In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power‐utility workers tolerate some unofficial forms of modifiying the electrical network, such as unsanctioned reconnections and extensions. These practices, which can also involve theft, bribery, and other illegal activities, both undermine and sustain an increasingly expensive public infrastructure that is in disrepair and subject to routine bureaucratic neglect. But such modifications also have their tacit limits, and people judge as foolish those who have exceeded them. The limits reveal a modal reasoning at work in the relationship among technical systems, urban ethics, and informal economic arrangements. In each of these domains, people use modal reasoning to simultaneously alter and preserve an emergent future. Such reasoning illustrates how infrastructures constitute wholes that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their constituent parts. [infrastructure, electricity, modality, reasoning, urbanism, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania] Dar es salaam, Tanzania, wakazi, mafundi umeme, na wafanyakazi wanaosambaza umeme wanaendekeza kufanya aina za marekebisho ya mifumo ya umeme isiyo rasmi, kwa mfano kuongeza idadi ya watumiaji wa umeme na kuwarudishia huduma ya umeme wale waliokatiwa bila ya kuingia nao mikataba na bila ya idhini kutoka shirika la umeme. Lakini marekebisho haya pia yana ukomo wa ukimya na watu wanawaona wale ambao wamezidi kama vile hawana busara. Ukomo huu unadhihirisha aina ya fikra ya kimfumo katika mahusiano ya nyanja za kiufundi, maadili ya kazi, na mipangilio ya kiuchumi isiyo rasmi. Katika hali hizi nyanja, watu wanatumia fikra za kimfumo kwa wakati huo huo kubadili na kutunza wanachokusudia hapo mbeleni. Fikra hii inaonyesha kwamba miundombuni ni mjumuisho unaotokana na mahusiano ya vipengele mbalimbali na sio vipengele vilivyokaa kipekee. [miundombinu, umeme, mfumo, fikra, mjini, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania]
This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.
The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Africa’s internal energy frontiers for understanding a global energy realignment marked by experiments in renewable technologies as well as revanchist investments in fossil fuels. It then discusses capture as a concept rooted in both Marxist informed accounts of global energy regimes as well as the political histories and practices of African populations. Finally, it discusses the articles as spanning three economies of capture along Africa’s energy frontier: resurgent extractivism, post-carbon development and consumer renewables.
Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high compression strength, buoyancy and thermal insulation. Perhaps most strikingly, its lack of sand aggregate makes it energy efficient compared to concrete. While aircrete is regularly sold by various construction companies, DIY enthusiasts and technicians around the world are cultivating more home-brew, open-source methods. This article follows James, an American ex-security contractor and mining engineer, as he attempts to convert his own embodied legacies of imperial extraction into a pro-social business venture by designing aircrete machines and mixes for urban Africa. His adventures in aircrete typify an energy future in which an array of intriguing experiments and technologies intersect with a broader entrepreneurial effort to capture Africa’s growing consumer markets.
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the national disposition to endure suffering that it seemed to make evident. It shows that in asking citizens to suffer the near-total breakdown of the power supply in good faith, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Party of the Revolution), drew on a cultural-political orientation developed during the socialist era and sustained through a long period of partial neoliberal reform. While some Tanzanians saw this suffering in good faith as an expression of docility and credulity, the essay suggests that it also speaks to the moral power of socialism's underlying vision of collective interdependence, and might be read as a utopian insistence on that vision in an era of growing oligarchy and inequality.
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