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Wage Labor and Social Inequality in Kinshasa’s Informal Economy: A Class Analysis

Travail et inégalité sociale dans l’« informel » à Kinshasa : Une analyse de classe
Héritier Mesa
p. 319-340

Résumés

Cet article explore les trajectoires sociales de certains « travailleurs informels » et les dynamiques d’inégalité qu’elles mettent en évidence. L’étude examine comment la structure des relations de travail révèle les relations de classe et, plus largement, les positions sociales inégales au sein de l’économie informelle. La recherche s’appuie sur des données ethnographiques recueillies sur trois formes d’activités génératrices de revenus à Kinshasa : le commerce ambulant de pain, la friperie et l’agriculture urbaine. Si l’accès au capital offre à certains la possibilité de développer avec succès une activité génératrice de revenus rentable, c’est l’accès limité à diverses formes de capital qui contraint beaucoup d’entre eux à vendre leur force de travail — souvent avec un pouvoir de négociation affaibli — à ceux qui possèdent le capital. À l’inverse, certains acteurs ont réussi à surmonter la contrainte des formes de relations de travail asymétriques au sein de l’économie informelle et à s’assurer une vie relativement décente malgré leur position précaire.

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Notes de l'auteur

This paper was completed during my research stay at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, at the University of Oxford, supported by a Fellowship from the Fondation Wiener-Anspach. For valuable comments on earlier versions of this text, I wish to thank Joël Noret, Benjamin Rubbers, Sasha Newell, David Pratten, Catherine Tivnan, and the two anonymous reviewers.

Texte intégral

  • 2 This research adopts an approach on the so-called “informal economy” that transcends the dichotomi (...)

1Because of a long-lasting and generalized socio-economic crisis that has transformed most State structures and left much of the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc) into extreme forms of poverty (Trefon 2004; de Villers 2016), most of the population of Kinshasa, commonly known as Kinois, resort to various creative methods to earn a living. Despite their poverty, or perhaps precisely because of it, many Kinois have thus developed a remarkable ingenuity in coping with the crisis (De Boeck 2015; Pype 2017). For most, such débrouillardise or resourcefulness entails kobeta libanga (breaking stones), meaning to engage in a variety of (unconventional) income-generating activities—which often involve a diversity of “capitals” and labor relations. The streets and markets of Kinshasa are indeed full of examples of such activities, going from women selling bread on the streets for industrial bakery firms to market intermediaries who try to lure potential customers into buying a product at a relatively higher price to young men and women who offer various services to business owners and customers for small pay. These diverse trajectories and labor situations—although not consistently recognized as labor, sometimes even by informal workers2 themselves (Rosa Bonheur et al. 2017)—actually represent a stimulating venue for analyzing the structure of the urban informal economy in Kinshasa “from below,” and how it (re)produces different forms of social inequalities. Drawing on recent debates on the conceptualization of class in Africa (Noret 2017, 2019; Chitonge 2018; Werbner 2018; Bernards 2019; McDermott 2021) and ethnographic fieldwork conducted on three case studies of Kinshasa’s informal workers, this paper argues that taking the class and social positionality seriously is key to understanding social inequality within an African informal economy.

2However, Sub-Saharan Africa’s informal economy is often portrayed as a classless economy. This view is a corollary to the persistent and dominant narrative that alternatively informal workers are self-employed entrepreneurs or unemployed masses excluded from the capitalist production system (McDermott 2021). As Bernards (2019) has recently suggested, because “free wage-labor,” often understood as the condition of workers dissociated from other means of production, is perceived as a defining feature of the capitalist production system, societies and segments of the society that seem to lack such traditional employment relationship are often perceived as eluding the capitalist system and its class analysis. From this perspective, since social class has been historically only weakly associated with workers in Sub-Saharan Africa in part due to colonial industrial fragility (Copans 2020), the urban environment in Sub-Saharan Africa has often been portrayed as a space marked by a fluidity of social positions between poor entrepreneurs. These are cities with weak job prospects (Davis 2006), where people must, to borrow from Kinois’ proverbial ethos, “break stones” to survive. From this view, the people who engage in such “parallel” or “shadow” economic activities cannot be objectively categorized as the working class or proletariat as they are believed to lack the class identity and ideology proper to a capitalist system of production.

3At the outset, this view on informal workers echoes a neoliberal perception that sees informal workers’ precarity as a result of their exclusion from the global capitalist system rather than the outcome of their incorporation into global capitalism (Bernards 2019; McDermott 2021: 2). However, because the current developments of many developing and some developed economies do not allow to foresee a near future inclusion of these masses of “reserve army of labor” into the capitalist production system, scholars who subscribe to this “exclusion paradigm” thus view entrepreneurship as the solution to address poverty and precarity (Prahalad 2005). In the absence of a “formal” and “stable” employment position, people are encouraged to resort to innumerable creative ways to earn a living. This is also reminiscent of what Rizzo (2017: 8) calls the “celebration of survivalism” or a romanticized view of the poor’s agency, and can also be traced back to a prominent scholar on the informal economy in Latin America, Hernando de Soto (1989), whose dualist approach suggests that the informal sector exists in separation from the formal sector, as a “spontaneous” and “collective response” to over-regulation by predatory State apparatuses. To avoid stringent government regulations and expensive taxes, the poor thus resort to various forms of economic activities in non-compliance with regulatory frameworks. This view had seduced many scholars and policymakers who then advocated for the promotion of “indigenous entrepreneurialism,” based on the market fundamentalism that providing the poor with financial services would lead to the development of their capabilities to meet market opportunities and thus survive extreme poverty and exclusion from the formal, capitalist economic sector (Prahalad 2005; Yunus 2005).

  • 3 See also Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), “WIEGO Manifesto,” <htt (...)

4In comparison to neoliberal approaches, some heterodox thinkers provide a more nuanced, “left-liberal” (McDermott 2021) perspective on the informal workers’ exclusion (Alter Chen 2005; Meagher 2013; Standing 2016).3 This view questions precisely the assumption that a mere provision of financial services to the poor can inexorably lead to their inclusion and socio-economic empowerment. However, while this position offers a critical view of the free-market policies, it nonetheless sees the merit of the capitalist economic system in providing social development for informal workers. From this perspective, although the market fundamentalism proposed by international financial institutions is deemed questionable in addressing the poor’s needs, global capitalism remains the only reasonable system to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. In other words, this view rejects a class-based political economy wherein informal workers would constitute a separate class whose interests can be fundamentally opposed to those of capital. Hence, like the neoliberal perspective, this view suggests that poverty and precarity of informal workers result from their exclusion from the capitalist system or the perversion of capitalism (Standing 2016) rather than the logical outcome of global capitalism and its class system. Therefore, formalization and support of informal workers unions are presented as plausible solutions to address informal workers’ precarity.

5Furthermore, following a relatively longer tradition on questioning the relationship between the formal and informal economic sectors (Lopez-Castaño 1987; Duque et al. 2013), other strands in recent scholarship have argued explicitly that one should study African informal workers through a class analysis lens (Rizzo 2017; Bernards 2019; McDermott 2021). Indeed, there is a “distinct manifestation of capitalism in African Societies” (Chitonge 2018: 158). Whether through externalization of production and distribution channels by capitalist firms or the proliferation of extractive industries or export-oriented production policies, African States have long been incorporated into global capitalism and its expansion. Rizzo (2017) has also used class as an analytical framework in studying labor relations within the daladala transport system in Tanzania. His research demonstrates that the dominant narrative of “entrepreneurial poor” often disguises the reality of many among the informal workers who, in reality, are constrained to sell their labor power to others. Similarly, McDermott’s (2021) case study of informal workers in Sierra Leone shows through a Marxist feminist theoretical framework that class and “the logic of capital” hold a central position in the production and reproduction of informal workers’ lives. Class analysis shed more light on asymmetrical labor relations and the dependence between informal economic activities and the capitalist sector, but it also highlights how the capitalist social division of labor plays a role in structuring the informal economy.

6Building on these contributions, we argue that because informal workers’ social positions intertwine with the production and reproduction process of capital, they are essential for apprehending multidimensional inequalities. In this respect, Bourdieu’s (1985) bridging of both the objective and subjective perspectives on class in his conceptualization of the social space offers us an attractive theoretical framework for studying the dynamics of inequality within Kinshasa’ informal economy and analyzing how social positions may determine life chances (Noret 2019). There is indeed a need for an analysis of social stratification that goes beyond the mere distinction of economic capital by considering that cultural and social capital are equally important sources of power as they interact with other factors in shaping social inequality (Heilbron & Steinmetz 2018). Therefore, the social world is a highly stratified space, marked by the structure of the “juxtaposition of social positions” (Swartz 2012; Reed-Dahanay 2019). Class and social positions entail combining several other social properties and stratifying factors such as gender, ethnicity, place of residence, and age, among others. However, as other researchers cautioned (Daloz 2020; Glevarec 2020), to avoid a direct generalization, a more heuristic class or stratification analysis that considers empirical evidence in its theorization of social stratification would provide a better understanding of social inequality within the society.

7Some scholars (Freund 2012; Trapido 2016) have argued in favor of the use of class in analyzing asymmetric relations between the elites and the working classes in Kinshasa. Patronage ties or connections with the elite could provide some informal traders with access to various capitals that others do not have (Malukisa & Titeca 2018). However, the use of class as an analytical concept remains a very contentious subject in the drc. Other authors questioned the usefulness of the concept of class in a social context marked by a sharp division between a small percentage of elites enjoying economic stability and the rest of the population languishing in poverty (De Boeck 2015; Braun 2019). Despite the persistent crisis, however, Kinshasa remains a highly stratified society. The intertwinement of a multitude of capitals and subsequent unequal social positions within the so-called informal sector does not allow an apprehension of Kinshasa as a social space without class, nor would a dichotomic opposition between the elite class and the rest do justice to the variety of social positioning at play in this urban space. Hence, unequal social positions within classes show disparities in access to capital, which can explain asymmetric labor relations among some actors. Given the difference in access to financial, social, and human capital and in lifestyle (house, assets and food), several shop owners or traders could arguably be considered belonging to a different class than those who work for them—like most market intermediaries. Similarly, one can note a sharp difference between street vendors of bread and owners of depots of bread, for instance.

8Ultimately, labor precarity can be conceptualized in relation to unequal positions of social actors and asymmetric labor relations. Traditionally defined by classical social theorists as the “condition of the lumpenproletariat” (Han 2018), precarity can appropriately represent the general condition of labor in this informal sector, marked by the absence of stability and weakness of forms of regulation. In the same vein, the prevalence of women, young people, and other minority groups, such as immigrants in some specific forms of activities, is notable. Specifically, the social category of “Youth”—as used in the case of young market intermediaries or bana Kwata—refers “less to a specific age cohort than to a set of precarious circumstances” (Watts 2018, cited in Trapido 2021: 199). Indeed, some of these market intermediaries would not strictly belong to the youth category based on their age. Many are older than 35 or are married with children. Nevertheless, their precarious position keeps them dependent on others for work or paid services, so that in the social imaginary of many Kinois they belong to the “Bana” category or the Youth. It remains much debated in Africanist literature whether such a category could be considered a class in its own right (ibid.: 199). Likewise, the feminization of poverty and discrimination in access to capital based on gender, age, and social origin, among others in Kinshasa, may suggest that the most vulnerable and marginalized groups are the most likely to engage in precarious forms of informal employment. This resonates clearly with Hart’s (1973) original claim and analysis contending that disparities in access to resources along class and ethnic lines relegate the most disadvantaged groups into forms of informal economic activities.

Methods

  • 4 This Lingala expression means “the children/the youth of Kwata.”
  • 5 The expression means “mothers of bread,” and it refers to female street vendors of bread.

9This article draws from field researches conducted in Kinshasa between 2019 and 2021. The inquiry adopted a qualitative method with ethnographic underpinnings. Three case studies of informal employment occupations were selected for analyzing differences in scale of economic activities and labor relations. These are the second-hand clothing trade, bread trade, and market farming in Kinshasa. About 30 vendors, market intermediaries or bana Kwata4 and coopérants of second-hand clothes, 15 street vendors of bread (maman mapa)5 and 10 market farmers and workers were purposely selected and interviewed between 2019 and 2021. For the second-hand clothing trade, the research was conducted in three of Kinshasa’s main public markets: Marché central or Zando, Marché de la liberté, and Marché de Matete. This choice had a twofold motivation. It allows studying informal vendors in their natural environments and in an environment that offers heightened possibilities of social relations to capture the variety of labor relations. Indeed, only a prolonged observation in the research environment made it possible to apprehend several social practices and labor relations. About 5 maman mapa were accompanied and interviewed during their work on the streets. The remaining were interviewed in one depot—distribution center—of bread from the company Pain Victoire in the commune of Lingwala. Interviews with the farmers took place in one of the major market farms in the marshlands of Kinshasa, Bilanga Ya Ngwele, located in the commune of Masina. In order to empirically capture the variety in forms of labor relation and unequal social positions, respondents were purposely selected among the different categories of informal economic activities, namely shop-owners, vendors, semi-wholesalers, resellers, market intermediaries, and farmworkers. In an effort to generate more complex research data for analysis, the selected respondents were chosen in a representative manner, taking into account diversities in the firm’s size and status and demographic data on the respondents’ gender, education, ethnic background, age, marital status, and business experience.

Informal Work and Subordination to the Formal Sector

10The case of female street vendors of bread, or maman mapa illustrates the continuity between the formal and informal sectors in Kinshasa. Although most large-scale and medium-scale bakeries are legally registered as business entities and follow official taxation regulations, their production and distribution channels involve a variety of labor relations that can be categorized as “informal wage labor” because of the lack of formal work contracts and legal protection. Most large-scale industrial bakeries in Kinshasa use two primary distribution channels. Bread is often distributed through both depot and retail channels. Through the depot channel, companies bring bread to individually owned depots as distribution points in the city. Here, the depot owner is in charge of selling bread to retailers and receives monthly pay in pro-rata to the quantity of bread sold. However, companies often privilege distribution through retail channels because this is the most efficient way to reach a more significant number of retailers and tap into a more extensive customer base.

11Through the retail channel, companies serve retailers (most of whom are women) directly through a system called “credit card system.” With an initial subscription fee of about 10 usd, individual vendors access a basket of bread to sell on the streets. Each vendor needs to pay another 10 usd for each additional basket of bread. The companies use these charges as a guarantee to ensure that the sellers will pay the price of the bread sold to the company. Individual sellers are therefore paid a commission of approximately 25 % of the amount sold at the end of the month. Depending on the number of baskets of bread sold per month, such commission fees can provide a relatively decent living, varying between 100 to 350 usd per month. Although many complain that the amount earned is barely enough to support their families, vendors who can afford more than one basket subscription at a time and those who can sell several baskets of bread a day appear pretty satisfied with their earnings. Such is the case, for example, of Denise, a married woman with four children. She started selling bread after her husband lost his job.

Life was difficult for us. Following the advice from some women in our church group, I decided to take a subscription to Pain Victoire. With the help from some relatives, I was able to gather 40 USD, which allowed me to have 4 subscriptions of 4 baskets of bread. Now I can easily make up to 250 or even 300 USD per month. This has allowed me to support my family since my husband can still not find a job. I can send my children to school. My eldest son has just finished high school.

12Noteworthily, the acquired knowledge of the business activities, the ability to mobilize strategic family and community networks (Calderon 2019), and to negotiate gender roles within the household or to bargain with public agents equally play a crucial role for entry points and the subsequent business development in many of these urban informal economic activities. Indeed, as this case study of street vendors of bread illustrates, often these female vendors of bread must mobilize their social capital to gather the required amount of money needed to start a business. Social capital is also helpful for transmitting useful information and specific business knowledge. Many bread vendors report that they initially heard the information about the business prospect of selling bread from fellow church members, family members or neighbors.

13While Denise’s business activity may appear at first as an entrepreneurial venture, a closer look into the practice suggests that most of these women do not have the degree of freedom to manage their activities that entrepreneurship would require. Although they need to always keep their subscription to the bakery firm up to date, their income depends solely on a fixed amount decided by the firm. This keeps them subordinate to the firm, and at the same time, it also ensures a fast and harmonized distribution of a product of basic necessity in the city. This practice ensures uniformity in the price of bread produced by the same company all around the city. On the other hand, unequal social positions within the city dictate the forms of contract one can have with the firm. Individuals from a relatively better financial position can afford to secure a depot contract with the firm and earn more than small-scale vendors who can afford only one or a few baskets of bread at a time. A significant limitation of such subordination becomes apparent in times of crisis. As the 2018’s pre-electoral crisis and the Covid-19 crisis have highlighted, market fluctuations in the drc, which cause depreciation of the Congolese franc and a subsequent increase in the price of imported wheat flour, negatively affect these vendors’ income. With the increase in the price of imported wheat flour, bakery firms also raise the price of bread. Therefore, the overall consumption of bread in the city decreases as well as the vendors’ monthly income. Referring to the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 lockdown, Bijoux, a street vendor, expressed how the crisis affects her life in the following terms:

This is unacceptable. A bread used to cost 200 Congolese francs, now the bakery firm has told us to sell bread at 300 cf. Even then, it was already difficult to sell all the bread we ordered from the bakery; now very few people can buy bread at that price. We end up with baskets half-full at the end of the day. This affects how much we earn at the end of the month. The mundele [the white man] who owns the bakery firm does not want to increase our earning commission. Long ago, we asked him to increase our commission up to 25 %. He does not want to hear that. But now, he is the first to increase the price of bread, while our commission remains meager. How are we supposed to live now with this price increase? I am also a part-time student, and this work has helped me attend training in sewing. Now I am not able to cope anymore.

14This is certainly not an isolated case. In Kinshasa, where economic fluctuations and depreciation are common, an increase in the price of a basic commodity, such as bread happens quite often. Sometimes, as in the case of the Covid-19 crisis, the government negotiates with the bakery firms and discusses the conditions for maintaining the price of bread through its Ministry of Economy. However, most of the time, small-scale vendors remain at the mercy of the firms.

15To a certain extent, this case study can illustrate the continuity between the formal and informal economy in Kinshasa. In this context, the “informal” becomes the content of the form (Hart 1985) or a different regime of regulation within the capitalist “formal” system. Indeed, by changing their scale of distribution as they chose to give bread directly to street vendors, the “formal,” capitalist economy, i.e., relative more robust regimes of regulations, engage in the process of unfavourably incorporating the masses into forms of less (or absence of) regulations in the informal economy. This move benefits industrial bakeries, which can earn more as they take control of the street-level economy and tap to a more significant customer base with a much lower distribution cost. However, to conceptualize these street vendors as own-account entrepreneurs would be to overlook such subordination and to conceal the disparities in the ways informality impacts different individuals and reproduces inequality. While the firms can undoubtedly take advantage of the absence or weakness of regulations in the informal economy, the same cannot be said of those in the poorer strata of the population.

Informal Work as “Cooperation” or “Collaboration”

16In addition to the subordinate relationship between capital and labor, informal work in Kinshasa can sometimes take complex arrangements among social actors, with overlapping forms between entrepreneurialism and wage labor. The second-hand clothing trade in Kinshasa can provide a good illustration of this. In recent years, the second-hand clothing industry has become a thriving economic sector with complex retail and recycling networks (Ayimpam 2016), which involve a variety of social actors and diverse labor relations. Traders in Kinshasa buy bundles of second-hand clothes in big depots owned by Middle Eastern and South Asian expats in the commune of Limete. These products are then dispersed to various points of sale in the city. With significant financial investment and international networks, these expatriate communities have succeeded in establishing business ventures in Kinshasa. Moreover, the connection with the political class through briberies offers many of them protection from excessive harassment from low-level bureaucrats, tax collectors, and police officers. Because not everyone can afford the price of an entire bundle of second-hand clothes (between 75 to 250 usd), many vendors resort to combining their resources to buy a bundle together or simply become resellers, buying clothes from other vendors to sell to individual customers. Workers can be divided between wholesalers and semi-wholesalers (who use their relative capital to buy several high-quality bundles whose contents can be sold to shop owners), individual resellers, and several market intermediaries such as bana Kwata and the so-called coopérants.

17Because class often relates to power relations within the social space, it is a sensitive research topic. Many respondents feel uncomfortable when asked about their subjective positioning in the social space. This is even more difficult in many sub-Saharan urban contexts where social actors tend to resort to bluffing or feigned privilege to reverse their social predicament (Newell 2012). To capture class differentiation and unequal social positions, we pay attention to both social actors’ subjective perception of their social positioning, objective measures such as the scale and size of their economic activities, and the volume and structure of their capitals (social, economic, and cultural), among others. In this respect, some traders (wholesalers and semi-wholesalers) appear to occupy a social position that could arguably be considered as forming a distinct class.

18Unlike most vendors who can afford only one bundle at a time, and those market intermediaries unable to afford even a single bundle, some shop owners, wholesalers, and semi-wholesalers can buy several bundles of clothes daily. This makes their economic activities quite lucrative. Remarkably, a group of local traders has been increasingly open to the global market. Many Congolese clothing traders, for instance, travel to China and Dubai to buy brand new (sometimes even expensive) clothes they sell in shops around the city. This group can be distinguished from the rest through a relatively higher volume of capitals. Not only do they have higher financial income, and financial literacy as well as the business skills to succeed in this trade, but they also appear to have strong networks. The role of social capital is fundamental both at the beginning and during the development of such economic activities. Networks can be helpful in securing a loan, being introduced to experienced traders, or in establishing connections with key public officials.

19A case in point, Maman Sifa, who owns a clothing shop in Zando (the central market of Kinshasa), has been able to run a successful business. Married to an executive manager of one of the local companies, she keeps her side business to maintain her independence, help her relatives, and put her gained business skills into practice. After graduating from one of the accounting Colleges in Lubumbashi, in south-eastern drc, she soon engaged in various types of economic activities, buying clothes and house garments from Zambia to sell in her hometown. After her marriage to a promising economist, the couple moved to Kinshasa, where the husband soon occupied a well-paid function, first in a government company and later in the private sector. Today, the couple leads a decent life and rents a house in a nice residential neighborhood in Kinshasa. Maman Sifa business seems rather promising as she often travels to Dubai to buy high-brand clothes for her shop that a distant relative keeps daily. After several years in this business, she has established and maintained good contacts with other traders. Sometimes when she cannot travel to Dubai, she may send the money to other traders who are travelling to buy clothes for her. She also buys a few bundles of second-hand shoes she sorts out and sells in her shop, alongside other high-brand clothing items. Although her husband provides considerable financial support, she has also accumulated financial capital and experience from her previous business activities. This case may illustrate how unequal social positions can provide some social actors with the opportunity for a successful business venture that others do not have. Undoubtedly, Maman Sifa’s family does not lead the life of a typical seller or market intermediary in Kinshasa. Because of her essential business experience and her husband’s advantageous professional career, she can run a successful, lucrative business. Despite being an immigrant in Kinshasa, her advantageous socioeconomic status provides her with the opportunity to overcome the constraints that other immigrants from poorer backgrounds face in Kinshasa.

20Her financial position and her social capital have also allowed her to better navigate several administrative constraints and the disturbances that are common in Kinshasa’s trade sector. Hence, when asked about the “excessive taxation” that several traders complain about in the market, she agrees that “connections” with the right people are crucial to avoid annoyance from police officers and tax collectors. “In this kind of business, at this level, we have to work with public officials. They know me as a respectable trader. I have contact with them through some ‘connections.’ I have an intermediary, who makes sure that I only pay the due taxes, and no more than that.” Certainly, the use of “connection” or branchement in Kinshasa’s trade sector is no news. For many medium and large-scale business owners, it becomes imperative to “connect”—often through bribes—with a high ranking official in the market or the city hall in order to gain their protection against daily annoyance from police officers and other public servants. Access to economic capital alone is not enough as an entry point to the business activity and can indeed not be viewed as indicating one’s future success in the business. Indeed, these trade activities require not only a solid and experienced start-up network but also the ability to continuously negotiate with other social actors such as fellow traders and public agents. This is in line with Muñoz’s (2017) investigation of the business environment in Cameroon, where access to the market and the success of economic activities require constant negotiation with other social actors and public servants.

21Next to the group of high-quality clothing shop owners, most traders regularly buy a bundle of second-hand clothes they sell on market stalls or in the streets. This second-hand clothing trade constitutes a hazardous business activity, as its success often depends on the quality of the products inside the bundle they bought. A bundle of low-quality clothes would result on substantial business loss for some vendors. To avoid this risk, some traders specialize and invest considerable resources in the recycling and valorization of the second-hand clothes sold to high-quality clothing shop owners. Traders with a limited income and those unable to mobilize a start-up network often have to negotiate with other traders to secure a living. This is the case of the so-called “coopérants” who occupy the street to sell their products, thus becoming vulnerable to daily annoyance from police officers. This group comprises primarily young men and women, with a tiny financial capital, who buy a handful of items that they later resell in the market streets. However, because they are often familiar with many market traders, they allow them to buy the clothes at a low price or even take some items on credit.

22On the other hand, bana Kwata do not possess any financial capital. These are primarily young men, without a starting capital, who use their street smarts and persuasive skills to “catch” customers in the market alleys for traders or business owners with whom they have an agreement. After the bargain, the price for such items would normally be a little higher than usual—then the owner receives back the original price of the item while the intermediary receives the surplus. Others, more enterprising, would even take one or a few items from a stall and try to sell them in the market alleys, hoping to make a small profit on top of the usual price set by the owner. These bana Kwata operate not only for small-scale traders but also for medium and large-scale businesses around Zando and in different parts of the city, where they are commended by Congolese and expatriate business owners alike. Indeed, for many big shops, these intermediaries are crucial for promoting their products in the street. Once a mwana Kwata (a singular for bana Kwata) brings a customer, the shop owner or the accountant would discretely add a small fee on top of the item’s original price to be sold. At the end of the day, the month, or sometimes even the year, they compute the exceeding profit made by each mwana Kwata and they pay them either in financial terms or in kind (through gifts or products to sell). Hence, although their relationship with customers and other traders may be problematic as they are often accused of duplicity, this group of bana Kwata, just like the coopérants and other traders, is an integral part of Kinshasa’s trade sector. Furthermore, as this paper argues, it could be an exciting entry point for studying the continuity between the so-called formal and informal trade sectors and analyzing the plurality of resources and social positions in Kinshasa’s trade sector.

23Although this group is not considered as employees in the strict sense of the word, they are in a form of asymmetrical relationship with those in possession of capital. This very asymmetric position to labor heightens their vulnerability as they are often left at the mercy of shop owners who decide how much and how to reward them. Nevertheless, it will be misleading to assume that these social actors are always oppressed because they depend on other economic actors. Observation patterns indicate that many bana Kwata often use their agency as they seek venues and strategies to profit from their position despite their social predicament. Several market intermediaries among clothing traders agree to earn a reasonable income as they often adapt the item’s price according to the customers—which can sometimes turn out to be very profitable. Junior, a mwana Kwata in Zando, explains it in these terms:

Sometimes you can see that this customer in the market alley might be rich or might be able to spend a good amount of money for the clothing they are looking for. Just from the way they dress or stand, you can tell. Then if I succeed to convince him or her to tell me what they are looking for, I can get the item from one trader’s stall and present it to the customer. Sometimes I can earn a much higher profit than than the item’s owner. I can earn twice or more than the owner of the clothing.

24Indeed, this specific trade activity requires good communication and social skills to engage with both potential customers and other traders. It is not surprising that most bana Kwata are either originally from Kinshasa or are immigrants who have lived long enough in the city to perfectly master Kinshasa’s Lingua Franca, Lingala, and other tricks and hacks helpful to survive in the streets. For many, indeed, this constitutes an identity they assume with a sense of pride—which sometimes can lead to discontentment from other traders and customers who accuse them of duplicity. Ultimately, their social position, just like the coopérants’ and other traders’ positions, conditions the kind of resources to which they have access. In this case, social inequality can be apprehended at the structural level as the production of unequal social positions and constrained access to a plurality of resources.

25Access to informal economic activities often entails important community or family ties with other traders. In this context, “labor” initially begins and is perceived as initiating a family member, a relative, or friend into one’s business activity. Many traders train their children or even long-distance relatives by having them work in their firms with little or no financial compensation. In this case, salary is supplanted by skill transfer, just as “labor” becomes synonymous with “training” (Viti 2013). Within family and community networks, the focus is more on investment for the near future rather than immediate compensation. In fact, these business owners would often be very helpful in setting up their protégé’s future business venture. This is the case of Moise, a 33-year-old vendor of second-hand clothes. Married and a father of four children, he left his native province of Bandundu two years ago to look for better life prospects in Kinshasa. Leaving behind his wife and children, he came to Kinshasa to live with his cousin and joined him in his second-hand clothing trade in one of the public markets of Kinshasa. He initially started working for his cousin, who would give him a “share” of the profits made at the end of each month. Today, he keeps a small side business—trading small Chinese-made ornaments— while still “collaborating” with his cousin. His future aspirations are to save enough money in addition to what he regularly sends to his wife, so that he can open a shop and bring his wife and children to Kinshasa. This case also reveals the family or social dimension of informal labor in Kinshasa. Especially when it comes to allowing a third person to take care of one’s business activity, people prefer to involve close family members or other relatives. A rationale behind this is that such informal labor relations require a certain level of trust that mostly comes from family members or long-term acquaintances. In many cases, this is also perceived as a way to initiate those family members or acquaintances to the business while helping them financially—by making sure that they “earn” the help provided. A respondent explains this in the following terms:

  • 6 Vieux” can be used to signify an elder. It is a term that symbolizes respect, and does not necess (...)

This boy here is my nephew. He has also come from the countryside. I saw that I would need to help him with school supplies and tuition fees in the terminal year of high school. So, I thought, just having him stay at home would cost me a lot and not help me. So, I took some clothes from my Vieux,6 and I gave him to sell. On his side, he can try to sell something, and on my side, I can also sell something. In that way, if we both earn something, I can buy some school materials for him or a pair of shoes for the new school year.

26This form of cooperation between relatives, friends, and acquaintances is widespread in the informal economy. To some extent, it reflects a sense of solidarity among social actors. However, it can also represent barriers to entry into the informal economy. Because not everyone has social ties in the city, many new migrants have often encountered insurmountable difficulties in establishing a lucrative economic activity in the new urban environment.

Informal Labor as a Long-Term or Intermittent Labor Position

27The use of non-contractual or seasonal work arrangements in the informal sector for survival purposes can be very beneficial for some informal sector workers, as it offers many people at the bottom of the income pyramid opportunities to earn money in times of job shortages. The case study of agricultural workers in the Bilanga ya Ngwele, one of the major market farms in Kinshasa, can provide a good illustration. Located in an extensive marshland east of central Kinshasa, Bilanga ya Ngwele has provided many families with an income-generating activity. Many farmers travel from different parts of the city to grow vegetables and fruits later sold around the city. However, this activity can be costly, as a lucrative farm business requires a significant workforce and investment in chemical fertilizers (Muzingu Nzolameso 2010).

28Because not everyone can afford such crucial financial investment, many farmers resort to keeping only a tiny portion of land that they can afford. Conversely, those with access to various capitals can afford sizable land, which would yield a higher income. In this specific context, unequal social positions offer some farmers relatively greater access to resources than others. Some farmers with significant social capital or those who can provide proof of financial security to microfinance institutions can thus use their contacts or credit to pay seasonal workers to help cultivate the farm. They do their account, repay the debt, and keep a more or less substantial income at the end of the harvest. Some have been in the farming business for generations—as some parents initiate their children and relatives. Others engage in such activities as a subsidiary income-generating activity to an underpaid “formal” occupation. This is the case, for instance, of some teachers and civil servants who engage in farming to help make ends meet. Another group—made up of primarily young men from modest origins and immigration backgrounds, without any other job prospects nor a strong family connection in this business—go from one farm to another to offer their labor service in exchange for a small amount of money. Depending on the number of hours worked, they could earn from around 2 to 10 usd a week. Given that many workers engaged in such informal arrangements after a more or less long period of joblessness, these activities can help many survive the crisis.

29A life history account of Gabriel, a rural migrant who now works in Kinshasa’s urban farming, can help shed more light on the social trajectories of such workers. Gabriel, who is now 45 years old, arrived in Kinshasa a long time ago, shortly after completing his high school education from Kikwit, the largest city of the Kwilu Province, located about 400 km from Kinshasa. During the first two years in Kinshasa, Gabriel stayed with his aunt. Due to the lack of financial support, Gabriel could not enroll in tertiary education. Instead, with the help from some relatives in Kinshasa, he rapidly secured a “small job” as a vendor in a small neighboring convenience store, where he worked for three years. His meager income was divided between a small portion regularly sent to his parents and savings for a rent deposit and small start-up capital. After two years of work, he could save enough for the rent deposit, and he left his aunt’s house to start a new life. However, his salary was so small that he had to develop a side business selling cigarettes to make ends meet. Unfortunately, after four years, Gabriel, who was now married with one child, lost his job and had only his side business as the main income-generating activity. For a decade, unable to find a more or less secure work arrangement, he moved from one part of the city to another doing odd jobs while his wife was running a small business selling vegetables in the market. Seven years ago, he was introduced to a man who owns a farm in the outskirts of Kinshasa.

30Today, Gabriel and eight other men work daily on the farm, planting various types of vegetables and crops to sell in Kinshasa. In return, they receive a daily (non-fixed) income, depending on the earnings from the sale. As he admits with noticeable melancholy, this is not the life he had pictured for himself when he arrived in Kinshasa. However, given his predicaments, he had learned the need to diversify the household’s income-generating sources to support his family, which has now grown considerably to five children. Besides his work on the farm and his wife’s business, he occasionally engages in miniature trading, sending small necessity goods to sell in his native town.

31Besides those who, like Gabriel, are employed on a more or less regular basis to cultivate other people’s farms, several farmers engage in this agricultural labor in exchange for a small amount of money on an intermittent basis, as a temporary arrangement to help them survive while waiting for their harvest income. For others still, working momentarily for other farmers helps them accumulate enough income to buy chemical fertilizers to use for their farms. Hence, this social space is marked by various exchanges and labor relations negotiations. However, this space is highly stratified—just like in the previous contexts. Unequal social positions determine the kind of capital to which one has access and ultimately condition the structure of labor relations in which they engage.

  • 7 This is the case for telephone companies that distribute phone credits to street vendors to reach (...)

32Research focusing on informality in Sub-Saharan Africa has often overlooked the issue of wage labor. Most studies conceptualize informality as an involuntary or voluntary resort to self-employment ventures. Nevertheless, empirical evidence suggests that besides the so-called micro-entrepreneur group, there are several forms of employment, which upon closer scrutiny, can be categorized as “wage labor in disguise” (Rizzo 2017: 11). Hence, discussions on wage labor among the working classes require a comprehensive understanding of labor relations beyond the informal/formal, entrepreneurial/wage labor dichotomy, and necessitate a theoretical disengagement from a dualistic perspective that perceives informality as a voluntary move towards “salutary” forms of entrepreneurship. In the context of Kinshasa—just as in most Sub-Saharan African cities—where the formal and informal turn out to be intertwining regimes of regulations, the line between wage labor and self-employment can likewise be blurred. As this paper demonstrates, since what we may conceive as “informal” can be the content of the “formal,” our categorization of some economic activities as self-employment can be challenged. Such is the case, for instance, of industrial bakery firms that shift the scale of distribution by taking advantage of the street-level economy to tap into a more extensive customer base and accumulate a more significant business profit. This practice, which is adopted by several other production firms in sub-Saharan Africa,7 allows us to question the position of many of these workers as independent entrepreneurs. Indeed, their subordination to capitalist firms raises questions about whether they may be a form of cheap labor for such firms. Moreover, the urban informal sector encompasses several economic activities that place various economic actors in different labor relations. These can be a long-term wage labor relation, such as a shopkeeper or farm worker; or an intermittent labor position in which workers are engaged to survive the crisis. In this respect, it is not only the access to the means of production that creates these asymmetric labor relations, but rather the combination of several other social properties or qualities that shape the contours of class and social positionalities (Bourdieu 1985). Social agents’ positions account for the differences in access to capital and subsequently in the forms of economic activities they engage in and the profitability of such activities. Indeed, agents from a well-to-do background and those occupying an advantageous position in the social space can mobilize larger volumes of capital (financial, human, and social) that the poor cannot access. To a certain extent, such unequal social positions determine the structure of labor relations in the informal economy. This ultimately reproduces social inequality and may constrain the possibility for social mobility despite incremental changes in social agents’ trajectories.

33Finally, this research also raises questions about the State’s role in this process of labor externalization and precarization of informal workers. As can be seen in the cases of industrial bakeries and the second-hand clothing trade, the State is omnipresent in the organization and governance of labor in the city. However, in a context where its structures are weak, this presence becomes more of a mechanism, a means, to ensure its survival rather than generate development. Undeniably, life in the city is intimately linked to the distribution of power and the relationship between different forms of institutions (Khan 1995). In such an urban space, governmental institutions can become means of accumulation and instruments of dispossession of social actors. To be sure, State policies and governance practices can heighten existing disparities among informal sector actors. Therefore, bringing front and center concepts such as class and unequal social positions in the study of the urban informal economy may present a promising approach to accounting for the various dynamics of social inequality.

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Notes

2 This research adopts an approach on the so-called “informal economy” that transcends the dichotomic apprehension of the formal/informal and the following criterion of the relationship to formal regulatory frameworks. Indeed, in a society such as the DRC, researchers (Rubbers 2007; De Villers 2016) propose to move away from such dichotomy by understanding such labels in a broader social and political process as points in a continuum and different forms and regimes of economic activities.

3 See also Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), “WIEGO Manifesto,” <https://www.wiego.org/about-us/what-we-do/wiego-manifesto> (Accessed September 3, 2021).

4 This Lingala expression means “the children/the youth of Kwata.”

5 The expression means “mothers of bread,” and it refers to female street vendors of bread.

6 Vieux” can be used to signify an elder. It is a term that symbolizes respect, and does not necessarily imply a relative when used in such context.

7 This is the case for telephone companies that distribute phone credits to street vendors to reach a greater customer base (Schilling & Dembele 2019).

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Héritier Mesa, « Wage Labor and Social Inequality in Kinshasa’s Informal Economy: A Class Analysis »Cahiers d’études africaines, 245-246 | 2022, 319-340.

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Héritier Mesa, « Wage Labor and Social Inequality in Kinshasa’s Informal Economy: A Class Analysis »Cahiers d’études africaines [En ligne], 245-246 | 2022, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2025, consulté le 11 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/36545 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.36545

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Héritier Mesa

Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains (LAMC), Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgique

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