4 |
Making a Living |
African Livelihoods |
Impressive tenacity and ingenuity enable Africans to survive and even prosper under extremely challenging circumstances. The widespread stereotype of the passive victim crumbles away in the face of Africans’ incessant efforts to protect their families’ interests and ensure security and progress for the next generation. It is a struggle that some people shirk and that many do not win. Even so, people’s agency must be taken seriously. Continuous experimentation and innovation are among the legacies of African societies in every part of the continent, as people make their living often under severe resource constraints and despite external shocks such as the recent spiraling prices of gasoline and corn.
Analyzing the strategies that people employ for preserving and adapting families and communities to these constraints has led researchers to adopt the term “livelihood” to indicate the paid and unpaid activities that together sustain communities and individuals over the long term. Conventional U.S. economic analysis makes a sharp distinction between work and family, confining the economy to the work side, measured primarily in monetary terms as gross domestic product (GDP), the value of goods and services produced in a country in a given year. Even calculations that try to include the production of goods and services that are not part of the official record, such as farming for direct consumption or using unpaid family labor, often disregard the domestic and cultural work that maintain a family’s well-being over the long run, from cooking and cleaning to the values and social institutions that keep people working together.
The concept of livelihood does justice to the way most Africans interweave their varying public and domestic areas of responsibility and reflects their realities better than earlier studies that analyzed productive and reproductive activities separately. Productive activities, identified conventionally as those taking place in the farm, market, office, factory, or workshop, are not cleanly detached in practice from those that reproduce the proper relations of family and gender, childbearing and child rearing, and community solidarity. A diverse repertoire of choices of work and family arrangements strengthens the flexibility that best prepares people for an unpredictable future. Out of this repertoire, people strategize collectively and individually to achieve and maintain sustainable economic positions. This chapter examines productive and reproductive activities together, asking how both contribute to people’s abilities to get by and lead meaningful lives.
The concept of livelihood proves useful at many levels of analysis, including the individual, household, and extended family or clan as well as local community, economic class, ethnic group, region, nation, and subcontinent. At each level a viable livelihood must be constructed from a multiplicity of different activities that, taken together, provide for material needs. The ever-changing configuration of resources, local cultural practices, and historical experiences sets the parameters for viable agency at each level of analysis. For an obvious example on a national level, countries with petroleum deposits have a valuable resource that others do not, but its impact has differed in Nigeria, Sudan, and Angola, just as it has in Norway, Britain, and the United States. On an individual level, children’s likelihood of attending school depends a great deal upon where their parents live and the affordability of school fees. Still, poverty does not automatically exclude young people from receiving an education, since some children of poor parents manage to get their schooling sponsored by relatives, neighbors, or teachers.
Livelihood approaches also recognize that multiple dimensions of disadvantage and privilege (such as race, gender, class, nation, ethnicity, geography, and ecology) interpenetrate within this analysis of human agency and shape people’s options and constraints. Barbara Cooper has shown how an elite Hausa woman in Niger faces much stricter norms of seclusion than her lower-class cousin who cannot afford to stay home because her family has no servants to fetch water and shop. Unlike her wealthier cousin, the poor woman can visit the market and the well without censure and work in the fields with her family and neighbors. She has more freedom of movement than her rich cousin, but less financial security and less prestige since her life does not conform to cultural ideals of modesty and restrictions on women’s movement. In this case, ethnicity (Hausa), gender (man or woman), class (wealthy or poor), and religion (Islam) all make a big difference to the consequences of the same action (going to market). The parameters operating at a particular level rarely dictate what any one person does; rather, they define a range of options in terms of likely consequences and prerequisites. Even in the most constraining circumstances, such as a refugee camp, there is never only one alternative for any person who is trying to construct a sustainable livelihood out of the locally available options. At the wider levels of the community or the nation, prospects for success may look rosy or bleak, but they are always indeterminate to some degree. Conformity and deviance, risk and precaution generate innumerable contradictory and reinforcing layers that accumulate into history.
Research on the farm household pioneered the concept of livelihood, and it remains highly relevant to sub-Saharan Africans, 62 percent of whom lived in rural communities in 2010, according to the World Bank. Although agriculture accounts for over 25 percent of GDP in many African countries, most households and individuals engage in several different kinds of work during a year, a month, or even a day. Nonfarming activities that generate income often prove as vital as agriculture to the viability of a rural community that is facing climate or health challenges. A bad year for one crop is likely to be a good year for something else. The combination of diverse activities can act as a cushion against risk, anticipating circumstances that might cripple one activity while sparing another or even enabling it to expand.
Annual fluctuations in the climate and world market prices mean that few African farm communities can survive on agriculture alone. Rural dwellers supplement their farming by engaging in a range of other activities that are paid in food, cash, or other goods. They may work on other people’s farms in exchange for a day’s meals or a share of the harvest as well as later assistance on their own fields. Other activities might include collecting wild plants to be used in crafts or for food, making baskets or pottery or metal tools, gathering firewood for sale, and selling food brought in from elsewhere. Widows and orphans without land rights or people without the physical strength or help from family members that is necessary to clear a farm may depend more heavily upon these sources of income.
The example of Niger takes us to one of the poorest countries in the world, ranked second to the bottom on the United Nations’ Human Development Index in 2011. The average income in this landlocked, mostly desert nation is less than two dollars a day, challenging rural Zarma villagers such as the four hundred adult residents of Fandou Béri to develop creative strategies of getting by, as Simon Batterbury has shown in his research. They received little outside assistance from the weak state’s reduced development programs even though their major crop, wet-season millet, suffered from droughts and inconsistent rainfall. Individuals made strategic choices about diversifying their livelihoods, influenced by their skills, wealth, and access to labor and technology, among other factors.
In the late 1990s, although all Zarma households that were surveyed farmed, only two met their food needs exclusively with their own crops. The rest depended upon an expansive repertoire of activities that included operating small businesses, trading, raising livestock, migrating abroad (often seasonally), working locally for wages, and collecting firewood for sale. Both men and women generated income in these ways, but they often did different kinds of work. Men took care of most agricultural tasks, and it was usually they who migrated to places such as Côte d’Ivoire during the dry season looking for additional work. Women often established small businesses where they sold food items or raised sheep, earning significant income. Age also affected the kinds of work that people did. Older men and women generally had increased flexibility in engaging in different kinds of activities, since they had more access to resources such as land and capital. Children contributed to household income by gathering local food items that could be sold in the market, performing small paid tasks such as fetching water, and selling jewelry. Since the form of Islam practiced in Fandou Béri somewhat restricted women’s movements, children also assisted their mothers with their work, such as by selling in the market the food that their mothers cooked at home. Despite this wide range of income-generating activities, the village did not seem to be becoming dependent on wage income. People continued to farm, some diversifying their crops to protect against drought and other risks, partly because agriculture was still an important part of Zarma culture.
Figure 4.1. Farms in rural Tanzania.
Katherine Wiley.
One of the first principles of sustainable agriculture is diversification. Farmers who plant a variety of crops usually mitigate the risk of catastrophic failure, since setbacks such as drought or locusts would need to affect several crops that have very different requirements for their rainfall needs and varying vulnerability to insects and diseases. Relying on one crop alone neglects this basic hedging measure, as when corn dominates farming in southern Africa. Farmers that have access to plots with varying altitudes or different rainfall patterns can plant diverse crops and place each in the location best suited for it. African farmers also commonly intercrop different species in the same plot—for example, cultivating plantain, a fast-growing tall crop, to protect the tender seedlings of slower-growing cocoa trees that will mature years after the plantain has been harvested. Tropical soils are often thin and easily bake hard in the sun or leach nutrients in the rains, and intercropping protects them by mimicking the cover of natural vegetation. Combining export crops with others that are marketed locally or used for food also reduces the risks that accompany market fluctuations. For example, hybrid corn is sold on the world market because new hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizer must be purchased each year, and because people do not like its taste as much as that of local varieties. Mixed farming also provides more balanced nutrition and spreads out the total harvest period, reducing farmers’ storage needs and labor bottlenecks.
Figure 4.2. Women in central Mali winnowing millet and preparing it for transport to the granary.
Maria Grosz-Ngaté.
Most indigenous farming systems involve long fallow periods when wild plants regenerate on the empty fields. Burning this growth just before planting provides the land with maximum access to the nitrogen and other nutrients that are stored in living biomass. This ash fertilizer lasts for only a few years, so the farmer must continually clear new plots that have rested as much as twenty years in order to obtain high-yield harvests. Several factors can restrict rotation capacity and lead to rapid loss of soil fertility and erosion. When large tracts of land are alienated for commercial plantations or white settlement, the crowding of Africans onto the remaining land prevents long fallowing. Labor migration, especially of young men, can also force family members remaining in villages to select new plots with less than optimal vegetation regrowth because they are easier to clear. Legal prohibitions on the burning of fields can make this activity clandestine, with people carrying it out during the peak of the dry season, when wildfires are easy to blame. Timing it during this period rather than right before the rains reduces the fertilizing effect and increases the risk of actually starting wildfires.
Combining farming with livestock raising or hunting is a common practice across the continent. In Ethiopia, Mursi women farm and men herd cattle. A man might be allotted a plot of his family land only when he marries, and a man who cannot provide land for his wife to farm to feed their family may have trouble remaining married. For the Kenyan Maasai, men herd cattle and women milk them, also preparing dairy products for consumption and to exchange for grain with Kikuyu women. The dramatic Bantu migration of recent millennia spread quickly across southern and eastern Africa largely because the migrants varied the balance between farming and herding to suit the ecology of each location. Most pastoralists further diversify by raising smaller animals such as goats, sheep, and poultry along with cattle.
African societies developed many ingenious and effective ways to coordinate the labor of different family members and divide the workload. Some groups define men’s crops and women’s crops, meaning that each family should enjoy a variety of produce. For example, in West Africa, yams are commonly a man’s crop, because yam fields must be laboriously hoed into mounds before planting. Women plant their soup vegetables on the sides of the mounds, stabilizing them and also weeding both crops at once. Women elsewhere grow swamp rice in the dry season or cassava (introduced from Brazil) on land that is unsuitable for yams or millet. In other societies, particularly in grain-growing areas, men and women complete different tasks on the same crop. Men typically clear and plant the fields, while women weed throughout the growing season. In the Cameroonian grass fields, farming and beer brewing are likened to growing a baby during pregnancy, and so are all naturally assigned to the women’s domain. Conversely, the Nigerian Yoruba find it equally natural for men to farm and women to trade. Of course, in many places migration and other social changes have shifted the balance of these historical divisions of labor.
Some regional variations have persisted through centuries of change. In most of West Africa each adult family member is entitled to some independent income, giving all of them an incentive to exert extra effort. In Nigerian Hausa villages, the entire extended family worked on the fields of the compound head and he divided that grain among maternal nuclear groups at harvest. In addition, junior men and women expected to be given additional plots where they could grow food for their private use or crops to sell to earn their own money. Mothers could enlist their young children to help on their private plots, but their offspring would ask for land of their own when they were fully grown. In most of eastern and southern Africa, there was less presumption that women needed an income of their own, especially in patrilineal societies where men paid bridewealth at marriage.
When drought strikes, the first strategy that people employ is often to expand their normal dry-season activities. In her work, Gracia Clark has discussed how women of Damongo, a savannah town in northern Ghana, explained during the severe drought in 1983 that since their crops had died they had no need to weed them. They abandoned their fields and started gathering shea nuts to make butter and locust tree beans to ferment into bean paste, intensifying this usual dry-season work by camping overnight at more distant groves of trees. Noticing that the cassava crop had survived better than others, some women decided to make money by processing it into gari, a dry toasted product that is popular in boarding schools. Since this is a traditional food in the Volta Region, they approached some local schoolteachers from that area asking them to teach them to make a high-quality product, which they successfully sold to schools, military barracks, and jails. For their own consumption, they preferred porridge made from cassava flour, so they dried the stubs of cassava left after grating gari and then pounded them into flour. These labor-intensive products used high quantities of water and firewood but found a ready market in a year when preferred foodstuffs were scarce and expensive, helping people to avoid outright famine.
In Darfur, a semidesert area in Western Sudan, men and women used similar strategies to combat and survive several famine years in the 1970s. Alexander de Waal conducted research during this period, showing that people began to eat wild grains and berries, even gathering them to sell in the market. In famine years, poorer people who had few or no cattle to sell migrated to towns earlier than they did in normal years to take up familiar urban occupations. Men from wealthier families had more cattle and savings and thus more flexibility in times of famine. Due to their large numbers of cattle, they had to take their herds farther, even in normal years, to find enough grass, so they had the contacts necessary to access ever more distant areas where there was still pasture. Their cash savings also helped them avoid selling cattle. Before leaving with their herds, they left money for household expenses with the women in their families, who could stay in the villages longer than poorer women in times of famine. When funds ran out, they also had to move to nearby towns, where they lacked work skills and the better jobs were already taken.
In areas with a very short farming season, such as the dry lands near the Sahara or Kalahari Deserts, migration of at least some family members as farm laborers to more fertile areas is a necessary part of the annual work cycle. Also common is seasonal migration to nearby towns and cities, where people look for casual work in construction, trade, and services. Young men from northern Ghana travel each dry season to Kumasi to work with secondhand-clothing wholesalers, unloading bales from trucks, carrying them to the transport yard for customers, and bringing them home to peddle in the villages. When the rains start they return to the farms, and the clothing trade slows markedly. Younger men historically dominated these types of migration, but today women also frequently travel away to work in domestic service or carrying loads. Young women from parts of Ghana’s Upper East and West Regions now expect to spend some period of time in southern cities, working as carriers to earn money for the dowries of enamelware pans that their mothers can no longer afford to provide.
Figure 4.3. Carrying a mobile lunch to market traders in Ghana.
Gracia Clark.
When farm villages come under economic pressure, these migration patterns can easily be extended to last for years. The “stranger farmers” of the Gambia peanut fields and the “abusa” cocoa sharecroppers of southern Ghana are two examples where this migration founded whole industries and lasted for years or even generations. The resulting loss of farm labor in the sending areas only compounds the stress on their farming systems, but it also reduces the number of mouths to feed and enables migrants to send money back to their families. Such sustained migration patterns generally have social as well as ecological causes. In West Africa, taxation and mandatory cultivation of export crops under colonial rule created pressure to migrate that was hard to reverse. In southern Africa and Kenya the colonial authorities expropriated the best land for European settlers, partly in order to more easily recruit labor migrants who traveled elsewhere looking for work. The notorious apartheid laws in the white-ruled Republic of South Africa represent an extreme form of British colonial pass laws that compelled workers to leave their families behind throughout the region. Majority rule under Nelson Mandela as president ended this legal framework but left intact the disparities it created in land ownership and wealth distribution; these inequalities continue to create the economic circumstances that force urban migration and disrupt families.
Conditions that interfere with drought-coping strategies, such as pass and property laws and immigration control, can turn a drought into a deadly famine. Even when it does not make farming impossible, violence or political unrest on roads and in the major target cities for migrants can interfere with migration or the marketing of cattle and wild foods. It also can raise the proportion of crops lost in transit and inhibit the flow of food back to deficit areas. In colonial Nyasaland (Malawi), British authorities responded to mounting food shortages by prohibiting the movement of grain between districts. Since the matrilineal men normally migrated to more fortunate areas to sell baskets or work on farms or roads so that they could bring back grain for their wives and children, this prohibition on transporting grain essentially forced them to behave irresponsibly, making many ashamed to return home.
Even development projects can have unintended consequences during drought years. For example, pastoralists in Mali normally take their cattle away from farming areas in the rainy season because grass sprouts in distant dry pastures during this period. However, during severe droughts this does not happen, so herders move into areas that are too swampy in normal times for either farming or pasture. During a drought, these swamps dry out enough for cattle to graze safely. In Mali, irrigation projects in the Niger bend took over much of this marshy land, with serious consequences when drought struck. Pastoralists could not graze their flocks in the irrigated area without severely damaging the canals and ditches, so they faced armed guards when they arrived with their herds.
The examples above make it clear that Africans have long participated actively in the local and global market economy, buying and selling goods and labor. Livelihood analysis also recognizes non-market parts of creative strategies for getting by, including taking part in gift exchanges. In these gift economies, the donor is not paid immediately in cash, but rather is given an equivalent or more valuable gift object at some later time. Exchanges like these occur in a variety of contexts, ranging from daily exchanges of beer or small food items in the market to ostentatious displays of expensive objects at life cycle rituals such as weddings and naming ceremonies. Such giving can play an integral part in people’s economic repertoires and help them to create relationships, display their own wealth and social status, and access other kinds of economic opportunities.
Working with the Kabre in northern Togo in the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologist Charles Piot noticed that they frequently gave gifts to each other. He was struck by the fact that men used half of the earnings they collected from selling agricultural products to buy beer for other men. They also presented people with beer-making items or sacrificial animals to thank them for assisting with the harvest and gave a third of their crops to the women who helped carry grain in from their fields. People also borrowed land from each other, sometimes even when they had excess land themselves. Often these exchange relationships began small and intensified over time. One Kabre man in his fifties, Karabu, described how he started a relationship by exchanging beer with a man in the market. They escalated their exchanges when the man needed a red chicken for a sacrifice and asked if he could trade a white chicken for Karabu’s red one. Later Karabu borrowed one of the man’s extra fields, and over the years they continued to loan land to one another. Such exchanges may seem utilitarian in nature because they fill people’s material needs, and it is true that this very real economic aspect of exchange can help families to support themselves financially. But Kabre exchanges are more complicated than this because developing ongoing gift exchanges helps people to establish enduring connections.
Exchanges bind all kinds of people together. People may enter into these relationships with their peers or relatives, but they also may occur between people of unequal social status and thus can establish difference. In the past in Mauritania, dependent groups paid tribute to higher-status groups in return for protection. In some cultures, entering into exchange relationships in certain circumstances is expected. For example, in Mauritania in-laws are supposed to give each other particular gifts at holidays and ceremonies. Likewise, many African marriages involve elaborate exchanges of money and goods between the bride and groom’s families, often stretched out over a period of years (see chapter 3). Since exchange relationships can be costly, people often strategically select exchange partners, sometimes on the basis of trust and reliability.
If exchanges are ways that people seek financial security and establish relationships, they are also a means through which people constitute and display themselves. Participating in elaborate public exchanges of expensive goods at weddings, for example, can be a way through which they demonstrate their wealth and influence. When the mother of the bride in Niger purchases expensive furniture and household goods for her daughter, it signifies the mother’s social status, productive ability, and collective networks, since women often draw upon family members and friends to gather the money needed to purchase these goods. Economics often intertwine with social relationships; for example, in the United States holiday gifts may both serve utilitarian purposes and bind individuals closer together. When your mother buys you jeans that you need, her gift still signifies your relationship. Giving a gift can also be a way of asserting power over another person, since this action leaves the receiver in debt to the giver. By providing his friend with the red rooster that he needed, Karabu obligated him to return the favor in the future. Debts like this can provide people with security in times of need, since they can collect on gifts that they have given in the past. This safety net aspect of exchange can be especially important in societies where weak states cannot provide adequate health care or other welfare services. In such settings, exchange networks provide economic security that people can harness in times of hardship. For example, friends and relatives will give money to help defray the costs of sickness, travel, or ceremonies such as weddings or funerals.
Participating in exchange networks can also create opportunities for making other economic transactions. The household goods that a bride obtains from her mother at the time of her marriage can serve as savings, since they can be converted to cash in times of need. They also provide her with some autonomy, since in many West African cultures women retain these items in case of divorce. In Senegal when women exchange expensive cloth at ceremonies, they mark themselves as wealthy and thus creditworthy, which can help them to harness other cash flows.
Relationships that seem altruistic or ceremonial can become material factors in a crisis. James Ferguson has shown how miners in Zambia earned relatively good wages and usually supported many relatives both in town and in their original villages. Some who had lived in mining towns all their lives never expected to return to their communities of origin and thus neglected to help rural relatives. When copper prices dropped, however, the mines closed, and the miners had to suddenly go back to their villages, where they had to rely on relatives for food, shelter, and farmland, perhaps permanently. This could mean humiliation and destitution for those who had evaded their moral obligations.
Of course, such exchanges can spark conflict and challenges. People may question the expectations of giving, such as in Senegal, where young men have contested the high amounts of bridewealth that elders expect them to pay. Establishing exchange relationships can also be risky since the receiver may not have the funds to return the gift or may simply refuse to do so. Similarly, since exchange partners make claims on people’s resources, saving money or investing in productive activities can be challenging. This means that part of economic success often involves being able to hold wealth back for oneself in spite of pressure to give. This can be a difficult balancing act, since not giving enough may stigmatize people as stingy, while being too generous means that they risk losing wealth, since there is no guarantee that it will be returned. Strategies that people employ to keep wealth out of exchange networks include investing in goods such as land, buildings, cattle, cloth, or gold, all of which may not easily be converted into liquid form.
Participating in rotating credit societies also puts money out of reach. Members of these associations contribute a fixed amount of money to them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The whole sum is given to one participant at each meeting; each participant gets a chance to receive the sum in turn. This means that the organizers do not hold money between meetings, which reduces the risk of theft. Participating in these sorts of groups keeps participants’ money safe from impulse purchases and makes it unavailable to tempt relatives to request gifts or loans.
Cities in Africa, like those elsewhere, attract migrants partly because they offer a wider range of alternatives for earning a living and defining one’s identity than villages or small towns. Educational and health facilities are disproportionately concentrated there, along with public and private investments. While the bulk of formal sector employment is also situated in cities, many urban Africans earn their living from work in the informal sector—activities that are often not taxed, regulated, or protected by the government and other institutions, and not factored into countries’ GDPs. Although associated with modernity and upward mobility, city life brings actual prosperity and secure livelihood to only a minority of urban residents in most African countries. The comfortable middle-class neighborhoods are dwarfed by large clusters of unplanned, substandard housing that is often illegal or quasi-legal and lacks basic utilities such as water, sanitation, and electricity. Nevertheless, the chance of being one of the lucky few who become financially successful, like the possibility of winning the lottery, exerts a powerful pull upon African populations (see chapter 6). Many parents also feel that relocating their children to cities will provide them with better educational and commercial opportunities. In Ghana, for example, wealthy Asante cocoa farmers built or bought houses in the regional capital, Kumasi. One explained this choice by saying, “I don’t want my children to grow up in the village,” even though it was too late to send them to school. Older traders, even those who had grown up in a village, showed real horror at the prospect of having to retire there for lack of urban assets. As one put it, “I would die in three days; there is nothing to do there.” Africans face both opportunities and challenges that arise from living and working in urban areas.
Yet the separation of livelihoods between rural and urban spaces should not be exaggerated. This is illustrated by Berida Ndambuki, an Akamba woman who shared her life story with historian Claire Robertson. Berida was born in Kenya in 1936 and grew up in a rural town. After marrying, Berida farmed with her husband, Ndambuki, but money was scarce, partly because he drank so much. Struggling to make ends meet with ten children, Berida decided she had to expand her work repertoire beyond agriculture in the hopes of alleviating her children’s poverty. She first began brewing beer in a nearby town, then sold corn flour near Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Finally, she began to sell a variety of foodstuffs from her home region, including corn, beans, millet, and sorghum, in Nairobi itself because they sold for higher prices there.
Figure 4.4. A tea stall with modern aspirations.
Gracia Clark.
After moving to the city, Berida helped to found Gikomba market, where traders either owned or rented places to sell dried staple foods, vegetables, used clothing, and other items. Although they struggled with authorities over permits, and police occasionally demolished their market stalls, the traders organized their market well. For example, Berida served on the market committee, which resolved disputes over debts and mediated quarrels between vendors or between vendors and customers. Of course, working in an urban area had its own challenges; Berida lost money through robbery and bad debts.
Berida engaged in several more income-generating activities, including selling cows and bringing products such as cloth from Tanzania and Uganda over the border to resell. Which activity she favored depended on larger economic and ecological conditions. During a drought in the mid-1970s, she bought cows cheaply from Maasai herders who were selling them to buy food for their families. She resold them later at a substantial profit, when the rains came and cattle prices rose.
Berida retained many links with her rural home, often returning there on buying trips or to farm during the rainy season. She became a member of several urban and rural women’s groups that pooled resources to help members save money or pay for their medical bills and children’s school fees. In the rural areas these groups also collaborated on activities such as jointly farming land or organizing community work projects to build dams. But her rural home connections also brought conflict with her husband over his inability to provide for their family, as well as frustration that her children did not seem to benefit from the education she had financed. Despite its challenges, Berida viewed her work positively, noting, “When I look back I can see that this work has removed me from a lot of slavery. . . . No matter how small my earnings were I would go and pay [my children’s] school fees. I am very grateful for my job. I can help myself and I don’t have problems” (Ndambuki and Robertson 2000, 86).
Figure 4.5. Members of a garden cooperative at work in Kankossa, Mauritania.
Katherine Wiley.
Such relationships have their conflicts, but are nonetheless important to family members at both ends. Urban Ghanaians likewise make an effort to retain close ties with rural relatives by exchanging frequent visits and gifts of farm produce from the village and consumer goods from the city. Older children from rural areas often come to stay with urban relatives to attend secondary schools or provide domestic help. Conversely, urban children may be sent to live in the village to receive better discipline or when trade disruptions create urban food shortages. In many countries, adequate transport enables city dwellers to plant farms in their home villages, working on them during the rainy season and leaving them under the care of village relatives after the harvest. Other city residents continue farming within or just outside of the city itself, and raising chickens and goats is also very common. Cultivating backyard gardens reduces food purchases for middle-income as well as poor families.
In the city, such farming is barely visible. A much larger number of home-based enterprises provide services such as tailoring, hairdressing, and car repair, or produce modest consumer items including cooked food, furniture, and shoes. In middle-income neighborhoods, home businesses such as frozen meat and fish shops or pharmacies can require more capital investment and connections. Trading remains the dominant occupation in most West African cities because of their long commercial history and the lack of mobility controls such as pass laws. In Ghana, the 2010 census revealed that about 80 percent of the urban adult female population works in trade, mostly as market and street traders. They provide most consumer goods for urban residents, and distribute complementary foodstuffs from other ecological zones as well as merchandise from ports and local factories to village residents. Specialist buyers travel to other countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to purchase all kinds of products, from cell phones and boom boxes to clothing and household goods. Much of this work is not officially recorded by the government and is excluded from calculations of GDP. It still is taxed—for example, when market traders pay stall rents—but often not in the same way.
The balance between formal and informal sectors in any particular city depends upon its location and the regulatory climate created by the national government; the boundaries between these sectors can frequently be blurred. Several analysts note that informal connections to the state through corruption or market taxes raise serious doubts about the assumption that informal trade lies outside the state system. These unstable definitions lead some scholars to prefer the distinction between legal and illegal trade or between corporate and noncorporate organizations, instead of that between the formal and informal sectors. While often thought of as an archetype of the informal sector, market trade has long been integrated with the state; colonial authorities actually promoted it in Ghana as a source of tax revenue. It is often legally recognized, although not given the degree of legal protection offered the corporate sector (which is frequently far from absolute). Legal protections for workers generally exempt informal sector workers, although their enforcement in corporate enterprises is also very uneven. These contradictions led the International Labor Organization to refocus its efforts on “decent work,” but informality remains the dominant terminology in policy and aid circles.
While Berida’s story illustrates the precariousness of informal sector employment, it also shows how such work is monitored and influenced by the state. Informal sector businesses may cultivate relationships with government officials or private factories such as breweries, but they can often draw more safely on unpaid family and apprentice labor. In Kumasi, an association of small-scale bakers, studied by Rudith King, sought formal government recognition as a cooperative for its owner-members but kept its relations with workers outside the purview of the minimum wage legislation. This situation encourages informal workers to start up their own operations as soon as possible and to cultivate personal relationships with suppliers and customers or with kin and neighbors, instead of keeping written accounts and contracts. Today, demolition of the stalls of informal traders in streets and markets is still common in Ghana, with notorious episodes also occurring in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and in Berida’s Kenya; while formal sector shops are also subject to occasional extralegal confiscations, they are rarely destroyed.
The subcontinental pattern of variation in the balance between formal and informal economies again contrasts West Africa to East and southern Africa. In West Africa, the informal sector predominates and shows more continuity with indigenous traditions. In many respects, the informal sector in this part of the continent is better organized and more reliable than the formal sector, not least in its ability to adjust quickly to shifts in climate or political unrest. In eastern and southern Africa, the relative size of white and Asian settlement brought more formal sector development, although management positions were often reserved for whites. The trade in imports and local foods in Zimbabwe at the wholesale level, for example, is organized through formal firms owned by Europeans and Lebanese, while Ghana and Nigeria have big African distributors at much higher levels within the informal sector. Informal trade and enterprises can pay better than many lower-level civil service or factory jobs, although not at the smallest scale. In southern Africa, the predominance of men in mine work tends to raise wages for men in other formal enterprises, while lower-paid farm and factory labor includes both male and female workers.
Figure 4.6. The Kumasi yam wholesale yard is big business in Ghana.
Gracia Clark.
In South Africa, the informal sector and indeed formal African business development was strictly prohibited for so many decades that its growth was seriously retarded. Even after decades of majority rule, much of the street commerce in this part of the continent is conducted in Asian shops or by immigrants from West and Central Africa. Studies of urban township life show effective organization by Africans in only a few occupations, notably as beer brewers at shebeens (illegal bars) and drivers at taxi stands. In squatter settlements such as Crossroads, studied by Fiona Ross, livelihoods are pieced together through casual work arrangements between neighbors for cash or payment in kind. These networks often center around the few people with formal sector jobs or old-age pensions.
While many Africans move to urban areas in their own countries to seek better employment opportunities and higher incomes, others emigrate abroad. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), more than thirty million Africans live outside of their home countries. While much of this migration is to elsewhere in Africa or to Europe and the Middle East, others travel to the United States. The 2000 U.S. Census documented that 881,300 people living in the United States were born in Africa; today the number is probably closer to one million. Many reside in heavily populated urban areas, such as New York, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, but increasingly also in smaller cities such as Greensboro, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. Although it is commonly thought that primarily young men emigrate, according to the World Bank 47.2 percent of emigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are now women.
Migrations like this are nothing new; for centuries groups have migrated into, within, and out of Africa. Over the last century, increasing urbanization in Morocco and elsewhere in Africa stimulated internal migration as people moved to cities looking for work. Likewise, international migration was sometimes encouraged by host countries. France actively recruited workers from its former colonies in the 1960s and 1970s, including from Morocco, which had been a French protectorate. Today more stringent migration restrictions mean that many workers are undocumented and that some Africans risk their lives traveling to Europe in precarious wooden boats. While some people emigrate permanently, many live abroad for shorter periods, eventually returning home.
These emigrants can have a dramatic impact on the livelihoods of the people they leave behind, particularly through remittances, the money or goods that they send back to their friends and families. Although people emigrate from all African countries, North Africa receives the bulk of remittances largely because of its geographic proximity to and historical relationship with Europe. According to the IFAD, in 2006 45 percent of remittances to the continent went to this region. For example, the World Bank reports that in 2010 Morocco received the third-highest amount of remittances in Africa (behind Nigeria and Egypt), garnering U.S. $6.4 billion, which accounted for 6.6 percent of the country’s GDP. Not surprisingly, these substantial remittances correlated with a large number of migrants. In 2010, more than 9 percent of Morocco’s population had emigrated, with the top destination countries being France, Spain, Italy, and Israel. Families that remain behind are often headed by women, who use these remittances in a variety of ways such as by supporting the daily needs of their households and paying for education, health care, and better nutrition.
A study conducted in the Todgha River valley by Hein de Haas in the southern High Atlas Mountains of Morocco analyzed the impact of this migration and the subsequent remittances on the local and regional economies. Receiving remittances, especially from international destinations, had a large impact on households: those that garnered remittances from international migrants had twice the income of those that did not. Households that were associated with international migration also had higher local cash incomes, indicating that members actively expanded their work in the local economy rather than passively depending upon money from abroad. The extra funds could also play an important part in household strategies to diversify livelihoods and could minimize risks in the way that insurance might do elsewhere.
Since accessing formal channels that provide financial services such as loans is often difficult for many Africans, remittances can play an important role in financing small businesses and development projects. For example, beyond employing remittances to support daily household needs, people in the Todgha River valley invested this money in improved agricultural techniques, such as buying water pumps to help with irrigation or purchasing new farmland. Others built houses, which could lead to rental income, or invested in private businesses. While not everyone in the region directly received remittances, an increase in construction projects and rising consumption rates resulted in local job creation, which benefited the region as a whole. Beyond helping families to secure livelihoods, in some cases remittances may have even helped people overcome discrimination. They enabled some people of lower social status to access new kinds of income and power, although they could also lead to new forms of inequality between families who had access to remittances and those who did not. While receiving remittances does not guarantee economic success, it can be a way for African households to diversify their livelihoods and protect themselves against unexpected hardships.
The livelihood approach to understanding how people get by in Africa invites us to acknowledge the complexity of their strategies, the many factors that shape them, and the innovative ways that people operate in the face of great constraints. As this chapter and its examples demonstrate, Africans tap into local, regional, national, and international networks in order to make their livelihoods viable. Factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, and social class also affect their possibilities for action and can both increase and limit opportunities. While their options may be restricted by their larger historical, socioeconomic, and environmental settings, people maneuver within these constraints to generate creative strategies for getting by and for making their lives meaningful. Livelihood approaches assume that constraint and agency are virtually coextensive and constantly interact and respond to each other.
The agency of individuals does not negate the strength of lineage and community solidarity; rather, it is enacted in terms of those social relationships. It is a question not of people rejecting the group but of finding themselves inside the group and expanding their scope within it. Rules of behavior and entitlement to resources may prescribe who does and owns what, but in practice some people always behave badly or cannot fulfill their duties, sometimes precisely because they lack the resources required to do so. Ideal models in any culture, however devoutly followed, are always supplemented by what happens when things do not work as planned. These “plan B” or fallback strategies are also a valuable part of the cultural repertoire. Although they may be rarely used, they must be available when needed because they are essential to long-term survival.
There remains debate over many questions, such as the effect of remittances on the receivers and their regions. While the Moroccan study suggests that this money can have a positive effect on entire regions, others suggest that it can be detrimental. Citing different examples, some development scholars worry that households can become dependent upon remittances, which can be devastating if they cease. While remittances may lead to increased financial security for some families, emigration can also result in “brain drain” as educated Africans move abroad to benefit from higher salaries. Others argue that when migrants return home, as many do, they bring new skills, knowledge, and resources with them. Development analysts do agree that public policies could do more to encourage remittances and better link them with development. This could include lowering fees on money transfers, easing taxes on remittances, and establishing programs whereby people could use access to remittances as collateral for small business loans. Such measures would also enable migrants to remain better connected with their home countries and families, thus increasing the odds that they—and their accompanying skills—will return home.
Africans are carrying out a nonverbal debate complementary to this verbal one, as they imagine and perform a range of strategies reflecting both their material and ideological constraints and the bottomless font of invention arising from their creative capacity. Conformity and deviance, risk and precaution generate innumerable contradictory and reinforcing layers that accumulate into history. Individuals always retain a significant degree of autonomy, and this helps them adapt to the inevitable changes and surprises of life. This room for maneuver constitutes the potential for social change through individual or collective action, but it is also essential for the maintenance of the social order or social reproduction. In human societies, both rules and exceptions need to be present to create the flexibility and adaptability that allow social systems and individuals to survive. Without the ability to constantly adjust to changing circumstances, no social system, oppressive or otherwise, could last for very long. Livelihoods are socially constructed and contested in a never-ending cycle of renewal and destruction that generates both continuity and change.
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