The literature on Africans and credit and debt is marked by a double binary. Scholars have tended to separate “traditional” or “informal” credit and debt relations from “modern” or “formal” financial institutions and instruments. In addition, scholars have either focused on the role credit and debt relations played in the economic realm or they have examined the social and cultural significance of debt and credit. As a result, the prevailing picture of Africans and finance in twentieth-century urban Africa is one of inadequacy, lack, and exclusion: the inadequacy of traditional forms of credit in market economies, Africans’ lack of access to formal financial institutions, and their exclusion from the modern world of finance. This dissertation challenges this doubly binary conceptualization and locates the myriad views and uses of credit and debt in one conceptual frame. It shows that credit and debt relations were constitutive of various aspects of urban life, including multi-racial neighborhood sub-communities, respectable identities, urban membership and belonging, urban livelihoods and entrepreneurship, and urban planning and governance. The Kariakoo neighborhood in Dar es Salaam serves as the locus to examine how debt and credit shaped work and business, social and communal life, and people’s identities and subjectivities in urban Africa. If debt is an anthropological and historical constant, the relations of debt and credit changed significantly over the twentieth century when economists and planners as well as urban traders and various groups of lenders hotly debated and discussed these relations. Moral perceptions of credit and debt were central to these negotiations and for the workings of urban life and trade. To get at the various forms of lending and borrowing and the multiple – at times competing, at times intersecting – moralities undergirding them, I combine the tools of cultural, social, and economic history. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the ways and meanings of borrowing, investing, and doing business in urban Africa in important ways. First of all, it challenges histories of credit and finance in colonial and postcolonial Africa, which have focused exclusively on formal financial institutions to which few had access. Urban Africans made extensive use of informal, semi-formal, and formal credit to create urban communities, trade networks, and personal businesses. Wholesale traders at the Kariakoo market relied on the indigenous credit system known as mali kauli – verbal letters of credit based on reputations and social capital – to trade relatively large amounts of agricultural products while having small amounts of cash at disposal (chapter 4). Kariakoo residents also turned pawnshop credit to their advantage and proved to be reliable borrowers (chapter 2). Second of all, it shows the significance of credit and debt well beyond the economic sphere of urban life in twentieth-century Africa. Credit and debt relations were central to cosmopolitan neighborhood communities Kariakoo residents formed across racial and class categories. Shopkeepers, for instance, who were mostly of Asian descent, were able to assert membership in Kariakoo by selling goods to customers on credit (chapter 1). The availability of small-scale shop credit and pawnshop credit was a constitutive element of the urban experience, urban living, and urban belonging (chapter 2). Third of all, I demonstrate how the morality at the center of discourses and practices of debt repeatedly acted as fulcrum for reforming urban subjects. Moral discourses around credit and debt were productive spaces because they provided a realm where local views of business practices and government visions of desirable business behavior intersected. Colonial and postcolonial governments undertook repeated efforts to make urban residents more business-minded by impelling them to work on their creditworthiness and become “good debtors.” The pervasiveness of credit and debt relations served as the discursive moral foil against which urban planning interventions were legitimated. Government officials chastised non-state or extra-institutional lenders and accused them of creating harmful debt relations (chapters 3 and 4). However, multiple moralities continued to exist in Kariakoo, which allowed urban residents to critically evaluate new forms of credit and debt and the attending moral discourses. Traders and residents in Kariakoo preferred older morally-grounded systems of trade to cash-based transactions facilitated by bank loans (chapter 5). Finally, I illustrate that the racial antagonisms between urban residents of African and Asian descent, which have dominated the literature on credit from the colonial era to the present one, have obscured the intimate and long-standing relations of credit and debt between Asians and Africans in various aspects of urban life. Following commodity trails and describing the workings of urban sub-communities, I show how Kariakoo residents of all hues and colors not only worked and lived together but also shared cultural notions of respectability, generosity, and shame (chapters 1 and 3).
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