Panel 155: Uncertainty, Danger and the Productive Life of Risk on and alongside African Roads

This panel departs from Adeline Masquelier’s observation that Nigerien roads are experienced as profoundly contradictory. They are ‘objects of both fascination and terror’ and ‘space of both fear and desire’ (2002: 831) since they may bring jobs, goods and economic opportunities, but they also lead to isolation, marginalization and fatalities. People’s engagement with such ambivalent roads thus epitomizes the perils and potentialities which characterise their experience of modernity.

We deem it fruitful to explore Masquelier’s stance by highlighting the distinct ways in which various road-users in colonial and post-colonial Africa have been and are currently engaging with and shaping the risky realms of roads. Here we think of contributions which may dwell on the uncertainties--in some cases even institutional harassment--marking the everyday life and practices of small-scale entrepreneurs such as transport workers (e.g. drivers, bookmen, mates/touts, fitters/mechanics, car decorators), traders or roadside hawkers; on dangerous encounters on and alongside roads (e.g. highway robbery, risk of HIV infection); or on issues of road safety and the notoriety of accidents in policies, public discourses, imageries and the lived experience of those who encounter roads as ‘death traps’.

At the same time, we are interested in revealing the various ways in which these uncertainties and dangers regularly open up spaces for opportunities, creativity and specific forms of appropriation from which emerge particular orders and economic landscapes. In these landscapes, uncertainties and dangers create and condition (rather than limit) possibilities which are thus not so much discerned as a mere facet of ambivalent roads, but as part of a ‘productive life of risk’ on and alongside the road.