Urban Appropriation and Transformation: Bicycle Taxi andHandcart Operators in Mzuzu, Malawi, Ignasio M. Jimu. Langaa,Bamenda (Cameroon) (2008)

摘要

Studies of non-motorised transport in urban Africa are rare. Accordingly, Jimu's text (distributed by African Books Collective and by Michigan State University Press) helps to create the empirical record. Its hallmarks are its thorough examination of the socio-economic profiles of bicycle taxi and handcart (often wheelbarrow) operators in a northern Malawian town. Mzuzu (population not yet 200,000) is the central African country's third largest settlement. Numerical tabulations (30), diagrams and maps (13), 'text boxed' life stories (6) and photographs (21) pepper the text. These materials are framed by and interpreted in terms of theory about micro-enterprise as a developmental device, and by analysis of urbanisation and poverty in Malawi. Half of the ten chapters set this scene. I did not notice any comment on the representativeness of the study sample, but Jimu's observations and interviews (21 bicycle taxi operators, 19 handcart operators) show that the need for self-employment in a poor urban economy, and opportunities for supplementing wages in formal sector employment, explain the uptake of NMT work. The mostly young-ish men (in their twenties and thirties), mostly little-educated, mostly married, mostly in-mi-grants, mostly home renters, work as pedallers and pushers out of necessity. They earn rather more than others in informal work. And there is evidently a market for cheap transport services in urban areas where public transport is deficient. This wider urban context - and the sustainability of NMT livelihoods - could have been explored at much greater length.