The City Is Burning! Street Economies and the Juxtacity of Kigali, Rwanda

Abstract

This article is about the juxtaposition—or side-by-side coexistence—of divergent economic, political, and city building processes in Kigali, Rwanda. I focus on abazunguzayi, nomadic merchants whose public presence in Kigali’s streets are seen as antithetical to the global city aesthetics that urban managers wish to stamp on Kigali as its future image. I argue that abazunguzayi shift the weight of authority from formalized sources to the streets by leveraging an internal contradiction of transforming Kigali’s surface into an optimally controlled high-tech city with world-class infrastructure municipal aspirations to produce Kigali’s future as a hub of high-end tourism and international conferences ironically depend on the very subjects and practices that are considered antithetical to that future. I argue that this is occurring for two reasons. First, Kigali’s street economy is embedded in the daily operations of the city. Abazunguzayi run discount economies that the city’s low-paid workforce depends on to reproduce their labor. This includes the labor that is necessary to build the envisioned new Kigali. Second, while everyone participates in the street economy, women abazunguzayi pose a specific problem for city authorities. As crackdowns on the street trade are becoming more violent and visibly target women, city authorities undermine the national project to promote “women’s empowerment” as an element of Rwanda’s world-class brand.