture to noise and atmosphere (composed of the sounds, voices and acoustic environment of the city), and they will unfold for viewers within the unique acoustic and visual contours of John's gallery space. John will be enmeshed in these works as well. He will appear both as a person who is practised in the art of assembling emergence and as an artist whose experience of the city is fundamentally constructed by the sensory environment that it throws up around him – both as a producer of assemblages, we might say, and as a component of them.
In his creative (and contextual) repurposing of social relations, material objects and even affective and sensory atmospheres, John bears a surprising resemblance to an LPG dealer. The works he intends to make, however, resemble something else: the market price of gas.Footnote 16 Gas itself may be a commodity and may therefore acquire a kind of magical allure that detaches it from its origins and processes of production, but the price paid for that gas on the streets of Bulawayo on a given day still carries the traces of the assemblages that produced it. In one encounter I witnessed, a customer was surprised to find that the price of LPG had dropped by US$0.50 from one day to the next. Puzzled, he asked his dealer what had changed. The dealer was happy to explain: refineries in South Africa had recently closed for maintenance and so LPG was in short supply. In the midst of this shortage, a supplier had found a new source of fuel. One tanker had arrived the day before, and Bulawayo had already drained it dry. A second had arrived that morning and, the man said, dealers were ‘decanting right off the back of the truck’. On this occasion, the price of LPG became a representation of everyday life in Bulawayo. That representation linked LPG to Zimbabwe's dependence on foreign refineries, to the local competitions between quasi-unregulated dealers, to the state and its interests, to wholesalers, and to the scarce fuel's domestic use. And, like John's paintings and soundscapes, that price located the dealer squarely within that broader context – as an engaged participant in the networks of bodies, objects, affect, politics and history that come together to circulate LPG in the city where he lives.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my colleagues at Bates College, to the attendees of the African Studies Association panel ‘Ethnographies of emergence’ (2016), and to my collaborators in this part issue for their feedback on this article at various stages of its development. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions. Special thanks are due to my fieldwork partners in Bulawayo. I am grateful to all of them – whether named in this article or not – for their patience and generosity. This article was funded by a grant from Bates College.
