Mary Kinyanjui's book contributes to a growing literature on alternative economies for Africa. The work teases out how the resilience of indigenous business models within the informal sector can provide new frameworks for inclusivity and sustainability. In recent years, there has been a deepening understanding of what journalist Dayo Olopade, borrowing from Yoruba, calls kanju – ‘a specific creativity born from African difficulty’. Kinyanjui's contribution to this is to reveal the logic of a sector that has been maligned and excluded from discussions of economic development, except as a problem to be solved. Her focus is on whether the adaptability cultivated out of necessity can be packaged and applied to change the paradigms of economic and social progress. This is a question of deep relevance today.
Kinyanjui takes two approaches. Her first is to show the historical vitality of ubiquitous traders and artisans who contributed to the construction of modern Nairobi. Armed with an indigenous economic logic, traders and artisans found a ready market on the margins of a segregated colonial city. Throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, they developed unauthorized villages on the edges of the city's borders that have evolved into sprawling informal settlements and an ever-expanding self-built ‘urban fringe’. Nairobi's ‘shadow’ city remains a development paradox that houses and occupies the majority of residents, but within which residents battle for legitimacy.
The second approach is to interrogate an utu-ubuntu business model (from the Swahili utu for humanness and the Zulu ubuntu for solidarity/humanity) as a way of explaining resilience and the persistence of the informal form. Economic livelihoods are an expression of interconnection and reciprocity. They focus on building and sustaining ‘autonomous and self-regulating networks’ rather than solely pursuing individualist growth. Kinyanjui's subjects share risks and collaborate while supporting individual agency and subscribing to values of economic justice and fairness. People do not hoard, choosing instead to engage in circular support networks that preserve and conserve labour and capital. The model describes what she calls ‘solidarity entrepreneurialism’, where individual, community and the divine are intertwined. Her framework reverses an idea that the ‘informal’ economy is a problem to be solved. Indeed, its longevity proves that a deeper examination can help us ‘create possibilities for equitable (and therefore sustainable) urban development’.
Of greatest significance to economic and urban reformers may be Kinyanjui's question of acknowledgement. It has not been enough to celebrate the creativity of informality when it continues to be maligned. One of the most recent ways in which informality has been packaged is through the umbrella of a global entrepreneurship ecosystem. In a fervour to solve urgent problems such as youth underemployment or failed (or underdeveloped) industrialization, informal economies have been rebranded. Traders have become micro-entrepreneurs who are building enterprises and individual urban residents find themselves tasked with personal job creation. Kinyanjui warns against the influence of global entrepreneurship interventions as they dilute the unique role that traders and artisans have played in the sustenance of urban neighbourhoods and downplay the significance of traders’ indigenous business practices. Instead, she asks us to imagine what we could learn if these contributions were brought into the light. The lesson of utu-ubuntu as applied through this lens is simple. Urban Africans can be fairer, more accountable and more collaborative with each other, and the end goal of every transaction need not be individualist success but social cohesion.
This final point is a laudable goal, but Kinyanjui's chapter on the application of these ideals left me with questions. One of her main messages is that the binaries that have divided Kenya's capital since its founding – formal and informal, traditional and modern, legal and illegal – need to be brought together through an inclusive and collaborative model of a ‘cultural village’. If the urban planners and the traders can find common ground through new frameworks, then collaborative solutions to pressing issues may be found. Nairobians, however, already deftly navigate their duality, investing in networks of solidarity while conforming to the customs of the formal and official city, especially when it is personally advantageous. I also wondered about politics. Is there an impetus to reverse long-standing practices against illegal hawkers and ‘squatter settlements’? Who will drive the change? Over time, upgrading programmes have displaced people rather than improving conditions, and regular cycles of slum clearance remain powerful political tools in the arsenal of city leaders. Will acknowledgement or recognition alone change baked-in, and largely negative, attitudes about informality?
All said, Kinyanjui's engaging monograph sparks deep reflection on the persistence of the prevailing, and outdated, urban-planning and economic development paradigms and provides a necessary and important exploration of alternative possibilities.
