Mobile Phone Theft, Resale, and Violence in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

In Africa’s towns and cities more than those on any other continent, governments seem unable to ensure security for their citizens. The majority of urban residents find themselves ‘entangled within power dynamics that position them at the city’s margins, literally and figuratively’ (Myers 2011) . Although urban informality is defined by its ‘illegality’ from the perspective of regulatory elites (Potts 2007) , some informal activities are viewed as predatory or harmful by the urban residents who must deal with them in their everyday lives. These include bribery by officials and service providers, dispossession of inheritance by relatives, brokerage fraud, extortion by local government officials, and the harassment carried out by security guards against street vendors. Taken together, these practices constitute both obstacles to accessing resources by the poor and impediments to residents’ abilities to keep their hard-won resources. In the city I studied – Dar es Salaam –...