Living through Crisis by Lake Chad

Violence, Labor and Resources

Alessio Iocchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032155296
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000610444
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the ways in which people in the Lake Chad region that divides Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon deal with the crises of violence, jihadism, drought, and climate change that continue to afflict the area.

In 2014 Boko Haram expanded into the Lake Chad region, prompting a counter-insurgency response, and exacerbating pre-existing social and ecological challenges. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this book investigates how people within the liminal space of this key border region respond to and navigate the unpredictability which typifies their day-to-day lives. Building up a picture of individual and community experiences of crisis, the book gradually demonstrates the complex interactions between economic circuits, political orders, socio-religious processes, and labour practices which operate in the region.

This book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, security studies, political science, and border studies.

Part IPatterns of Accumulation and Dispossession in the Sahel

1LinesRethinking Networks, Labor and Resources in the Sahel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003244530-3

Ni talaga kuroya,

ate galiju sobannemi!

If you are poor,

do not make a rich man thy friend!

(Kanuri proverb)

Informality, Agency, and Neoliberalism

“As Africans, we must be flexible” once told me a young boy pushing a pousse-pousse (wheelbarrow) in a sort of apology while getting past the severe gaze of a douanier (customs agent) at the frontier-site of Nguéli, in N’Djamena. Individual capability and collective resourcefulness determine the degree of success or, prosaically speaking, the amount of food available for the household at the end of the day. Possession of talents or specific features is scarcely productive if they don’t match adequate social capital and the capacity to position oneself among the variety of (religious, linguistic, and community) identities of the cosmopolitan Lake Chad Basin. Flexibility and sociality go hand in hand for the 21st-century Sahelian youth who self-taught to fend for himself in the chaotic traffic of N’Djamena’s frontier site, attesting for the importance of the precious yet fragmented kind of sociality generated by individuals and communities. Nguéli is the kind of place where, in the worst case, a jobless young man can hope to get at least a cup of chai (tea) and some criquets frits (fried crickets) to full the stomach. In many other instances, one can reasonably hope to run some errands for one of those well-seated in the local offices (les biens assis), such as the customs office employees or the transporters association members. Those who are slightly more skilful and organized come to Nguéli with a purpose: for example, someone may work as ramasseur des clientes (clients-pickers) for the banged-up and unbelievably resilient minivans that constitute the skeleton of public transportation in the city. Someone else, endowed with more social capital, may drive motorbikes packed with boxes and merchandises and scramble into not-so-hidden “illicit” paths in order to deliver the carriage to the right person without paying the custom fees. Nguéli, in fact, is the sunburned corridor through which thousands of commodities of any kind—crammed into containers or carried by motorbike or car—pass every day. In this corridor, it is possible to observe how the urban–rural exchange is at the heart of the trading and, in general, of the economic activities on the Lake Chad region. Here, the dissonance between economic truths and true economic practices—meant dans le vrai—makes falter the presumed abyss between urban and rural environments.

Urban spaces of the Lake Chad region seem to have never really cut the cord from the food-producing rural environ: the rural blurs in the urban, and vice-versa. Being driven neither by industrialization nor by massive development plans, urban landscapes in the postcolonial central Sahel have grown with no master plan and, for an untrained eye, they can easily appear as those places of “pollution, excrement and decay” that Mike Davis describes in Planet of Slums (Davis 2006: 19). To use an economic parlance, in sum, Sahel urbanities can appear as places where the dramatic growth of population is not matched in job provision, with all the social consequences this entails. For Sahelian states, the demise of the initial postcolonial state project of development in the late 1970s was followed by the advancement of neoliberal economic reforms sponsored by global financial institutions (the World Bank, the World Trade Organization). Multiple harsh structural adjustment plans and costs rationalization policies, in the 1980s, were responsible in this region for the public sector’s withdrawal in key sectors such as sanitation, housing, health access, education, to say nothing about the pernicious effects on employment. Urban laborers in the area experienced the retreat of public investment in social security, a sector that was at its embryonic stage, while also witnessing the decrease of public job opportunities in an oversaturated market: the demise of the public sector coincided with the first cracks in the postcolonial developmental state dream.

Africa Between Structure and Agency

Such representations of economic reforms in Africa strongly underline the structural processes at the basis of the multiplication of shantytowns with poor formal job offer. The potentials for job opportunities and poverty eradication, following the rationalistic neoliberal script promoted by international financial institutions, are withdrawn from the state administrative responsibilities and progressively transferred to the NGO universe through social safety net programs. When coming to Africa (meant as sub-Saharan Africa), the kind of narratives and fantasies fueled by the ‘neo-liberal parlance’ seem to be just another update in the discursive tropos about the presumed African exceptionalism. Such exceptionalism is not only the direct outcome of the structuring of economic and state power and Western dominance (Hobson & Seabrooke 2007) but also the result of a misconceived presumption about Africa that has been acutely captured by Achille Mbembe: “[a] bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gaps and primordial chaos” (2001: 3). The ‘African exceptionalism’ is an integral part of the discourse on liberal integrative globalization that intends to represent the world as increasingly interconnected and converging (Hay & Marsh 1999). National, cultural, and economic differences are portrayed as “rigidities and vestiges” (Bourdieu 1998) that cannot but succumb vis-à-vis the robustness of the new sociability spearheaded by neoliberal ideas. Such sociability is based on the manifold and laudable possibilities provided by the free market for the rationality of the Homo Economicus. Leaving aside the fact that such definition of rationality poorly exhausts the ontological nuances of the notion as it seems mainly centered around individualism, opportunism, and egoism (Manor 1991: 311), we are presented with a greater problem. The neoliberal representation of globalization as a natural process toward convergence leading to mutually beneficial interconnectedness fails to articulate appropriately the coercive and disruptive aspects inherently latent in the process. The neoliberal canon’s effort to portray a stable picture in which ‘challenges’ and ‘issues’ can be dealt with reform scheduling, structural adjustments, and redesign struggles to frame Africa’s (apparently) marginal role in the globalizing process: a corner of the world that risks to be left behind in the march toward global integration.

At a closer observation, though, Africa instead appears at the forefront of any discourse on globalization, and as a continent that has undergone a protracted and extensive social engineering (Kozul-Wright & Rayment 2007: 177), it rather appears as an advantaged point to look at and get instructed on the contradictions, practices, and processes of the current economic landscape. In this sense, scholarship needs contributions that allow readers to take a glimpse in the structural inequalities and the acute contradictions provoked by neoliberalism through its “maximisation of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterised by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007: 22). Nonetheless, this kind of representations has a creepy tendency toward sensationalism while, most importantly, tend to focus in a limited way on the importance of the historical agency that poor and dispossessed people might exercise in their life-worlds, coping, surviving, and reordering them (Locatelli & Nugent 2009).

Conversely, literature about the “complex agency and determinacy” (Pieterse 2008: 100) of the poor from the Global South specifically aims to overcome materialist explanations of urban realities that see them mostly as the result of economic policies gone wrong. Scholars like Pieterse (2008) or Simone (2004a, 2004b, 2005) have engaged in an effort to dismiss the views about urbanities of the Global South conveyed by a critical (but often defeatist) political economy, insisting instead on ‘capacity’ and ‘resourcefulness’ as key concepts. The first implication of such reasoning is the commendable will to put African urban realities back on the map that is an attempt to develop a sort of postcolonial urban theory that concretely takes the African city out of the ‘heart of darkness’. A second—political—implication lies in the will to frame everyday labor practices developed in the South as the cornerstone of new and radical imaginations, and therefore interventions: claiming that African cities are built upon “people as infrastructure” (2004b) implies a turn also in policy formulations that can therefore be built upon such a view. Recuperating the “generative powers of the ordinary” (Pieterse 2008: 10), though, does not tell us much about how the challenging conditions of the Global South are generated. Any radical imagining and intervention to improve living conditions in the Global South, indeed, cannot happen without addressing the root or structural causes of poverty and inequality. While surely right when arguing against any defeatist and implicitly teleological narrative about African realities, invitations to consider the ‘generative powers of the ordinary’ or ‘people as infrastructure’ seem necessarily vague. They might instead appear as notions better suiting to politically settled and developed contexts such as those that finance and promote this type of visions in the first place: such efforts seem the natural by-product of a Western research environment whose audience naturally belongs to a North.

The vagueness of such formulations is inscribed by some authors to the inherent ‘provisionality’ and elusiveness of the African terrain, especially the urban one (Nuttall & Mbembe 2005: 200), which make hard for observers to clearly understand the workings of arrangements made in these contexts. While this claim might appear as just a matter of methodological preference—and therefore based on the researcher’s choices and not a matter of fact—it implies a sort of updated version about African exceptionalism: a continent populated by cities of noise, chaos, and indecipherable arrangements. Therefore, again, we are presented with a narrative that struggles to avoid those same traps of romanticization, which indeed it aims to stigmatize. When Simone writes about the “provisional intersections of residents” (2004a: 407) in Southern slums, he advances the open-ended as modus operandi. However, Simone seems still to wear on Orientalist glasses when he argues that the “astute capability” of postcolonial urban residents “preclude any definitive judgment of efficacy or impossibility” (2004a: 428). Such consideration considers only limitedly the reality of African contexts where individuals are likely to experience a ‘social or political death’. We, as researchers and observers, cannot but draw attention on how ‘necropolitical’ regimes in Africa dispose of citizens in arbitrary, authoritarian, and illiberal ways, in line with a precolonial and colonial ruling tradition that ultimately interrogates us about the physical weight of constraints for individual agency in postcolonial settings.¹ Moreover, in its effort to look for human agency in front of the “neoliberal grandslam” (Watts 2005: 184), a renewed vision of African cities as ‘exceptional’ obscures the most interesting implication lying in concepts like “people as infrastructure” or the “generative power of the ordinary”, i.e., the invitation to reflect on the immaterial life of things and on its performative power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Patterns of Accumulation and Dispossession in the Sahel
• Part II Living Through Crises by Lake Chad
• Part III Negotiating Livelihoods at the Frontier
• Postscript
• Index