Young female traders’ quest for viability in Zimbabwe's politicised urban spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the viability struggles of young female traders in Harare, Zimbabwe. It makes a conceptual contribution to debates about viability, which captures how young people connect and pursue aims across diverse life domains (referred to as ‘thinking and acting across’), by addressing gender and generational power dynamics. The article demonstrates how young female traders in Harare are thinking and acting across the domains of work and politics in a context of urban authoritarianism, by negotiating the challenging economic conditions and ruling party-aligned brokers that dominate the urban spaces in which they sell their wares. Based on over two years of qualitative research, which continued during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study shows how gendered expectations around young women's voice and presentation in public affairs shapes the agency of female second-hand clothes traders. The wider context of economic crisis, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, deepened the precarity of the traders, requiring young women to defy lockdown measures. However, their agency with respect to challenging (‘acting against’) law enforcement and political brokers remained constrained. We argue that gendered power dynamics intersect with notions of youth in the Zimbabwean context and infuse authoritarian politics, creating attempts at viability shaped by risk calculation.