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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Trading Places in Tanzania: The importance of mobility in a time of travel-saving technologies
| Panel |
73. New Social Spaces. Mobility and technology in Africa
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| Paper ID | 391 |
| Author(s) |
Molony, Thomas S.J.
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Information and communication technologies, and especially mobile phones, are frequently heralded a saviour for poor Africans. One of the most common examples given for how these technologies are being used to alleviate poverty in Africa is of rural farmers accessing wholesale market prices to circumvent the evil middleman. Many such accounts are anecdotal or are based on reports of unsustainable donor projects that fail to represent the typical situation many information and communication technology (ICT) users find themselves in. While recent research does recognise that the ways in which ICT can help increase information about the availability and price of goods are much more complex than the rather naïve suggestions that it enables producers to ‘bypass intermediaries, there is no analysis of these crucial complexities and how they affect socio-economic interaction.
Using as a case study the domestic trade of perishable foodstuffs between the Southern Highlands of Tanzania and Dar es Salaam, the paper shows how “parasitic” middlemen can play a crucial role in these markets. Emphasis is given to the centrality of mobility in dealings between wholesale buyers in the Dar es Salaam municipal market and producers in rural isolated communities, and it is suggested that ICT alone are not always sufficient in sustaining a working relationship between the farmer and his urban buyer. For some of the most successful and respected wholesale buyers the interactions with their rural suppliers are as much social as they are economic. These interactions rely on face-to-face communication that apparently cannot be substituted by distance technologies such as mobile phones. The evidence is based on semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2003 with 15 tomato and potato farmers, 4 intermediary traders, 5 Dar es Salaam-based wholesale buyers and various other key informants involved in the trade. It highlights the contested meaning of “mobility”, and questions whether established relations between marginal farmers and their urban buyers that are previously based on face-to-face communication really are being damaged by information and communication technologies. While mobile phones do open up some useful new alleys of contact, they do not always close off other routes and means of interaction and as some players choose to maintain their old, pre-ICT methods of interaction. In this context the paper shows how some on the “mobile margins” who are assumed to benefit drastically from new information and technologies are embedded in particular systems of power that are more complex than many in the pro-ICT community realise.
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