Anyway, it is high time for me to say something more about my research. So here goes: some thoughts about the human dimension of travel and transport in rural Zambia, illustrated by Rose-Marie Westling's beautiful photographs.
If I'm allowed to generalize, Zambians are usually quiet and cautious in public and seem to prefer sober and restrained manners. There are two exceptions to this. Any shyness and restraint disappear in the vapours of the local brew in bars or behind some reed fence in a village. Under the influence of alcohol digressions from proper conduct is often excused and "he/she was drunk" is often used in order to exhonorate a misbehaving person. The second exception is more specific and concerns the behaviour of young men (always men) involved in the transport of people and goods. Sure, they are (frighteningly often) drunk or high on marijuana as well, but the determining factor in this case seems to be the transport situation itself, which I like to think of as not very different from a hostage situation. That is, the relationship between passengers and transporters are similar to that between hostages and their captors: passengers are as powerless, uninformed and subject to random decisions and insults.
A person, having decided to travel from, say Kalabo to Mongu, goes to Kalabo harbour on the banks of the Luanginga River early in the morning on the day of departure. (During the flooding of the Zambezi plain, December to June, boats are the most common means of transport). There are several boats there and a hoard of young men, who will approach the traveller and quite aggressively try to persuade him or her to buy tickets on a particular boat. The boat is always leaving "very soon". If the traveller presses them on the exact time, they might reveal that the boat will leave "around 9 hours" or "any time, we're just waiting for a few more passengers". Then again, the seasoned traveler in these parts, knows that it will rarely depart before noon.
In the meantime, different groups of these young men are hotly debating and arguing among themselves, while continuing trying to talk people into putting their luggage in their boat. Their behaviour is often erratic, frequently breaking out into bursts of physical violence or insulting language, and often quite disrespectful to the passengers and bystanders. People do protest to such behaviour, but rather half-heartedly and with obvious resignation.
Now, this does not mean that there is no formal order to these situations. In Kalabo, for instance, there is an officer placed in the harbour by the District Council and charged with keeping a waiting list of departing boats. He or she will also try to direct passengers to the boat which is next in line. However, while many passengers follow his advice, this does not prevent other (often half-empty) boats from leaving. This happened when Rose-Marie and I were leaving Kalabo in March: Wanting to speed up the process, we asked where a particular departing, half-empty boat was going. The District representative as well as a few of the boat people answered: "that boat is only traveling as far as Mpungu [about 30 minutes from Kalabo], not to Mongu", while some other men stealthily (and very confusingly) whispered to us: "no, it's actually going to Mongu!" Obviously, we did not board that boat, but found out later the same night that it had, indeed, gone to Mongu, arriving several hours before we did.
There are many interesting leads for further research to be found in the tensions and conflicts in such transport situations, all of which I will spend the rest of my (quickly vanishing) research time looking into.
1. The social roles and sociality of the transport sector personnel. This social world has its own hierarchies , ranging from the "spanner boys" (apprentices), fuel boys, and conductors to drivers and operators. It has its social conventions and cultural values, coded in localized versions of global ways of being masculine, urban, and modern. These values are intimately connected to "vehicle fetishism" - the global social and cultural value attached to motor vehicles, often seemingly surpassing any "rational" value or utility.
2. Deregulation of transport: Zambia used to have a state-operated transport network (UBZ) that extended even to remote areas, far outside District Centers. I have met several people from Kalabo who spoke in amazement of the twice daily bus service between the District capital Kalabo and Sikongo (a remote border town with Angola) in the 1970s. I certainly do not want to downplay the improvements brought about by the deregulated transport system nor the problems (frequently voiced) Zambians experienced with UBZ . But what has followed in the wake of liberalization of the transport sector seems like a bewildering combination of (moral and institutional) structure and market anarchy.
3. The role of Government workers in controlling and monitoring mobility: the Police, who call busses "ATMs " (since they are reliable sources of bribe money), the administrators, tax collectors (self-proclaimed or not) and planners who manage the wider infrastructure.
4. The economics of transport: it seems to make perfect economic sense from the transporters' point of view to let the hostage situation continue! At the end of the day it is in their interest to maximise the number of passengers in their vehicle at every time, whether these passengers are furious or not….the owners have faith in the fact that there are simply no other alternatives for the dissatisfied customer! Drivers in rural areas usually wait to buy fuel until all the passengers have paid and are seated in the sun waiting for departure…whether this is a problem of liquidity or lack of trust between operator and staff remains to be seen.
5. The moral economy of transport: The logic of competition in this transport system cannot be fully understood in terms of formal economic theory. There are moral and cultural grounds for how transporters view competition with their peers and success in business. Their lives are often entangled in many ways other than the one-dimensional model of economic man supposes. An obvious factor is the common fear of magical retribution, but ideas about risk, wealth, and social standing certainly also play a part.
There are also more intangible reasons why rural travelers comply with, frankly lousy services. These reasons have everything to do with the inhabitants of Western Zambia being long-standing subjects, to pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial masters. But that is something I will return to in a future entry. Next week, back to Western Province for some serious fieldwork!
