Tanzania’s Informal Economy is a vivid portrait of street vending in Dar es Salaam. Malefakis follows a group of Wayao used-shoe sellers, mainly from a village called Miungo in the south of the country. The book traces their daily routines, showing how, paradoxically, their common ethnic and kinship ties, combined with the close proximity in which they work, inhibit the formation of solidarities and collaboration beyond the very short term. Wayao street vendors draw on these relations to carve out a living in an often hostile environment. Where many discussions of ‘informal’ work tend to romanticize these social ties, Malefakis suggests that his participants experience and speak about those ties as constraints.
Thirty years ago, Janet Roitman observed that the concept of ‘informal’ economies was an inherently negative one. Informal spheres of action are ‘delineated and analyzed as reactions to state and formal market “failures”; the concept of “informal” work thus virtually always describes an absence’.Footnote 1 Informal economies, in short, are often understood and analysed as a function of what they are not.
It is very much to the credit of Malefakis’s book that it avoids this ‘negative’ reading of ‘informality’. Indeed (the title aside), the book explicitly rejects the label ‘informal’ altogether (pp. 7–9). Instead, Malefakis explores the actual daily spatial and social practices of shoe sellers in fine-grained detail. The most interesting chapters (in my view) are all in the latter half of the book and trace the different phases of the shoe sellers’ days. Chapter 6 follows key informants as they go to early-morning markets, where sellers choose and buy a few pairs of second-hand shoes from bulk import markets. The following chapters follow them back to a ‘backyard’ near the Dar es Salaam central business district, where shoe sellers wash and repair shoes to prepare them for sale, and then out on their daily rounds as they try to construct ‘market interactions’ out of fleeting encounters with passers-by on the street.
Malefakis emphasizes the ways in which Wayao shoe sellers often experience their common ethnic and kinship ties and close working proximity as constraints. He clearly shows how workers rely on some forms of collective practice – sharing tools and selling on commission and through various forms of short-term entrustment – as well as on the production of shared space, both in the backyard and in collective maps of the city centre. Yet relations of mistrust and resentment also inhibit more deliberate collective action that might improve their material lot – as illustrated vividly in the story of a failed effort by some group members to set up a shared bank account (pp. 68–71).
There are a couple issues where the book is surprisingly silent. The first is gender. Malefakis describes what are clearly very deeply gendered patterns of activity. All of the shoe sellers are men; they sell shoes mainly, if not entirely, to women. Gender is seemingly constitutive of the socialities that Malefakis puts at the centre of the book, yet it receives little to no explicit analytical attention.
The second is around issues of exploitation and stratification. Malefakis puts a good degree of emphasis on the determinedly flat social hierarchy among shoe sellers, which contributes to an atmosphere of mutual resentment and makes cooperative and collaborative work much more difficult. There are hints throughout, though, of the embeddedness of shoe selling within wider patterns of economic stratification and exploitation. The Wayao shoe sellers have very precarious incomes, and the book suggests that they are squeezed both by wholesalers of used clothes and shoes and by their largely affluent clientele. They also suffer from police raids and harassment, intensified by the increasing privatization of space in the city centre. It is mentioned only in passing that the ‘backyard’, very much the centre of both the livelihoods and socialities of Wayao shoe sellers, is owned by a shopkeeper (pp. 32–3). Moreover, in the figure of ‘Patrick’ (pp. 62–5), the book highlights the fact that some sellers manage to accumulate significant capital and regularly employ other shoe sellers on commission. Malefakis makes the compelling argument that the economic circumstances of the book’s subjects should be attributed at least in part to their particular forms of sociality, especially insofar as these inhibit the mobilization of solidarity or collective action. However, he does not necessarily reflect on how this relationship might also work the other way around.
All of that said, this is an excellent book. In its fine-grained attention to the realities of street selling in Dar es Salaam, it makes a notable contribution to debates about so-called informal work and will be of interest to many scholars working on labour and livelihoods.
