‘Looking for money’: hustling, youth survival strategies and schizoid subjectivities in Zimbabwe’s crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zimbabwe’s socio-economic crises are well debated but not so much how they encroach on subjectivities. This paper discusses hustling as a multidimensional practice wrought by the crises and used by unemployed youth to get by. Using material from intensive fieldwork done in 2009–10 in Beitbridge on the border with South Africa, the paper discusses subjectivities spawned by and through hustling. With a premium on survival and managing uncertainty, hustling enlists ordinary citizens, law enforcement agents and others and blurs the line between work and crime as well (il)licit and (il)legal. Through the concept of ‘schizoid subjectivities’, the paper illustrates not only paradoxes of policy incoherencies and contradictions that create opportunities for hustling, perpetuate uncertainty for hustlers and deepen distrust among actors, but also edgy and conflicted lives of actors. The paper concludes that in the absence of viable alternative employment hustling is likely to continue.