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Life (and limb) in the fast-lane
Citation for published version:
Doherty, J 2017, 'Life (and limb) in the fast-lane: Disposable people as infrastructure in Kampala’s boda
boda industry', Critical African Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 192-209.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2017.1317457
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
10.1080/21681392.2017.1317457
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Critical African Studies
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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical African Studies on 3 May
2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2017.1317457.
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Download date: 10. Aug. 2022
Life (and Limb) in the Fast-Lane:
Disposable People as Infrastructure in Kampala’s Boda Boda Industry
Jacob Doherty
This is the accepted manuscript of an article published in
Critical African Studies 9(2): 192-209
available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21681392.2017.1317457
Special Issue “Vital Instability: Ontological Insecurity and African Urbanisms”
Edited by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Peter Kandonde, and Lorena Núñez
Abstract: Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s
transportation infrastructure, yet the industry is perpetually precarious, threatened with wholesale
eviction. Moreover, drivers’ lives and bodies are continually put at risk by the city’s traffic.
Through a relational approach to ontology, this article asks how the boda boda industry comes
into being and endures, what forms of vulnerability it entails, and what experiences, relations,
and forms of urban life it produces. It argues that three forms disposability structure and arise
from the industry - structural unemployment, embodied vulnerability, and infrastructural
displacement. Infrastructural violence, it is argued, must be considered when describing and
theorizing people as infrastructure. The article examines how boda boda drivers’ shared
condition of insecurity and disposability generates intense forms of sociality, solidarity, mutual
obligation, recognition, and urban vitality.
Keywords: Infrastructure, Vulnerability, Disposability, Mobility, Ontology, Uganda
9,286 Words
(excluding references, endnotes, and figure captions)
On the night of June 29
th
, 2013, an explosion rocked Kampala’s Northern Bypass. A
private car collided with an oil tanker, rupturing its tank and causing it to leak fuel into the
nearby wetland. A few boda boda (motor-cycle taxi) drivers nearby noticed and took advantage
of the situation, following the tanker to try to collect petrol in jerrycans. Others joined in, using
helmets, plastic water bottles, and bare hands to scoop up the fuel. Some phoned colleagues,
inviting them to partake in the illicit flow. This expression of the solidarity within the industry
turned against drivers, however, when a spark caught, igniting the evaporated petrol vapor that
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saturated the air, and the entire area went up in flames. Forty-two people, most of them boda
boda drivers, died in the fire.
In the aftermath of the fire, the dead boda boda drivers were decried in the media as
irresponsible thieves who died because of foolishness and greed. Commentators cited their
deaths as evidence of the “the bankruptcy of our morals” (The East African, July 6, 2013). When
the president offered five million Shillings (US$2000) as compensation to families of the victims,
he was attacked for “validating hooliganism” by an irate letter writer concerned with the fact that
“the fuel at Namungoona [the site of the accident] was not free; it had/has an owner who pays
taxes used to surface the road on which the boda bodas ride” (The Daily Monitor, July 4, 2013).
Disregarding the value of their own lives, driven by poverty to taking extreme risks, sacrificing
everything for the sake of a few thousand shillings, and ignoring the strictures of property law,
drivers embodied the forces of disorder often seen as threats to the moral foundations of the
Ugandan social order. The debate about the accident turned on the question of whether drivers
were greedy looters, or, if poverty was a sufficient rationale for drivers to risk their lives for a
jerrycan full of petrol (The Daily Monitor, July 1, 2013). Trying to strike a populist, yet paternal,
note, President Museveni visited the accident site to express his condolences and to caution “the
youth against living recklessly, [urging] them to engage in income generating activities that can
improve their lives” (The New Vision, July 1, 2013).
For many Kampala youth, the boda boda business is just such an activity. Boda bodas are
motorcycle taxis operated primarily by young men.
i
They make up a critical element of
Kampala’s transportation infrastructure, extending the city’s mini-bus routes and cutting through
its daily traffic jams. Boda bodas are ubiquitous in Kampala. No one knows exactly how many
there are in the city; estimates range from 30,000 to 300,000. In a city of approximately 1.6
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million people, this means that potentially as many as one in five Kampalans is a boda boda
driver.
ii
Boda bodas do not simply use infrastructure, but become a substantial component of it.
The boda boda industry attests to the remarkable capacity of people, assembled as infrastructure,
to provide vital services, enhance urban mobilities, create livelihoods, and improvise new forms
of urban life. It also discloses the violence that inheres in the instrumentalization of human life as
people become means to ends, the platform upon which urban life can unfold.
Ontological instability is not the peculiar characteristic of exotic African cities, always
discursively tethered to the sign of crisis (Mbembe and Roitman 1995). Drawing on feminist and
post-colonial science studies, this article takes ontological instability as its starting point and
seeks to describe the ways in which stability is achieved, tentatively and precariously as people
become infrastructure.
iii
Accounting for power is vital for describing such stabilization. As such,
this approach is inherently relational, predicated on the idea that “relata do not precede relations”
(Barad 2007: 334), that people and things come into being, cohere, and stabilize through
relations, that the distinctions between entities are political effects rather than pre-discursive
given, and that ontologies are simultaneously material and moral in ways that are structured by
racialized and colonial hierarchies of being (Fanon 1967). Social struggles in contemporary
Kampala revolve around competing understandings of what a city is and what forms of life are
properly urban. Attending to such ontological plurality (within rather than across societies) then
becomes critical to understanding unfolding forms of historical injustice and material inequality.
As the contributions to this volume illustrate, examining the precarious, material, and plural
ways in which urban worlds are made and unmade is far from apolitical. In the context of an
unevenly fragile urban environment, then, this article asks how boda boda infrastructure comes
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into being and endures, what forms of vulnerability it entails, and what experiences, relations,
and forms of urban life and vitality it, in turn, produces.
The explosion at Namugoona dramatized the dynamics of disposability in Kampala’s
boda boda industry. While in the everyday operations of the industry, risk is distributed in less
spectacular but no less fatal ways, the explosion made visible the complex entanglements of
poverty, unemployment, infrastructure, planning, mobility, risk, morality, and materiality
through which the business has emerged. This article describes the more commonplace and
uneventful forms of infrastructural violence and vulnerability that drivers contend with on a daily
basis. Judith Butler observes that vulnerability affords the insight that “there are others out there
on whom my life depends” (2004: xii) and can thus serve as an occasion to cultivate an ethics of
mutuality. Yet this mutuality is not guaranteed. It is mediated by urban infrastructures and
patterns of recognition that unevenly distribute being. Disposability is an ontological condition
of paradoxical indispensability and superfluity that is differentially produced in diverse material
contexts. Building on Butler’s observations, I consider vulnerability not as a primary human
condition, but as something historically materialized and distributed. Under what conditions can
such ontological exposure be recognized, by whom, and to what ends? In other words, what can
be made of disposability, besides more disposability?
I argue that boda boda infrastructure is shaped by, and in turn produces, three forms of
disposability: surplus, embodiment, and displacement. First, boda drivers are part of the urban
surplus population, unable to find work and forced to seek precarious livelihoods in the so-called
informal sector due to structural mass-unemployment. Second, the conditions of work in the
boda boda business unevenly expose drivers to death, injury, and harm, their lives and bodies
vulnerable to the diffuse and heterogeneous assemblage of physical infrastructures, regulations,
