Research on sub-Saharan Africa's unrecorded international trade: some methodological and conceptual problems

This paper describes some of the methodological and conceptual problems in researching aspects of sub-Saharan Africa's international 'underground' trade, meaning commercial transactions which are conducted across international frontiers but which are unrecorded in official data. The authors focus in particular on trade across intercontinental frontiers. They consider some problems of identifying and researching long-distance trade, and particularly intercontinental trade, which is illegal, unofficial or informal. They do so at two levels: first, by looking at sources of evidence for intercontinental flows (the examples of ivory and drugs); second, by adopting a 'bottom-up' approach, studying activities of individuals or small groups of intercontinental traders with a view to extrapolating from their activities in order to draw conclusions of wider application. Finally, they make some remarks concerning new modes of unofficial trade and the people who participate in them.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Le commerce international informel en Afrique sub-saharienne: quelques problèmes méthodologiques et conceptuels

L'économie informelle africaine a pris une telle ampleur qu'il est devenu impossible de la considérer comme une forme annexe de l'économie formelle ou comme un facteur d'importance strictement locale. En outre, le qualificatif «informel» n'est que l'un des termes employés, terme d'ailleurs inapte à rendre compte des flux de biens et de services ne faisant pas l'objet d'un enregistrement officiel ou qui sont totalement illégaux. La portée inter-continentale de cette économie mérite une analyse plus fouillée. Cela pose toute une série de problèmes techniques qui sont examinés ici. Une masse considérable d'informations peut être collectée dans les statistiques portant en particulier sur des types de commerce partiellement ou totalement clandestin, tels que le trafic de l'ivoire ou celui de la drogue. On peut également, en utilisant des techniques anthropologiques, étudier des groupes de petits commerçants exerçant leur activité outre-merASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Remaking Africa's informal economies: youth, entrepreneurship and the promise of inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid

In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents vast 'under-served' informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the prcesses of individual and collective 'transformation' that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the 'line' is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa's informal economies

Norms, Networks, Power, and Control: Understanding Informal Payments and Brokerage in Cross-Border Trade in Sierra Leone

Recent research has cast light on the variety of informal payments and practices that govern the day-to-day interactions between traders and customs agents at border posts in low-income countries. Building on this literature, this paper draws on survey and qualitative evidence in an effort to explore which groups are most advantaged and disadvantaged by the largely informal processes and norms governing cross-border trade. We find that understanding variation in strategies and outcomes across traders can only be effectively understood with reference to the importance of norms, networks, power, and the logic of control.Department for International DevelopmentBill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

The Flip-Flop Trail and Fragile Globalisation

The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in place of economic processes and commodity chains favoured in hegemonic versions of globalization. These reduce globalization’s complex social forms to the grand narratives of the logics of capital accumulation, implicitly naturalizing it, if critically, as inevitable, entrenched and robust. From the vantage point of the flip- flop trail, globalization looks rather different. It is more fragile and shifting, generating multiple forms of uncertainty in the lives and landscapes it simultaneously sustains and undermines

The elusive archaeology of Kongo urbanism: the case of Kindoki, Mbanza Nsundi (Lower Congo, DRC)

We present here results, analyses and an in-depth historical contextualisation of the fieldwork undertaken in 2012 and 2013 at the Kindoki site in the Lower Congo (DRC). This site is linked with Mbanza Nsundi, one of the Kongo Kingdom's provincial capitals, which turns out to be archaeologically 'elusive'. Pinpointing its location proved to be particularly challenging. To this end, a historically-informed excavation methodology was developed that was never implemented in Central Africa before. We combined a strategy of systematic test pits with a large-scale 50 m grid approach. A cemetery was identified on Kindoki Hill with distinct but contemporaneous quarters of a 16th-17thcenturies settlement on both sides. The cemetery itself contains mainly 18th-century burials, in all likelihood of successive Nsundi rulers. The foreign, especially Portuguese, ceramics excavated on the hilltop and the hundreds of Venetian and likely Bavarian beads found in the graves are indicative of Mbanza Nsundi's connection to trade routes linking the Atlantic coast with the Pool region. The most striking discovery is that of a previously unknown type of comb-impressed pottery, from a pit with a calibrated radiocarbon date AD 1294-1393 (2 sigma). This suggests that a settlement had been developing at Kindoki since at least the 14th century, which allows us, for the very first time, to spatially bridge Kongo history and 'prehistory'. For the entire Lower Congo region only three 14C dates posterior to AD 1000 were available before the start of the KongoKing project, twelve have been added for just Kindoki

The Elephant in the Room: Off-shore companies, liberalisation and extension of presidential power in DR Congo

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, donors promoted rapid liberalisation and presidential elections in the aftermath of the war, and after two terms, President Kabila has not left office. This article engages with the question of how liberalisation and elections are connected, and how they are related to the extension of presidential power. It finds that the international market for minerals has shaped the domestic political economy but its nature has effectively been ignored in the formulation of donor policy; efforts at regulating trade have been concentrated on due diligence of origin in Congo but have not addressed the secrecy of international trade. Liberalisation has removed control of economic resources from Congo, provided returns for elite politicians and funded violence to control the disenfranchised population. The offshore companies are the elephant in the room; without acknowledging them, analysis of the liberalisation and its interaction with presidential tenure lacks assessment of the opportunities, interests and power that shaped the processes