Mary Njeri Kinyanjui's book makes a convincing argument against the kind of top-down urban planning that disregards the lived realities of urban residents in Africa. As she describes for Nairobi, Kenya, Western notions of urbanity have been transplanted to the African continent since colonial times and today are often advocated by political elites and urban planners. Through the eyes of Western-educated urban theorists, Kinyanjui argues, the living conditions and business practices of many residents in African cities appear as creating deviant or unformed versions of ‘proper’ urban development. The author opposes this view by arguing that urban citizens have created sustainable and functioning networks, institutions and rules that represent an ‘authentically African process of urban formation’ (p. 50). According to the author, self-organized work in market places and among artisans follows an ‘African logic’ of solidarity and community that is opposed to Western capitalism's ideology of individualism and the ‘survival of the fittest’. This logic is what the term ‘utu-ubuntu’ in the book's title summarizes.
Kinyanjui's book thus speaks to the vast literature on ‘informality’ in urban Africa and offers a refreshingly contrasting standpoint. Since the 1970s the notion of an ‘informal economy’ has become a catch-all phrase to describe the self-organized work of people who often operate outside state regulations, which often leads to their criminalization and persecution. From an anthropological standpoint, however, thinking that the ways in which people organize their life are ‘informal’ in the sense of lacking form and established regularity is probably just as misleading as thinking that ‘formal’ spheres of life such as bureaucracies are solely organized along ‘rational’ principles devoid of cultural and social logics. Instead, Kinyanjui quotes some of the organizing principles by which Nairobi's traders and artisans organize their work. She posits that ‘resilience, self-reliance, solidarity, entrepreneurship, economic justice, communal responsibility and inclusiveness’ (p. 114) are the values by which people in Nairobi's markets orient their interaction with one another and thus give their daily life and work a sustainable form.
In that respect, the author's argument directed at urban planners and policymakers is certainly well placed. In order to create more inclusive cities, she asserts that, instead of ignoring the cultural logics of traders and artisans in African cities, they need to be acknowledged and appreciated as viable business models and included within urban policies and development plans.
From an ethnographically informed perspective, however, the way in which the author depicts the utu-ubuntu business practices sometimes seems a little too harmonious and free of contradiction and conflict. According to Kinyanjui, the logic that informs traders and artisans in African markets is about endurance, loyalty, sharing, hard work, concern for the welfare of others, resilience and generosity (p. 115). The anthropologically inclined reader might want to learn more about the relation between what respondents in her survey of 674 traders and artisans said about the way they conducted their businesses and the way these notions play out in their actual practices and interactions.
Reading Kinyanjui's book, I could not help but compare what she describes with what I found among a group of mobile street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with whom I conducted fifteen months of fieldwork. The situation under which the mobile street vendors in Dar es Salaam worked is certainly not directly comparable with the circumstances under which market traders and artisans operate from fixed locations in Nairobi. However, the specific case of street vendors in Dar es Salaam contrasts sharply with Kinyanjui's overarching claim of an ‘African logic’ of solidarity that opposes ‘modernity's’ individualism. As rural–urban migrants, the Wayao traders I studied were heavily dependent on their fellow Wayao in the city to gain access to housing, capital and the market of the streets. But close cooperation or the pooling of funds was highly problematic for them. While the majority of individuals in the group had been born and raised in the same village in the country's south and were related to one another through kinship ties, there was a general lack of trust among them. Their cooperation in street vending was therefore rather limited to short-term collaborations. In contrast to what Kinyanjui describes broadly as a ‘traditional form of African logic’ of solidarity that persists in the face of the ‘modernity’ of urban life, the Wayao explained their precarious social relations and their lack of trust with reference to their shared ethnic origin and kinship relations. As they told me, mistrust and jealousy of each other's successes were character traits they had inherited from the elders in their village.Footnote 9 If they regarded individualism and mistrust as problematic for coping with life and work in the city, they did not attribute it to the city's fast-paced and capitalist living conditions, but to their rural upbringing, which some might describe as ‘traditional’ rather than ‘modern’.
From an anthropological standpoint, more detail on the interplay between traders’ and artisans’ responses in the survey and their actual practices would have been desirable. This, however, does not compromise the well-argued case that Mary Kinyanjui makes against top-down urban planning that disregards the skills, knowledge and ethics of self-organized workers in African cities, whose practices and business models are obscured rather than understood if we keep referring to them as ‘informal’.
