A term, as I think all of you know, right now, my name is Liz,
I'm one of the convenors of the African Studies seminar this term and this week we're really excited to have William Monteith to be our presenter.
Will is a lecturer in the Geography Department at Queen Mary University of London.
And when I actually have quite similar research interests, although geographically a bit different,
so we've actually been at a number of workshops and conferences together.
And whenever I hear will give a talk, I always feel like there's not enough time.
So I'm really excited for today because hopefully there will be enough time. So too much time.
Maybe not too much. Yeah. Christine, thanks very much for the invitation, and thanks so much for a great audience turning out today.
Great to be here. First time in African studies at Oxford.
And so and also apologies for scaling back the total slightly in the kind of heady days of late September before teaching started.
I had this idea of reading a lot more than I have managed to the last five or six weeks,
so it's been scaled back slightly from rethinking work through racial capitalism to
rethinking work through Ugandan marketplace and a retreating back to my case study.
But thinking through different literatures, one of which includes strands of racial capitalism.
So happy to talk a little bit more about that at the end,
and the talk really is the story of my attempts to transform my Ph.D. thesis, which I completed in development.
Studies at UEA views back into the monograph, and so it's the story of kind of trying different hats on my kind of ethnographic case study,
if you will, and kind of with an eye to making a larger argument.
I'm going to start with a few kind of reflections on on what it says,
the changing world of work or some of the kind of key dynamics and tensions in the changing world of work as
a way to open up discussion in relation to kind of new authorisations or openings for thinking about work,
but also life beyond work interventions such as those raised by James Ferguson, for example,
most recently in and give a man fish amongst a number of other scholars and then to move a little bit more concretely
to the context of Kampala and my field site here in Macassar Market as a Central Market Place and in Kampala,
Uganda.
And to think through what this case study, what this marketplace might do, how it might help might help us rethink these kind of debates around work,
both historically through a bit of archival work that I did,
but also ethnographic through a year of ethnographic fieldwork in this particular marketplace.
So to make a start? We're living in strange times in terms of what we understand to be the world of work.
So one of the most, historically most powerful kind of representations of work or the absence of work is the unemployment rate,
the official unemployment rate. And you could argue these kind of representations have gone a long way to form a line,
a large part of the contemporary legitimacy if there's such a thing of the current UK and US administrations.
It's a very powerful kind of indicators and indicators that that have been used to justify various forms of intervention.
And in the case of Uganda,
under this constant kind of concern and emphasis and kind of moral concern with with youth employment and youth unemployment.
And so these kind of statistics are rather familiar. All right.
So historically, low unemployment rates in the UK, around four percent and much larger unemployment rates in Uganda,
which rise to two, up to about 40 percent for for the youth population. And yet at the same time,
we know that these historically low unemployment rates in the UK conceal the fact that
a majority of those in poverty are either in work or residing in working families.
And at the same time, these comparatively much larger unemployment rates in Uganda,
the kind of representations of crisis, if you like, of moral concern,
conceal the fact that according to other representations,
Uganda was declared the most entrepreneurialism in the world recently by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.
So how might we make sense of these kind of changing landscapes of work and geographical differentiation was the kind of broader story here,
and there are different prongs to this. I mean, one of which is is, of course,
the inability of the increased inability to wage employment and increase the relevance of wage deployment in most people's lives.
The redundancy, therefore, of conventional measures such as the commercial unemployment employment rate,
which in the UK includes people who are working two hours a week as an Uber driver,
for example, to capture the realities of people's diverse working lives.
And thirdly, the increased reliance on alternative and additional activities and exchanges to provide for people's basic needs.
So we're saying if you like a destabilisation of the last 10, 20 years of conventional ideas of work and what it is to work.
And at the same time, we're seeing the opening up of alternative scenarios and alternative theoretical space
for thinking about how income identity and security might be woven together differently,
whether for the better or for the worse. And it's in this kind of theoretical space that we see the arguments,
the more recent contributions of people such as Ferguson arguing that across much of the world,
people today lack access both to land and to waste employment.
And these people form an increasingly prominent part of a social and political reality. Equally important,
those occupying such ill defined and precarious social locations are both
pioneering new modes of livelihood and making new kinds of political demands,
right? So these kind of shifts,
these kind of transformations needn't be the source of the kind of forms of condemnation and crisis that they often are often associated with.
And then there's also the seeds of an alternative way of thinking about work within this kind of current scenario current crisis.
At the same time,
some of the barriers to thinking in different ways around work are the kind of theoretical baggage that we bring with us into this conversation.
Right? And so scholars like Ferguson and Franco by Chelsea and from African contexts argue that this this idea of wage labour,
of the reduction of work to wage labour and the wage relation remains hegemonic in the social sciences,
reproducing what he calls a politics of labour nostalgia or an inability to kind of move beyond this kind of narrow conceptualisation of work.
And so Ferguson Aliev argued more recently that there's a need for a profound analytical,
deep centring of wage and salaried employment as a presumed norm Portillo's and a consequent reorientation of our empirical research protocols.
So the challenge if you were, if you like, is to produce a reading which we might consider to be more politically useful, right?
That is to say, if we suspend this idea of waste employment or suspend the singular idea of workers wages,
employment, what alternative types of social political economic projects might come into view right beyond,
for example, the trade union movement beyond, for example,
the ILO's decent work agenda might what alternative types of projects might start to surface and come onto the horizon?
So some broader questions raised, if you like, within this kind of uncertain world of work and this kind of new if you like theoretical terrain,
how might we reclaim work from the confines of wage labour and more specifically thinking about the context of Uganda?
How might we research and represents? This is social scientists sitting here in the UK alternative modes of cooperation,
production and self provisioning in Africa without normalising exploitative and degrading conditions at work.
And so some of the kind of points of departure here, I find some of the kind of people I find useful for thinking through this puzzle.
First of all, an emphasis in Bombay and on this kind of scholarship on the importance of historic sizing, the wage relation in Africa,
both as a form of violence and a techniques of governance that takes on different forms in different African context.
Secondly, to quote the work, more recent work of measurement and kind of the emphasis of this coming out of much
of the work in urban ethnography by reckoning with lived practises and living
alternative to wage labour and examining the integrity of potential of new relations
for nurturing what she terms social being through the material activities of living,
going back to Marx and then thinking with Fanon about kind of reinterpreting the so-called lumpen proletariat,
the importance of taking seriously the demands and the transformative potential of people located in the so-called marginal socioeconomic positions.
People kind of parenting alternative modes of life and livelihood.
And so what might be some of the stumbling blocks, I think,
was the conversation that's happening between some of these kind of more radical if you like ways of thinking about work and some of
the more conventional and dominant ways in which scholars have historically thought about work and thinking urban African contexts.
Well, I think I can think of three dominant ways in the current kind of landscape that work is thought about in much of urban Africa in particular.
And these are the kind of categories of informal entrepreneurialism surpluses.
I do have informal work, entrepreneurialism or entrepreneurship and surplus workers surplus populations.
The first of these debates is a very familiar one at this point. So informal work,
which dates back to the work of the ILO key thought in the early 1970s as being economic activity unregistered or minimally registered with the state.
All right. A discourse or a category that was central to the kind of just a of state models of development in the 1970s,
and one which really reaffirms the state as the institution responsible for providing structure, security and protection and work.
And so well, this has been helpful in many ways for notably for thinking bit more critically about the role of,
for example, women and their relationships to the economy more broadly.
It's been critiqued, first of all, for conjuring this dualistic idea of the economy,
of the form of the informal and kind of missing the connexions between different segments of economic activity.
But perhaps more significantly, for for this kind of question,
the question I'm asking today for the fact that it renders deviant entire sectors of economic activity,
social and economic activity that have long constituted what Janet McAfee is termed the real or the popular economy in many of an African context.
Secondly, and more recently, there's a new a discourse kind of 20 or so years, going back to the 1980s on African workers being entrepreneurialism,
which dates back really to the the World Bank and other kind of powerful
developing institutions rebranding if you like the informal sector in the 1980s.
And instead of saying exploitation instead of saying segregation instead of saying and marginalisation starting to see economic activity as being,
uh, kind of starting to see these activities as volunteers crisis only to see economic activities as being deliberately separate from the state.
Ratifying the market and particularly consumption as the institution responsible for generating and regulating work.
Central to a switch towards market led developments from the 1990s as we know and critiqued extensively,
particularly more recent literature and work by Catherine Dolan on on the Entrepreneurial South for seeking
individual solutions to socially produced troubles and equating failure economic failure with individual deficiency.
So people in places like Noncancer Market are now seen as the kind of individually responsible for the development of Uganda,
individually responsible for contributing to the national gross product of Uganda.
And so we see a new kind of model of a kind of development intervention in the work space,
which is all about kind of rethinking people in marketplaces as as entrepreneurs and as job creators.
And then thirdly, a categorisation of of African work and African workers,
a surplus derived from from particularly more structuralist and kind of different
strands of Marxist thinking on on economic activity in urban Africa today.
So surplus work being understood as economic activities that are undervalued or undervalued by capitalist processes of accumulation.
Central to what Gibson graham term capitalist centric theory and intervention.
Right. And so the tendency here and the critique here is that the by kind of this constant emphasis
on notions of waste and expandability and surplus become a kind of total housing framework,
right? Suggesting as Captain Miller. And then you could widely, amongst others,
have said as if to suggest that those not employed in wage labour or those subsisting outside of
wage labour are somehow not engaged in any other productive activities or efforts in their lives.
So the tendency here within this, this scholarship in this framework to reduce the complexities of work to the use value of capitalism.
So we're thinking across these kind of three genres, these three kind of categories,
if you like for thinking three way, what are the kind of values, the kind of general picture that's emerging here?
Well, overall, these conceptualisation will centre a relatively narrow understanding of work as non-domestic paid,
institutionalised market based employment. It's worth emphasising in historical terms.
This is, of course, a relatively new idea of work rights.
It's still a relatively new and novel idea of work dating back to the project of European industrialisation and its export through colonialism.
And what this idea of work excludes is all kind of much of the anthropological
scholarship on how socio economic life takes place in places like Uganda,
right? So it excludes the dimensions of the reciprocal, the immediate and the degree of gratuitous,
which are all pushed out of the economic sphere altogether, kind of evacuated from the economic sphere and excluded from a official statistics.
Right. So we see a kind of tying down within these concepts of a relatively narrow idea of work and what it means to work.
And Ferguson and Fred Cooper have argued that that underpinning this kind of tendency to revert
to this is rather narrow conceptual work is a broader myth of proletarian ization in Africa.
Right? So keepers argue that labour history is too wedded to the meta narrative opponent of proletarian ization,
which treats this as a universal trend, right? Beginning in Europe and rolling out over the African continent.
And yet we know that the number of people who fit into the category of the wage worker in post-colonial Africa did not grow as expected,
and instead it was the category of it was the kind of alternate category you cite and variously known as customary labour,
informal labour, precarious labour, surplus labour, etc., etc. but expanded and were colonial administrations reproduced the particular discourse
of work to define and enforce these categories and associated ideas of private property,
labour, time and discipline. Africans were trying to give such categories their own meanings and to seek alternatives
to wage labour in responding to their growing interest in and commodities.
Pierogies and Ferguson earlier this year has talked about the proletariat as a kind of inappropriate metaphor in the context of South Africa.
So historically, a very particular category used to analyse political economic forms of 19th century Europe,
which now struggles to find traction in the contemporary context in urban South Africa and struggles to kind of
get to grips with and to describe the kind of diversity of kind of forms of life and labour that take place.
For example, in South African cities. Right.
So this is to say that there's a kind of meta narrative here that underpins a lot of the conversations that discourses around work in Africa,
which conceals more than it reveals about the realities of working life.
So where might we look for for kind of the seeds of alternative ideas of alternative kind of theories, oceans of work for kind of pluralism?
If you like the conceptual apparatus that we have to describe evolving forms of work and livelihood in rapidly urbanising contexts such as component.
Ferguson has an offer of offers up this idea of distributive labour, the work of surviving by accessing or making claims on the resources of others.
Right.
This is the idea that rather than production, most livelihood activities in contemporary southern African cities conform to ideas of distribution.
Right. We're living in a distributed economy rather than a productive economy.
And secondly, Julia Alisha's idea of putting labour right for the work,
not of of producing value in the forms of capital for commodities, for sale on on capitalist market.
But the work of creating and maintaining social channels through which information and resources can flow,
which he argues has been fundamental to the historical survival, particularly of women, in this case in Cairo.
And then if we think about the kind of proliferation of studies emerging within urban ethnography and in Africa,
we see an emphasis on a much broader suddenly all kind of conceptual range of vocabulary becomes much broader.
Right. So as emphasis on February IDs hustle, zigzag and make it right.
And this literature, this kind of ethnographic literature emerging from from the kind of prolonged engagement with African
cities places emphasis rather on the wage relation on ideas of occupations straddling occupations,
simultaneously occupying multiple occupations of improvisation and experimentation
of skills acquired outside of formal education of kin and social relations.
And again, going back to Ferguson and on kind of systems of reciprocation and redistribution.
And so this decision was really kind of playing with these kind of taken for granted delineations between work time and leisure time,
between work and leisure and between work and life. Right.
And so scholars like Tammany,
some own kind of conceptualise these kind of activities are forms of life work right straddling these kind of taken for granted
divisions that date back to categories derived from the historical experiences of industrial countries in Western Europe.
Furthermore, we might think about.
So we put this kind of a broader kind of conceptual apparatus, if you like to think through some of these questions,
some of these puzzles we might think about what are the conventional sites in which work has been studied in Africa?
Right. So we might think back to historical ethnographic work on proliferation of anthropological studies of the copper belt,
for example, and in Zambia, and then thinking about to a lesser extent.
But the kind of proliferation of more Orthodox Marxist concerns with the factory as the space in which working subjectivities are produced,
in which work is studied. And then as a result of the interventions of second major second wave feminism, we might think about the household.
And then more recently, through racial capitalism, we're being encouraged to think through the plantation and the prison as spaces of
work spaces through which working subject tenancies are produced and manufactured.
And each of these sites involves its own form of socialisation, discipline and subject formation.
And so my own site is it is a slightly different site. So a different, slightly different site in which to think through some of these questions.
That is the site of the marketplace, as I've as I've mentioned, which of course has a long history and a long kind of literature in African studies.
All right. So for many years, people have been conducting research on the significance of African marketplaces as sites of communication of trade,
particularly into kind of cultural and international trade politics in relation to the
more recent debates on urban regeneration and development of sites of performance,
and also as transgressive spaces for gender roles in relations. Right?
The very rich literature on markets and these kind of ways over less attention being paid to the role
of markets and particularly transgressive potential of markets in relation to the study of work.
Right. What is it about a marketplace? What does a marketplace do to preconceived ideas of work, right?
How might a marketplace make us rethink and reconceptualize dominant ways of thinking through work and labour, right?
Those are interesting places to ask these questions.
Insofar as they are, they've almost become directly associated with the emergence of the types of categories in populations described earlier.
Right? So the population in so the market was constructed by the British colonial administration for around 300 people.
And today the infrastructure is the physical infrastructure is very much the same
for those of you haven't been in the space of kind of 300 400 metres squared.
You can kind of see this image here. And so this very same space in this very same infrastructure today provides a
livelihood for over 10000 people from across Uganda and the broader region.
So interesting to think about in the context of this so-called explosion or emergence of of of people seeking a livelihood outside of wage labour.
What are the ways in which they are making a living and making sense of what they're doing in spaces like Coursera, right?
So how is work been historically kind of categorised, imagined and performed in these kind of spaces, right?
To what extent is this thinking about Mark work through the marketplace and settle the single story of wage employment?
And what alternative visions of work might it bring into view, as I'm attracted also to to mix own,
I'd get this idea of the marketplace as a space that as long provided a context for witnessing how social and
economic realities get done as examples of collective self-management that unsettle the dominance of any one story.
This is why governments see markets as dangerous places for the long association between markets
and the transgressive as spaces that are beyond the kind of direct regulation of the state.
So I'm going to sketch out now thinking historically through these questions in relation to the particular case of Macassar Market.
So a brief sketch of apologies for those of you familiar with the literature on Buganda and beyond, of course,
one of the most largest symmetrical annual Central African kingdoms at the end of the 19th century.
This is coming through Holly Hansen's work through the archive on the pre-colonial and the kingdom.
So Hanson argues that the basic ecological unit in the region was the hill surrounded by banana gardens,
which form the basis of Canada economy, sociology and nutrition clerkship.
She argues that the primary marker of identity and solidarity and political accountability
provided through a kind of decentralised networks of chiefs which connect the Newbery,
the Gunda Palace with the provinces beyond right elibiary.
So the capital of the beyond the region moved on the ascension of each different
king and settling in modern day Kampala towards the end of the 19th century,
right? And so this would this would work have made sense in particular Uganda, right?
What is an engagement with the kind of archive? What is an engagement with the historical that Trump began to do?
I'm talking specialisations of work. So to the began to there was an emphasis on on on ties of reciprocal obligation to create Connexions,
to incorporate strangers and to vanquish competitors, in Hansen's words. So rather than through market exchange goods,
we provided for gift exchange and chiefs responsible for feeding their followers who would withdraw allegiance if they felt mistreated.
And that is to say it rather than a market economy. This is a gift economy in which is a great emphasis going back into the Anthropocene
literature on accumulating wealth in people rather than wealth in material goods.
And so China shows this kind of brought this thesis up to date by arguing that in contemporary Buganda,
strategies of self making continue to involve creating and using networks which are often hierarchical to secure support, which is often material.
And so this was a space in which, as we shall see, kind of one day conception of a marketplace didn't make a lot of sense.
Right? And indeed, you can read the kind of history of the tensions and the arguments and debates that were taking place in the archive.
Through the archive, I should say about the arrival of the kind of and the emergence of the first marketplaces in Buganda,
which interestingly were were promoted initially by not by the clan administration, but by the Catholic missionaries.
So in the pre-colonial era, markets in the Great Lakes were restricted, predominate for borders and no man's land between different kingdoms.
Right. So no need for kind of market exchange within the kingdom itself.
Right. Insofar as goods are provided for these kind of disaggregated networks of chiefs and gift exchange.
And so as Catholic missionaries, that made the case for a new market in 1881.
And so this is from appliances theory. The king asked me the other day as to how he could enrich this country.
I gave him a few items of information. First, let there be a market not where the king can sell is surplus supplies,
but a market for the people where the peasants can buy and sell, make profit and get supplies.
Right? And so in matters kind of analysis of these kind of interactions was this is a way of concealing the reliance.
The increased reliance on the Catholic Church,
on the monarchy for its survival in the book and the reason for its ability to get supplies and reproduce itself.
And so a marketplace along these lines was very much seen to be in the interests of the Catholic Church.
Interesting also for kind of thinking about what kind of challenging this kind of idea of the market as this kind of great secular institution,
right in the context of began.
And so the Kabaka opens the first market in the Kabuga in eighteen eighty two and names it the child buys for himself a painting to this
kind of popular idea of the market for the people and meadowlark is that the people responded at the time by criticising the Kabaka,
right? By calling the Kabaka a selfish on account of the fact that they were now expected to purchase
goods like cattle from his marketplace for cash and for exchange of other commodities,
rather than through other forms of exchange and by the free gift exchange,
most notably, which is historically form the basis of acquiring cattle in the Kingdom.
And we then see the entry of of British colonial rule in 1990, led by Frederick Lugard, enshrined in the 1800s Buganda Agreement,
which divides British from Buganda land and accompanied by a range of land reforms and poll taxes,
which Hansen argues forced people in the region to engage in activities outside of Canada.
Outside of the realm of kind of Ganda notions of production.
Right. So compelling the indigenous population to engage in different forms of labour.
And this is set out.
I think most effectively and in the the agreement itself, which you can now read a as part of the release of the restricted archive,
I believe that was released in relation to the Maamoun settlement two or three years ago.
And so you can now read the original form of the correspondence between the British colonial administration
and what would become the British colony administration and the began the chiefs from nineteen hundreds.
And so what I find most interesting about these kinds of documents is a very kind of affecting critique of the idea,
the very idea of a market of a of a market, but also the idea of a of wage labour.
Right. And so we see here on one point two in their response to the Jackson, the British administration,
we agree to the annual hot tax of one shilling hut, which is a reasonable tax.
We would, however, ask you how invalids and old men and women are to obtain means for this tax when
they do not have access to the wages for employment and have access to work.
So as an immediate concern with with kind of how categories of person that don't conform this kind of racialized,
the idea of the male wage worker to conform,
to comply simply to exist within the idea of the market economy, put forward in the correspondence of the British administration.
And the letter ends by saying many of our neighbours have regularly warned us that the Europeans will possess our country,
but we protested against what they said. We pointed out to them that they could see for themselves that the Europeans, although powerful,
respect our customs for the sake of our friendly relations and our neighbours will defeat us in this contention of us.
And so Jackson's response to that concerns was to argue that if the result of the proposed changes to make
idle men do a certain amount of work in return for the privilege of existing in this beautiful world,
it will be a very good thing for Uganda. Her Majesty the Queen is the hardest working woman in her dominions,
so a real ratification of the value of wage employment here based on a racialised idea of the male wage worker.
And I think most importantly,
it's often messed with in these kind of conceptualisation is the simultaneous distancing and criminalisation even of all other forms of work, right?
So rather than conforming to other forms of work, people are the people in Uganda become labelled as idle men, idleness and criminals.
And also interesting going back to Mbemba is thinking about the role of the wage relation,
the role of race in employment and the justification of it not in economic terms, but in kind of disciplinary terms, right?
Which is emphasised continually through these kind of correspondences in the archives.
So Jackson's successor argued that I have no hesitation that this tax will prove to be the making of the country,
not because of the revenue it brings in, but because of the habits of work it insulates.
Right? It's this idea of disciplining bodies with the aim of making better use of them in relation to the colonial market economy.
And so we start to see the proliferation of diverse livelihood activities around this time.
The first market on on McKaiser is current site was present in 1995,
is an account from a contemporary member of the market who's talking about his
father and his grandfather and their engagement in early markets and component.
So these are the Indians established a small market here where they could get onions and spices.
It was not a local food like cassava and so on, because that was for our indigenous people.
When the spices were brought in here, we began digging them and selling them.
Even my father used to come and sell spices in the market every morning after his working in the palace.
So he's working the palace, but he was farming spices on the side as an extra business.
So even as early as the kind of the very, very start the 20th century CE,
the proliferation of diverse and livelihood activities and particularly the kind of straddling of the market and non-market economies.
So in this case this fall, this kind of performing tributary latent labour for the public and the monarchy at the same time as selling spices
on the side in the market economy in Kampala and so early photographs of some of the first marketplaces in Kampala.
When thinking through the history of markets also interests to differentiate
and try and kind of tease out the differences between the market as a client,
the marketplace as a colonial institution and kind of different assemblages or
different ideas and marketplaces that were assembled in different parts of the city,
but the modern day city at this time. Right. So Nicastro Market was very much located within the racialised confines of compartments of
polity within so-called Indian commercial space located here within the centre of Kampala.
So African kind of day vendors and so-called luggage carriers were permitted entry into the market during the day, but had to leave at night.
Right. And so what that meant is that other forms of marketplace,
other kind of ideas of marketplace began to proliferate in other bits of the city around
around the kind of edges of Kampala Township and conforming to different types of logic.
Right. And what's interesting here is that these kind of market scenes conform much more,
much more closely to kind of the contemporary nicastro market than the colonial market did.
And what we see here is a much more flexible idea of the marketplace in which
anyone can come on any given day without necessarily having a rental contract,
without necessarily having to have a legally kind of designated space.
Everyone can come on a given day with a certain amount of goods and pace and amount of money to
the people around them and and sell everything they had until until I've done and they go home.
They may come back the next day, they may not rent.
So more kind of spontaneous kind of intrusive idea of the marketplace than that put forward by the current administration.
And we then see, of course, a range of of of licencing laws and kind of legal instruments aiming to prohibit the entry of
of of the so-called petty trader or African trader into the European and Indian marketplace.
So this is quite amazing quotation from a colonial researcher, Brailsford,
in relation to the copper markets in the markets in the Copper Belt in Zambia,
which is also quoted and cited by pipeline administrators in Kampala at the time.
And he argued it is not undesirable for an African to make money, but the danger lies in the second fascination.
Fascination of marketeering for added to financial reward is the attraction of a leisurely way of life.
The man is his own master.
He does not have to follow the grind of monotonous labour, and shouting and gossiping between cells is a way of life that has its compensations.
Even in cases where the cash receipts or is not as big as from labour and a
great many cases is designed for the leisurely life has developed into low paid,
low paying for their a few shillings to be made.
Such profits are not deserved, and they earned by a lazy man or unemployed worker at the expense of the consumer.
So again, we see this kind of real re-emphasise of this kind of racialised idea of the wage earning male worker right?
And at the same time, the criminalisation of all kind of all alternative ideas of what it means to work right.
Going back to the elections of fatigue, Labour write a great a great amount of the work in the marketplace.
The contemporary marketplace is exactly around these forms of networking, of gossiping, of negotiation, of gift exchange.
And so we've seen. And so we see in the 1930s a marketplace with very few people in it.
All right. Very kind of highly regulated space suggested here by the kind of the policeman standing on the kind of right
hand side of the picture observing the kind of enforcement officer observing the space in front of him?
Right. A space is a kind of picture is very difficult to imagine.
And in contemporary component,
we then see in the 1960s and the early kind of post-independence era scholars such as Christine Obo and Meccanica Masisi have written about the
kind of incremental role of of of the Canada market trade and particularly the female gender market trader in the early post-independence era.
And so this is the famous postcard of female fruit sellers in front of the new Ugandan Parliament Buildings, the 1960s and 70s.
He argues that during this period, the the retreats of the colonial state and in some sense,
the kind of partiality of the independent state created new spaces and opportunities for women to enter the cash economy.
So Canada women began trading from their households on footpaths and roads and the passageways
between city buildings and in open-air marketplaces akin to those that we saw minutes ago.
And they also created their own new kind of urban infrastructures, including the female night market.
The 10 year old candy, or don't step in mine. So I'll use this on year as a place.
Where can the women pursue aggressive mini capitalist ventures selling food by the light of paraffin lanterns?
For me, a demand generated by shortages of food and cooking cooking equipment in the early post-colonial era?
Right. So we see the kind of the proliferation of different ideas of work.
And if you like the appropriation of the marketplace by the gang, the population in particular by going to women, right?
Combining ideas of market exchange, many capitalist fantasies described Masisi with other forms of reciprocation right through which women,
for example, which one, five or six different women would share the same space in the marketplace, right?
And share childcare responsibilities on the occasions where they were unable to attend the market.
The 1970s is an image of a of an Asian man being arrested on Kampala Road next to the marketplace and as part of the expulsion in the 1970s.
In an interesting era in terms of Amin's Uganda, in terms of this is we're kind of entering into the kind of oral history of the marketplace here,
the living history of the marketplace in which people would talk about the role of static labour,
the role of kind of hidden channels and communications for sustaining life in the market, right?
There's a period of heavy regulation of tariffs of rationing, which was negotiated by people in the market through these forms of frantic labour,
illustrated by the fact that by the 19th early 1980s,
politicians had to come and address the market vendors in the market rather than the other way around.
So this is a Laura Callow addressing market traders in 1980, pleading with them to obey government legislation on price restrictions.
And so this kind of appropriation, if you like to the market or a kind of plural ization of the idea of what the marketplace,
this continues to the present day and to the kind of privatisation through which market vendors have continually over kind of a 20 year period,
successfully resisted redevelopment and privatisation by laying claim to alternative ideas to very particular ideas about what the marketplace is.
So a lot of the placards during this period read things like Don't you want us to eat right?
So making claims to the moral economy of the marketplace and making claims of their livelihood,
but also making claims over the marketplace as a broader institution,
an educational institution, a place that provides food and also contacts and livelihood to new arrivals in the city,
eventually ending in a consultation with the very opportunistic Museveni.
Just prior to the election. And so that kind of final slide here is thinking about.
So during this period, you've seen this kind of journey from this kind of interaction of different ideas of work through the pre-colonial era,
thinking about the role of gift exchange and using persons and ideas of economy and
sociality for the colonial era for this kind of very deliberate attempt to kind of tie down
and reduce this very restrictive idea of work as wage as a kind of masculine wage labour
and then into the kind of neoliberal Uganda in which we have a different kind of idea.
This kind of idea of entrepreneurship starts to to enter popular discourse.
And scholars like Wheatgrass have argued for the proliferation of so-called neoliberal norms and values within these kind of marketplaces.
All right. So affecting the moral order of the marketplace,
these kind of neoliberal norms and values manifested in the rise of individual self-interest, inquisitiveness and ruthlessness.
So the question really for an ethnographic question, which is about how the idea,
this particular idea of the marketplace interacts with previous ideas? Right.
Both Gandhi's ideas of the marketplace as being a kind of foreign institution.
Right. Which which is kind of undermines systems of gift exchange to this kind of more restrictive,
reductive idea of the British colonial administration marketplace.
How do these kind of different ideas of what it is to be a marketplace and what it is to work in the marketplace, interact with one another?
So that's the kind of ethnographic question is the last? Snapshot, if you like.
Before I provide some reflections.
So this is the mark at the time of my entry in 2014, at which point something I said around 10000 people a residing in this particular place.
And so one of my first tasks was was trying to kind of write down and I'm trying to get to grips with all the different socioeconomic,
social, economic activities that were taking place within the space.
And so it soon became apparent that this task was akin to that of writing a dictionary.
All right. Insofar as as soon as you would write down 10, 20, 30, 40 different activities that were taking place in different space,
a dozen more would kind of arise or fusions of different activities would could arise,
or people would describe what they were doing differently on different days.
But from kind of more conventional understandings of of work in relation to procurement, retail,
wholesaling, brokering, transporting by lying to kind of more intermediary activities like speculation,
money lending, gambling and service provision involving entertainment, catering, waitressing, cleaning, recycling, etc.
And so this idea in terms of the thinking about work.
And one of the puzzles here was thinking about the ways in which people made sense of their exchanges in the market, right?
And exchanges which did not conform to conventional ideas of of wage exchange.
So to give an example, somebody would say when you go and park your car in the market, which is very difficult to do,
two or three guys will come and kind of block off a space for you or guide you to the best place in the market,
a very familiar scene in markets all over the world, and they will not expect an immediate payment necessarily for that service.
All right. What they will expect, however, is for you to procure another service for them as you kind of enter into a different kind of
contract with them through which they then carry your shopping for you around the marketplace.
Right? Which then would raise expectations of a cash payment.
But as all kinds of other kinds of interactions in which a service is rendered and without an immediate economic return.
So is a question about what this does to our conception of work when we suspend payment, when we suspend when the return is somehow suspended.
All right. How might this kind of complicate our understandings of work and the wage relation?
And so to trying to get to grips of some of these questions? So in addition to kind of mapping out different socio economic activities,
those involve kind of mapping out different social and cultural institutions in the market,
which again were numerous from all kinds of of of kind of committees which appear to follow the language of of the kind of Clinton administration.
So market disciplinary committees in particular and the language of the contemporary Ugandan state, for example,
there is even a market defence committee responsible for defending the market from the incursions of outside forces,
but also a range of kind of sporting, cultural and institutions that might be associated with forms of social welfare.
Burial societies forms of social assistance that you can appeal to in cases where you're unable to work.
And so in illuminating these kind of the interaction of these kind of economic activities in the social institutions that underpin them,
I had a kind of ethnographic extract which follows one particular member of the market around over the course of a typical market day.
And so this is Alex, who's in his early 20s, and he describes his role in the market as one of a waste picker and a recycler,
someone who moves rubbish and collects rubbish from different pots and waste from different parts of the market and deposits it and the rubbish dump,
right? And so I'll now try and illustrate some of his kind of daily interactions as a way of
thinking through different kind of forms of work that exist in the contemporary market.
And so Alex is twenty six year old and twenty six years old,
and you arrived in the market about three years ago as an orphan without a secondary school
qualification or the contacts or capital necessary to enter other areas of the market,
right? Well, the contacts of capital necessary to enter the proper kind of market economy, right, as in the sale of commodities.
And so in some owns word, it might be said of someone who arrived in the market with only his bare life to offer.
And so he wakes up every morning around 6:00 in the morning on the veranda of a hardware store on the edge of the market.
He's woken by Frank Matovic, the owner of the shop, who greets him before opening his business.
Frank and Alex are the same age. A university graduate, Frank is responsible for one of his mother's several shops in the market,
including handling phone calls to suppliers of tools and appliances from China and Dubai.
Right. So conventional kind of sociological analysis would put frank and omics in very different class categorisations.
Right? The shop veranda offers Alex a space of shelter in relative.
Safety not found, another is the market or the centre of Kampala,
which Frank provides in return for the security that Alex offers his shop at night through his provision of eyes on the street.
Frank describes Alex as a low earner in the market. So again,
I got kind of class distinction and in doing so invokes the obligations that so-called high earners such as
himself have in providing addicts with forms of work advice and other unnamed forms of material support.
So after waking up on on on Veranda, Alex crosses the road.
Sorry, into the ghetto, and the ghetto is the entry point into the market, with people with only their bare limbs,
they've said, and willingness to engage in challenging forms of physical labour.
New arrivals by their entry into the market, into the ghetto through the offer of gifts,
which are then shared out amongst the group after initially being chased away from the market.
On his arrival, Alex secured his entry through the offer of cigarettes, which were then shared out amongst the group.
So in this particular space, he takes a drink of water, Archie Ugandan spirit, an exchange of stories with the men in the area from the night before.
After a couple of hours, he then says he begins work where he begins his hustle.
He leaves the ghetto and walks through.
The Cabango near Cabango is inhabited by a younger group of men who arrived in the market with small amounts of capital,
which they were able to purchase single sacks of produce that they sell in this
open air of the markets is the area of the market that very much resembles,
if you like, the very early markets of the 20th century, which we see on the outskirts of the colonial capital.
People arriving and negotiating access to space with a single sack of goods to sell in a single day.
New arrivals to this space must place their produce on the road designation on the edge of the market,
where they risk being confiscated by a council enforcement officers.
They then seek to enter the market proper by performing favours for those further exchange inside me by moving kind of to the right,
moving into the market, for example, by watching someone stock while they're away.
By offering to sell their stock for them for a number of days and for various other forms of kind of favours.
An exchange that take place over the course of a market thing on the entry into the Cabango,
young men take a great deal of care to manage their reputation as a good boy as opposed to being a so-called thief or a moral deviant.
A good boy in the market is generally understood to be someone who uses their full family name,
as opposed to the pseudonym Abstains from crime, drugs and alcohol, and speaks well to market elders.
So these categories are interesting as a kind of fusion of this kind of colonial
idea of the of the good valorise kind of male wage employee and this kind of gun,
the idea of the kind of at the good of the good kind of reciprocates of the person who who,
who is who is respectful of the kind of social hierarchies of the market and is able
to reciprocate and redistribute as they kind of move through the market structure.
And so success in this area of the market requires young men to speak in multiple registers to master the soft,
deferential tones expected by customers and suppliers,
as well as the loud, self-confident performances geared towards the protection of their space from their immediate neighbours and competitors.
So Alex kind of arrives in this area.
He greets the guys working here and engages in bets and arguments relating to sporting matches the night before and
before continuing towards the upper stalls where his his kind of work of waste collection begins and is there.
The market is populated probably by female vendors of Kenyan origin, selling imported fruit and vegetables from as far as Egypt and South Africa.
As Frank arrives, he greets Margaret, a young female vendor, at the end of the row.
He then cleans the ditch behind a stall, dividing the discarded produce between that which is spoilt and consigned to the dump,
and that which is salvageable and may be sold from the floor in the ghetto.
People in the market make a common distinction between first and second class produce.
First class produce is sold in these kind of areas of the stalls often imported fruit and vegetables
seen as high class fetches a high price and associated with a particular type of customer.
Often Indian Uganda customers, on the other hand, second class produce is produced, which is not spoilt,
which is nevertheless fetches a much lower price and is sold to a different kind
of more working class if you like customer base on the outskirts of the market.
And so Alex's job, in addition to kind of cleaning the marketplace,
is differentiating between these three categories of produce and kind of reforming and reorganising the marketplace in relation to these categories.
So in relation, in return for his work of cleaning, Monica pays front, pays Alex about 1000 shillings, about 30 percent.
However, she also provides him with additional forms of support as and when they are needed,
for example, by bailing them out of the local police post when he's arrested under the Vagrancy Act.
On a regular basis.
And so Alex makes his first trip back to the ghetto, carrying one sack of rubbish and one sack of second class produce to sell behind the road.
And you can see the kind of differentiation between the dump and the sale of second class produce here in front.
At the end of the market day, he makes around eight thousand shillings,
about 2.50 of which he spends around thousand food and drink and two thousand fifty doesn't drink and remains around 4000.
Have a role in keeping this honest person. He gives it to a moneylender in the market to keep safe.
Over the course of the Single Market Day, Alex is involved in exchanges and interactions with a diverse range of people generating
social and material compositions across a range of singular capacities and needs,
and contributing to the reproduction of the market as a social and the material space.
So it's physically moving the tables around the market and reproducing the market in this kind of way.
But he's also contributing to the reproduction of these kind of categories and hierarchies
through which these forms of reciprocation and redistribution are taking place.
And so the social organisation of the market draws heavily on notions of social spatial hierarchy of high and low earners,
a first and second class produce in ways that a kind of remind me of a lot of the kind of literature coming out
on the Buganda sociology and of gift exchange and the kind of activities and exchanges between these categories.
Arguably illustrative of Ferguson's idea of distributed labour moving kind of products,
materials and resources across very different sets of capacities and needs.
But in this sense,
this is a kind of hierarchical sense of redistribution from the so-called high earners and vendors of first class produce to the so-called Low A.
And so obligations to extend forms of social and material support emerge around particular
practises negotiated through a range of moral categories which have their histories,
both in the colonial administration and the kind of pre-colonial era.
So these categories of The Good Boy and the young.
And so when I asked Alex what he's doing in the market, how he would describe his activities of this kind of market thing,
he would draw upon the word of the verb or canchola to work.
But of course, on further inspection, this is a word in Uganda which has many other meanings.
It's a word which also means to make to make do right in relation to the kind of ethnographic literature on May two to construct,
to execute, to perform, to toil, to abuse and to mend.
So again, an emphasis on this kind of this kind of cyclical feature of the work that he's performing in the market.
However, him and the other people are working with him in the ghetto would also use different kind of verbs.
So we also draw up on a language of struggle and survival and in articulating what they're doing in the market.
And again, when kind of thinking about the market as a place of work,
people were quick to kind of re designate the market by the plurals ideas of the marketplace.
There was a school, a garden and a pharmacy for the common man, a pharmacy in the sense,
the place where people could access spices and kind of home home remedies.
Markets are important for building society.
People come from all over the country and learn to lose their bad habits and to be in one line to have a good heart and to help others.
So there's this kind of disciplinary social socialising effect of the marketplace,
albeit based on a very different kind of idea of the market for that articulated by the British Columbia administration.
And so there's a couple of slides on on this work of redistribution and how people decide whether to redistribute to others or not.
Right. Invoking ideas of kind of hierarchical status, but also faith.
All right. So a lot of the money lending institutions were run by Pentecostals. Pentecostal Christians.
And yet these kind of categories kept resurfacing and these explanations? Right.
So this distinction between the criminal?
I mean, I and a good point and I noticed that these countries could be mobilised by high earners to deny the redistributive requests of young men.
So you could mobilise this idea of the money in order to deny the request of someone to whom you're obliged to share resources and
so distribute of labour in the market thus requires young men to conform to a certain normative idea of the good market citizen.
Right? However, I get this idea of the good market citizen is a much broader understanding than that of the waged employees.
So some final reflections in many senses,
the history of the market can be read as a refusal of people a market in Nicosia to abstract work from life to in December,
the economy from the realm of the social. So rather than passively accepting the kind of commodification of labour and the people in
the market have mobilised alternate theories of value grounded in local history and culture.
And so the result is neither the annihilation of pre-colonial systems of exchange and reciprocation,
as is often assumed in some of the kind of new neoliberal literature in which everyone is kind of walking
around and kind of hustling and continually after kind of very individualistic ideas of accumulation.
But neither are these. Neither of these kind of particular institutions emerge unscathed in this kind of contemporary moment.
And what we instead see is the proliferation of diverse forms of life and labour
produced through the interaction of market and non-formal non-market forms of exchange.
So what Palani would termed a double movement.
And so, as many have argued, we need to better differentiate between the diverse forms of life and labour.
They're often folded into the categories of informal entrepreneurialism surplus and also avoid reproducing narrow
conceptualisation of work based on the historical experiences of wage labourers industrial in you're right.
And so Alec's work in the market may be characterised as informal insofar as it's unrecognised and registered by the state.
However, such a conceptualisation would conceal the form generating qualities of his work and
the various social and cultural institutions that regulate it right at the same time.
Alex's work in the market might be categorised as an entrepreneurialism insofar
as it involves the creation of economic activity out of individual endeavour.
However, such a conceptualisation would conceal the social structures and relationships that facilitate his work in the morning, and at the same time,
Alex is working like may again be characterised as surplus insofar as it appears to be on valued or minimally valued by the capitalist economy.
However, again, such a conceptualisation would conceal the value of his work to the real or needs based economy of Kampala.
And so I argue that the seeds of an alternative story of work in Kampala and in Uganda are located in these, however.
These besides and these elsewhere. And this is the starting point for thinking differently for governments.
I want to thank you.