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Abstract
Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infrastructure, yet the industry is perpetually precarious, threatened with wholesale eviction. Moreover, drivers’ lives and bodies are continually put at risk by the city’s traffic. Through a relational approach to ontology, this article asks how the boda boda industry comes into being and endures, what forms of vulnerability it entails, and what experiences, relations, and forms of urban life it produces. It argues that three forms disposability structure and arise from the industry – structural unemployment, embodied vulnerability, and infrastructural displacement. Infrastructural violence, it is argued, must be considered when describing and theorizing people as infrastructure. The article examines how boda boda drivers’ shared condition of insecurity and disposability generates intense forms of sociality, solidarity, mutual obligation, recognition, and urban vitality.
Les taxis moto, appelés boda bodas, constituent un aspect vital de l’infrastructure des transports de Kampala, et pourtant le secteur est perpétuellement précaire, menacé par l’expulsion massive. De plus la vie et les corps de chauffeurs sont constamment exposés au risque que présente la circulation de la ville. Cet article propose une approche relationnelle de l’ontologie, et pose la question de savoir comment le secteur des boda bodas est né et survit, quelles formes de vulnérabilités il entraîne, et quelles expériences, relations et formes de vie urbaine il produit. Selon l’article, ces trois aspects constituent une structure à caractère remplaçable et découle de l’activité - chômage structurel, vulnérabilité incarnée, et déplacement infrastructurel. Selon nous, la violence infrastructurelle doit être étudiée pour décrire et théoriser la population en tant qu’infrastructure. L’article étudie en quoi les chauffeurs de boda bodas, qui vivent dans des conditions d’insécurité et qui subissent la remplaçabilité, génèrent des formes intenses de socialité, de solidarité, d’obligation mutuelle, de reconnaissance et de vitalité urbaine.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Peter Kankonde Bukasa, and Lorena Núñez, the editors of this special issue, ‘Vital Instability: Ontological Insecurity and African Urbanisms', for their vital contributions to this article and for the immensely generative prompt provided by the 2014 conference. I am deeply grateful to James Ferguson, Lochlann Jain, Liisa Malkki, Julienne Obadia and Vasiliki Touhouliotis for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. George Mpanga was an invaluable research assistant whom I cannot thank enough.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Boda boda drivers are also known as boba boda riders, boda boda operators, boda boda cyclists, boda boda men, ababoda (boda people), abana ba boda (boda boys, literally: children of bodas), or simply as boda bodas. Here, I use the terms driver or boda boda. Local terms for the overall economic practice include boda boda industry, boda boda business, boda boda sector, and again, simply, boda boda. I also use these interchangeably in addition to my own rendering, boda boda infrastructure.
2. Although these numbers are almost certainly an exaggeration, this exaggeration attests to boda bodas’ sense of ubiquity in the city.
3. While the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology has animated one line of debate, ontology in general can only be understood as a novel disciplinary concern by ignoring decades of scholarship not only in African studies, as noted in the introduction to this special issue, but also in feminist and medical anthropology, in the anthropology of religion, and in post-colonial and black studies, where questions of being, mutability, and materiality have long been central.
4. These conditions are not unique to Kampala's roads; such ‘infrastructural overload’ (Lamont Citation2013), is the subject of a growing body of research (Masquelier Citation2002; Mutongi Citation2006; Gibbs Citation2014; Stasik Citation2016; Lamont and Lee Citation2015; for an overview, see Klaeger Citation2013).
5. This stage name, as with all proper names and certain identifying descriptors in this article, has been changed.
6. Kavuuyo is a locally used term that refers to disorder at a few different registers. These range from the riotous street demonstrations associated with the political opposition centered around Kisekka Market in the Central Business District to the tendency of guests at parties or weddings to selfishly rush the buffet table, ignore the queue, and cause disputes.
7. While there were older men working in the industry, driving a bike was widely considered a young man's game. For many drivers I met it was treated as a transitional occupation, a means of accumulating money and connections in order to move into more prestigious work, like driving a special hire (a private taxi), opening a retail shop, or buying more bikes to rent out. Boda bodas thus while provided a (risky) means for drivers’ accumulation and eventual exit from both the industry and the associated status of dependent, working as boda driver could be respectable, but not prestigious. As in the South African taxi industry as described by Gibbs (Citation2014), personal aggrandizement could come through owning and controlling bikes, rather than driving them.
8. Writing of similar affective dynamics around Nairobi's matutu industry, Kenda Mutongi argues that “commuters have created the monster [the matatu man] and then attacked it in order to exorcise their collective guilt” (Citation2006, 549), detailing the illicit practices developed by mini-bus drivers in response to public demands for mobility that are, in turn, reframed as essential traits of the industry and its “thug” operators.
9. Taxi is the Ugandan name for the system of (typically second-hand Toyota) 14-seater minibuses, imported from Japan, that operate as the primary means of public transportation in the city.
10. A friend reported the following exchange with a driver at the stage near his job that illustrates the ways in which price is negotiated based on interpretations of self-presentation and social positioning: Adam: ‘Sebo [sir] how are you? How much to Kisimenti?’ Boda: ‘5k.’ Adam: ‘But aren’t you the one who took me last time for 3k?’ Boda: ‘Yes, but today you are wearing a suit.’
11. The main artery connecting the Mombasa Port to Kampala, Western and Northern Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo passes through Kampala, meaning that local and international, personal and commercial, industrial and agricultural auto-mobilities converge in the city. Lamont (Citation2013) situates this kind of infrastructural overload between the contradictory state mandates promoting public safety and rapid economic expansion. His work on Kenyan traffic describes the paradox in which an ideology of speed, valued as iconic of modernity and economic growth, combined with intensive car importation produces overloaded and deadly roads.
12. Material disposability on the road is entangled with financial arrangements. In his analysis of the motor-cycle taxi industry in Togo and Benin, economist Moussa Blimpo (Citation2015) shows that kinship relations between owners and drivers lead to a preference for daily leases rather than (lower trust) lease-to-own contracts that, he argues, reduce moral hazard and encourage safer driving practices.
13. Simone's impressionist account renders as a given conditions of infrastructural under-investment, that, as in the case he describes of Johannesburg's Hillbrow, are often results of deliberate urban policies aimed at producing and maintaining violently uneven conditions of life (Morris Citation1999).
14. While boda bodas are hardly quiet, this dynamic is akin to the dynamic that Bayat (Citation2010) labels quiet encroachment, whereby poor people's practices of urban life are not collectively organized as movements until threatened by displacement. Drawing on Scott (Citation1990), Chattopadhyay (Citation2012) identifies similar forms as infra-politics, describing the everyday economies of belonging that become the basis for more visible forms of protest and contestation.
15. President Milton Obote was president of Uganda from 1966 to 1971 (when he was overthrown by Idi Amin) and from 1980 to 1985 (when he was overthrown by Yoweri Museveni). This reference to the roads being built by Obote and the British signifies both the fact that they are very old, and, with intended bitter irony, that they were built under regimes considered to be undemocratic.
16. In addition to referring to themselves collectively as abaana ba boda [sons of boda], in conversation, many boda drivers I met referred to their co-workers as their “real brothers” (in English, eschewing the more precise vocabulary of relatedness available in Luganda) in contradistinction to siblings with whom they shared parentage but little intimacy or reciprocity. Robert, for instance, contrasted the easy conviviality and mutuality of his stage with the distance he felt from a successful older sibling with a downtown retail shop who, despite his wealth, refused to assist him in moments of hardship. He and other drivers also frequently attended funerals together, both for other drivers and their parents. Several interviewees referred to the patrons to whom they paid back loans on their motorbikes as uncles, but it was never explicit if this identified a consanguine relation, it was a primarily financial and hierarchical bond. By contrast, other drivers alluded to property speculators who encouraged them to take loans to buy bikes using family lands as collateral, hoping for a default that would allow the speculator to amass valuable peri-urban land. Insofar as, ‘kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are members of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent’, as Sahlins (Citation2011, 11) suggests, the involvement of boda boda drivers in each other's lives is kinship, rather than a fictitious kinship idiom.
17. Entrepreneurialism was an alternative, though not mutually exclusive, idiom through which drivers staked their claim to the streets. Some drivers, redeploying President Museveni's neoliberal rhetoric valorizing foreign investment, infrastructural development, and individual responsibility, framed themselves as job-creators and investors in urban infrastructure. Boda drivers, in this view, built their industry with no support from the KCCA who, accordingly, have no right to displace them. Boda boda drivers’ sense of themselves as innovators and entrepreneurs of a vital and unique urban infrastructure echoes Jomo Kenyatta's view on independence era taxi operators in Kenya (Mutongi Citation2006) and resonates with Mavhunga’s (Citation2014) argument that a narrow focus on roads and automobiles has privileged a simplistic narrative of technology transfer from Europe to Africa and obscured the innovations of African mobilities. Although Mavhunga is primarily interested in neglected rural mobilities, my analysis of Kampala's boda boda infrastructure builds on his argument that rather than simply using technology as passive recipients, “the African becomes a designer who makes technology” (Citation2014, 16).
18. As Melly (Citation2013) observes, one of the ambiguities of the road is the radically divergent experience of this temporal expansion. In Dakar, she argues, ‘temporary hardships’ in traffic jams are framed as sacrifices to a shared brilliant future; yet, while all commuters must deal with congestion, phenomenologically, the experience of time in an air-conditioned and chauffeured luxury SUV cannot be compared to that in the crowded and uncomfortable seats of a mini-bus.