They Eat Our Sweat Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria

by Agbiboa, Daniel E.

• ISBN13: 9780198861546
• ISBN10: 0198861540
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-05-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.

Author Biography

Daniel E. Agbiboa, Harvard University

Daniel Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He earned a PhD in International Development from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research and teaching center on the relations
between state and nonstate actors in contemporary Africa, specifically in the contexts of cities and conflict. He is the author of Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge, 2018) and co-author of People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa (Langaa
RPCIG, 2021). He is the author of several articles which have appeared in journals such as African Studies Review, African Affairs, Journal of Modern African Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Current History.

Table of Contents

"[T]his book is poetic and readable, and it will resonate with anyone who has navigated the vast city it describes." -- Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Current Anthropology