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Cotonou's Klondike : a sociological analysis of entrepreneurship in the Euro- West African second-hand car trade
Beuving, J.J.
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Download date:04 Oct 2021 COTONOU’S KLONDIKE
A sociological analysis of entrepreneurship in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade
J. Joost Beuving This research was funded by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (NWO/WOTRO). The Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR) contributed to the reproduction of this dissertation.
Beuving, J. J.
Cotonou’s Klondike. A sociological analysis of entrepreneurship in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade
ISBN 90-9020487-3 © 2006 J. Joost Beuving COTONOU’S KLONDIKE
A sociological analysis of entrepreneurship in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P. F. van der Heijden ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op woensdag 3 mei, te 12.00 uur
door Jan Joost Beuving geboren te Amstelveen Promotiecommissie:
Promotor: prof. dr. P. L. Geschiere
Co-promotor: dr. J. K. van Donge
Overige leden: prof. dr. T. Bierschenk prof. dr. N. Long prof. dr. B. Meyer dr. J. B. Gewald prof. dr. N. Besnier prof. dr. S. van der Geest
Faculteit der Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures, tables & photos vi
Acknowledgements vii
1. Introduction: African traders and European cars 1
2. Striking gold: doing business in an era of economic opportunity 23
3. Mediating businessmen: démarcheurs on a changing market 51
4. Beyond supply: family firms in governing transnational trade 75
5. Strangers and immigrant traders: running multiple enterprise 99 overseas
6. Discussion: Cotonou’s Klondike - entrepreneurs as gamblers 127
References 146
Other sources 157
Dutch summary (Nederlandse samenvatting) 160
Curriculum Vitae 166 vi Table of contents
FIGURES 1.1 Shipping route, ports and major car markets in Western Europe 6 1.2 Shipping route, ports, trade flows and major car markets in West Africa 6 1.3 Sales receipt (specimen) 16 2.1 Port and car markets in Cotonou 31 2.2 Genealogy of Abdul’s business contacts 38 4.1 Monthly car imports (units) in Cotonou: 1996-2002 (trend line added) 79 4.2 Monthly car sales (units) in Cotonou 80 5.1 Concise genealogy of the Tannir family 106
TABLES 2.1 Average selling prices on the Cotonou car market 25 3.1 Makes of cars sold in Cotonou 55
PHOTOS* 1. Second-hand cars disembarking from a reefer ship in the port of Cotonou x 2. Abdul the car trader negotiating a favourable selling price 22 3. Nigerian démarcheurs on their way to a customer 50 4. Nigerien businessman El Hadj Hamidou with paternal cousin Boubacar 74 5. Lebanese trader Khaled with Béninese employee Mathieu 98 6. View on a car market, with paillote and neatly parked second-hand cars 126
NOTE ON NAMES USED Except for names of countries, towns and locations, the names of families and persons have, in some cases, been altered.
*Reprinted by courtesy of Jeroen Bruggeman; personal permission for reproduction was obtained from recognizable individuals. Acknowledgements vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have contributed to this dissertation. In the pages that follow, I will try to mention those who stand out in particular. Joyce, I thank you for raising my interest in the second-hand car business, and for giving me the possibility to collect the first pieces of information that eventually led to this dissertation. Bart, Joris and Ronald, thanks for your companionship during the trip that first acquainted me with business life in West Africa. Jens, many years ago you helped me to improve my skills as an anthropological field researcher by accompanying me on field trips to Antwerp and Brussels. Next, you sharpened my ideas while drafting the proposal for this research; without you, I don’t think that my dissertation would have seen the light of day. In the years that followed your inspired friendship has always encouraged me to exceed expectations; what I lacked in self-confidence was in the end made up by our in ‘Oude van Wees’ immersed sessions. JanKees, you discovered the researcher in me, long before I did so myself. As a true mentor you helped shaping my academic training, first by reading classic ethnographic texts with me and later by encouraging me to share with you stories from the field. Your unique capacity to ‘think with’, rather than to ‘think for’, on basis of one’s early impressions made me acutely aware of the power of observation in sociological research. During the turbulent years that followed our relation deepened to become the spirited friendship that I appreciate so much. The friendship extends to Aafke; your house in Den Haag always felt like a home to me, and I’m only too glad to have helped out with the odd job every now and then. Though originating from what most Amsterdam people teasingly call ‘the province’, and though living beyond the ring road circling Amsterdam dubbed ‘de ring’ by the locals, in daily practice my Amsterdam colleagues proved to be friendly natives. I therefore thank them for building me a hut in the Amsterdam bush, especially John, Martijn, Chris, Josien and Nynke. A special word of thanks goes to my roommate and friend Eelke, the years with you have been wonderfully special: B209 for ever! Joris I thank for his stimulating company, especially during our countless spaziergänger in the city centre at lunch hour, invariably ending in a nearby café where our talks continued. Hans and José, many thanks for allowing me to use the university’s facilities well after completion of my contract, your accommodating attitude has been instrumental in the completion of the dissertation. Teun, Miriam and Anneke I kindly thank for familiarising me with the ways of the ASSR, and for your assistance with the practicalities of carrying out a PhD project. This dissertation could not have been written without the scholarly support of Peter Geschiere: many thanks for linking me up to academic life in Amsterdam by finding a place for my research project within the ASSR. Another word of thanks goes viii Acknowledgements to those who have made the research possible financially: the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) for the research grant, and the ASSR for additional funds for conference visits throughout. While drafting the articles that present the core of this dissertation, I benefited from the useful comments of several people, in alphabetical order: Jeroen Bruggeman, Christopher Clapham, Jan Kees van Donge, Stephen Ellis, Sjaak van der Geest, Peter Geschiere, Jan Bart Gewald, Tim Kelsall, Birgit Meyer, Thessa Ploos van Amstel, Jorieke Potters, Martin Prowse, Edwin Rap, Joris van de Sandt, Judith de Wolf and a number of anonymous referees. A special word of thanks goes to Catherine ‘O Dea, thanks for the miraculous way you have always succeeded to transform my drafts into intelligible English, without your intervention I doubt if the editorial boards would have accepted my articles for publication. Annechien, Gisbert, Joris, Jorieke, Judith, Michelle, Saar, Steffie en Thessa, you have been the best friends one could possibly hope for; in my memory you have always been there, and in my dreams you always will be. I doubt if this dissertation would have been there without your continued moral support. Corine, a special word of thanks to you: our lives overlapped for such a long time, thanks for your kind support, your love and your friendship. Henri, mon frère, je te remercie beaucoup pour ton assistance et amitié à Cotonou comme ailleurs; j’ai toujours pu compter sur toi. Mes amis á Cotonou, surtout Abdul, Ahmad et Hamidou, vous m’avez toujours souhaité la bienvenue: grande merci pour partager vos vies avec moi. L’équipe á LARES je remercie pour vos support indispensable pendent les premières étapes de la recherche. Cher Raphaël, malgré d’être très affairé, tu as toujours trouvé du temps au niveau pratique comme vie privée. Félix and Amuma, I fondly recall our long and interesting conversations; many thanks for opening your social network to me that offered a unique entry in West African social life. James, you helped me to find the much needed moments of relaxation during the fieldwork by taking me on trips outside town. Life in Cotonou cannot go without referring to the visit of Jens and Judith, both wonderful field researchers who helped me to conceptualise my fieldwork material in terms of journal articles. Jeroen, it was good to spend some time with you in Cotonou, many thanks for the wonderful photo’s that you left me – some are reproduced in this dissertation. Dear Tessel, you have enlightened my life during the past few months. When prospects were bleak last summer, you kept me going; your faith in me has been an important source of perseverance; your love and presence the haven I needed. To conclude, I would like to thank those who have been with me the longest: my family. Even though things look much better than before, life has not always been kind with us. Lucie, in addition to being the greatest mother a son could possibly wish for, thanks for giving me the self-confidence I needed to finish this dissertation. Jan and Jannemarie, Onno and Sandra, many thanks for you unconditional support throughout, we have seen far less of one another than we wanted, I’m confident that it will change for the best. ix x Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 1 Second-hand cars disembarking from a reefer ship in the port of Cotonou. African traders and European cars 1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN TRADERS AND EUROPEAN CARS
Visitors who travel the coastal road dividing the mainland of West Africa from the waters of the Gulf of Guinea, enter the republic of Bénin from the West at the Hilakondji border crossing. There, in the no-man's-land separating Bénin from its neighbour Togo, stands a huge billboard, which welcomes the visitor with a friendly ‘Bienvenue au Bénin’. Though such inviting billboards are common at most West African borders, this one displays something unusual: the painted picture of an ocean steamer with slim derricks protruding from its forecastle, and the name of a large European shipping company prominently printed on its sides. On its top deck we see reddish, corrugated rectangular objects that with some fantasy make a collection of sea containers. More clearly distinguishable are numerous multicoloured dots, running from the ship over the lowered massive bow and stern doors onto the quay beneath it. On closer inspection we see that the dots represent passenger cars, with their wheels and windows clearly visible. Then the column of fellow travellers, swiftly moving towards the customs station, pulls the visitor away from this intriguing spectacle, giving no more opportunity to contemplate its further significance. The picture that the visitor just witnessed represents the landing of a roll- on/roll-off ship; specialised car-carrying vessels, in this case bringing second-hand cars from Europe. The size of the impressive ship, a multi-story building in height, is indicative of the size of the operation: several hundred thousand cars, almost without exception second-hand, arrive in this fashion in West Africa’s ports every year. This sea transport of cars forms part of a fascinating Euro-West African trade network. It starts at second-hand car markets, in garages and seaports in Europe, and, via complex business contacts that tie traders and their trade together, ends on one of West Africa’s many car markets. After they are sold there, sometimes changing hands several times, they are put to use in local and regional transporting systems.1 The following remark of one of my informants best captures the widespread view among West African car traders regarding the significance of this transnational network: ‘Car business is big business’.
1 The cars are shipped for re-use; they are therefore not part of a transnational recycling sector (cf. van Beukering & Bouman, 2001). 2 Cotonou’s Klondike
Previous academic studies of the phenomenon of ‘cars in Africa’ have extensively addressed practices and images of car use. For instance, geographers indicated the significance of passenger cars in carrying out (informal) urban and rural transport (Hilling, 1996; Moriarty & Beed, 1989). Historians pointed at the importance of motorcars in the exercise of colonial rule (Gewald, 2002), the role they played in the development of new trade routes, and their effect on Africa’s urbanisation in modern times (cf. Hopkins, 1973; Epstein, 1967a). Anthropologists stressed that cars are more than neutral means of transport, and constitute an important source of prestige and symbolism. West Africans develop special relations with cars, they argue, in some cases manifested through car slogans (van der Geest, 1989; Peace, 1988; Lawuyi, 1988). This image of cars as an object of desire is also conveyed, for instance in the countless video clips that are broadcasted daily on national TV, and in numerous pop songs stressing the ‘modernity’ of car ownership and automobility (cf. Verrips & Meyer, 2001). Again others have pointed out that not all cars are equally desirable: the few shiny ‘head turners’ that the local elite drives stand out against the battered, endlessly patched-up crocks that dominate West Africa’s roads (Daloz, 1990). While these studies contributed in some way to bringing out a cultural and historical ‘biography’ of second- hand cars in Africa (Kopytoff, 1988; Appadurai, 1988), the pathway preceding their use in Africa thus far remained largely underexposed.2 Hence the aim of this book: to better appreciate the working of the Euro-West African second-hand car trade. A second reason to study the second-hand car trade is its relevance for the ‘trade and (economic) development’ debate. Throughout the last two decades, issues related to economic deregulation and global economic integration have dominated discussions on development policy. In this discussion one can discern a growing concern for the lack of economic integration of Africa economies into global economic structures. Recent World Trade Organisation negotiation rounds have, once more, emphasised Africa’s weak position in international commodity trade. Also, the trade and aid treaties between industrialised countries in the North and ‘underdeveloped’ African countries that intend to regulate the access of underdeveloped economies to the world commodity market3 are not necessarily contributory to Africa’s economic
2 Second-hand car trade is by no means a ‘typical’ West African phenomenon. Similar transnational trade flows have been reported for parts of Russia (cars sourced from Japan driving on Siberia’s roads: see Brooke, 2003), the former East European states (with Poland as the main importer of cars from Germany, Infopolen 2004), Latin America (large-scale car import in Peru - see EIU 2004) and the Middle East (with a proper ‘boom’ of cars exported to Iraq after ousting the Saddam Hussein regime: Cooper, 2004). 3 A recent example of these treaties is the ‘Treaty of Cotonou’, that has been signed in 2004 in Cotonou and regulates economic relations between 69 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the European Union. African traders and European cars 3 development (Berman, 1995). Both concerns, expressed by a great variety of NGOs, government institutions and international development agencies alike, have recently focused on the negative effects of trade liberalisation and obstacles of the articulation of West African economies to the world commodity market. One major policy problem associated with commodity trade to and from African countries remains, however, that an important part of its exchange takes place in informal economic networks and thus remains unrecorded in official data. To come to grips with the actual consequences of neoliberal development policies for Africa’s economic integration in the face of increasing economic complexity, therefore requires a more comprehensive understanding of the structure and dynamics of commodity trade. The objective of the remainder of this introductory chapter is threefold. Firstly, it aims to present a broad overview of the second-hand car trade with West Africa. This overview is organised as a research journey that traces the genesis of the study underlying this book. The main reason for doing so is that, firstly, the early stages of this research are grounded in my personal experiences, and, secondly, while I developed a number of key insights early on, I gradually succeeded in verifying them in the course of the research. The second objective regards the relevance of my research methods. The second-hand car trade with West African is a predominantly informal activity, which is difficult to access for an outsider, so that its study requires the use of a specialised, ‘multi-method’ research approach. Thirdly, the chapter presents a brief outline of the argument that will be developed in the book. That is, the four case studies that comprise this book4 seek to add to the understanding on the relation between the economic actions of traders and the working of the Euro-West African second-hand car trade by drawing attention to the theme of entrepreneurship.
THE EURO-WEST AFRICAN SECOND-HAND CAR TRADE: EARLY OBSERVATIONS Following a well-established pattern of Wageningen University postgraduate adventurism, in 1998 I assisted in driving an old Peugeot 505 from The Netherlands, through North Africa to Bamako, Mali, with the objective to sell it there. The trip brought me for the first time in touch with the intriguing world of West African second-hand traders and revealed something important: its inaccessibility for the casual visitor. For instance, once in Bamako, the Peugeot attracted overwhelming attention of what I have now come to recognise as intermediaries, or ‘runners’ (see Chapter 3), yet
4 Chapters 2, 4 and 5 present case studies that are also published as journal articles (check the references list for a full description); the case study in chapter 3 has been submitted for publication in an edited volume. 4 Cotonou’s Klondike none of them ever explained to us how they made a living. Further, the mechanics accompanying them always managed to find something wrong with the car, even though it had just completed, without falter, a cross-Sahara trip. In the end, after two weeks of fruitless negotiating, we gave up our attempts to fetch a good price and sold our Peugeot at a formidable loss, and with what little money we had left booked a flight back home. Later that year, I started working as a staff member at the non-governmental advocacy organisation ‘INZET’ in Amsterdam. Institutionally framed within the sustainable development agreements between the Netherlands and Bénin5, one of its projects aimed at the reduction of polluting exhaust gas in West African city centres, a necessity that will be immediately acknowledged by even the most hardened globetrotter. In order to fuel political lobby and to inform the general public, the project initially focused on fact finding.6 In West Africa, preliminary investigation by INZET’s project partners pointed in the direction of second-hand car importation as the main source of air pollution in the region (Serhau-Sem, 1999). Little appeared to be known about its functioning at this stage, however; several non-academic periodicals, such as Jeune Afrique, The Courier and West Africa cited it in passing, and several academic studies mentioned it by way of anecdote or illustration (Ellis & MacGaffey, 1998; Igué, 1983; ibid, 1999; Peil, 1995). Further inquiry based on a review of academic literature and conversations with scientific experts on international trade learned that a profound understanding of the driving forces shaping transnational second-hand car trade was lacking, and required more in-depth research. To get acquainted with the West European dimension of the trade, I recurrently talked with car dealers in the ‘Randstad’7 during the preliminary phase of this research (1999-2001); furthermore, I went a few times to the port of Amsterdam to see how cars are actually shipped, and gradually developed visits to the nearby Utrecht car market into a weekly fieldwork routine. My casual talks with the traders at this stage pointed at the existence of a second-hand car trading ‘belt’, roughly confined by a series of markets found within the triangle Essen (Germany) – Brussels (Belgium) – Utrecht. The talks also showed the involvement of West African in the trade from across the sub-continent, comprising traders from both Francophone and Anglophone countries. Finally, it uncovered the presence of several types of West African businessmen in the
5 For further information on these agreements, see www.ecooperation.nl. 6 Mrs. Joyce Kortlandt has been instrumental in designing this part of the project. 7 The ‘Randstad’ is the main metropolitan area in The Netherlands, which contains most of the Dutch population and includes its chief cities (from West to East) The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrecht. African traders and European cars 5 trade, mostly settled migrants, but also including itinerant merchants, ranging from petty traders to large wholesalers, and including both veteran and novice traders. Following up on these early observations, I went several times to Belgian second-hand car markets8, and had a few talks with representatives of large shipping companies there. From the talks with the shippers I learned that the majority of traded cars is shipped from Europe to West Africa by a small number of shipping companies, operating on the route Hamburg-Amsterdam-Antwerp-LeHavre towards West Africa, whereby all the ships moor at Antwerp, the central port of European car exports (see Figure 1.1). My attempts to mingle with the West Africans were less rewarding; in line with my earlier experiences in the Dutch car-trading sector, engaging in casual conversation with them proved difficult. However, touring the Belgian markets in search of respondents enabled me to establish that West Africans present a prominent category of second-hand car traders. I became aware of the scale of their trade during a visit to the port of Antwerp: I remember seeing several thousands of second-hand cars lined up on different quays across the port area, waiting to be carried off to their West African destination. Analysis of the shipping companies’ sailing schedules revealed that in West Africa, car-ships from Europe, leaving several times per week, typically follow the route: Dakar-Abidjan-Tema-Lomé-Cotonou-Lagos-Duala-Matadi (Figure 1.2). A car- ship usually does not call in at all these ports, yet the schedules showed that most cars are disembarked in Cotonou, the main port-town in Bénin. A small survey I carried out among the waiting cars while in the port of Antwerp suggested that from Cotonou the imported cars find their way to local markets and to markets further afield (in neighbouring countries). Cotonou therefore appeared an important hub in the Euro- West African car trade, and hence seemed a good starting point for further (field) research.
8 Belgium’s larger car markets are found in or near Antwerp (the ‘A12’ market), Brussels, Ghent and Liege; smaller markets are found across the country. 6 Cotonou’s Klondike
FIGURE 1.1: Shipping route, ports and major car markets in Western Europe
FIGURE 1.2: Shipping route, ports, trade flows and major car markets in West Africa
Note: Major car markets are underlined.9
My preliminary field research in Europe led to the themes that appeared in a big way during the fieldwork in Cotonou and elsewhere in West Africa. To further
9 Many thanks to Jens Andersson for his aid in drawing up this figure. African traders and European cars 7 introduce these themes, the following paragraph presents a brief account of a morning on the Utrecht car market.
Tales from the Utrecht car market Located near a major highway cutting through The Netherlands from West (Amsterdam) to East (German border), the Utrecht car market attracts large numbers of traders looking for cheap second-hand cars.10 The market, organised every Tuesday on the premises of a well-known cattle market, was established in the early 1970s when several Dutch garage owners started to pool their trading activities. Though it served a national function in the beginning, the Utrecht market quickly attracted foreign traders, firstly coming from neighbouring (European) countries, followed by (West) African traders in the 1980s, and then by traders of East European origin who entered European car markets en masse from the late 1980s onwards. Currently, about half of the Utrecht car market sales are directed towards East European countries, whereas the other half is equally divided between the West African and the West European car market.11 Alongside this development, the Utrecht market saw the rise of an elaborate service industry. Particularly during the 1990s transport and shipping companies specialised in moving the sold second-hand cars to markets further afield opened their offices on the Utrecht market. In addition, the creation of the Utrecht car market syndicate12 in 1991 and its subsequent collaboration with a large clearing agent13 led to a centralisation of key trade services, notably customs clearance and car insurance. To further illuminate several essential characteristics of second-hand car trading, what follows conveys some of the impressions that I collected during repeated visits of the Utrecht car market, complemented by a series of background interviews with those concerned. One Tuesday morning, early in 2002, I climb up the stairs leading to the large canteen on the second floor of the shoebox-shaped building overviewing the Utrecht car market. Inside it is already busy, with a mixture of foreign and local faces, most of them car buyers, seated in the cheap plastic furniture scattered across the canteen floor,
10 For further information please, see http://bau.nl 11 From an analysis of the monthly trading statistics (‘Marktberichten’) that the Utrecht car market distributes free of charge to the traders follows that 10-15% of the cars sold weekly sold in Utrecht are directly shipped out. According to the shipping companies most of them go to West African destinations. My talks with some of the car traders in Utrecht furthermore suggest that a significant portion of the cars with West European destinations are eventually shipped out from there to West Africa. 12 ‘Belangenvereniging Automarkt Utrecht‘ (BAU), comprising prominent car sellers and several Dutch garage owners. 13 ‘VWE bureau voor voertuigdocumentatie en–administratie’; managing director Ton Vestering kindly explained its many functions to me. 8 Cotonou’s Klondike some sipping a tea quietly by themselves, others eating in small groups the simple food that the canteen’s kitchen offers. From a distance I recognise my friend Philippe, a stout Béninese man in his early fifties, wearing a colourful West African dress, topped off with a traditional Yoruba cap. He stands in the midst of piles of paper, and is surrounded by fax machines, laptop computers and other office equipment characteristic of the shipping companies operating from the Utrecht market. He heatedly gesticulates to one of the dozen West African men who are seated in front of him, on the other side of the provisional office, and explains, in French, that freight costs from Antwerp to West Africa are not negotiable, ‘ici on n’est pas en Afrique; on ne discute pas!’ The young man, a Nigerien car trader who had come from Brussels early this morning in anticipation of a good bargain, bought a car with a malfunctioning engine and now seeks to recoup his losses by discussing a shipping discount. ‘Hallo Joost’, Philippe then greets me in unaccented Dutch, ‘hoe gaat het (‘how are you’)?, but before he gets a chance to answer my return question, his state-of-the-art mobile phone rings, and, with an apologising gesture, Philippe turns away from me to answer the call. While I wait for Philippe to finish his talk, I walk to one of the man-sized windows overlooking the outdoor trading floor. Outside a few hundred cars are neatly lined up, and I see several car dealers, most of them Dutchmen, pace up and down in front of the cars they have put up for display, dressed in thick overcoats to protect them from the winter cold, a plastic cup of hot coffee in their hands, waiting for their customers to arrive. Between the lines of cars and the main entrance of the market building, an elongated space is marked out, locally known as the ‘racetrack’. There I see how several cars accelerate and, just before they reach the end, come to a stop with shrieking tires. A little further a few vehicles are standing idly with their bonnets open, their engines running, drawing attention from traders passing-by, who cast a casual look on the car’s insides. More experienced traders venture closer by, some of them even stick a hand under the bonnet to manipulate the car’s carburettor and, with some theatre, let the engine rev while attentively listening to its vrooming. These traders are testing the waters, they might consider buying the car, though most of them will do so only after they completed several rounds on the market later today. When I turn away from the window I notice that Philippe walks past a young Dutch woman, whom I recognise as Colette, the oldest of two sisters who together run a shipping company specialised in Euro-West African sea transport. I notice how they quickly exchange glances, but do not stop to talk. This is surprising; the contact between Philippe and Colette dates back to the mid-1990s when they both worked for the Dutch trading company CARSO. Created by the Dutchman Willem Huiser in the 1970s as a car demolition firm, it later diversified into selling spare parts, and, following intensifying contacts with West African migrants during the mid-1980s, developed into African traders and European cars 9 a second-hand car export company. Colette, the daughter of a car dealer and former business partner of Huiser, worked a few years for the company and, not long ago, left it to set up her own shipping firm. Her step upset Huiser, who, as a result, broke off all ongoing contacts with her. Around that same time, Philippe, who previously worked as a computer programmer, was promoted to one of the salesmen at CARSO. Philippe had settled in the Netherlands in the 1970s following his marriage to a Dutch development-aid worker he met in Cotonou. He had been brought in touch with Huiser about a decade ago through Eddy, a young Ghanaian man he knew from the nightlife in Amsterdam and who had been one of Huiser’s earliest African contacts. Eddy’s career had seen an erratic pattern. Starting as a guide for African (car) traders visiting Europe in the late 1980s, he proceeded to work as an odd-job man for Huiser in 1991, and made sufficient money to venture into car trading himself. CARSO’s expansion in the 1990s eventually brought Eddy to Cotonou, where he unsuccessfully tried to set up a branch office for the trading company, and then went bankrupt in 1999 following the indemnities that he had to pay to Huiser. Presently, he ekes out a living by reselling cars and spare parts for other traders in West Africa. As the busyness in the market finally picks up - the morning is now half- through - it is clear to me that Philippe will be too occupied for an off-hand talk with me during the next few hours, and I therefore decide to wander off. I wave at him from a distance, take the stairs down, and then walk into the cold winter morning.
Research themes The previous account of my stay in Utrecht is not a comprehensive overview of car trading in The Netherlands, or in Europe, yet it suggests that the following three themes play an important role in the second-hand car trade. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of personal contacts in this trade. In the beginning of the research I strongly believed in the efficacy of a person’s network of social contacts, for instance as a source of market access or of capital. A shared social background, perhaps reinforced by a similar personal history, I argued, would lead to dependable social contacts, and hence to the creation of interpersonal trust. The encounter between Philippe and Colette, or the row between her and Huiser, seem to suggest, however, that the day-to-day reality of most of these contacts is more difficult to understand; social contacts in the car trade are often brittle, and governed by distrust. Rather than constituting a steady foundation for the development of a business, all too often I witnessed situations where social contacts presented a major source of conflict, and hence contributed to the insecurity of the second-hand car trade (a situation that led in Eddy’s case to bankruptcy). This observation is not consonant with academic perspectives underscoring the gain or benefit that people enjoy from their social contacts. Viewing car traders as investors in 10 Cotonou’s Klondike the ‘social capital’ of their business relations may be a good way to appreciate their stated motives to engage in a specific set of social contacts (see Coleman, 1988; Fukuyama, 1995; Putnam, 1993). However, the observed behaviour of the traders, for instance Philippe’ conspicuous use of Yoruba symbols, suggests that sociocultural factors informs their day-to-day interaction. Thus, the enquiries in this book give attention to the way business contacts are embedded in particular social institutions (Alexander & Alexander, 1991; Granovetter, 1985; Douglas & Ney 1998; Polanyi, 1970), and produced within a specific cultural framework.14 A second subject that stands out from the account of the Utrecht market is the role of information in operating the second-hand car trade. For instance, as the ‘racetrack’ in Utrecht shows, most car traders belief that they can assess the quality of a second-hand car by listening to the sound of the engine. However, a fundamental technical problem of second-hand cars is forecasting which worn-out part will first collapse. Price information also plays an important role in the trade; the cars are sourced on European markets, and hence shipped to their African destinations. The car trade to West Africa has increasingly seen the use of mobile telephones and the Internet in an attempt to curb uncertainties about the conditions of supply and demand in geographically separated markets. However, in the daily practice of car trading the exchange of price information between business partners remains prominent, and, as exemplified by the meeting between Philippe and the trader from Niger, is bound to promote imbalances in access to crucial information. Such information asymmetries are a widespread phenomenon in the world of the second-hand car trade, and their observed persistence is at odds with current academic views stressing the efficiency of attempts to handle the problem of information search (Akerlof, 1970; Coase, 1960; North, 1986a). For instance, it remains to be seen whether or not particular groups of traders, or other categories of economic agents, are able to draw a structural advantage from creating or maintaining differential access to market information. The studies in this book will therefore pay ample attention to the information managing practices of the traders, including an attempt to appreciate the traders’ propensity to either share with or conceal from their business partners critical information for running a car business (see for instance Geertz, 1979; Cohen, 1965). A third, and final, topic that emanates from the visit to Philippe, is the significance of economic decision-making in shaping the second-hand car trade. In that respect, during the early stages of this research I did not doubt the decision-making capabilities
14 With Geertz, culture is here understood as ‘webs of significance’ people themselves have spun and encoded in symbolic forms; the analysis of it is an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz, 1973: 4-5; ibid. 1984; Ortner, 1999: 3). African traders and European cars 11 of the traders, and hence shared the widespread positive bias towards their profit- creating capabilities. Informed by an intimate knowledge of the market and its agents, I reasoned, traders take clever decisions and hence earn big money. My gradual acquaintance with a few traders who were willing to share their bookkeeping with me, however, showed a more diverse pattern of trade and entrepreneurial careers. Eddy’s downfall, for instance, reflects a common phenomenon: people in the second-hand car business experience significant financial setbacks throughout their careers, yet they stay committed to trading second-hand cars. This is difficult to understand with a general notion of economic decision-making in mind, focusing on goal-directed rational behaviour. Reasoning in terms of goals may be useful in explaining standard situations, yet the empirical material I collected for the Euro-West African car trade suggests that expectations play a more prominent role in people’s motivations to engage in the trade, and in the strategies they devise to cope with the complexities of this business. A focus on expectations draws attention to the social life of the car traders and, significantly, offers room for sociological analysis. Hence the important challenge that this book faces: to reconcile a sociological research approach with an analysis of the economics of the second-hand car trade.
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC METHOD AND ECONOMIC UNDERSTANDING Collecting empirical material on the second-hand car trade proved to be difficult at times due to the inaccessibility of the car trade, the highly informalised practices defining it and the complicated nature of the trade itself. To switch from merely recording anecdotes and casually observing incidents that characterised the early stages of my field research to more systematic forms of data collection needed for the in- depth analysis of economic behaviour that follows, required a special research approach. I developed this approach while carrying out the remaining fieldwork;15 it is therefore not the result of exhaustive planning in advance, but instead results from a great deal of trial and error while staying in the field. In retrospect, this approach is organised around the following three methodological key elements: firstly, the selection of the life world of traders as the proper analytical unit; secondly, my increasing reliance on mainly qualitative research methods for data collection; and, thirdly, identifying the scope for inferring generalizations from the collected empirical material. I will further discuss these three points in the following section.
15 After completion of the preliminary research phase in the summer of 2001, I alternated three fieldwork episodes totalling 16 months in West Africa (mainly Cotonou, but also in Accra, Lomé and Niamey) with reflection and writing sessions in Amsterdam; I finally returned to The Netherlands in December 2003. 12 Cotonou’s Klondike
Studying the everyday life of car traders During the early stages of the fieldwork, the economic behaviour of car traders appeared an important factor in understanding the working of the second-hand car trade, both in Europe and in West Africa. When I first returned from the field, I began to read on interpretative forms of understanding, and found that, in order to appreciate the complexities of the behaviour of traders, one can best start by studying their everyday lives16. Understanding social practices through the study of the way people interpret the world required in the first place a research methodology, that looks at the way social actors construct economic action ‘from below’ (Long, 1977; Long, 1992). During my professional training at the Wageningen University I came to value such an actor-oriented approach: it opens up a perspective that is productive for research since it does not provide a closed conceptual framework that offers a priori explanations. Nonetheless, while highlighting the diversity of outcomes in processes of social change, I gradually grew uncomfortable with the fixation on business success associated with its applications in the field of entrepreneurial studies. This appeared at odds with the findings from my field research that progressively drew my attention to the significance of financial loss, debt and decline in the second-hand car trade. While continuing to build on an actor-oriented approach as a research methodology, along the field research I also developed the need for an approach suitable to accommodate the study of business failure. To make things more difficult, the focus on success typical for the field of entrepreneurial studies appeared to match in a striking way local narratives of possibilities to gain in the second-hand car trade: most traders tended to express themselves in an ideological idiom of entrepreneurial success. This observation does not only apply to so called business elites; even the most destitute trader, just recovering from bankruptcy, will gladly tell you that ‘car business is good business’. A second reason to be cautious in placing too much value on the traders’ language for understanding their economic behaviour was the prevalence of secrecy in the car trade. It operates not only on contacts between strangers and competitors, but even more striking, shapes social interaction between close business partners. Traders therefore express themselves in evasive, indirect terms, directed at creating or maintaining information asymmetries. A third argument in support of my prudence to focus on people’s discourses as a vehicle for sociological understanding is the large number of languages characterising the West African car business. Unlike instances of trade elsewhere in West Africa (cf. Cohen, 1969), several ethnic groups operate the car trade
16 I was particularly inspired in that regard by the work of Berger & Luckmann (1967), Douglas (1970), Geertz (1973) and Garfinkel (1967; 1996). African traders and European cars 13 today, and, significantly, the trade itself is characterised by the absence of a lingua franca. Though the linguistic skills of West Africans are renowned – some car traders are fluent in several group-languages at a time - communication between groups mostly happens through intermediary languages, notably English and French. Their command of these languages appeared highly variable, however, thus curtailing the usefulness of rigorous linguistic analysis. To understand the everyday lives of the car traders, including the central experience of financial losses, I have tried to adopt a verstehende approach throughout this study. This form of interpretative understanding focuses on the value orientations that inform people’s actions, and hence tries to develop an understanding of social life ‘from within’ (Outhwaite, 1975: 38-55). It furthermore emphasises people’s organising practices, and by thus stressing ‘how things are done’ (Jenkins, 1992; see also Martinelli, 1994). The usefulness of building on the reality of everyday life became more convincing during successive fieldwork episodes (I stayed in West Africa on four occasions) when I found time and again that the social organisation of the trade overlaps to a high extent with other domains of the traders’ lives; for instance, their business contacts are commonly inseparable from private relationships; also, most of the traders that I interacted with during this study did not stop seeing themselves as a trader after business hours; and, finally, the social life of the car traders that I studied is to a large extent marked by daily humdrum, with little variation between days, and hence calls for an approach with an eye for the repetitive nature of ordinary life. A focus on people’s everyday lives requires the ability to develop insights based on direct observations of what they do and how they behave (Douglas, 1970: 3- 45). Methodologically, it implies observing social life as it unfolds without attempting to stage a favourable research setting (Mills & Gibb, 2001).17 Spending long stretches of time with the traders wherever they met, thereby engaging in casual conversation, appeared especially fruitful in this respect. Much has been said about participant observation as a way to establish rapport with informants and hence gain access to their life world (cf. Hammersley & Atkinson, 2000). Save the cross-Sahara trip, I never participated in the car trade itself, though. Second-hand car trade is complicated: it involves detailed knowledge of administrative procedures, of market organisation and, to a lesser degree, of car mechanics. In order to develop a practical working knowledge of the business, I followed the movements of specific traders on car markets, and other important nodes of the second-hand car commodity chain. This allowed me to interact with different groups of traders, without being seen as a competitor or a spy, and hence
17 This research approach contrasts current scientific practice focusing on dialogue, whereby the observer intervenes in the life of the participant (Burawoy, 1998: 16). 14 Cotonou’s Klondike offered the important advantage to develop a ‘helicopter view’ of whatever went on among the car traders, and between them and other economic actors.
Collecting data in the car trade The adventurous West African trip and my preliminary European fieldwork uncovered an important methodological problem in the study of the second-hand car business: traders are generally reluctant to talk. The closed nature of the trade therefore invoked the need to slowly gain the trust of traders, by being among them for a long period of time, and by then being introduced by the trustees to some of their contacts. This problem is common for the study of the ‘informal’ sector, of which the second-hand car trade is a clear case in point.18 Interestingly, much academic debate has been dedicated to come to conceptual terms with informal economies (starting with Hart, 1973), yet surprising little attention has been given to the question how information is to be collected in the absence of formal economic records. Thus, for a long time scholars interested in the study of economic life have followed a largely unproblematic recipe of data collection, typically revolving around ‘listing household items and trader’s assets’ (Epstein, 1967b). The shift of scholarly attention towards ‘modern’ economic phenomena in Africa saw increasing attention for ways to monitor new modes of product circulation and novel ways of economic organisation. Much of this attention has, however, been devoted to understanding illicit economic practices – well-known examples include drugs trafficking (Shaw, 2002), black diamonds smuggling (de Boeck, 1998) and poached ivory contraband (Ellis & MacGaffey, 1998). Conversely, the development of research methodologies for more mundane economic forms, linking up to common people’s everyday lives, has remained relatively underexposed. The inaccessible nature of the second-hand car trade had an important methodological consequence: it limited the possibility for quantitative data collection. For instance, to acquaint myself with the car trade in West Africa and to get an overview of the car traders’ social profiles, I first designed a survey, and administered it among selected traders. It proved an unsatisfying method, for two reasons. Firstly, most traders reacted suspiciously when I confronted them with lists of questions. The survey-situation made them feel uncomfortable, it seemed reminiscent of customs or tax collectors, and they therefore responded by answering in the most general way permitted by custom of courtesy. Secondly, though the survey gave me some rudimentary access to a few well-disposed traders, it soon appeared that measurable properties of traders and their enterprises provided insufficient information to explain
18 However, establishing rapport with traders is difficult, even in more formal market settings such as high-finance spot-markets (cf. Abolafia, 1998). African traders and European cars 15 the differential outcomes of car trading. Significantly, it could not account for the profit fluctuations most enterprises appeared subjected to. Another problem regarding the collection of quantitative information surfaced when I tried to assess the magnitude of the trade flow. Consultation of several commercial registers uncovered that trade statistics present a confusing domain, both in Europe and West Africa. Analysis of whatever statistical sources I could get hold of, eventually led me to conclude that the datasets from the agencies concerned, including for instance customs, port and market authorities, and chambers of commerce, present parallel quantitative universes. This implicated that, though most sources pointed in the direction of trade expansion, it proved impossible to reconstruct their underlying patterns without running into internal contradictions. My search for ‘hard’ data also brought some unexpected results. During the fieldwork in Cotonou I found that most car traders fill out a sales receipt when they sell a car. The car traders appeared staunch collectors of their receipts; they keep a carbon copy and hand the original to their client. This should in theory result in a rich database of price and product information; the photocopied receipt in Figure 1.3, for instance, mentions the sale of a Toyota Carina for a price of CFA 820,000 (about 1,250 euro). In daily practice it appeared, however, that collecting the receipts required some degree of trust with me, or with my field assistants. Nonetheless, whatever receipts I could get hold of (I collected a total of about 2,300), gave me at least a good excuse for a regular return visit, and proved a good indicator of the degree of trust I enjoyed with a particular trader. The value of the information on the receipts themselves was limited – the possibility of rigorous statistical analysis was severely hampered by the traders’ reticence to share their receipts with outsiders. It proved, however, an interesting source of additional information: the traders tend to scribble notes on the backside of their receipts, which provided valuable insights into the nature of the (financial) arrangements found in the car trade. The receipt in Figure 1.3, for instance, reflects the widespread use of down payments for the purchase of cars. This practice arises from the high capital intensity of the trade, and is therefore a way to carry out trade with little cash available. The scribbled text on the back of the receipt shows that settling the payments is often problematic and presents an important source of conflict in the second-hand car business. 16 Cotonou’s Klondike
FIGURE 1.3 Sales receipt (specimen)
front back
In order to further my understanding of the second-hand car trade through the perspective of the life-world of the car traders, I increasingly came to build on qualitative research methods during this study. This regarded more than just recording anecdotes. Before carrying out the field research, I first acquainted myself with economic and sociological literature on transnational trade. It directed my attention to the study of the economic behaviour of the traders in that respect. With this literature in mind I went into the field to study the car traders: theoretical concepts thus guided the data collection. Prior to the fieldwork I had not clearly specified a hypothesis regarding the relation between the car traders’ behaviour and the working of the Euro- West African second-hand car trade. Instead, I developed hypothesis while collecting the data so that the research was structured as a dialogue between theoretical ideas and empirical facts, a procedure elsewhere described as ‘thinking with data’ (Mukherjee & Wuyts, 1997). The adopted research procedure is therefore iterative, whereby one moves from one level of inference to another, up till one has arrived at the best possible explanation for the studied phenomenon (Wuyts, 1993). This method is not only time-demanding, it also requires a great deal of reflection on the material collected, African traders and European cars 17 and I therefore alternated the fieldwork in West Africa with stays in Amsterdam, where I exhaustively discussed my preliminary findings with fellow researchers and with my supervisors. The moment of explanatory saturation coincided with exhaustion of the empirical database. Towards the end of the fieldwork I noticed that I learned nothing new: my respondents started repeating themselves and direct observation yielded no further insights.
Generalizing micro-data To understand the practice of second-hand car trading, this book offers a detailed description of the lives of a relatively small group of car traders. It is therefore necessary to address the epistemological question of how detailed study of a specified class of phenomena can provide important general insights. With this study I maintain that generalizing from micro-data is an opportune research strategy, provided that the parameters of inference from the described set of incidents or events are clearly specified. Reporting the field data as an ethnographic text (or case study) is crucial to this procedure. There seems to be a widespread confusion about the contribution of ethnography to the social sciences. To some, it is little but endless descriptions of exotic peoples’ rituals in foreign places we commonly associate with palm trees and white beaches. To others, it is abstract anthropological theorising in incomprehensible jargon, at best with a touch of couleur locale. To me, ethnography is none of the above. It is essentially an advanced form of story telling; not a free-floating narrative, but one structured by intimate knowledge of living culture (van Donge, 2004). Furthermore, it is firmly grounded in sociological theory in the sense that theory is developed as it emerges from the research findings; one starts with as few pre-conceived ideas as possible, but gradually refines general concepts to fit the empirical situation under study (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). In this procedure, called grounded theory, theory will thus be developed in the first place as it emerges from the research findings. Moreover, this ethnographic approach, rather than seeking to uncover the ‘essence’ of a local culture19, is aimed at illuminating the logic of specific social practices, including their ideological and symbolic conditions of reproduction (‘structuring structure’ in Giddens’ terminology, see also Jacobs, 1993). In practice, this means that the ethnographer tries to ‘read’ a social situation, much like the reader reads a book: gradually the plot of a story, its main characters, their symbolic actions and the drama they portray unfold (cf. Geertz, 1973; Garfinkel, 1967).
19 See for further arguments against cultural essentialism Geschiere, 1989. 18 Cotonou’s Klondike
The scale of ethnographic research is therefore necessarily limited: for the researcher to become intimately familiarised with the field of study, to apprehend the logic of social practices in their full breath, and to develop an insider’s knowledge of their meanings takes up considerable time (van Velsen, 1967). Scale of data collection should not, however, be confused with the range of inferences that can be drawn from ethnographic research. The ethnographer develops an understanding for the way social organisation and social practice are articulated, enabling comparison with situations characterised by similar or contrasting parameters (Mitchell, 1983). This allows moving ahead from observing some specified incident or event - ‘a moment of conflict or crisis that may be highly ordinary, yet forces the actors involved to work out some sort of solution’ (Geschiere, 2001: 62), via the study of the social structure involved, to the wider implications of this configuration (van Velsen, 1964)20. Following an ethnographic approach hence differs from other research strategies: it does not seek to be representative in the sense that a properly conducted survey can be, but looks for the mechanisms and processes that define a particular social situation. In the case of this study: rather than presenting a comprehensive account of all elements in the Euro-West African car trade, it aims to uncover the social world of second-hand car traders. This starts, firstly, by recording the way the second- hand car trade operates, through investigating the organising practices of its agents. These investigations are organised as narratives, which are all connected to the town of Cotonou. The Euro-West African second-hand car trade is therefore studied through the lens of events in Cotonou. The analysis is not, however, limited to Cotonou alone: the events are socially contextualised by moving back and forth between local action and the wider social and trade networks it is embedded. This is done following traders and their trade from one setting to another, meanwhile recording their network of social contacts and registering the pattern of their actions and modes of conduct. By thus pursuing a multi-local research approach (Ellis & MacGaffey, 1998), I collected information that allowed to contrast the foreground performances of the traders with their background reflections, and hence to develop an intimate understanding of their behaviour in different social situations. Secondly follows an analysis of the socio- cultural dispositions shaping these practices, aimed at identifying the structural elements
20 A focus on conflict is particularly productive for fieldwork since it reveals the norms or codes of the society under study and hence provides vital leads for further research (Bierschenk & de Sardan, 1997: 240). Two renowned examples of ethnographic field studies are: 1) Max Gluckman’s (1958) description of the events surrounding the opening of a bridge, which uncovers the social organisation of British South Africa, 2) Paul Willis’ detailed study of a small group of grammar school students which illuminates how class differences are reproduced in the British educational system (1977; see also Jacobs, 1993). African traders and European cars 19 of the second-hand car trade. This analysis will point at the entrepreneurial behaviour of the second-hand car traders as an important factor in understanding the working of the Euro-West African car trade. Their entrepreneurship is shaped by distrust, lack of collaboration and reliance on distorted information, and resembles the gambling behaviour of gold diggers. Thirdly, I contrast this metaphor with sociological theory on the entrepreneurial behaviour of economic agents; thus challenging received ideas enriches academic debate by giving room to rethinking entrepreneurship. The book concludes by arguing that the gold digging mentality of second-hand car traders that I widely encountered on the trading floor may be an important factor in explaining the behaviour of economic agents in economic situations elsewhere that are characterised by high expectations of windfall gains.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK With the ethnographic method of enquiry adopted in the four studies of this book, I hope to critically address the entrepreneurial behaviour of (car) traders as a key factor in understanding the way the Euro-West African second-hand car trade developed, especially during the 1990s. To develop the intimate understanding of the social life of the traders that is required for that, the next chapters present detailed investigations of their organising practices. These investigations focus on different groups of traders. This arrangement follows from a salient property of the car trade: it is segregated along lines of ethnicity and order of establishment in the trade and hence resulted in the creation of several, more or less autonomously functioning, socioethnic trading groups. Close study of these trading groups will uncover a general pattern of economic behaviour that is widely found among businessmen in the second-hand car trade. Chapter 2 raises a central question in that respect, which came early in the research process and runs throughout the book: is a view on second-hand car traders as rational calculators in a situation of economic opportunity the proper way to understand the Euro-West African second-hand car trade? A discussion of key organisational features of the Cotonou car market uncovers that, even though the car trade itself knew a boom-like expansion during the 1990s, the universe in which the second-hand traders operate is characterised by significant capital scarcity, dramatic losses and widespread bankruptcies. To better understand this paradox, I then present a case study of a Béninese retail trader, which suggests that car trading in Cotonou is shaped by the manipulation of social contacts, characterised by self-interest and distrust among business partners. Further analysis of this behaviour shows that it strikingly contrasts current models of economic action stressing rational action. It appears instead that the car traders’ engagement with the trade is best compared to fortune seekers who 20 Cotonou’s Klondike gamble driven by the illusion of riches. This ‘culture of gambling’ bears a striking resemblance to the behaviour of gold diggers during the last great North American gold rush of Klondike – hence the metaphor Cotonou’s Klondike to indicate how second-hand car traders run their businesses. The gambler’s high hopes of striking gold one day, rather than by balancing costs with benefits, also drives a prominent category of economic actors, called démarcheurs. Chapter 3 shows how they recently entered in large numbers the complex business environment of the Cotonou market where they aim to distinguish themselves as information specialists by bringing together car buyers and sellers. Their strong presence brings up the question whether the démarcheurs as an economic institution exist because they fulfil a particular function – minimising transaction costs (market information) in an opaque market. An examination of the day-to-day lives of a group of Nigerian démarcheurs, focusing on their brokering practices, suggests, however, that their actual contribution to the information system of the Cotonou market is limited. In order to present themselves as information specialists, and hence bolster their position in the second-hand car trade, the démarcheurs manipulate their business contacts and their knowledge of the car market. It appears, however, that most buyers and sellers will eventually surrender to collaborate with démarcheurs for another reason: their omnipresence on the market complicates getting around them. The strong expectation of progress in the car business is also found with the car importers from Niger who feature in Chapter 4. Like the Cotonou car trading community at large, these traders, who are organised in family enterprises and operate on car markets worldwide, showed a reluctance to leave the car trade and diversify their business into more profitable economic arenas following marked stagnation of local car sales around 2002. This observation justifies the question whether or not ethnicity and kinship promote control over the second-hand car trade. To better understand these key elements of the informal organisation of car trading, I then present a case study of several Nigerien car traders, showing how they exhibit a propensity to live up to the expectations of people in authority. It results in economic behaviour that is at odds with the dependency on reliable exchange of information about the conditions of supply and demand in geographically separated markets. This cultural element, that is associated with ethnicity and kinship, in turn, leads to a belief of profitability in the car trade that is no longer grounded in observable facts and hence leads to financial losses. The ‘carpe diem’ logic of social contacts that is typical of gold diggers is brought out by a sociocultural analysis of economic mobility and capital accumulation of Lebanese traders in Cotonou. Chapter 5 shows how Lebanese businessmen, who are organised in migrant communities, have come to control the wholesale second- hand car trade in Cotonou. In doing so they entered into different forms of business African traders and European cars 21 collaboration, obviously with their kinsmen, but also with (African) friends. It raises the question whether or not Lebanese traders should be seen as strangers in African host society. To appreciate the way Lebanese operate their overseas business, I present a reconstruction of their careers (including a number of activities in the car trade), which shows that Lebanese business, which can go through a rapid succession of different economic activities, starts as kin-based enterprise, but gradually incorporates peers and friends. In doing so, Lebanese traders show an increasing preference for single- stranded, occasional business contacts, which contributes to the insecurity of the car trade. Close analysis of this practice suggests that it is not an instrumental response to avoid obligations of social intimates that might hamper capital accumulation. Lebanese car traders appear instead driven by the culturally determined ideal of enjoying life through adopting an expatriate lifestyle. In Chapter 6 I reflect on the broader research theme that emerges from the case studies: the entrepreneurship of the car traders. This is an important theme, because the lives and careers of the individuals in this book draw attention to economic situations wherein financial losses are a recurrent aspect of everyday life. A commonsense explanation for this phenomenon would maintain that these traders are typical examples of substandard entrepreneurs. By building on the work of the economist Keynes I argue instead that it highlights the central role of expectations in entrepreneurial behaviour. The case studies suggest, in that respect, that economic situations, which are characterised by high expectations of entrepreneurship that are fuelled by large perceived prestations at stake, lead to institutionalised distrust and to the cultural belief that one can gain at the expense of others; this, in turn, contributes to the uncertainties of trade by promoting brittle business contacts that skew entrepreneurial behaviour towards gambling. This is a form of economic behaviour that may be associated to economic booms resembling a gold rush elsewhere, and is therefore an urgent concern for further study. 22 Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 2 Béninese car trader Abdul busy negotiating a selling price. Striking gold 23
CHAPTER 2
STRIKING GOLD: DOING BUSINESS IN AN ERA OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY 21
Early in 2002, during one of my daily rounds on the car markets in Cotonou, I find my Béninese friend Abdul in a remote corner, sitting on a pile of old car tires, with drooping shoulders and his eyes fixed on the ground. After some instigation I come to understand that he just lost a large sum of money in an unfavourable business deal. While helping himself to one of my cigarettes, he voices his discontent: ‘These days everyone tries to make a quick buck in the car business, but at the end of the day its me who has to resolve other people’s trouble!’ Abdul’s complaint brings out the theme of this chapter: the problems of doing business in Africa in the changed economic environment since the liberalisation of international trade. It is situated in the port of Cotonou, Bénin, where the trade in second hand cars from Western Europe is booming. Trade statistics suggest that the import of used European cars into Bénin skyrocketed from a few thousand per year in the mid-1980s to about two hundred thousand by the year 2000 (Bio-Sawe, 1995; INSAE, 1992-2002). These figures match a wider trend: the estimated monetary value of cars exported from Europe to West Africa as a whole increased from a few million euros in the early 1980s to a little under one billion euros by the turn of the century (Lejeal, 2002). Comprising a few thousand cars per year initially, the Euro-West African car trade nowadays probably involves about half a million cars.22 The import of these cars largely exceeds Bénin’s domestic consumption.23 Although it has led to a lively car market in Cotonou, most of the cars eventually end up in Nigeria, with the large urban centres of Kano and Lagos as immediate
21 A slightly modified version of this chapter has been published as: Beuving, J. J. 2004. ‘Cotonou’s Klondike. African traders and second hand car markets in Bénin’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 42, 4: 511-537. 22 Export figures have been compiled on the basis of official European trade statistics: see EUROSTAT (1999). Consultancy reports were also checked; see World Bank (1998) and Serhau-Sem (1999). Discussions were held during the period 2000-1 with the following shipping company representatives: Mr. A. Carez, Unamar; Mr. P. Page, OTAL; and Mr. F. Plomteux, Hessenatie. 23 The proportion of domestic consumption to total car imports between 1998 and 2000 varied between 4% and 6% (République du Bénin, 2001). 24 Cotonou’s Klondike destinations. In marked contrast to nearby Nigerian ports, car trade in Bénin benefits from the free port status of Cotonou, meaning that trade is permitted before customs declaration. This permission drastically reduces capital requirements for traders: import duties can constitute up to half of the value of a car.24 Further, whereas the Nigerian government prohibits the import of cars older than seven years, the Béninese government has not adopted an age limit for cars. This favours the import of older, and generally cheaper, cars in Cotonou. Trade in the port of Cotonou was limited under Bénin’s Marxist-Leninist government that ruled the country from 1972 to 1989. From then on, successive governments made access to import licences easier, lessened foreign exchange controls, and eased the distribution of travel permits under a series of structural adjustment programmes (David, 1998; Igué & Soulé, 1992). The spectacular growth of the car trade is therefore embedded in the deregulation of commodity and money markets and in the removal of trade barriers. This seems to have given room to a type of entrepreneurs in the car business ‘who perceive profitable opportunities, are willing to take risks in pursuing them, and have the ability to organise a business’ (World Bank, 1989: 135). But does economic liberalisation also mean that Cotonou car traders have efficiently responded to market forces, by consciously choosing between alternative courses of action in order to accumulate profit? To further explore the relation between entrepreneurship and economic reform, I now briefly review the academic literature probing the nature of African entrepreneurship. Three perspectives are successively discussed: neo-liberalism, institutionalism and socio-culturalism. Whereas the first two perspectives highlight the role of African entrepreneurs in economic development, their optimistic view of the economic effect of entrepreneurship discords with the observed behaviour of car traders in Cotonou. This chapter therefore adopts an older sociological approach instead. Proponents of the neo-liberal perspective adhere to a universalistic notion of entrepreneurship that assumes an automatic causality between economic reform and entrepreneurial success – the perspective found in World Bank documents referred to
24 Sea-transport presents another significant cost. This varies considerably from one provenance to another, and between different periods. Shipping a car from The Netherlands to Cotonou during the past four years, for instance, differed from €400 to €650 per unit (pers. comm. Mrs. M. Kleinbussink, All Round Shipping, The Netherlands). Car buyers usually pay for these costs under ‘freight payable at destination’ arrangements with the shipping companies. The costs for shipping do therefore not add up to the traders’ capital requirements. Striking gold 25 above. This chapter does not deny that economic liberalisation was a necessary condition for the second hand car trade to emerge. However, the rapid emergence of the Euro-West African car trade, and especially the particular directions this trade has taken, cannot exclusively be attributed to the effects of neo-liberal development policies. These policies straightforwardly apply received micro-economic wisdom in universalistic terms. This cannot capture the peculiarities of car markets in Cotonou, since it ignores important questions as to how ‘risks’ are interpreted locally, and how those concerned understand ‘profit’ and what constitutes a ‘properly organised business’. There are also more empirical reasons to question the validity of the neoliberal perspective in this case. Most importantly, the optimism inherent in the neo-liberal economic actor – elsewhere described as ‘utility-maximising, self-interested rational individuals’ (Gee, 1991: 106) – clashes with the performance of car business in Cotonou. Aggregated trade statistics draw a successful picture of car trade in Cotonou, yet close study of this trade reveals an insecure market wherein few traders succeed. When the trade emerged in the early 1990s, big profits may have been common, but that is no longer the case. The supply of cheap cars in Western Europe has declined. This is mainly because African car traders faced increasing competition when East European car traders, interested in similar car types, entered European car markets from the mid 1990s onwards. Average selling prices in Cotonou have simultaneously dropped. A survey of sales receipts suggests that prices have decreased between 2%–7% for the majority of cars sold in the period between 2000 and 2002.25 African traders have also seen the terms of transnational car trade deteriorate as a result of
25 In the absence of officially recorded sales prices in Cotonou, during this fieldwork 2,315 sales receipts were collected among 25 car traders in Cotonou. The resulting statistical data are presented in tabulated form in the next table.
TABLE 2.1 Average selling prices on the Cotonou car market Price range (in €) Percentage Average price (in €) Sales 2000 2001 2002 500-1000 16 892 837 830 1000-1500 39 1254 1242 1232 1500-2000 24 1801 1758 1733 2000-3000 12 2214 2360 2484 3000-5000 9 4004 3685 3739 26 Cotonou’s Klondike currency crises.26 To make things worse, African car traders have not been able to control important nodes of the Euro-West African commodity chain. Companies that ship second hand cars to West Africa are generally European-owned, and Lebanese traders dominate the West African wholesale second hand car market. While trade seems to be burgeoning at the point where seller meets buyer, the real profits are made elsewhere. A second line of reasoning is less individualistic than the neo-liberal perspective, and situates the particular nature of entrepreneurship that developed after liberalisation in particular (social) institutions. This institutionalist perspective recognises that economic behaviour is socially embedded, and focuses on the way markets are organised. For instance, Peter Gibbon (1996: 769) provides an example of how entrepreneurship is situated in socio-political institutions. After an extensive evaluation of the effects of structural adjustment policies, he concludes that 'the private sector mainly consists of enterprises dependent to different degrees upon various kinds of state connection’. Peter Lewis (1994: 441) similarly stresses the importance of these private sector/state connections: 'entrepreneurs have utilised clientelistic networks to seek individual favours and patronage from the state'. In this view, African entrepreneurs direct their actions not so much towards the development of profitable enterprise, but rather towards the pursuit of economic rents monopolised by the state. Others perceive entrepreneurship as rooted in socio-cultural institutions. Collier and Gunning (1999: 87), for instance, explain how African manufacturing firms have adopted the kin group, or family social networks, as the basis for their enterprises. These authors are, however, sceptical about the efficacy of these contacts: ‘the size of the network is restricted by the need for close observation of business partners’. Thus, the authors maintain, the kin-based social network for most African-owned firm ‘is not an option … for it imposes costs’ (ibid.: 88.). A similar cost-based approach is found in Spring and McDade’s (1998: 5) book on African entrepreneurship. While recognising that the shape entrepreneurship takes depends on the institutional context in which entrepreneurs operate, they argue that entrepreneurs’ organisational skills contribute to economic growth because they ‘reduce the transaction costs in firms’. As with the neoliberal perspective, institutionalist explanations of entrepreneurship revolve around rational calculation as the defining logic of economic behaviour. Perceiving entrepreneurs as actors who rationally balance costs with benefits falls short,
26 The best known of these crises is the 1994 CFA devaluation, when the value of this West African currency (used in 11 Francophone countries, including Bénin) halved almost overnight. Striking gold 27 however, in the light of observed behaviour of Cotonou car traders. Bankruptcies, for instance, are common among these traders, but this does not discourage them from continuing their businesses. For instance, out of a hundred and eight car traders consulted for this research, only three benefited from the car trade between 2000 and 2003. In similar vein, from twenty-one key informants selected among these car traders for more intensive study, four neither gained nor lost money during the fieldwork period; the rest suffered considerable financial losses. Nevertheless, none of those who saw their capital subside, abandoned their businesses during this period. Further, falling profits have necessitated the external mobilisation of capital. Banks rarely provide loans for the car trade, so that traders depend on credit arrangements with their peers or family members.27 Their inability to mobilise sufficient capital through these channels has given rise to widespread straddling of the car trade with other economic activities, including other forms of trade, to generate sufficient income. The second hand car trade has therefore become increasingly dependent on other economic activity. When traders continue their businesses despite the real danger of bankruptcy in a trade that increasingly exists thanks to capital gained elsewhere, what does this tell us about the economic logic that shapes the Cotonou car business? Whereas neoliberal and institutional perspectives on entrepreneurship view economic behaviour as solely structured by profit maximisation, this chapter argues that Cotonou car traders’ behaviour is rooted in a different logic. This logic is studied following a third line of reasoning that predates the debate on structural adjustment and entrepreneurship. Economic behaviour is interpreted as social in nature: people’s preferences and strategies must be analysed as part of a wider socio-cultural environment (Granovetter, 1985). In relation to the study of entrepreneurs, this implies that the determination of prices and costs and the realisation of profit are generally shaped by people’s interpretations of social behaviour, and not by mere impersonal market logic (van Donge, 1992). Prices and costs simultaneously provide the context for further economic action: entrepreneurs operate in particularly organised markets (Giddens, 1984). In this socio-culturalist perspective, entrepreneurship is therefore seen to result from the interplay of the social dynamics of business contacts and values that are attached to different forms of trade with the organisation of the market institution.28
27 Not only private banks have been very reluctant to issue loans for car trade. Bénin’s largest microfinance institution PADME (Association pour la Promotion et l’Appui au Développement de Micro Enterprises) recently refused to lend money to car traders after they failed to recover a large share of the loans within the due date (ORTB 2002). 28 The adopted socio-culturalist perspective is inspired by the work of Fredrik Barth, Clifford Geertz and Norman Long. For good classic examples see in particular Barth (1967) on a 28 Cotonou’s Klondike
By situating entrepreneurship in the concrete social situations in which it emerges, this chapter reveals how car business in Cotonou is shaped not so much by calculations of costs and benefits, as by the manipulation of social contacts between business partners. Such manipulation, resulting in a sphere of secrecy, cannot be reduced to building up of trust. Social contacts in the Cotonou car business are typically structured along ethnic lines, and day-to-day business is commonly enacted in the context of kin ties. Common culture and dense socio-cultural bonds therefore abound, yet this does not result in widespread trustworthy business contacts.29 The reasons for this widespread distrust among business partners should be sought in the economic logic that underlies the car trade in Cotonou. Whereas the neoliberal and institutional economic actor bails out once costs no longer break even against profits, car traders in Cotonou can best be compared to fortune seekers who gamble driven by the illusion of riches. This brings to mind the economic behaviour of gold diggers. During the days of the last great North American 19th century gold rush, more than a hundred thousand people from forty nationalities set off to the gold fields near the Klondike river. The gold diggers were lured by the prospect of making a fortune. Few succeeded, however, due to the harsh circumstances of gold mining and the sharp devaluation of gold (Porsild, 1999). The big winners in the gold rush were those who supplied the miners with food, clothing and equipment. Most gold diggers quarried gold ore with little knowledge of the condition of the soil they worked. They therefore could not accurately predict the location of ore-rich soils, so that striking gold became a matter of chance. As with the car trade in Cotonou, gold digging was an individual enterprise. Most preferred to work their plots alone, so that the risks involved in gold digging were not cushioned by cooperation and solidarity. Though some gold diggers struck gold, and thus kept the expectation of immediate riches alive, most of them were ultimately impoverished (Berton, 1958; Brands, 2002). ‘Klondike’ is therefore the metaphor that best captures the behaviour of Cotonou car traders. In order to understand this ‘Klondike’-like behaviour of African car traders, it is first necessary to appreciate the way the car market in Cotonou is organised. A description of the operations in the port and in the car markets, which brings out the various actors involved, will show that car trading is an ordered activity, carried out by
Norwegian herring crew, Geertz (1973) on a Balinese cockfight, and Long (1979) on a Peruvian patron. Abolafia (1996) provides an interesting contemporary example with an analysis of entrepreneurial behaviour among New York stock and bond traders. 29 This observation contrasts with ideas found in the social capital literature. In this literature shared ‘culture’ and sociocultural bonds are thought to facilitate interpersonal trust (Humphrey & Schmitz, 1998), while dense networks of social exchange supposedly promote social trust (Putnam, 1993: 163-185). Striking gold 29 different groups of traders bound in a common career perspective. It is argued that this perspective shapes people’s actions, and this ideal of progress in the trade structures their social contacts. The chapter then presents a case study of a Béninese car trader, Abdul. The anthropological case study is a method that seeks to illuminate principles of social organisation by examining in detail a single social event, or case (Gluckmann, 1961). This qualitative research method contrasts with more quantitative means of data collection, such as surveys. Whereas survey data are selected for their empirical representativeness, anthropological cases are selected on the basis of the explanatory power of theoretical principles (Mitchell, 1983). As a result, instead of drawing statistical inferences from data sampled on probability, the anthropological analyst draws logical inferences from evidence selected with reference to a particular idea, which renders it relevant (Mukherjee & Wuyts, 1998). In practice this is done, first, by recording actual events and practices by social actors during a period of fieldwork. After identification of the principle that organises these events and practices, the analyst then deliberately selects an example that best fits this principle (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). This implies that the findings of a particular case stretch beyond its immediate descriptive content. Behavioural traits found for Abdul and his peers therefore characterise the ‘typical’ behaviour of many car traders in Cotonou. Third, the chapter identifies the social dynamics of business contacts and analyses how these dynamics regulate market information, supply of capital, and establishment in the Cotonou car trade. It concludes by comparing the presented findings with the Klondike metaphor. It argues that Abdul and his fellow car traders, unlike the neoliberal or institutionalist economic actor, gamble rather than calculate. Cotonou car traders therefore stay in business despite immediate losses: they are convinced by their dream of, one day, striking gold.
THE COTONOU SECOND-HAND CAR MARKET Three to four times per week, thousands of people gather at one of the quays in the port of Cotonou as majestic car-carrying ships moor there. The city of Cotonou is then in turmoil; many rush to the port to witness what is considered to be an exciting event: the arrival of cars from Western Europe. Inside the port, a confusing assembly of gesticulating and screaming, sometimes even fighting, tradesmen unfolds against the backdrop of car engines roaring. Uniformed security personnel appointed by the port authorities frantically try to keep them at a distance from the ships, shouting at those who attempt to come near the disembarked cars, threatening them with their two-tailed whips. But their attempts are mostly in vain. Once landed, the cars are assaulted by the 30 Cotonou’s Klondike waiting mob, and from the jostling crowd every now and then someone triumphantly emerges with a detached car part. Headlights, wheel rims and side mirrors are thus usually removed minutes after a car arrives in Cotonou. Next, the car’s front doors are pulled open, two or more persons jump hurriedly inside and drive the car off with spinning wheels from the quay. Leaving the bewildered spectator behind, the car has now begun its second life in Africa. Despite its chaotic first impression – tradesmen running every which way in the port, looting cars seemingly at will, and coming occasionally to blows – the car trade in Cotonou is organised in a particular way. In its simplest form, this organisation consists of the routes that cars follow after they are landed: from the port, via the central parking lot, to a car market where they are sold and subsequently taken elsewhere (see Figure 2.1). Car traders move along with the cars, so that when car-carrying ships arrive in the port of Cotonou, most of the car markets are virtually abandoned.30 But the port is not only the location where car trade starts, or a spot for meeting fellow traders. It is also considered as the place to be when new second hand cars arrive. A well-established importer remarks: 'If you don’t stay in the port, you lose out on trading opportunities, it all happens here!’ Many cars are traded immediately on arrival. Whereas markets outside the port are open to all kinds of traders, trade within the port area is restricted to experienced traders – or newcomers accompanied by such a trader – who possess a laissez-passer from the port authority.31 Access is restricted because of a dearth of information about the port and the complexity of port procedures. Shipping schedules are only sparsely distributed and are known to be unreliable. For inexperienced traders without well- developed contacts, the arrival of a particular ship is therefore difficult to predict.
30 At present two types of ship transport cars to Cotonou: reefers and Roll-on-Roll-off ships (‘RoRos’). RoRos, specially constructed for shipping cars, can carry up to four thousand cars per voyage and can be disembarked fast. Reefers transport agricultural goods to Europe from Central and West Africa and on their return journey have idle cargo space. They typically carry a few hundred cars per voyage. 31 A laissez-passer is a document that allows the bearer to pass by security unhampered. Striking gold 31
FIGURE 2.1 Port and car markets in Cotonou
Car traders who are not in the port when the cars arrive run a risk: the theft of spare parts and damage to cars are widespread. Whereas the loss of spare parts is reversible – most parts are renewable and readily available at cheap prices – damage is more problematic due to the high costs incurred. Being absent is also risky because drivers appointed by the port authorities will remove the cars from the quay. These drivers usually work under pressure of time, and their chief interest is to drive the cars from the quay as soon as possible. Cars driven by these drivers are therefore usually haphazardly parked near, or inside the central parking lot. Retrieving a car then requires the logistic support of employees working here. Most car traders therefore prefer a long waiting period in the port to losing track of their cars. Once command of a car is obtained, a series of shipping documents has to be processed by specialised clearing agents (see Bako-Arifari, 2001). Maintaining good contacts with these specialists is of crucial importance to settle administrative procedures required to clear the car with the briefest delay. These characteristics of the car trade in Cotonou are described by a trader: ‘Too much happens here: people steal things; you have to be careful about your belongings. In addition, the port authorities harass me all the time. It’s difficult to bear this by yourself’. This comment reveals how basic social contacts are needed to overcome the complexities of this trade. Cars not traded in the port are moved, usually in large convoys, to one of Cotonou’s car markets. These markets consist of a large tract of barren land enclosed 32 Cotonou’s Klondike by a stone wall, accessible through different gates manned by security guards. The gates are locked at night to prevent theft and damage. Immediately on arrival, the cars are registered by the market authorities and allocated a place. Goods transported in the cars, such as refrigerators, TVs and spare parts, are normally unloaded here and displayed separately. The market fee (amounting to about 5% of the value of a car) is usually paid to the market authorities at this stage, although this can vary depending on local conditions. After a car is sold, it is normally taken away within a few days. This time is typically used to make tax arrangements with customs, which are represented at all car markets. An importer articulates a common opinion: ‘I prefer the markets to be well managed. Even if this is costly, that doesn’t bother me, because without security you can easily lose money’. In sum, the Cotonou car trade is an ordered activity, carried out by people who tend to hang around the cars, and whose social contacts inform their success or failure. These contacts are needed to overcome problems of theft and damage, secure access to reliable information, and settle administrative procedures. To further the sociological understanding of this market organisation, this chapter now addresses the question of who engages in car trade and how they can be differentiated into several groups of traders.
Car traders in Cotonou Car traders in Cotonou usually identify four categories of economic actors. An elaboration of these categories helps to clarify the economic environment in which they operate.
Car market owners are a small group of wealthy businessmen who are permitted to levy particular fees on all items traded on the markets through a system of concessions granted by the Béninese government. Market owners are divided into the following four groups of people. First, Yoruba-speaking Béninese car traders from Porto Novo created the first two car markets in the centre of Cotonou in the early 1990s. They organised themselves in a syndicate and shifted from trading cars to operating car markets when Bénin’s new government prohibited the sale of cars in the port.32 Second, Lebanese car traders opened two large car markets near the port in the mid 1990s, after they struck a deal with the Yoruba syndicate. Following negotiations by the
32 These now abandoned car markets are indicated in Figure 2.1. The ban was instituted by the Soglo-administration, the first democratically elected government after 17 years of Marxism- Leninism in Bénin. Striking gold 33
Lebanese council, they later obtained concessions from the Béninese government to create three small car markets. Third, Fon-speaking Béninese businessmen who had financially contributed to president Kerekou’s re-election in 1996 were allowed to create two car markets near the port. Early in 2001 these had set up a syndicate and were reported to have obtained concessions for three new car markets near Akpakpa. Fourth, Nigerois cattle and lorry traders set up three large car markets in Cotonou’s Islamic centre (Zongo) in the late 1990s. These markets were sub-divided into two large and four small markets by early 2001.33 This differentiation of market owners shapes car trade in Cotonou in three ways. Firstly, lack of cooperation between groups of market owners has resulted in different fee regimes for different markets. Attempts by the Béninese state to harmonise these fees by setting up an organisation to accommodate all car market owners have so far failed. Secondly, market owners have generally handed the day-to-day operations of the markets – involving the collection of fees and maintaining order – to managers. Most people in Cotonou therefore deal with these managers; the market owners remain largely invisible for them. Thirdly, car traders in Cotonou, especially car importers, tend to be distributed over car markets according to the market owner’s ethnicity, particularly in smaller, older car markets. The newer and larger car markets are generally more ethnically heterogeneous.
Car importers are a large, heterogeneous group of people who sell cars in the port or at one of Cotonou’s car markets. Most importers maintain business relations with people living, or temporarily residing, in Europe. Some travel occasionally to Europe, where they buy cars for export to Cotonou. Others mainly stay in Cotonou and arrange the purchase of cars in Europe through their social contacts. About eight hundred importers have obtained, from the chamber of commerce, an import licence at an annual cost of about the price of two second hand cars. This amount of money is out of most people’s reach, and an extensive system of import licence sharing has therefore emerged. This practice, which typically involves the payment of €15 per car to an import licensee, has significantly reduced the capital requirement for car trading.34 As a result, the unofficial number of car importers presently stands at about four thousand.
33 Current distribution of Cotonou’s car markets on the basis of their size over these socioethnic groups is as follows: Yoruba 35%, Lebanese 20%, Fon 30% and Hausa 15%. 34 Though the currency used in Bénin is the Franc CFA, for convenience the Euro is used throughout the text. The CFA stands to the Euro at a fixed rate of 656:1. 34 Cotonou’s Klondike
Most people in Cotonou consider an import licence to be a desirable asset for two reasons. First, only licensees enjoy the right to construct in the car markets a paillote – small, roofed constructions on stilts where importers generally reside during market days. Paillotes provide useful vantage points to overview the market and are favourite meeting places. Second, membership of the African syndicates is limited to import licensees. In these syndicates, rules and regulations are formulated for the operation of the car markets based on majority vote. Syndicate members can therefore influence key decisions about the levying of fees, market access for colleague traders and forms of cooperation between car markets. Also, syndicate membership presents an opportunity for licensees to interact with market owners, who are a source of information and favours.
Resellers buy cars in the port or the central parking lot to resell them elsewhere, mostly at one of Cotonou’s car markets. They comprise a heterogeneous group of people who do not hold an import licence and have not made cooperative arrangements with a licence holder. Most resellers maintain extensive contacts with importers, with whom they frequently engage in credit arrangements, often in the form of delayed payment. Further, a quick glance at the list of arrivals often permitted to them by importers allows resellers to preselect particular brands and types of cars for purchase, even before a ship's arrival. This arrangement is typically seen when an importer assists a poorer family member to set up a car business. Once resellers and importers have established a stable alliance, they appear to divide between them the long and unpredictable waiting period typically associated with the arrival and disembarkation of cars. In some cases resellers hire extra hands to disembarking the cars, thus allowing them increase their contacts with importers.
Market runners mediate between sellers and buyers of second hand cars. This group includes a high proportion of women and is characterised by a lack of business capital and an inability to establish credit or licence arrangements with importers. This form of mediation is not unproblematic, especially when a buyer, a seller, or both refuse to make use of the runner’s service. Frequently buyers can be observed being chased away from a market by a group of runners, for not doing so. Market runners are therefore often accused of seeking monetary gain without delivering any service and without true effort. Resellers emphasise how they themselves prepare transactions by preselecting cars and prenegotiating the sale of a car. Market runners tend to specialise: they limit their actions to a single car market and they normally confine themselves to particular types of cars. They are mostly seen at Striking gold 35 the ethnically heterogeneous, larger car markets, where they benefit from the multiplicity of languages spoken and where they can check prices asked with car sellers.35 They also tend to cooperate with fellow runners. They normally roam a market in small groups; one pre-arranges a price with an importer or reseller, and the others seek potential clients around the market. After an agreement between buyer and seller has been reached, one of them returns to the seller where a commission is pocketed and subsequently distributed among them. With the rise of the number of car markets in Cotonou and the lack of harmonisation of different fee regimes, market runners are increasingly seen as playing off managers of car markets against each other. This has attracted the attention of market owners, who have started to discuss harmonisation of fee regimes.
Careers in the car trade So far, the differentiation of car traders in Cotonou into several categories has focused on how they make money and mobilise business capital. In particular, attention has been given to the types of markets in which traders operate, and the forms of cooperation they seek. These categories represent different steps in a local ideal of a career in the car trade. Operating as a market runner often represents the beginning of such a career. Market runners frequently become involved in the trade as hired hands of resellers or importers. They are not always newcomers to the trade: mediating between buyers and sellers also presents an opportunity to restart in the business after bankruptcy. Particularly when a bankruptcy results in unpaid bills, re-entrants switch their operations to a different car market. Market runners generally enjoy little prestige, especially among importers who have developed stable alliances with their clients. A market runner explains this as follows: ‘You have to move around a lot, to find the cars and to [get to] know the people around here well. Of course, it sometimes happens that a seller doesn’t want me around. But this is what I have to do to make money’. Once sufficient capital can be mobilised, either as savings or in the form of credit, market runners are inclined to become resellers. Their previous experience as brokers facilitates their role as car buyer. But whereas market runners maintain a large number of superficial contacts, with occasional recourse to force, resellers need dependable social contacts to mobilise sufficient credit. The occupational shift does not necessarily
35 Car trade in Cotonou is characterised by the absence of a lingua franca. Languages spoken include Arabic (Lebanese traders); English, Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba (Nigerian traders); and Fon, French and Yoruba (Béninese traders). 36 Cotonou’s Klondike imply that resellers make more money than market runners. Resellers bear financial risk. Some of them are known to have lost large sums of money in unprofitable transactions, and they therefore enjoy more prestige. At this stage, direct dealing with cars seems to motivate people to further their activities. This motivation is voiced in the following comment by a reseller: ‘Sometimes market runners make more money than we do. But this is not money made from [car] trade. Me, in contrast, I deal with cars, that’s where you can really make money!’. A successful reseller is liable to start importing cars him/herself. Now social contacts with people in Europe come into play. Most commonly, an importer’s career starts by paying a number of visits to family or friends residing in Europe. These ‘business trips’, as they are called, typically involve a stay of up to three months in one European country.36 During their stay, African-European market runners usually see these importers around various car markets and garages and assist in arranging shipping to West Africa. In this way, the travelling importer may eventually get in touch with a Europe-based car-exporting company with whom they start operating on a more regular basis. In very few cases, resellers accompany an importer on their European business trip. This arrangement usually comes about when they wish to operate in different European countries. In Cotonou, operating as a registered importer independent of credit arrangements is considered the climax of a career in the car business. Only car market owners surpass this prestigious position. As market owners constitute a small business elite through their well-developed political connections, most people consider this to be beyond their reach. People’s trading activities are therefore generally directed at becoming an importer, involving regular visits to Europe, access to a paillote and possession of an import licence that is regularly leased out to resellers. A reseller explains: ‘I don’t like [car] importers, they are too arrogant. But they have one big advantage: they no longer suffer because they have managed their money well. Besides, they can buy cars as they please!’. This discussion of occupational steps in the car trade suggests that people’s aspirations and actions are shaped by what is understood as a respectable career. Market runners want to become resellers – inspired by having direct dealings with cars; and resellers ultimately wish to become importers – motivated by the desire to get away from credit ties. Each career step entails its own set of social contacts that can be seen
36 This three-month period is the maximum length of the European ‘Schengen’ visas issued in West African countries. Striking gold 37 as a hierarchy: going from superficial contacts of market runners, via more dependable local contacts of resellers, to contacts spanning long distances for importers. Thus far this chapter has explored some of the elementary organisational features of the Cotonou car market. Car traders move along with the cars from the port to one of the car markets, and need some basic social contacts to overcome the complexities of the trade. Several categories of car traders are identified, who are bound in a shared career perspective. The organisation of the market provides the social background against which the entrepreneurial behaviour of car traders is shaped. But to understand more about the social dynamics of this behaviour, it must be appreciated how entrepreneurship comes into play in concrete social situations. A case study of Abdul, a Béninese car trader, elucidates this.
CASE STUDY: ABDUL THE CAR TRADER The ATB-2 car market, situated in the centre of Cotonou, was constructed in 1996 by Sale Jake, a wealthy Yoruba from Porto Novo.37 ATB-2 is considered a small car market: no more than five hundred cars can be parked and only twelve importers are registered here, ten of whom are Yoruba-speaking; the remaining two are Hausas from Niger. Because of the widespread sharing of import licences, the actual number of traders is four to five times the official figure; the vast majority of them are Yoruba- speaking. As with most car markets, ATB-2 is accessed through a large gate, which is closed every afternoon at five and opened in the morning at nine. Behind this gate, in a ramshackle customs building, car sellers pay the import tax for sold cars. A little further on are the buildings of Mr. Jake's personnel where the market inspector, the sales inspector and their assistants have offices. Here, the parking fees are paid. Just opposite there is a small canteen, run by a distant relative of the market inspector. Directly behind the canteen is a small parallel market in refrigerators that emerged a number of years ago, when a middle-aged woman called Mrs. Hassani expanded her water selling business in ATB-2 to the sale of fridges. At the back of the car market, the remains of unsold cars evoke vague reminiscences of failed business.
37 ATB is an abbreviation of ‘AlHumdoolillah-Trans-Bénin’ – the first word meaning ‘Thanks to God’ in Arabic – and ‘2’ indicates that the market is among a group of markets, managed by the same owner. 38 Cotonou’s Klondike
On success and failure: Abdul the car trader One of the traders operating on the ATB-2 car market is Abdul, a bilingual (Yoruba and English) Béninese in his early thirties. Abdul was born and raised by his mother in Lagos; his father originates from Porto Novo but presently lives in the north of Nigeria. Today is an important day for Abdul as this afternoon a car-ship is due to arrive in the port of Cotonou. Even though several car-ships arrive every week, it has been months since Abdul received fresh second hand cars from his main business contact in Europe, his older paternal cousin Mohammed (a genealogy of Abdul’s business contacts is mapped in Figure 2.2). This morning, however, Abdul is not going to collect cars sent by Mohammed, as he struck a deal with Mrs. Hassani’s younger sister, Mrs. Oketokoun, whose son, Akim, ships cars every now and then to Bénin from Bordeaux, where he is at university. Abdul contacted Mrs. Oketokoun after she had asked her sister, Mrs. Hassani, to recommend a trustworthy person who would be willing to collect three cars in the port that her son had shipped a few weeks earlier. With the corn market picking up, she was uncertain whether she could combine collecting the cars with her corn business in the Dantokpa market.38 She insisted that the person had to be from Porto Novo so that there would be, as she said 'a proper understanding' between this person and herself. Abdul knows Mrs. Oketokoun from the time Mohammed introduced him to ATB-2; being trained as an electrician, Abdul had more than once repaired fridges that Mrs. Hassani had wanted to sell behind the canteen.
FIGURE 2.2 Genealogy of Abdul’s business contacts
According to the market inspector, the ship Abdul is waiting for docks at noon, but to be sure Abdul goes directly to the port after breakfast. During the long wait – the ship eventually arrives halfway through the afternoon – Abdul is approached by several resellers and market runners; some of them have previously dealt with him, others are
38 Dantokpa is Cotonou's largest open-air daily market where foodstuffs, clothing, fabric and metalwork are traded. Striking gold 39 attracted by the shipping documentation he visibly carries. Abdul brushes most of them aside, as he is supposed to hand the cars over to Mrs. Oketokoun rather than resell them. Nor does he wish to hire extra hands to drive the cars to the central parking lot or to handle the import documentation. Abdul insisted on Mrs. Oketokoun paying him a flat rate in cash for the job. Thus, the more Abdul does himself, the more money he makes. He makes one important exception however: a young Nigerian reseller, a maternal cousin called Henri, asks Abdul to sell him one of Mrs. Oketokoun’s cars, at a favourable price. Abdul complies with the request because, as he explains: ‘Mohammed only sends me cars if he is ready for it; he never asks me when the market here is favourable. This young man here I know, he’s also from my town, and maybe I can do business with him.’ Later, it emerges that Abdul is competing with Mohammed for an inheritance from their Muslim grandfather. This inheritance is probably lost to him as Mohammed is a Mecca pilgrim and Abdul a recently converted Christian. Furthermore, Abdul’s previous attempts to contact his maternal family – Christian Yorubas from Lagos – have been in vain. Henri’s request therefore represents another chance to re-establish his maternal contacts. The two men agree on the sale of a 1988 Toyota Corolla for about €1220. Although the purchase price is not indicated on the shipping documentation given to him by Mrs. Oketokoun, in Abdul’s experience €1,150 is a reasonable price for this type of car. The transaction will thus allow him to pocket about €70, which is not a bad return for selling a car these days. In the meantime, the RoRo-ship has arrived, and moments later the Toyota Corolla is driven onto the quay by the port crew. As Abdul expects more of Mrs. Oketokoun’s cars to arrive, and since he is afraid that the car will be damaged on its way from the port to the central parking lot, he asks Henri to follow the first car on his moped so that he can oversee the arrival of the other cars. They exchange mobile phone numbers so that Abdul can call Henri when the other cars arrive. Eventually only one more car is disembarked for Mrs. Oketokoun, hours later. Abdul follows it on a taxi-moto, a rented moped with driver, to the central parking lot where he meets Henri again. Here, they discuss the details of their transaction and Henri immediately admits that he does not have the €1,220 with him. He proposes to pay a down payment of €550 and the remainder the next morning. In return he demands the duplicate bill of lading, a document generally taken as proof of 40 Cotonou’s Klondike ownership.39 Abdul is slow to agree because of the risk involved in not receiving all the money at once. On the other hand, Abdul realises that this transaction might free him from the tribulations of doing business with Mohammed. As Abdul is making his way home, Mrs. Oketokoun calls him to inquire what has happened to her cars. Even though she seems upset that her son apparently sent two rather than three cars, Abdul reassures her that the two cars have arrived safely and that he will bring them to the market the following morning. He does not yet mention the duplicitous sale of the Toyota Corolla, as he is well aware that he should discuss that at the car market, with Henri to back him up. The next morning Abdul and Henri arrive just after the car market opens at nine to meet Mrs. Oketokoun, who is pleased to find her cars in good shape. Abdul now beckons her to the canteen where he indicates that Henri is willing to buy the Toyota Corolla for €1,150. To Abdul's great dismay, Mrs. Oketokoun immediately turns down the offer, arguing that her son, Akim, paid €1,220 for the car in Bordeaux. Abdul is now presented with an embarrassing situation: not only is the lucrative transaction he had arranged with Henri endangered, but he may now have to spell out the details of his arrangement with Henri, including his handing over of the bill of lading. To avoid the latter, Abdul – now accompanied by Henri – asks for her final price. Mrs. Oketokoun is swift to reply: she will accept no less than €1,300. Abdul takes Henri aside, presses him either to pay the additional €80, or to hand back the bill of lading in return for his down payment. Henri refuses. Abdul now realises that he has three possible courses of action. First, he can admit to Mrs. Oketokoun that he made a duplicitous arrangement and risk being denied further shipments from her as well as being labelled as an unreliable trader by his colleagues in the ATB-2 car market. Second, Abdul can start a row with Henri, which may eventually result in police intervention and the chance of the car being confiscated until things are sorted out. Thus he would also jeopardise the relationship he is trying to establish with his maternal family. Abdul decides on a third option that results in financial loss. He asks Henri to go to Abdul's nearby house and to await further details concerning the transaction. He then goes back to the canteen and asks Mrs. Oketokoun not to sell the car for the time being. Next, he visits Mrs. Hassani and asks her to advance him €80 – claiming that he needs money to pay a mechanic – in return for repairing three fridges during the next few days.
39 A bill of lading is a document containing a car's technical information plus the details of shipment. When a car is being shipped, the original bill of lading is sent to the shipping company's representative in the receiving country, whereas the duplicate is considered to be proof of ownership. Striking gold 41
Fortunately she accepts his offer; Abdul pockets the money and brings it to Henri. What happens now determines the direction the transaction takes: Henri admits that he has not brought the remaining €670. He explains that another car he had bought a few days before for a client in Lagos is stuck at the Nigerian border. To convince the now angry Abdul he shows the Béninese customs documentation, proving that he has indeed purchased this car. After a brief exchange of hostilities, the two men work out an arrangement: Henri will pay a total sum of €1,300 to Mrs. Oketokoun. A down payment of €550 will be handed to her immediately, and the remaining money will be paid within two weeks. It does not take much to convince Henri to pay the additional €80, as Abdul threatens to withdraw from the deal, claiming that Henri has insulted him by not bringing the money. All that remains is for Abdul to return to Mrs. Oketokoun and plead on Henri's behalf for delayed payment. She kindly accepts the terms proposed, as she will now receive her final price – €80 more than what she thinks her son paid for the car in Bordeaux. Further, she is aware that Abdul and Henri are tied through kin and she realises that ATB-2 is a small car market where Abdul maintains a business relationship with her sister; she is sure that Abdul will take care of Henri's payment. After Abdul has handed the down payment to Mrs. Oketokoun and Henri has left with his car, Abdul complains bitterly out of Mrs. Oketokoun’s earshot about what just happened to him: ‘How can I do business like this, with everyone cheating me; in this way I will always be a small one!’ The next day Abdul is again to be found at ATB-2; he repairs one of Mrs. Hassani’s fridges to repay the money he borrowed. When asked what he would do next, Abdul says: ‘Who knows, perhaps Mohammed sends me another car, or maybe someone else I know will ask for me again.’
COTONOU CAR TRADERS IN SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT The end of Marxist-Leninist rule in Bénin and the ensuing adoption of structural adjustment programmes from the early 1990s onwards have resulted in deregulation of the Cotonou car market. An informal market organisation emerged, structured along ethnic lines and commonly involving kin-based collaboration, yet this did not result in widespread trust among business partners. Abdul’s story, for instance, shows that Cotonou car traders, rather than pooling money, knowledge and contacts, compete for capital and profit, and withhold information. In the car trade, forms of cooperation therefore tend to be short-lived and conflictive. 42 Cotonou’s Klondike
The explanation for the absence of trust in the Cotonou car trade should be sought in the particular logic that shapes the entrepreneurial behaviour of the traders. The socio-culturalist perspective developed earlier in this chapter suggested how this logic is shaped by, on the one hand, informal market organisation and, on the other, the type of business contacts deployed and the valuation of car trade. To bring out the entrepreneurial logic of Cotonou car traders, this perspective is now applied to the empirical findings presented in the previous section of this chapter.
Informal market organization Abdul’s story suggests that the car trade is an ordered activity: Abdul and his contacts conduct their business in the port when ships arrive, and then move on to car markets where their stay is limited to the opening hours. Abdul therefore waits in the port until the car-carrying ship docks and, from that moment, follows the car until it arrives at the car market. Administrative artefacts, such as shipping documentation and import licences, further shape the car trade. For instance, Abdul was easily recognised in the port by others as a car seller through the documents he visibly carried. Also, Mrs. Oketokoun’s laissez-passer enabled Abdul to enter the port without much trouble. In addition to these formal organisational features of the Cotonou car market, Abdul’s actions are also shaped by the limited options available to him. These options reflect the local ideal of a career in the car trade that is part of the car market’s informal structure. For Abdul this means that he lacks sufficient business capital and dependable local contacts to allow him to start reselling cars. He further lacks the experience of a business trip typical for importers; his contact with Europe is indirect, through Mohammed. His single option to enter the car trade is therefore to operate as a market runner. As pointed out, market runners are predominantly found in large, ethnically heterogeneous markets. The whole transaction takes place, however, in the port and in ATB-2 – a small and ethnically homogeneous market. Here, Abdul has the disadvantage of not being able to get in touch with other market runners. Furthermore, he cannot benefit from a multiplicity of languages spoken, or check prices asked with car sellers. Ethnicity constitutes the third organisational pillar of the Cotonou car market. Most Cotonou car traders refrain from conducting business with total strangers. They collaborate with people from the same ethnic group, as a way to reduce the uncertainties of the trade. This is why Mrs. Oketokoun deliberately asks her sister to recommend an assistant from the same socioethnic background: a Yoruba Porto Novien. More elaborate forms of collaboration are found among family members. For example, Striking gold 43
Abdul’s main business partner is his paternal cousin Mohammed, and he seeks to establish a new contact with his maternal cousin Henri. This preference to work with ethnic peers in general, and with kinsmen in particular, does not yet explain the outcome of business transactions. To better appreciate how trading practices interlock with business contacts, we therefore need to examine the social dynamics of these contacts.
Social dynamics of business contacts Business contacts can make or break a trader. Although Abdul appears to deal with his contacts clumsily, in fact he follows a well-established pattern of contact mobilisation. This means that Abdul and his peers attempt to gain access to market information, regulate the availability of credit and capital, and become established on the car market by liaising with particular car traders. This is discussed in greater detail below.
Market information Transactions in Cotonou often involve high degrees of uncertainty. For instance, the arrival of car-carrying ships is erratic and difficult to predict. Also, most African car traders do not have direct access to prices on European car markets. For price information they therefore depend on their contacts overseas, which is often problematic. Mrs. Oketokoun, for example, does not precisely know how much her son Akim spends on the purchase of a car. Mrs. Oketokoun’s lack of information is rooted in a disturbed relationship with her son. According to her, he tends to buy too expensive cars, and is often not able to send as many cars as she wants. Being a student at a Bordeaux university, Akim soon lost interest in roaming France’s car markets. According to his mother, he has not been very motivated to negotiate good sea- transport prices as his purchases are paid for by his father’s inheritance. She voices her concern: ‘My son squanders our money in France. But what can I do? If I call him, he doesn’t answer the phone. Sometimes he even forgets to contact me if he has sent cars from there.’ Mrs. Oketokoun has difficulties coordinating Akim’s actions abroad, so she opts for selling corn at the Dantokpa market. She does not share her concerns with Abdul, who therefore lacks proper price information. Whereas Abdul has the advantage of being engaged in a transaction where he knows both the potential seller and buyer fairly well, this is hardly beneficial to him. He cannot fully grasp Mrs. Oketokoun’s relationship with her son for two reasons. First, Mrs. Oketokoun is seldom present at the car market because after the depreciation of the cotton trade in Bénin other agricultural commodities, such as corn, have become more lucrative. Her straddling of 44 Cotonou’s Klondike the car and corn trade is further complicated by her husband’s recent death: she can no longer divide tasks. Second, Abdul had no previous contact with Akim. Even though they are related through kin to the Yoruba centre of Porto Novo, they did not grow up together. Abdul therefore cannot contact Akim to verify Mrs. Oketokoun’s account of his actions. But the uncertainties of the car trade do not only result from limited access to prices overseas. Information about local business partners also plays a role. The importance of this factor emerges in particular from the transaction between Henri and Abdul. Abdul does not tell Henri that he is insufficiently informed about the price to be paid for the Toyota Corolla. Instead he relies on his limited experience of car trading, and opts for a best guess regarding the selling price. Abdul proceeds with the transaction while concealing his wish to manoeuvre away from his paternal family. Abdul is afraid that if he makes public his previous attempts to re-establish his maternal contacts, Henri might back out altogether. Henri does not tell Abdul that he needs some form of credit to enable him to buy the Toyota Corolla. He knows from the start that he is too short of cash to pay for the car on the spot, but he impresses Abdul with export documentation concerning another car. Thus he convinces Abdul to proceed with the transaction. This story proves to be false, however: some time after the transaction is concluded, it becomes clear that Henri needs to buy the Toyota Corolla for a Nigerian client, that no car of his is stalled at the border. Henri explains this as follows: ‘Had he looked in my pocket, this guy [Abdul] would never have given me my credit. This lady [Mrs. Oketokoun] I didn’t know, but she wasn’t my problem. It’s too bad the trick with the export chapter didn’t work out.’ The experiences of these traders therefore suggests that business contacts in Cotonou, instead of reducing information uncertainties, contribute to reducing access to reliable market information.
Business capital and credit The story of Abdul’s transaction shows that car markets in Cotonou are characterised by unreliable supply, small profit margins (about 5% for Mrs. Oketokoun), and low turnover due to the time-demanding nature of car sales. Capital is therefore scarce, and traders like Abdul commonly lack sufficient capital to dedicate themselves wholly to buying and selling cars. One way to resolve a shortage of money is to pursue several economic activities simultaneously, which requires a constant switch between various roles in response to varying circumstances. The money earned elsewhere is then often invested in the car trade: Abdul falls back on his fridge workshop to cover imminent losses ensuing from the transaction. Striking gold 45
Reinvesting money in car business that is earned elsewhere, however, is not often preferred. In the absence of easily accessible formal credit institutions, Cotonou car traders commonly rely on more informal forms of credit. More specifically, they approach their peers or family members. Mohammed, for instance, hands the cars to Abdul, and as a form of credit Abdul is permitted delayed payment. Once Abdul is no longer content with merely selling cars for another trader, rivalry emerges between the two men. Mohammed refuses to inform Abdul about prices paid in Europe and complains that Abdul does not send back the money due in good time. Mohammed comments on these problems as follows: ‘Abdul doesn’t understand my situation; I cannot simply send cars on his request, I’m too busy for that. He also doesn’t understand business, it is not a children’s play in which you can ask all sorts of questions. What I pay for my cars is my affair.’ Abdul’s discontent with Mohammed’s refusal to give access to his profit margins further deepens over a disputed inheritance, to the extent that Abdul stretches his wings and seeks contact with a maternal cousin. The competition between Mohammed and Abdul reveals an important problem that Cotonou car traders face in mobilising trading capital through their social networks: profits from business are usually not shared among business partners.
Market access Most car traders start their careers on the Cotonou car market via earlier established colleagues. This is clear in Abdul’s case: Mohammed introduced him on the ATB-2 market, convincing him to leave Lagos and to settle in Cotonou. A few years earlier, Mohammed had married a Togolese woman who was granted residence in Germany in the wake of the political upheaval in Lomé during the early 1990s. As Mohammed was now allowed to travel to Germany under a family-unification agreement, he sought someone to oversee the sale of cars that he planned to ship to West Africa. Following a commonly observed tendency among Cotonou car traders, Mohammed was not keen on working with a male sibling. So he needed to look further, and found Abdul, who at that time operated a nearly bankrupt beer-parlour in Lagos. As revenue from the car trade in Germany proved to be erratic at best, Mohammed happily accepted a job offered to him by one of Germany’s employment agencies. Even though he did not want to abandon the car trade, he soon found that his new job complicated habitual visits to the German car markets. As a consequence, his shipments to Abdul in Cotonou became irregular. After first establishment, Abdul sought to consolidate his position in Cotonou. He is disappointed by the car arrivals from Mohammed, and therefore attempts to turn his trade away from his untrustworthy paternal kin. He does so by betting on two horses. 46 Cotonou’s Klondike
On the one hand, he guesses that re-establishing his maternal business contacts will not be difficult: the beer parlour that Abdul ran in Lagos was financed with capital from his mother’s family. On the other hand, Abdul joins in with Mohammed’s business success. After his European adventure Mohammed increasingly came to be considered as a grand, a successful trader. Very few people are aware of the problems that divide the two men, so that Abdul can still appeal to his cousin’s success. Thus, Abdul’s prestige is to some extent safeguarded by his association with Mohammed. Whereas candidate car traders need to liaise with an established trader to gain access to the car market, Abdul’s haggling reveals how opportunistic behaviour results in limited loyalty between business partners.
Valuation of car trade So far, the discussion of how entrepreneurship in Cotonou comes into play in a concrete social situation has focused on the conditions of economic action: market organisation and contact mobilisation. The analysis has not yet exposed the forces that drive economic action: which opportunities are seized, rather than others? For instance, why would a car trader like Abdul switch from handling the arrival of cars entrusted to him by a business contact to selling those cars? Also, why would Abdul continue car business even after suffering significant financial loss: what makes it worthwhile? These questions are difficult to appreciate through a universalistic notion of entrepreneurial rationality. We therefore need to delve into the culturally determined economic motivations of Cotonou car traders. Abdul’s last remark in the case study gives a clue about why he wishes to continue his efforts in the car trade. Even though he has lost a considerable amount of money trading a car, Abdul has a strong expectation of progress. Car traders like Abdul are well aware of their immediate financial losses, but these losses are not perceived as a negative business incentive. Nor are such losses interpreted as a strategic investment in business contacts, or as the cost for insurance against decline of prestige. Cotonou car traders don’t invest in their contacts, they manipulate. And though Abdul is keen to keeping up appearances, he does not take into account the possibility that Mrs. Oketokoun is well aware of his duplicitous sale. The high expectations and optimism that we find with Abdul are common among car traders in Cotonou. They often cling to car business, even in the face of financial loss, because they are convinced that any deal can result in significant profits. The earlier mentioned comments by car traders in the port reinforce the general belief in Cotonou that car trade is successful business. It is commonly believed that to become economically successful is to have dealings with cars. People like Abdul have therefore Striking gold 47 developed a propensity to hang around cars, and to follow cars from one place to another. Even though several types of goods are routinely shipped to and from Cotonou, the city is in turmoil in particular when second hand cars arrive. In addition to preventing theft and damage, car traders legitimate their presence in the port with the idea that ‘being there’ is needed for a successful career in the car trade. Even though theft and damage pose serious problems for most car traders, and divisions of labour could diminish their effects, most people come to the port with high expectations. Summarising, Abdul switches from handling to selling because he perceives Mrs. Oketokoun’s request for assistance and his encounter with Henri as an opportunity for personal gain. To attain this goal, Abdul withholds the information he considers relevant for the transaction. Abdul runs into trouble once Henri and Mrs. Oketokoun recur to similar tactics. Such manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring is consistent with a wider pattern: car traders in Cotonou do not perceive sharing of market information or pooling of efforts as beneficial. Their central experience in business is that of a social game, revolving around strategic manipulation of information and business partners: a game, however, that knows many losers, and few winners.
CONCLUSION: CAR TRADERS AS GOLD DIGGERS The second hand car trade from West Europe to Bénin has grown spectacularly over the past fifteen years. It is therefore tempting to understand Cotonou car traders as profit maximisers in a situation of economic opportunity. The analysis presented in this chapter however shows that these traders do not evaluate profits against losses. Their behaviour is inconsistent with models of economic action stressing rational calculation. The final section of this chapter is therefore dedicated to briefly bringing out the behaviour of Cotonou car traders against another model of economic action: the Klondike gold digger. Gold mining in the Klondike was marked by the absence of a regulative body that coordinated access to the gold fields. Gold diggers were therefore free to search promising mining spots. This reminds us of the Cotonou car trade, which has developed in the context of economic deregulation and trade liberalisation after structural adjustment. Rumours of fabulous stocks of gold, only waiting to be harvested, brought about rushes of fortune seekers. In Cotonou, rumours of the big profits made in the early days of the car trade fuel current expectations of immediate riches. The gold diggers usually arrived alone at the gold fields, and avoided company: they were taken as adversaries. Though some stable forms of collaboration have emerged, for instance ethnic-based syndicates, car trade in Cotonou is chiefly carried out by individual traders who compete for capital, information and profit. Most gold diggers delved 48 Cotonou’s Klondike the gold fields with little knowledge of the condition of the soil they worked; striking gold was therefore the result of chance. Cotonou car traders operate in an insecure economic environment: they have limited access to accurate information about car prices and their business partners. Profitable enterprise can therefore hardly be planned. Whereas most gold diggers were impoverished to the degree that they left the gold field empty-handed, the suppliers of the mining campaigns realised large revenues. Those not directly implicated in the car trade – market owners, shipping companies and licensees – still make money, while Cotonou car traders commonly face financial losses. Consequently, the impressive second hand car boom that has changed the face of Cotonou during the past fifteen years has little to do with the automatic response of entrepreneurs to beneficial circumstances. Most car traders have not stayed in business because of windfall gains. Instead, they never bailed out, convinced as they are of Cotonou’s Klondike dream. Striking gold 49 50 Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 3 Nigerian démarcheurs on their way to a customer. Mediating businessmen 51
CHAPTER 3
MEDIATING BUSINESSMEN: DÉMARCHEURS ON A CHANGING MARKET 40
‘These people are like flies: They are everywhere, and a nuisance to everyone!’
This contemptuous statement of a well-established Cotonou car trader expresses a popular view among both buyers and sellers of imported second-hand cars from Europe. It refers to démarcheurs, or ‘market runners’; groups of young men, generally of Nigerian origin, who accost car traders visiting the city of Cotonou, Bénin and insist on chaperoning them in the local car markets. Inexperienced traders feel attracted to the youngsters: they put them in touch with other car traders, and apparently help them to acquire product and price information. More experienced traders are irritated by the démarcheurs’ rather obtrusive presence, and would preferably wish them away. This sentiment is captured by the trader’s statement above: the démarcheurs are useless, yet cannot be avoided. Thus, this trader presents the démarcheurs as an economic institution that makes no contribution to the trade. The trader’s statement brings out the central theme of this chapter: the role that institutions play in economic life. Current academic thinking in this field understands the rise of a particular institution in relation to its effectuation of economic transactions. A widely adopted perspective, called new institutional economics, relates the nature of economic exchange to costs associated with effecting economic transactions – or transaction costs. Its general proposition is that ‘institutions are transaction cost-minimizing arrangements, which change with the nature of these costs’ (Nabli & Nugent, 1989: 1337). Stressing the problem-handling capabilities of institutions, the argument continues that particular economic institutions emerge and thrive so long as they fulfil their function, which is, limiting transaction costs (North, 1986b: 5-7). Finally, this perspective suggests that the more efficient an institution, the more likely it is to survive: ‘whether a set of transactions ought to be executed across markets or within a firm depends on the relative efficiency of each mode' (Williamson, 1975: 9). Well-known applications of this thinking are studies claiming, for instance,
40 This chapter has been submitted as: Beuving, J. J. ‘Institutional change in a West African second- hand car market: the case of Nigerian démarcheurs’, in Gewald, Luning & Walraven, eds. Motor-vehicles and people in 20th century Africa’. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg. 52 Cotonou’s Klondike that land markets are non-existent in areas where titling costs are high (Platteau, 1996), or that cattle markets emerge where contract enforcement costs are low (Ensminger, 1996).41 In the context of the Cotonou car market, this perspective raises the question as to whether the démarcheurs as an economic institution exist because they fulfil a particular function – minimising transaction costs (market information) in an opaque market. 42 To further examine the significance of the démarcheurs on the Cotonou car market, this chapter adopts a social constructivist perspective on market information, paying special attention to the role of information agents in economic exchange. Most economists tend to think of market information as part of the universe of objective, quantifiable facts (Douglas & Ney, 1998: 74-95). In this perspective, information can simply be expressed in measurable properties, such as (statistical) distribution, accuracy and reliability. Sociologists instead argue that we understand the world around us as an ongoing discussion of our subjective perceptions of social conditions (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). To the sociologist the world does not present itself objectively to the observer, but is known through actual human experience. For the study of market information, this implies that people’s social constructions of, for instance, prices and product quality, shaped by and produced in social interaction, structure economic exchange (Geertz, 1978: 29, see also Alexander & Alexander, 1991 504). This chapter does therefore not interpret the distribution of market information as a function of its procurement costs. It rather sees knowledge regarding economic phenomena to unfold in the context of day-to-day behaviour of market agents. This can be studied through analysis of their taken-for-granted everyday life. In order to appreciate the life-world of the Nigerian démarcheurs in Cotonou, it is first needed to understand the way in which the Cotonou car market developed. A review of past processes shaping this market will show that the growing volume of trade, with a diversity of cars transacted on heterogeneous markets, coincided with a growth in the number of démarcheurs. Then follows a case study describing a day in the life of four Nigerian démarcheurs. Their social life is to a large extent marked by daily humdrum, with little variation between days, and considerable time spent waiting.
41 Geschiere offers a fascinating counter-case: the widespread practice among the Maka of Cameroon to carry out work in so-called ‘working groups’ has not endured because of its efficieny in labour allocation, but through its association with festivity (1995: 514-5). 42 Démarcheurs in the West African second-hand car trade exemplify a broader phenomenon in many places in the developing world today, namely that of intermediaries operating in informal economies. They are labelled differently from one situation to another, and include beach boys - see for instance Brown (1992) and Prowse (2004); tourist guides – see Dahles & Bras (1999) and Crick (1992); market runners – for instance by de Herdt (2002) and Walsh (2004); and parking boys – see Wainaina (1981). Mediating businessmen 53
Studying the démarcheurs therefore calls for a research method with an eye for the repetitive nature of ordinary life. Such a method is found in the sociology of everyday life, which attempts to reconstruct the flow of everyday life into distinct social categories (Douglas, 1970). This qualitative method seeks to explore the routine grounds of everyday life, with a view to illuminating broader principles of social organisation (Garfinkel, 1967: 35). A focus on daily routines brings out the logic that institutionalises the habitualised practices of Nigerian démarcheurs into coherent, meaningful patterns (Bourdieu, 1977: 78-87). The way the démarcheurs make sense of their life-world has therefore been at the heart of the data collection. Rather than seeking to maximise the number of informants through a survey-type approach, this research makes a minute and detailed study of the démarcheurs’ performances and routines (Lemert & Branaman, 1997).43 This is a ‘naturalistic’ research method (Mills & Gibb, 2001: 6): the démarcheurs’ social life has been observed as it unfolded, without attempting to stage a favourable research setting. Analysis of the case material brings out that close, yet secretive social relations shape the démarcheurs’ everyday lives. Further, instead of collecting market information, most démarcheurs are seen to manipulate their social contacts and their knowledge of the Cotonou car market in the pursuit of a commission. The chapter concludes by arguing that this is a situation that cannot be reduced to information brokerage.
THE COTONOU CAR MARKET AND NIGERIAN DÉMARCHEURS The Cotonou car market today is large and vibrant, with huge quantities of second- hand cars from Western Europe being sold on a daily basis. Cars have been traded in Bénin for a long time, but the large-scale trade started after Marxist-Leninist rule ended here in 1989 (David, 1998). Before that time, cars were marketed by two groups of traders: European tourists travelling to West Africa, so called ‘overlanders’, and young West Africans studying at European universities. Whereas the first group sold their cars in West Africa’s savannah-zone, including the north of Bénin, the West Africans shipped their cars from Europe on freight ships that called in at West African seaports. In those days the trade typically involved the sale of a few hundred cars per year, mainly for domestic consumption. This bimodal form of trade changed with the arrival of specialised car-carrying ships in Cotonou and the liberalisation of international trade in Bénin under structural adjustment from 1990 onwards (Igué & Soulé, 1992; Igué, 1999). In marked contrast to
43 See for an illustration of the performative character of economic transactions in a West African context Guyer’s account of fuel distribution at a Nigerian petrol station (2004: 107-113). 54 Cotonou’s Klondike the nearby Nigerian ports, car trade benefited from the free port status of Cotonou, which means that trade was permitted before customs. Also, Nigeria increasingly limited the importation of older cars into the country, while Bénin lifted the age limit for imported cars. As more and more cars entered the country through the port of Cotonou, the Béninese people soon saw the majority of imported cars end up in Nigeria. The rapid rise of car imports from a few thousand per year in the early 1990s to nearly a quarter million by the turn of the century has changed the face of Cotonou beyond recognition.44 This relatively small city in one of West Africa’s smallest countries soon became a major hub in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade. Alongside this increase in scale, car trade in Cotonou became a more complex business environment. For instance, numerous makes and models of cars change hands every day in Cotonou, ranging from nearly new to nearly antique. Estimates of the average age of an imported car are between 14 and 16 years.45 Official import statistics show that one to five per cent of cars imported into Cotonou are new or nearly new.46 At the other end of the scale, cars up to twenty-five years of age are still sold in Cotonou. The cars are generally in good shape, although a significant number are damaged or missing basic parts. Most damage results from the sea voyage from Europe to West Africa, or from transportation between the port and the car markets. Spare parts disappear in particular while car-carrying vessels are being offloaded in the port. To further illuminate the complexity of the car trade in Cotonou: the composition of the car stock has changed in a short space of time. Whereas French cars dominated car sales in Cotonou until the mid 1990s, more than ninety per cent of cars sold today are
44 Most sources confirm that Bénin’s second-hand car imports have grown from a few thousand per year in the mid-1990s to about 250,000 by the year 2001. See in particular the following sources: République du Bénin/MdC, 1995; République du Bénin/NLTPS, 1999; République du Bénin/CBDC, 2001: 455-466; Bio-Sawe, 1995: 187. Supplementary extensive consultation of statistical archives from the Chamber of Commerce, the Port of Cotonou, the Custom’s Statistical Service, the National Archives and the Béninese Centre for Foreign Trade have not, however, returned an unambiguous, coherent pattern of second-hand car imports. 45 Perret (2002: 8) gives the higher figure; the lower figure comes from my survey, administered among twenty-five car traders in Cotonou between June 2000 and December 2003. This survey includes 2,315 registered transactions from which selling prices, car make and model, and age have been derived. 46 See in particular INSAE, 1992-2001. Mediating businessmen 55
German and Japanese.47 These cars are usually traded on heterogeneous markets: though some individual car traders specialise in particular makes and models of cars, most car markets do not engage in such product specialisation. Finally, car business in Cotonou takes place simultaneously in several markets. Whereas it was initially limited to one place inside the port, today more than twenty markets are found throughout the city. With the expanding trade flow also followed an increase in types of market agents. Up to the early 1990s most car sales were dyadic in nature – involving only car buyers and sellers. The majority of today’s car sales entail in addition at least one, and more commonly several démarcheurs.48 Their number has increased substantially, and with some 8,000-10,000 of them, they constitute the single largest category of economic agents on the Cotonou car markets.49 By comparison, Bénin’s Chamber of Commerce registers about 700 car importers; other sources mention 2,000 to 4,000 sellers.50 Their growth in number marked a shift in their mode of organisation. Earlier démarcheurs, limited in number, tended to operate in ethnically homogeneous occasional groups, while nowadays démarcheurs often operate in small, ethnically heterogeneous groups
47 TABLE 3.1 Makes of cars sold in Cotonou Manufacturing country Main representative makes Percentage sales France Peugeot 2.6 Germany Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Opel, VW 41.0 Japan Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Toyota 52.9 Korea Hyundai 0.9 Sweden Volvo 1.3 USA Ford 1.3
48 These organisational aspects of the Cotonou car market are an important reason why earlier, well-known economic analyses of second-hand car markets are of little relevance here. Notably, these analysis were based on ‘dealer-markets’, where buyers and sellers interact directly (Stigler, 1961: 216); or drew from a comparison with markets for new cars, an almost non-existent commodity in Cotonou (Akerlof, 1970: 489). 49 This figure is an estimation: démarcheurs do not represent an officially recognised employment category, and are therefore not found in public records. It is established as follows. The official monthly car import figure presently stands at about 20,000 units. A survey administered during the fieldwork among three groups of démarcheurs shows that currently four to eight démarcheurs typically take part in the sale of a car in Cotonou – or two cars every four to five weeks per démarcheur. Further substantiation of this figure is difficult to achieve since, for reasons that will be explained later in this text, démarcheurs tend to conceal the nature of their activities to outsiders. This tendency complicates an accurate estimation of the number of démarcheurs, for instance by a sampling procedure. 50 Perret (2002: 12) gives the lower figure, the higher figure follows from my own survey. 56 Cotonou’s Klondike that are held together by multiplex, non-kin social relations. Most of the démarcheurs today are young Nigerian men, who became acquainted with Cotonou as itinerant traders.51 These Nigerians settled in Cotonou after dropping out of Nigeria’s school system and choose a career in the car business.52 They rely on personal contacts, which stretch well beyond the immediate domain of that business. That is, the Nigerian démarcheurs frequently live together, often eat and travel together, and, from time to time, join forces. To better understand the role that the démarcheurs play in the day-to-day operation of the Cotonou market, the following section presents a case study detailing their economic practices.
A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIAN DÉMARCHEURS IN COTONOU As a preamble to the case study, I would first like to give a few clarifying comments regarding the claims and style of the narrative that follows. Prior to conducting the fieldwork for this study I did not specify a hypothesis regarding the role of the démarcheurs on the Cotonou car market. Instead, I developed hypotheses while collecting the data so that the field research was structured as a dialogue between theoretical ideas and empirical facts (Mukherjee & Wuyts, 1997). In this fashion, I systematically collected information by directly observing the démarcheurs’ actions and behaviour in the context of their everyday lives and through casual conversation with several of them. Next, I carefully selected relevant evidence to aptly represent the démarcheurs’ day-to-day courses of action. The narrative is therefore not an objective representation aimed at complete empirical coverage; it is instead my reconstruction, albeit one informed by intimate knowledge of the démarcheurs’ life-world, and with a view to highlight the social processes that their actions embody (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). This research procedure has an important consequence for the significance of the case study; rather than viewing it as just a story, I argue that it constitutes a theory-laden narrative that can therefore be linked up to ongoing sociological debates. While collecting the information for this study, I noticed that my presence did not appear to matter much for the course of events. After gaining their confidence, the
51 Démarcheurs operating on the Cotonou car market during the early 1990s were predominantly Yoruba-speaking Béninese. Today, three socioethnic groups of démarcheurs can be identified: Fon and Yoruba from the South of Bénin; Fulani and Zerma from Niger; Yoruba, Ogoni and Ibo from the South of Nigeria. The Nigerians were the last, and largest, démarcheur group to settle in Cotonou: from the late 1990s onwards their number grew most spectacularly. 52 Operating as a démarcheur in Cotonou requires little start-up capital, and is not dependent on formal education or training. Mediating businessmen 57 démarcheurs granted me access to their circles. They saw me initially as an amusing source of distraction, but when they had become accustomed to my ongoing presence a few months later, they carried on their businesses as usual – even with me around. Though I made friends with several of the démarcheurs, I never became fully part of their society. Instead, I acquired a role of accepted outsider, which offered the important advantage to develop a ‘helicopter view’ of whatever went on among the démarcheurs, and between them and other market agents in Cotonou. By following them from one setting to another I succeeded, after some time, to contrast the démarcheurs’ foreground performances with their background reflections, and hence to develop an understanding ‘from within’ (verstehen) of their behaviour in different social situations (cf. Outhwaite, 1975: 38-55). This understanding gave room for writing the case study in an auctorial style: it presents a series of events occurring at roughly the same time, but on different locations (Friedman, 1967). The case study itself narrates the daily affairs of the four Nigerian démarcheurs Emmanuel, Israel, Terrance and Tony. Following the actions of these four persons in the space of a single day between dawn and dusk brings to light not only with whom they collaborate and on what basis, but, more important, the dilemmas they face in the car business. The main dramatis persona here is Emmanuel Abaye, an Ogoni- speaking unmarried Nigerian man in his early twenties. Emmanuel’s father was a soldier in the Nigerian army up to the mid-1980s. After his retirement, he started working as a bookkeeper for a commercial bank in Lagos. Emmanuel’s mother retails foodstuffs in a fruit market in Lagos, where she has recently bought a stall. Emmanuel’s parents started building a house after he left Lagos. Emmanuel is their eldest son; Emmanuel’s elder sister recently died in London, where she had moved five years previously with a Nigerian husband. Emmanuel settled in Cotonou after he dropped out of university in 1999. From 1996 to 1999, Emmanuel had commuted between Cotonou, where he bought clothes, and Lagos, where he sold them. Emmanuel used the small capital he thus accumulated to start working as a démarcheur.
Morning Emmanuel wakes up early this morning in his small rented room on the outskirts of Cotonou. He notices that fellow démarcheur, Tony, has gone out already. A few weeks ago Tony moved in with Emmanuel after he ran into trouble with his landlord. Although Tony’s sister provides him with accommodation at the weekend, he needed a place to stay during the week. Difficult, as cheap accommodation in Cotonou is hard to find. As Emmanuel turns over to get another hour of sleep before going to the car markets, he notices that he is still not alone. Last night, when Emmanuel was playing 58 Cotonou’s Klondike billiards with friends after work, démarcheur Terrance asked if he could spend the night at Emmanuel’s. Terrance reluctantly explained how he had run out of money and therefore had had to abandon his room earlier that morning. To convince Emmanuel of his trouble, he showed the receipt for his mobile phone that he had pawned that night. Displeased with the prospect of having to put up another of his démarcheur friends, Emmanuel invited him nonetheless to come over. Clearly disgruntled with his changed domestic situation, Emmanuel now gets up and starts his morning preparations. He polishes his shoes, selects an ironed shirt from a coat hanger dangling from the ceiling, brushes his cropped hair, switches on his – recently bought - mobile telephone and puts on a fancy-looking watch. A last look inside confirms that Terrance is still sleeping, so Emmanuel walks away alone towards the main road. Here he flags down a taxi-moto, a rented moped, which takes him to the main car markets downtown. Along the way, Emmanuel receives a phone call from his friend, Doctor. Doctor, a Nigerian General Practitioner who alternates his work at a Lagos hospital with a prospering car business, usually contacts Emmanuel before coming to Cotonou. The two young men go back a long time as they grew up in the same army barracks: Doctor’s father is an old army comrade of Emmanuel’s father. This time, Doctor’s call worries Emmanuel: whereas Doctor normally comes to Cotonou unaccompanied, he now unexpectedly spoke of someone who would come along with him today. When Emmanuel gets off the moped at the entrance to a group of car markets commonly referred to as ‘German.Co’53, he notices that it is nearly ten o’clock. Though Doctor asked Emmanuel to wait for him near the entrance to the markets, Emmanuel knows from previous experience that his Nigerian friend will not arrive before noon. After all, Doctor will first have to cross the Bénino-Nigerian border, which is notorious for its delays, and then change a large amount of cash, which is a delicate operation, before going downtown. So therefore Emmanuel enters the main gate of the corridor that separates the different markets constituting German.Co. Halfway down the corridor, he enters the ‘office’, a small, shed-like construction54 where most démarcheurs gather during the morning before starting their business.
53 Although in total eight car markets are accessed via the corridor, they are commonly referred to by the name of the oldest among them: ‘German.Co’. This market was constructed and opened in 1994, the year that car sales were prohibited in the port of Cotonou. 54 At some point during the construction of the first car markets adjacent to the corridor during the mid-1990s, spaces were demarcated opposite the car markets’ entrances by clearing agents. Later on, ramshackle constructions were built, consisting of poles and corrugated iron. Thus, these agents attempted to control the administrative procedures involved in transactions for cars. Such attempts could no longer be sustained after the large influx of people into Cotonou’s car Mediating businessmen 59
Inside is Tony, who is devouring a plate of food and engaging in playful conversation with a recently established Yoruba-speaking Béninese food vendor. He, absently, greets Emmanuel. Tony, a Nigerian Yoruba, teases the vendor about her command of their shared language: ‘I cannot hear you when you speak this funny language. So how can I pay you the right amount for this plate?’ It is very common for Béninese and Nigerian Yoruba speakers to mock one another about their dialects, so the vendor indifferently shrugs and makes a start to serve Emmanuel. As the two men eat, they watch the already substantial mob pass noisily through the corridor – customers (mainly Nigerian), often chaperoned by démarcheurs; importers accompanied by their employees; and repairmen hastily heading to a job at one of the car markets. Their heads move nervously from left to right as they survey the corridor for possible clients, preferably those with whom the two men have worked before. In the meantime, a few loudly hooting cars are trying to make their way towards the main gate, hampered by waiting groups of people, and skirting large potholes dotted throughout the corridor. The silence that has settled between Emmanuel and Tony is interrupted by the arrival of Israel, another Nigerian démarcheur. Israel, who settled in Cotonou before Tony and Emmanuel, excitedly exclaims that he has spotted a Nigerian acquaintance. ‘Let’s follow him’, Israel suggests, ‘I know he has brought some money and wants to buy a V-boot55’. Although the prospect of earning some cash this early in the morning is tempting, Emmanuel hesitates: ‘Doctor called me just now, I think he will arrive here around noon’, he objects. Tony, who has stopped talking to the food vendor, cuts into their conversation: ‘Don’t mind Doctor’, he says to Emmanuel, ‘don’t you remember how he didn’t pay us our share last time? I don’t want to sit and wait in the sun like we always do!’ Emmanuel is not yet convinced. ‘Why give up on Doctor’, he mumbles, ‘when this guy [Israel] never shares his money with us?’ Israel, restlessly moving to and fro, encourages both men to join him: ‘Come now, my man won’t wait all day, there’s no time to lose’. Emmanuel unenthusiastically follows Israel and Tony, who speed towards the entrance of one of the car markets where an older, stout man dressed in colourful garments is engaged in fierce debate with a young man. ‘Get off my back’, the old man shouts, ‘I don’t need you!’ Israel quickly steps forward and pushes the young man aside: ‘What are you doing, harassing my client like this?’ Daunted by Israel’s intimidation, the young man takes to his heels and disappears into the corridor. The older man, a markets during the late 1990s. Gradually these spaces changed into gathering places for démarcheurs, small boutiques for hi-fi sellers and pitches for (ambulant) food stalls. 55 Most cars in Cotonou are nicknamed: ‘V-boot’ refers to newer models Mercedes, whose boot is vaguely v-shaped. 60 Cotonou’s Klondike
Nigerian el-Hadj56 from Kano, brusquely turns around and asks Israel in his native language, Hausa, why he has brought the other two with him. As the conversation between Israel and el-Hadj develops, Emmanuel and Tony impatiently await translation. In the meantime, Israel not only succeeds in calming down el-Hadj, but he also secures el-Hadj’s promise to give him an extra commission. Emmanuel and Tony, however, remain oblivious of this special agreement and believe that Israel is acting in their mutual interest. Next, the men break up. Israel stays with el-Hadj, he takes the sleeve of his garment and gently ushers him away from the entrance where by now numerous démarcheurs have gathered. Thus Israel attempts to isolate el-Hadj from competing démarcheurs and from direct contact with car sellers. Tony and Emmanuel, meanwhile, head for what most démarcheurs consider ‘good’ markets; those dominated by Lebanese importers. The two men arrange to meet halfway through their tour and to maintain contact by mobile phone. Emmanuel enters the market and walks at a brisk pace along the neatly parked rows of second-hand cars. Halfway down the first row, he briefly halts in front of a car hi-fi seller where he fumbles with one of the displayed radios and puts it back once he attracts the hi-fi seller’s attention. Emmanuel continues and finds, almost at the end of the row, what he was looking for: a ramshackle paillote57 where an older Lebanese man, Ahmad, is comfortably seated with a pocket-radio in his hand. Underneath the paillote a small group of lively chatting West African men hang about. As Emmanuel approaches the yard laid out around the paillote, he greets the Lebanese man: ‘Salut patron, Salam Alaikum’58. At this, Ahmad looks up, mumbles a greeting in reply, and points to the group below him. As it is common for Lebanese traders to charge their senior employees with the sale of their cars, Emmanuel is not surprised to see that a middle- aged man breaks away from the group. The two men have met on previous occasions, and they greet each other jokingly: ‘Ah, you Nigerian thief, have you come to rob us again?’ the man asks Emmanuel. ‘So you never take money from your patron?’ Emmanuel replies. As the senior employee, called Pierre, bursts out laughing, Emmanuel gestures towards one of the cars parked in the yard and asks its price. Before the employee can respond, Ahmad leans over the paillote’s railing and cries ‘Don’t let this youngster chop my money!’ As the two men turn their backs to the
56 Muslim pilgrims who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca (Saudi Arabia) are entitled to add the respectable phrase el-Hadj (pilgrim) to their name. 57 Paillotes (from the French paille, straw) are small, roofed constructions on stilts where importers generally reside during market days. Paillotes provide useful vantage points to oversee the market and are favourite meeting places. 58 ‘Salam Alaikum’ – ‘may God’s peace be upon you’, a common greeting among Muslims. Mediating businessmen 61 paillote, Emmanuel’s phone rings. It is Tony, who has met a reseller with whom he is acquainted at the other side of the market. Tony explains that the reseller is offering them the type of car they are looking for at a cheap rate, provided that they share their commission with him. Emmanuel shakes his head disapprovingly and replies that Tony should continue to look for a better offer. Pierre, who leans against the car that they were talking about before, now asks Emmanuel how much he is willing to pay. Without looking at Pierre, Emmanuel walks around the car, peeps inside, pats the bonnet and asks for it to be opened. Pierre hisses at one of the young men beneath the paillote, who flings him a set of keys with which he opens the car, unlocks the bonnet and starts the engine. For a while Emmanuel listens attentively as he lets the engine roar, and then closes the bonnet resolutely. ‘This engine is no good’, he concludes, and walks away. Pierre, who notices that his Lebanese patron has overheard their conversation, calls Emmanuel again ‘Bring me two-six’59. Emmanuel turns around and starts bargaining for a much lower price, claiming that he works as a reseller at another car market, and should therefore be offered a better proposition. Then Ahmad, still in his paillote, gets up and says ‘what do you know about cars? You’re only a démarcheur! I have seen you before: bring your customer, and then we’ll talk’. The employee, who sees how Emmanuel is offended by the Lebanese’s remark, gently leads him towards the edge of the yard. Before they say good-bye, Pierre proposes that Emmanuel call him back later ‘so that we can do business without my boss seeing me’. Emmanuel now sets out for the ‘office’, where he meets with Tony who has returned empty-handed as well. For a while they discuss their affairs, complaining how they both failed to secure what seemed a promising transaction. ‘We bring the Nigerians to this place, these white people60 cannot do business without us, and we get nothing in return’, Tony grumbles, to which Emmanuel nods in agreement. The two young men order bottles of beer, which they drink silently until Israel returns, unaccompanied by el-Hadj. ‘This man means Wahalla’61, Israel explains, ‘I tried to show him around, to help him make up his mind. But when he showed me his money, it was only enough to put down a deposit!’ Tony and Emmanuel look up in disbelief: Israel is reputed to be a conscientious démarcheur, who would surely have verified his client’s money beforehand. Israel justifies this negligence by referring to his personal relation with el-Hadj: ‘I worked with him before, I thought I could trust him’. Though Tony and Emmanuel sympathise with Israel’s failed transaction, Israel’s explanation is inaccurate. Once Israel had spotted a suitable car, el-Hadj withdrew his original offer -
59 ‘Two-six’, meaning 2,600,000 CFA, which corresponds to about €4,000. 60 ‘White people’ is how Nigerian démarcheurs commonly refer to Lebanese traders. 61 Wahalla is a Hausa word meaning ‘trouble’; the phrase has been integrated in common Pidgin English and is nowadays widely used outside the Hausas-speaking community. 62 Cotonou’s Klondike additional commission. Since Israel had concealed the particulars of the arrangement with el-Hadj from his friends, he could not now involve them to exert the additional pressure needed to coax the recalcitrant businessman into collaboration, and thus withdrew from the transaction altogether. Without mentioning any of this, Israel takes a seat next to the others, sips from one of their bottles, and starts looking up and down the corridor. By now it is around noon; Doctor might show up any time.
Afternoon For a while not much happens: the three men drink their beers, wipe the sweat off their faces and occasionally glance at the continuous flow of people and cars in the corridor. Meanwhile, they squabble about the right phrasing of fashionable pop songs62, from which they sing particular lines. Their singing, interspersed with boisterous talk and laughter from other people in the ‘office’, stops when Emmanuel suddenly gets to his feet. He has spotted Doctor, who is, to his dismay, accompanied by Terrance and another young man. ‘How did you get here with Doctor?’, Emmanuel asks in their shared language, Ogoni, ‘why didn’t you call me?’ Terrance grins sheepishly, and replies while he motions to Doctor’s companion: ‘Tunde phoned me a little while ago; it was he who brought Doctor along.’ Emmanuel is clearly upset: thus far he considered his personal contact with Doctor to be a well-balanced mix of friendship and business – a balance that now seems to be undermined by a fellow démarcheur. Emmanuel realises that he cannot hector Terrance in front of Doctor, so instead he jokes Terrance condescendingly: ‘Hey small boy, did you come along with the big men today?’ Meanwhile Doctor stands forlornly aside, not understanding what is being said between Emmanuel and Terrance. Emmanuel now addresses Doctor, smiles at him, gestures in the direction of the car markets and indicates that they are ready to go. On their way to German.Co, Emmanuel tries to establish which car Doctor wants to buy, and, more important, how much money he has brought along. Whereas the other démarcheurs follow Doctor at some distance, Emmanuel notices how Doctor’s young companion Tunde tries to stay as close as possible to him. Therefore Emmanuel interviews Doctor cautiously, avoiding direct questions. ‘Did you bring the same money as you did last time?’ Emmanuel asks, hoping that Doctor has not mentioned this to Tunde. Doctor looks up in surprise at Emmanuel’s indirect phrasing, but nevertheless nods affirmatively. Next, Emmanuel turns around and, without further
62 At the time of the fieldwork, R&B musician R. Kelly, reggae singer Bob Marley, and Afro-pop performer Fela Kuti were popular among Nigerian démarcheurs. The démarcheurs frequently and thoroughly discuss this music that constitutes a significant part of their leisure time repertoire. Mediating businessmen 63 explanation, instructs Israel and Tony to start their tour of a nearby car market and asks Terrance to join himself in yet another car market. The two groups split up; Emmanuel is annoyed to see that Tunde stays with him. For the next half hour, the four men wander about the car market in silence, without attempting to speak to the car sellers they walk past. When they approach the back of the car market, towards Ahmad’s paillote, Pierre, who is polishing a series of newer cars parked in the yard, walks up to them and asks Emmanuel what he wants. Tunde, who has thus far remained silent, now clears his throat and asks the price of one of the polished cars. Emmanuel, baffled by Tunde’s question, silently awaits Pierre’s asking price, which, to his relief, is much too high. Tunde reacts by disputing the car’s proposed price: ‘Why do you insult me like that, this is a ridiculous price!’ Emmanuel, who notices that Tunde’s reply annoys Pierre, pushes Tunde away: ‘Shut up, you are spoiling the deal, you know nothing about this trade’. Pierre, outwardly unmoved by Emmanuel’s outburst, turns around and continues his polishing. Next, Terrance takes Emmanuel aside: ‘Don’t mind this man’, he pleads. ‘Let’s go on, we will come back here later’. Doctor nods in agreement and motions to Tunde to follow suit. When the men make a start to continue their tour, Emmanuel is called from a distance. When he turns around, Emmanuel sees Israel and Tony hurrying towards him. ‘I received your beep63, has your man brought out his money?’ Israel breathlessly asks. Emmanuel shakes his head in negation and points at Tunde, stating ‘He oppresses us, he makes Wahalla’. Israel and Emmanuel therefore agree to join their efforts: they will go back to Pierre; Tony and Terrance continue to accompany Doctor. Emmanuel assumes that Doctor will be reassured by Terrance’s presence, so no further explanation is offered to Doctor as regards this manoeuvre. To their relief, Emmanuel and Israel notice that the senior employee is still alone. Pierre explains that Ahmad went to meet his older brother in another car market. The absence of Ahmad changes the situation for the démarcheurs. On the one hand, they can discuss the details of Doctor’s purchase much more openly as the Lebanese patron is not around. On the other hand, it is most likely that Ahmad took with him the car’s import documents64 so Doctor will have to be coaxed into not paying a down payment. Démarcheurs normally prefer their clients to pay the total sum due, so that a commission can be pocketed immediately.
63 ‘Beeping’ here means ringing someone once so that the receiving person’s mobile phone displays the number of the calling person. Beeping can be done secretly, which is what Emmanuel did to notify Israel. 64 In particular the bill of lading (sea transport) and the vehicle registration certificate (ownership). 64 Cotonou’s Klondike
After that, Emmanuel buys two bags of water65 from an ambulant seller, and hands one of them to Pierre. Emmanuel finishes his water, demonstratively throws the empty bag on the ground, and starts commenting on Pierre’s mobile phone. ‘Patron, if we make our client bring out big money, will you give me your phone?’ In reply Pierre states ‘You go chop big66, you cheat your man [Doctor], and now you want my phone?’ As Pierre walks away indignantly, Emmanuel calls after him ‘give us a hundred, you can take twenty’. This remark reflects a common approach among démarcheurs: once the range of the selling price has been established (the ‘two-six’ mentioned earlier by Pierre), démarcheurs attempt to settle their commission. With his proposition, Emmanuel shows he is aware of how much Doctor is willing to pay, but he also comments on how the money appropriated should be divided between the démarcheurs and Pierre. Though Pierre disagrees with Emmanuel’s suggestion, he does not react immediately and keeps silent instead. Meanwhile Israel, who has wandered around the car and glanced inside several times, turns towards Pierre and asks for the car’s spare parts67. Pierre, who has so far maintained his reserve, suddenly jumps up and moves towards the boot of the car from where he produces a large plastic bag with the parts. After the two démarcheurs have inspected the contents of the bag and handed it back, they slowly walk away from the yard. To the observer, the interaction between the three men thus far may seem to lack the specificity and concreteness for conducting business. Those involved, however, interpret the situation differently. Pierre, Emmanuel and Israel are fairly convinced that they have come close to concluding a transaction. For example, by asking for the spare parts, the démarcheurs have expressed genuine interest in Pierre’s car. Also, by none of them remaining behind in the yard, Israel and Emmanuel demonstrate their conviction that Pierre will not sell the car behind their backs. Finally, Pierre’s silence on Emmanuel’s proposition reassures the démarcheurs that they are near to securing their commission. If not, Pierre would have protested against the proposed minority share. Once they have left the yard, Emmanuel takes out his mobile phone and calls Terrance to bring Doctor along. Moments later the two démarcheurs, Doctor and his companion Tunde show up and join Emmanuel and Israel. Without further ceremony
65 In Cotonou, small plastic bags filled with filtered and cooled tap water – commonly called ‘pure water’ - are sold cheaply, mostly by young, female vendors. 66 ‘To chop’, literally meaning ‘to eat’ here refers to appropriation. In Pidgin English the verb ‘to eat’ is often metaphorically applied where individual appropriation is concerned, and can have both accusing and admiring connotations. 67 On the Cotonou car market, cars are normally stripped of their visible paraphernalia, such as mirrors, side strips and wheel rims, before being put up for sale. Mediating businessmen 65 the six men now walk towards Pierre’s. ‘Chairman’68, Emmanuel addresses Doctor, ‘we have talked seriously to this man Pierre, and he can help us’. Doctor, who is flanked by Emmanuel and Israel, turns his head around to cast a warning glance at Tunde. Thus Doctor tries to remove the doubt that Tunde had earlier cast on the course of business. Later it appears that Doctor has brought along Tunde, a younger paternal cousin, to show him the ropes of the car trade in Cotonou. Though Doctor prefers to operate solo in Cotonou, he felt he could not refuse to allow Tunde to come along: Tunde’s father in part financed Doctor’s medical education. Doctor did not want to lend money to Tunde, nor did he want to pay his cousin a salary. Instead, he raised Tunde’s hopes by saying that clever men could make money in Cotonou. Now that Tunde has been convinced not to intervene, Doctor addresses Pierre: ‘How about two-zero?’ he asks. Pierre replies by laughing: ‘Maybe cars don’t cost money in Naya [Nigeria], but here we pay’. ‘Chairman’, Emmanuel intervenes, ‘this car is fine: we checked this morning’. ‘I’ll bring two-one’, Doctor proposes. Pierre shakes his head in disagreement and replies: ‘Then you’ll need to talk to your boys’. Emmanuel and Israel look up startled: they realise that Pierre is about to break their agreement not to mention the size of the commission. Though by saying this Pierre runs the risk of Doctor retreating, in this way he puts pressure on the démarcheurs to accept a much lower commission than they had initially discussed. Pierre’s remark infuriates Emmanuel, who realises that he cannot express his anger openly without alarming Doctor. To prevent escalation of the situation, Israel restrains Emmanuel, and promises Pierre that they will pay the parking fee due69. After a brief silence, Pierre mumbles: ‘Bring me two-three’. Before Doctor can react, he is taken aside by Tunde from the waiting group. Though the démarcheurs can pick up only fragments of the talk between the Nigerian GP and his companion, to them it is clear that Tunde is attempting to torpedo their mediation. While the démarcheurs deliberate their situation, Doctor summons Pierre to join him. In response, Emmanuel leaves the other démarcheurs and cautiously approaches Doctor and Pierre. When he overhears the two men discussing how to deal with the car’s import documents, Emmanuel interjects: ‘You get your V-boot tomorrow, don’t mind the others: we have our fathers in common’.
68 ‘Chairman’ is a respectful form of address commonly used by people from the south of Nigeria. 69 Though different parking fee systems exist in car markets in Cotonou, in most cases a lump sum per car is paid for a two to four week period. After this period, a per diem fee is paid, that can quickly amount to a significant sum of money. The fees due are calculated as from the date of the car’s arrival in Cotonou. This date is normally written on the dashboard, inside the car. Israel, who had looked inside the car earlier, thus knew how much parking fee had to be paid. 66 Cotonou’s Klondike
Next, Doctor produces a thick wad of banknotes that he hands to Tunde. Silence settles between the démarcheurs, who gaze intently at Tunde’s hands as they count and recount the bank notes. Once he has ascertained that the amount of cash is correct, Tunde triumphantly pulls out a ten thousand CFA note70, which he pockets, and presents the remaining money to Pierre. After Pierre has recounted the money and handed a receipt for the sold car to Doctor, the six men leave the yard. Doctor and Tunde hurry towards a clearing agent’s office in the corridor where they will try to arrange customs clearance and payment of shipping before closing time. The démarcheurs linger for a while, tensely looking around to see if Doctor has already disappeared. Then Emmanuel halts the démarcheurs with a gesture, turns around and hurries towards Pierre, leaving the others behind. ‘You no go chop today!’ Pierre exclaims as he notices Emmanuel’s reappearance. ‘Please patron’, Emmanuel pleads, ‘we worked hard today, our client brought out big money’. In reply, Pierre meticulously selects several well-worn bank notes from the pile of money he just received, and waves them in the air. Quickly Emmanuel snatches the money away, and immediately starts leafing through the notes. Though the money is considerably less than they first agreed, Emmanuel does not protest. The other démarcheurs have by now entered the yard: Emmanuel does not want to involve them in the details of his agreement with Pierre. After Emmanuel has stuffed the money into his breast pocket, he brusquely turns around, and urges the other démarcheurs to follow him. The four men, livelily chatting and cheering, stroll to the main exit of the car markets. By now it is around five o’clock and soon the car markets will be closed for the day.
Night After Doctor and Tunde have disappeared, the four démarcheurs flag down two taxi- motos and go to a square not far from Cotonou’s main lighthouse. Many démarcheurs meet here at the end of the day to drink large bottles of Béninese beer and to play billiards on tables that are placed in the sand outside. They dismount and plod through the sand towards the billiard tables. Here the four men are cheerfully greeted by some of the démarcheurs with whom they have passed the day in the ‘office’, their common meeting place. The news of their successful transaction has travelled fast: ‘Give us some beer, we have been out there in the sun, like you’, one of them shouts. In reply Emmanuel looks at his three friends, shrugs and enters one of the small bars nearby. Minutes later he returns, arms filled with bottles of beer. ‘Hey, take it easy with our
70 Ten thousand CFA equals about €15. Mediating businessmen 67 money!’ Israel comments on Emmanuel’s generosity. After the beer has been passed around, and bottles have been clinked, Israel pulls Emmanuel aside. ‘How far, let’s rub heads?’71 ‘Yeah, I want to get my phone back’, Terrance joins in, ‘bring out the money’. Emmanuel, irritated, reacts: ‘What are you saying about this money? Doctor is my man’. Terrance laughs out loud, surprised by Emmanuel’s outcry, and then tries to pull out one of the banknotes in Emmanuel’s breast pocket. In a split second, Emmanuel pushes Terrance away and kicks off his shoes to show his anger. Before Terrance gets the chance to react, Israel interjects. ‘Don’t go crazy now’, he urges ‘we should talk about this money’. Israel succeeds in calming down the two men and asks Tony, who is watching the scene from a distance, to bring two more bottles of beer. Tony walks away, shaking his head in disbelief at the scene he has just witnessed. Israel uses the silence that has settled to suggest splitting the money between them. ‘Doctor is your man, so take twenty, and I’ll share the rest with them’. Though Israel does not know precisely how much money Emmanuel has pocketed, a brief glance at the bundle of money in his breast pocket reassures him that there is enough to share. Emmanuel agrees quickly. He knows that twenty thousand CFA corresponds to about what he considers to be his fair share. So instead of negotiating a larger share, Emmanuel takes out the money, extracts twenty thousand CFA, and hands the remaining notes to Israel. Then he accepts a cue offered to him by one of the billiard players, turns around and starts to play. Swiftly, Israel hands some of the money to Terrance, who has silently watched the game, and to Tony, who has just returned with more beers. They empty their bottles, and make a start to leave the lighthouse. Emmanuel looks back, hands his cue to another player, and joins the three démarcheurs. Night falls, and the men go home.
ANALYSIS: DYNAMICS OF INFORMATION MANIPULATION The social constructivist perspective developed earlier in this chapter suggested studying the démarcheur as an institutional form by focusing on the role démarcheurs play in the day-to-day operations of the Cotonou car market. On the one hand, this focus entices one to agree with the démarcheurs who think of themselves as agents that, in the words of one, ‘help clients to make up their minds’. After all, the démarcheurs appear to mediate between sellers and buyers of second-hand cars, and earn a commission in the course of a business transaction. On the other hand, the case study clearly shows how the démarcheurs, while showing their clients around car
71 ‘How far?’ is an interrogative question in Pidgin English; ‘to rub heads’ roughly means ‘to consult’, or ‘to discuss’ (my translation). 68 Cotonou’s Klondike markets, attentively monitor their reactions. These reactions, often revealed in facial expressions or minor remarks, then inform the démarcheurs about their clients’ preferences. In the event of a client showing what seems genuine interest in a particular car, the démarcheur starts to downplay the qualities of the car, the reputation of the car seller, or both. Thus, démarcheurs try to steer their client’s attention away from the desired car, only to return at a later time to set up the conditions of the transaction. By means of this practice, the démarcheurs let their clients select, meanwhile suggesting that they were the ones who found the appropriate car. The remaining pages of this chapter are therefore dedicated to examining the degree to which the Nigerian démarcheurs fulfil a role of information agents, or brokers, in the Cotonou car markets. In the light of the position they occupy in the car trade, this seems at first an odd question to ask. After all, the démarcheurs appear well placed to have the cutting edge over other economic actors in Cotonou: they are highly mobile agents, who operate in a loosely integrated market. The story of Emmanuel and his friends shows how the démarcheurs spend a considerable portion of their time walking through Cotonou’s car markets. When following their clients, or prenegotiating selling prices with car sellers, they can therefore build up a comprehensive inventory of prices, makes and models of cars. In the absence of firmly established business contacts between car buyers and sellers - the regularity of encounters between them is usually limited - such an inventory could subsequently be transformed into stable returns. Bridging the linguistic gap separating several groups of car traders could further bring about a consolidation of these returns: the Nigerian démarcheurs all understand Pidgin English, but the Cotonou car market is marked by the absence of a lingua franca. Most démarcheurs are aware of these information deficiencies, yet they do not, in general, make use of this to secure their position in the Cotonou car market, or boost their careers in the car trade. Rather than systematically collecting data, or patiently building up a set of business contacts, the strategy of Emmanuel and his friends consists of working case-by-case.
Image control What lies beneath this strategy is that Nigerian démarcheurs in Cotonou tend to play off against each other what limited market information they command. Though this seems a practice of despair, it is important to remember that the Nigerians had established business before as itinerant traders, which saw higher, and more stable, revenues than those gained in the car business. They entered the car trade in Cotonou with high expectations – with ‘dreams of making a fortune’ (Beuving, 2004). A significant manifestation of this dream is that the démarcheurs mostly engage in car business in the pursuit of independence from immediate kin ties. Though Nigerian Mediating businessmen 69 démarcheurs are sometimes pressurised by their Nigerian families to introduce relatives to the Cotonou car market, most stable démarcheur groups do not include kin. A tried and tested method to keep their families from meddling with their affairs is to avoid them. This explains, for instance, why Tony preferred not to stay with his sister. When family contacts cannot be avoided, the démarcheurs often have recourse to fabricating a favourable business history, rather than admit their involvement with the car business in Cotonou. This is why Emmanuel did not tell his father that he had desisted from his clothing trade. Démarcheurs articulate such stratagems, for instance with reference to their fathers: ‘In Nigeria, I have to prowl around; my father’s eyes are everywhere. Here [in Cotonou] I’m free: my old man never comes here’. Though their parents would have liked them to choose a career in banking (Emmanuel), the army (Israel), petrol industry (Terrance) or the civil service (Tony), they opted for the car trade instead. An important means by which the démarcheurs try to throw dust in their relatives’ eyes is through vigilant image control. Notice, for instance, that the case study started with an account of how Emmanuel dresses carefully before going out to the car markets. In general, most démarcheurs stand out among other economic actors in Cotonou with their neatly ironed shirts and properly polished shoes. Carefulness changes into meticulousness when Nigerian démarcheurs visit their parental home in Nigeria. Then all the stops are pulled out. Pawned mobile phones are recovered, and debts are called in. New clothing is specially bought, and perfume and DVDs are purchased to give away as presents. In this manner, a significant amount of money is dedicated to keeping up the appearance of business success, without giving away the details of these businesses.
Genesis of social contacts Secrecy, however, is not reserved for dealing with next-of-kin; it is also widespread among the démarcheurs themselves. The démarcheurs operate in a narrow social universe, confined by a web of tight social relations with their fellow démarcheurs. Operating in this universe implies that the démarcheurs constantly juggle to retain control of business situations. Business control is informed not so much by the width or depth of their web of business relations as by the sociogenesis of their companionship. Démarcheurs are a closely packed group: they tend to collaborate in small, relatively enduring formations, which are characterised by tight and multiplex social relations. In its simplest form, this quality prevents the démarcheurs easily escaping from each other’s attention. They spend a lot of time together, either in Emmanuel’s house, beneath the lighthouse or in the car markets. Though their room for manoeuvre increases in the latter, they come across each other even in crowded car markets. More 70 Cotonou’s Klondike elaborately, démarcheurs experience this social density as problematic in two ways. First, though deceptive behaviour permeates their daily lives at several points, chicanery is not attempted lightly. Israel, for instance, attempted to secure a disproportionate share of his commission by taking advantage of his - superficial - contact with el-Hadj. After the Nigerian client turned down his proposition, Israel escaped scot-free by under-supplying his colleagues with accurate information. Israel later freed himself from eventual blame by preventing the escalation of the smouldering conflict between Emmanuel and Terrance. Similarly, Pierre hinted at the size of the démarcheurs’ commission, but backtracked when Emmanuel showed up to collect the money. Consequently, Emmanuel made the best of a bad job by accepting this money, so that he could conceal the amount he finally received. Second, whereas the persons in the case all attempted to coordinate the actions of those involved in a business transaction, control over particular situations is not easily attained, and sometimes downright lost. Emmanuel, for example, experienced difficulties in deflecting Tunde’s interference. And though Emmanuel ruled the roost when they enter the car markets with Doctor, he could not prevent Pierre from withholding a part of the commission. In similar vein, Terrance thought that he could benefit from his unexpected contact with Tunde, but had to look on sadly while Israel distributed the remaining commission. So instead of seizing their intensive collaboration as a starting point to achieve a competitive edge over other market agents, the démarcheurs tend to compete with one another for absolute control over the car market. This competition does not simply reflect the interplay of market forces, but is rooted in internal stratification of the démarcheur group. For instance Emmanuel, though not the veteran, is clearly a central figure in the daily affairs of the four démarcheurs. Emmanuel became something of a prominent figure shortly after he settled in Cotonou. At that time, he had not yet developed a running network of business contacts and still operated under Israel’s wing. As his business improved, Emmanuel first put aside some money to rent his current room. Later on, he inherited some money from his deceased sister. This money Emmanuel did not invest in his former clothing trade, as he had promised his father, but bought a television and DVD player instead. Soon after Emmanuel started buying DVD movies from ambulant sellers at the car market, an increasing flow of visitors dropped by. Most of them were fellow démarcheurs, who came to watch the latest Hollywood movies and popular video clips. The increased number of visitors coincided with Emmanuel’s establishment as a démarcheur in the corridor – an enterprise that received an impetus after he succeeded in tapping his father’s army contacts. But by then Emmanuel had already expanded his business contacts among fellow démarcheurs. Still later, as pointed out in the case, some of these contacts moved in. What started as sleepovers after late-night DVD sessions gradually grew into more Mediating businessmen 71 permanent residence. This happened for instance with Terrance, who moved in when he could no longer meet his rent. What once appeared as a beneficial set of contacts among peers, slowly but surely backfired against Emmanuel. After all, hosting several people requires some sort of household organisation. Instead of merely receiving visitors, Emmanuel now had to organise, for instance, the procurement of food and the distribution of sleeping places. This resulted in a series of quarrels among the men, to the point that Emmanuel’s popularity sharply declined. Ironically, this shift in prestige concurred with a tentative consolidation of his father’s army contacts, and the development of some contacts with car sellers in Cotonou, such as Pierre.
Omnipresence The sociogenesis of the démarcheurs’ network is an important factor explaining the adroitness of their collaboration, and hence informs the degree to which the démarcheurs succeed to collectively perform as information specialists vis-à-vis other market agents in Cotonou. Whereas Israel failed to do so with el-Hadj - clearly a seasoned car trader – Emmanuel managed to maintain his stature of information broker with Doctor. These differential outcomes of similar attempts point at an important characteristic of the Cotonou car market: visiting car traders do not necessarily require démarcheurs to purchase their cars. The model of car in which Doctor is interested, a Mercedes ‘V-boot’, is quite common in Cotonou. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, most car markets do not specialise in particular makes and models of cars. Even a brief market survey will therefore normally result in several suitable cars. Nevertheless and in spite of earlier ‘shopping experience’, Doctor continued his collaboration with Emmanuel. Doctor’s experience certainly permitted him to seek out suitable cars himself, yet Emmanuel, the eldest son of his father’s old army comrade, presented one of Doctor’s few familiar faces in Cotonou. The association between the men is therefore fairly friction-free. This, however, represents the exceptional case: relations between démarcheurs and visiting businessmen are usually much more volatile. From the perspective of most market agents, the démarcheurs appear to control the movements of visiting businessmen. Car traders in Cotonou therefore consider démarcheurs as a disturbance to the free flow of market forces, especially since, in the eyes of many, démarcheurs prey on the car business by illegitimately appropriating revenues. When roaming the car markets in pursuit of clients, démarcheurs therefore generally meet resistance, mostly expressed in unfriendly remarks, note for instance the encounter with el-Hadj, but sometimes resulting in direct assaults from car sellers. Succeeding to avoid one group of démarcheurs does not, however, safeguard against being accosted by another, and most economic agents in Cotonou therefore eventually surrender and collaborate with them. Ultimately, this is 72 Cotonou’s Klondike why Pierre chose to pay part of the commission to Emmanuel: to get rid of a – potentially nasty – démarcheur group. This defeatism, voiced by the contemptuous statement of the well-established trader in the beginning of this chapter - ‘They are everywhere!’ - is to some extent fuelled by fear of a violent encounter with a pack of démarcheurs. However, as especially more experienced traders will know, the internal contradictions that characterise most groups of démarcheurs strongly reduce their efficacy in exercising physical violence. It leaves intact, though, the démarcheurs’ capacity to wear out their clients and hence secure a commission.
CONCLUSION The second-hand car market in Cotonou has rapidly expanded and gained in complexity during the past two decades. This development coincided with a strong growth in the number of (mainly Nigerian) démarcheurs; it is therefore tempting to understand them as a (transaction) cost-minimising arrangement for the problem of information search. This chapter has tried to show, however, that most démarcheurs are too pre-occupied with themselves to bridge the information gap separating buyers and sellers. Specifically, they monitor each other constantly and intensely, deliberately seeking to impede their peers’ degrees of freedom. This limitation is achieved by constant scheming and counter-scheming, motivated by personal gain and at the cost of the other. Schemes arise in response to the occasion; in achieving their objectives, the démarcheurs show little deployment of business strategies or other forms of longer- term planning. In result, individual positions, or particular personal qualities, might provide a temporary cutting edge, yet no permanent advantage of one over the other is attained. Rather than utilising their collective understanding of the Cotonou car market for profitable and reliable revenue, their mutual behaviour therefore commonly results in loss of control over business situations. The logic of the démarcheurs’ behaviour has appeared inconsistent with common models of institutional change stressing the functionality of information agents for market exchange. This raises the question what explains the continuation of an institution that does not fulfill an economic function. I have tried to show that the démarcheurs’ omnipresense is an important factor for understanding their persistence on the Cotonou car market; while buyers and sellers generally show a profound dislike of the démarcheurs, it is difficult to get around them. The current situation in Cotonou does not, however, rule out the possibility that car buyers and sellers sometimes achieve better prices, or purchase cars of higher quality in the company of démarcheurs. Nonetheless, such a favourable outcome may have more to do with the counter- Mediating businessmen 73 scheming skills of their clients, than with the brokering capabilities of démarcheurs themselves. 74 Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 4 Nigerien businessman El Hadj Hamidou with paternal cousin Boubacar. Beyond supply 75
CHAPTER 4
BEYOND SUPPLY: FAMILY FIRMS IN GOVERNING TRANSNATIONAL TRADE 72
Not long after I had completed my West African fieldwork in 2003, my Nigerien73 friend Hadj Amadou Hamidou came to Europe. Though he had accompanied his father, a wealthy trader, on business trips to Belgian second-hand car markets before, this time Hamidou had come by himself. We could therefore meet in Amsterdam, where he shared his doubts about the purpose of his European visit. ‘We still have so many unsold cars in Cotonou’, he said, ‘and we’re losing money everyday, but father told me to buy cars from Brussels.’ He bitterly added: ‘It’s me who knows what goes around in Cotonou; he does not know that this business is no longer what it used to be.’ Hamidou concluded his complaint by stating: ‘Now my friends sell for me. But I would have liked to stay there, it’s best to sell the cars myself’. Hamidou’s rebellious remark aptly brings out the central theme of this chapter: the ambivalences of doing business with kinsmen or members of the same ethnic group in Africa. This will be illustrated by the case of migrant traders from Niger who operate in large second-hand car markets found in Cotonou - an important hub in the second-hand car trade with West Africa. A brief presentation of recent developments in Cotonou will show that these car markets, marked by a significant drop in local demand around 2002, are to a large extent segmented along ethnic lines. Nigerien traders distinguish themselves in these groups by the explicit denial of conflict. Conversation with them tends therefore to be bland: they resort to Islamic rhetoric that preaches group loyalty and (fraternal) harmony. They are also reluctant to comment on each other’s conduct and exhibited a strong sensitivity to authority. It is striking that the abovementioned remark by Hamidou was made away from authority figures (his father) and after a considerable time of acquaintance. Whilst African traders struggle to deal with the complexities of business based on family or ethnic grouping in their day-to-day lives, it is also a hotly debated topic in African studies. To some observers ethnicity and kinship, sometimes supplemented
72 A shorter version of this chapter is published as Beuving, J. J. 2006. ‘Nigerien second-hand car traders in Cotonou: a sociocultural analysis of economic decision-making’, African Affairs, 105, 419: 1-21. Parts of this chapter were presented at the biennial conference of the African Studies Association of the UK in London (2004). 73 ‘Nigerien’ is the English adjective referring to the West African country Niger. 76 Cotonou’s Klondike with religion, promote control over trade. These institutions are thought to help overcome the technical complexities of long distance trade, notably ‘that of securing the continuous and rapid exchange of information between traders in the various centres about conditions of supply and demand’ (Cohen, 1969: 17).74 Proponents of this view furthermore argue that this institutional characteristic has an important consequence for the organisation of long-distance trade: eventually it develops into an ‘interrelated net of commercial communities forming a network’ (Curtin, 1984: 3).75 Others have contested the significance of family and other descent groups as a productive factor in African business by pointing out that the scale of economic activity in Africa is often limited ‘because large firms have become so substantial that they cannot draw effectively on family, ethnic and religious ties’ (Hopkins, 1988: 23). The limited effectiveness of the governance structure in African firms arises, they argue, from the fact that ‘obligations to junior kinsmen are more compelling that those to subordinates who are not member of the descent group’ (Berry, 1983: 155).76 Recent contributions in this debate have suggested that, rather than the social institution of ethnicity and kinship in itself, a number of cultural elements associated with a particular group, notably the exercise of power and the functioning of social prestige, are instrumental to intra-firm dynamics.77 This chapter wishes to contribute to this debate by trying to show that the social life of Nigerien car traders is characterised by a propensity to please people in authority. This behavioural pattern is at odds with the dependency on reliable exchange of information over large areas: Hamidou’s worry about oversupply on the car market reflects widely held views among the community dealing in second-hand cars in Cotonou, yet Hamidou’s father just like that community at large continued to believe that much money was to be made in second-hand cars. This chapter intends to show that an important consequence of these distorted information flows is that shifting local economic conditions are neither acknowledged in time nor sufficiently incorporated in management decisions and hence lead to financial losses. The trade in second-hand cars that is studied here is to a high degree informal and this has consequences for data collection and the claims that can be made. The
74 See for similar observations: Eades (1993), Quarles van Ufford & Zaal (2004) and Diouf, (2000). 75 Well-known contemporary examples of trade diasporas include Indian handicraft traders of Ecuador, see Kyle (1999) and Lebanese merchants, see Rais (1988). 76 A similar argument is found in Hart (1975) and in Sam (2003). 77 See for instance Roitman (2003) for a discussion on how the prestige of family heads in northern Cameroon regulates their access to cash through advances; see Forrest (1994) for a demonstration of how the reluctance of the founder of a business to delegate authority to sons or distant kin reduces the possibility for commercial expansion or diversification. Beyond supply 77 possibilities for quantitative data collection are obviously limited. Therefore one has to rely more on direct observation with limited historical depth. However, some forty Nigerien traders (mainly men) in Cotonou and Niamey were closely followed, and seven of them featured as key informants with whom lengthy conversations were conducted on a regular basis throughout the fieldwork period. These conversations made it possible to reconstruct their life histories (including their professional careers), and to educe their comments on current events. Additional talks with a number of Nigerien travellers to Belgium and the Netherlands on car business enabled to see the performance facade that Nigerien traders projected as well as their background reflections and hence to develop an understanding ‘from within’ of their behaviour in different social situations. This chapter has not only limited historical depth, but it also does not claim to be representative in the sense that a properly conducted survey can be. Central in the following pages is a case study featuring several Nigerien traders. The anthropological case study is a research method that revolves around detailed analysis of a particular situation aimed at illuminating the social processes at work.78 This in depth analysis allows identification of similar elements or differences in other social situations. It does therefore not represent the whole trading population of Niger, but draws conclusions from the study of Nigerien businessmen who were at a particular moment car traders in Cotonou. This study does not, therefore, want to say anything about Nigerien as an essentialist social category, nor does it view the findings as an inherent, fixed properly of the individual traders sampled for this research.79 It is seen as habitualised action that is socially constructed in day-to-day interaction and therefore subject to change (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). A key element in this chapter is the role of expectations, in the sense of living up to a certain image. Such expectations lead to distorted information flows that in this case leads in turn to an exaggerated image of business profitability. This phenomenon does not fit goal-directed rational behaviour. Whether that is exceptional or is linked to much wider patterns in decision-making is a topic for the discussion where the findings of this chapter are compared with current academic literature on the working of firms. It concludes that investment decisions in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade operate under a self-denying prophecy: in seeking to live up to other people’s
78 See: van Donge (forthcoming 2006). This inductive, qualitative method is particularly associated with the Manchester school of social anthropology, Gluckmann’s analysis of the opening of a bridge in modern Zululand is a well-known example, see Gluckmann (1958). The method is also referred to as the analysis of social drama or as the extended case study method, see van Velsen (1967). 79 A powerful argument against such ‘cultural essentialism’ is found in Geschiere (1989). 78 Cotonou’s Klondike expectations, car traders create a false impression of commercial success, thus directing productive capital into unproductive avenues.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COTONOU CAR MARKET Large quantities of second-hand cars, mostly from European markets but also from markets further away, started to pour into West Africa by the late 1980s. Cars had already been traded in this part of the world much earlier. However, the magnitude of such trade was mainly limited to individual European ‘overlanders’ dealing with African traders along cross-Sahara routes. The arrival of specialised ships (RoRos) offering cheap and quick mass vehicle transport marked a change in the scale of the Euro-West African car trade. After West African governments had dredged their ports (often with international donor money) to accommodate modern cargo vessels, a steady flow of used cars started to appear. The imported cars quickly found their way to local markets, and later to markets further afield. Bénin was among the West African countries where the car trade thrived. Up to 1989, Bénin’s centrally planned economy based on the export of primary agricultural goods did not permit the import of cars or other luxuries (Igué, 1999). After Bénin’s Marxist regime stepped down, successive neoliberal governments made access to import licences easier, lessened foreign exchange controls and eased the distribution of travel permits (David, 1998). These adjustments created an enabling economic environment in which to conduct trade and resulted in a significant expansion of car imports from some ten thousand per annum in the early 1990s to almost a quarter million by the year 2000.80 With this rapid growth came the idea of large profits and windfall gains, and this created a sphere of fortune seeking in the car trade. A veteran Béninese car trader comments on this phenomenon: ‘Before, no-one knew about this place, but then the business became big, with cars everywhere in town, and many traders came here in search for money’. Rumours of the rapidly expanding car trade, locally known as the ‘Cotonou miracle’, abounded during the 1990s, in Bénin and beyond. This had five significant effects on the organisation of the car trade. First, it attracted traders from all walks of life and from all corners of the region. Whereas a handful of traders controlled the early phase of the Euro-West African trade, today thousands of traders roam Cotonou’s car markets. Second, when few traders carried out the trade, car sales were dyadic in nature – involving only buyers and sellers. After the trading community
80 These figures are documented in the following publications: Bio-Sawe (1995), Lejeal (2002) and Perret (2002). Beyond supply 79 expanded, more complex arrangements evolved, involving wholesalers, retailers and their intermediaries. Third, the expansion of car sales led to the creation of several car markets across town. The greater involvement of migrant traders, who became associated with specific markets, resulted in segmentation of the car business in Cotonou along socio-ethnic lines. Fourth, after the needs of Bénin’s limited domestic car market had been met, the car trade became increasingly geared towards serving neighbouring countries – in particular Nigeria. Fifth, the composition of the car fleet traded on the Cotonou markets became more heterogeneous over time. The mid-1990s saw a shift from predominantly French makes to Japanese and German makes; this trend was completed in the late 1990s with the arrival of American cars.81 The 1990s presented a decade of unprecedented growth in the car trade, embedded in changes in the organisation of the Cotonou car market. A slight flattening of the car import rate heralded alterations in the performance of the trade by the year 2001 (see Figure 4.1).
FIGURE 4.1 Monthly car imports (units) in Cotonou: 1996-2002 (trend line added)82
40000
35000
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
Source: Port Autonome de Cotonou, 2003.
81 The disappearance of French cars from West African car markets has been noticed by several periodicals, such as Jeune Afrique, The Courier and West Africa. Cars originating from the US started to surface in Bénin’s official trade statistics from the late 1990s onwards; see INSAE, 2001). My survey conducted among 20 Cotonou car traders suggests that during the period 2000-03 about ten thousand American cars were imported into Cotonou. This figure under-represents their economic contribution to the trade, as they are usually higher priced cars (ranging between €2,000-3,000 each). 82 This graph has been constructed from import data collected by the port of Cotonou (PAC, 2003), based on import tax registration. Though other public statistical sources have been consulted for this research, these figures offer the most comprehensive time series for car imports into Bénin. These imports consist mainly of second-hand cars; none of the data sources consulted for this study shows a proportion (in units) of new cars that exceeds 1%. 80 Cotonou’s Klondike
But this decrease was too insignificant to be readily noticed by the traders themselves. Large quantities of cars still continued to flood the Cotonou market and did not give rise to alarm on the ground. Also, most individual traders could not at first distinguish the structurally decreasing importation from the major temporal fluctuations that mark the arrival of the vehicles. What mattered ultimately more to them was the course of their own sales. And here a landmark change could be observed. Car sellers had over the years grown used to the vagaries of doing business with their predominantly Nigerian clients, but the 2000s saw increasingly irregular visits of a decreasing number of (Nigerian) car buyers – and this caused car sales to drop. This culminated in what came to be known in Cotonou as, in the words of a well-known car trader, ‘the catastrophic year of 2002’. Throughout that year, car sales were almost uninterruptedly low – except for a minor recovery towards the end of the last quarter (see Figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.2 Monthly car sales (units) in Cotonou83
Source: author’s collection of sales receipts.
The drop in car sales had three effects on the functioning of the Cotonou market. First, unsold cars that idly awaited more prosperous times started clogging up the available market space. Most of the traders I talked to during this period indicated
83 This graph summarises information of 2,150 sales receipts collected from 20 informants by two field assistants and myself during a 24-month period. I completed this formal source of data with regular return-visits, during which I kept track of sales through casual conversation with the traders and through close observation of car sales on the Cotonou market. The graph does therefore not present randomly sampled data, thus limiting the scope for inferring statistically informed generalisations, but it coincides with the downswing of the car trade in Cotonou that I noticed from 2001 onwards. Beyond supply 81 that the length of stay of a car on the market increased from a few weeks to a few months, in extreme cases even exceeding half a year. Those fortunate enough to command business contacts outside Cotonou increasingly tried to sell their cars there, but the majority of the traders spent a greater portion of their time negotiating new selling pitches, or securing old ones, at one of the markets. Second, the number of cars seized by the Béninese customs shot up.84 Though the magnitude of the effects resulting from this measure remained limited, its discriminatory consequence created unrest. In particular, sellers who could no longer pay the parking fee to the market authorities seemed to be most seriously affected. Third, in the absence of compensation schemes, provided by the state or otherwise, capital invested in the cars became immobilised. Also, under pressure of the tight market, sellers in need of cash were forced to accept lower prices.85 Either action resulted in a diminished availability of cash and increasingly led to capital scarcity. A well-established trader commented on these dramatic developments as follows: ‘We don’t earn a thing anymore. If this situation carries on, it’ll soon be over for all of us’. Such changes in the performance of the car trade did not go unnoticed. Throughout 2002 much public debate was dedicated to offering an explanation as to why the demand side of the car market showed signs of stagnation. Those stressing Bénin’s dependence on wider politico-economic structures argued that Nigeria’s recent depreciation of its currency made cars from Cotonou expensive. Others maintained that the Nigerian clientele were shunning Cotonou in anticipation of Nigeria’s upcoming federal elections – usually accompanied by havoc at the border.86 Another line of reasoning, emphasising internal explanations for the downswing, pointed to Bénin’s limited competitiveness relative to its surrounding economies.87 Proponents of
84 During the 1990s, the number of cars thus confiscated by customs officers never exceeded a few hundred per year (personal comment, H. Sagbo, customs inspector). This figure increased, however, first to 1,104 in 2000, then reached 2,026 in 2001 and amounted to 3,575 units in 2002; these statistics were generously made available by the Département des Statistiques de la Direction Centrale des Droits Directs et Indirects de la Douane. 85 My data suggests that average prices decreased by 2% - 7% for the majority of second-hand cars sold in Cotonou between 2000 and 2002. These figures are ‘real’ selling prices: Cotonou is a so-called free port, meaning that trade is permitted before customs declaration; shipping costs are usually settled after the sale following a ‘freight payable at destination’ system, which includes an insurance for loss and damage. 86 A well-known Béninese expression, summarising this view, runs: ‘If Nigeria coughs, Bénin falls ill’. 87 Representatives of Cotonou’s trading community mainly voiced these objections - including the newspaper supporting their views, Bénin Espoir (BE); see the ‘other sources’ list on p.176 for a selection of relevant clippings. Their stance is brought out by the following comment: ‘The freight from Europe to Togo and from Europe to Bénin is comparable, but transit costs in Togo 82 Cotonou’s Klondike this perspective argued that, in addition to high official costs (in particular VAT and customs duty), car sellers in Cotonou had to pay supplementary costs – mainly resulting from widespread corruption. Others contended likewise that the packed and messy markets in Cotonou drove the clients away to more favourable places elsewhere in West Africa.88 This confusing array of explanations for the drop in car sales is rooted in an important structural feature of the trade: most car sellers lack well-established contacts with buyers. Car sellers in Cotonou usually try to minimise trade relations with their clientele in order to get a better bargain. This ideology of avoidance has resulted in a market situation wherein less than 5% of the encounters between market parties are repeat business.89The vast majority of the transactions on the Cotonou market are therefore carried out between relative strangers. These shallow contacts, which have developed in the absence of formal market information systems90, appear to be weak channels for gauging the mood of the market. Car sellers therefore experience difficulties in predicting price and sales (demand) fluctuations. Surprisingly, the year 2002 saw little debate in Cotonou as to why changes in the demand for cars were not followed up by a similar drop in supply – a seemingly ‘uneconomic’ response to a changing economic reality. This neglect probably results from the optimism we commonly find among local (economic) actors. For instance, a widespread belief exists on the ground that dealing in second-hand cars leads the way to material prosperity. In the words of an established trader: ‘Car business is good business’. Economic behaviour is thus fuelled by expectations of striking gold one day, rather than by economic calculation of costs and benefits (Beuving, 2004). Similar ideas are found further up the hierarchy as well; the former chief director of the port explains in a newspaper article: ‘The car trade is Bénin’s lifeline for the 21st century’ (Bénin
are lower. That’s why we’re losing out nowadays’ (Mr. M. Badarou, cited in BE, 04 November 2002). 88 Although throughout the fieldwork rumours persisted that car buyers had shifted their activities to car markets in Lomé, my repeated visits to Cotonou’s neighbouring market could not confirm this. This opinion, stressing the lack of market space, was particularly voiced by leading figures in the traders’ syndicates. By propagating the construction of new markets, they seem to have been paying lip service to the car market owners – well established, wealthy businessmen. 89 This figure is drawn from analysis of the sales receipts. The absence of well-established ties between buyers and sellers seems also to result from the proliferation of specialised intermediaries – so called démarcheurs. They put businessmen visiting Cotonou in contact with car sellers and, by deploying different forms of impression management, seek to enhance the distance between market parties. 90 For instance, neither individual traders nor branch organisations have as yet launched advertisement campaigns for second-hand cars in Cotonou. A notable exception was the distribution of the magazine Afrique Auto Moto in 2003, which soon failed due to disappointing sales. Beyond supply 83
Espoir, December 2002).91 These views convinced most traders in Cotonou that sales would eventually resume their normal course, thus disposing of excess cars and bringing in urgently needed cash. This expectation of progress in the car business may of course make one reluctant to leave the car trade altogether and diversify one's business into more profitable economic arenas. One could also temporarily scale down one's car business, limit imports, and await better times. While the first is common practice among car traders – many straddle their car business with other forms of economic activity - the latter option seems hardly practiced. To better understand this peculiar economic behaviour, and thus elucidate the workings of economic principles that govern the Cotonou car market, I shall now turn to a discussion of a prominent category of transnational second-hand car dealers – businessmen from Niger.
NIGERIEN BUSINESSMEN IN THE SECOND-HAND CAR TRADE Nigerien traders nowadays operate on car markets worldwide. Their involvement with the car trade started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when several Nigerien traded cars with European tourists in desert towns close to Niger’s northern border (mainly Agadez and Arlit). The closure of the overland route in the early 1990s because of the Algerian civil war saw an end to this small-scale trade. Some of the traders returned to earlier economic activity, including peddling and money changing, trade in cattle (with Nigeria) and in clothing (Ghana/Togo). Others ventured into the car trade with northern Nigeria. They obtained the vehicles mostly from urban centres further afield and they then sold them across the Nigerian border. Their search for merchandise brought some of the Nigerien traders to the emerging car markets along West Africa’s southern coast – notably to Cotonou. Up until the mid-1990s the Nigerien were thus mainly found as itinerant car traders in the port of Cotonou. This changed in 1997 after the Béninese government issued a market permit to business tycoon Issa Salifou.92 With money made in long- distance transport, this young businessman of mixed Nigerien/Béninese descent created a series of markets in downtown Cotonou, commonly know as ‘ATB’. Soon after these markets came into operation, Nigerien traders withdrew from the port and
91 Consult the ‘other sources’ list on p.176 for a selection of relevant clippings. 92 The controversies surrounding Mr. Salifou’s business success were aired in the course of the television programme, Entre-Nous, on the economic aspects of second-hand car importation into Bénin, ORTB (2002). During the programme, Mr. Salifou tried to debunk allegations made in the popular press suggesting that he had been able to secure access to these car markets as a result of his financial contribution to President Kerekou’s presidential election campaign in 2001. 84 Cotonou’s Klondike started to set up their car business in this particular market, thus reflecting the ethnic base of their enterprise. Their rise to prominence entailed a marked shift in business orientation. Whereas previously Nigerien traders had specialised in the trade up north, they now started buying and selling cars in Cotonou.93 Thus, as resellers, they met with the increasingly stiff competition of earlier established traders, mostly the Yoruba.94 Around this time, some of the more successful Nigerien traders started organising business trips to European car markets. To some extent they worked through their contacts with Nigerien asylum migrants in Europe. However, the small and scattered nature of their overseas migrant community95 did not make a reliable transnational trade hub. In order to deal with the complexities of overseas travel and trade, the Nigerien therefore turned towards another important group of car traders in Cotonou – the Lebanese. Unlike African car traders, Lebanese businessmen control crucial nodes of the Euro-West African commodity chain – notably the shipping of cars and the issuing of invitation letters needed for travel documents. After they had collaborated for some time, the Lebanese then extended their services to offering their (Nigerien) clients accommodation, thus facilitating their stay abroad. As a result, Nigerien car traders have become a common phenomenon on the rue de Heyvaert in downtown Brussels – the heart of the Lebanese shipping enterprise - from where they send cars to West Africa. Nigerien traders have also been operating from the United States. Their presence there dates back probably as far as the great droughts that swept the Sahel during the 1970s. Whereas early Nigerien migrants in the US were an exceptional phenomenon, during the 1990s several thousand of them obtained official US resident permits – probably accompanied by a similar number of unrecorded migrants (USCIS, 2003).96 Lack of precise migration statistics renders their destinations in the US difficult to establish; informed estimates, however, suggest that about two thousand Nigerien arrived in the state of North Carolina during the early 2000s alone (CNNC, 2001). Most of them settled in the urban areas of this state, and in particular in the town of Greensboro. In addition to being the state’s main town, Greensboro is a large industrial centre in this part of the US, offering several thousand jobs. Large manufacturing companies operating here provided an entry to paid labour for the Nigerien migrants.
93 Much of this en route trade occurs in Malanville, northern Bénin and in Dosso, southern Niger. 94 Béninese Yoruba traders established the first car markets outside the port of Cotonou in 1996, called ‘Betrexco’. 95 For recent statistics on (West) African migrants in Western Europe see, for instance, Böcker & Havinga (1998), and Münz (2004). 96 This conjecture is consistent with figures found elsewhere for West African migrants in the United States; see for instance Stoller & McConatha (2001). Beyond supply 85
Those lucky enough to get hold of even temporary factory work saved their salary and eventually applied their savings to the purchase of manufactured goods for shipment back home – including second-hand cars.97 Many of these American migrants returned to West Africa when life for (African) Moslems came under pressure following the 2001 Twin Towers attack. Moreover, the early 2000s showed a more important change among the Nigerien living in Cotonou: the pioneers in the car trade increasingly moved back to Niamey. An aspiring, young trader offered an explanation for this development: ‘The old men don’t stay anymore in Cotonou, they rather spend their time in Niamey’. This remark reflects how the Nigerien, even though they might spend lengthy periods of time elsewhere, remain strongly linked to Niger. Two additional observations support this preference. First, the festivities marking the ending of the Moslem month of fasting (Ramadan) typically entail an exodus from Cotonou of Nigerien wishing to celebrate back home. Second, the Nigerien have a strong preference to bury their dead in Niger: the Moslem cemetery in Cotonou therefore contains surprisingly few Nigerien names.98 The pioneer traders returning to Niger continued to coordinate their affairs in Cotonou. Though some returned to itinerant car trade, they usually tried to develop a form of distant control by sending close kinsmen down to Cotonou. This had a profound impact on the composition of the trading community in Cotonou. Three changes particularly stand out. First, younger traders came to carry out the car trade, with little experience in other forms of trade. Second, though accustomed to travel in West Africa, few of them had direct knowledge of car markets overseas. Third, their preceding occupational backgrounds, mostly involving transportation (lorry and taxi drivers) and domestic work (including house guarding), brought them little surplus cash for setting up their own businesses in Cotonou. These changes in composition have entailed changes in the organisation of Nigerien car trade. Most obviously, whereas formerly capital and management were embodied in one person, nowadays different persons carry out investment decisions and day-to-day business operations. This is usually accompanied by a geographical separation of the pioneers from their successors – a situation that elicits more indirect forms of social interaction between them, such as occasional visits and phone calls. To arrive at a deeper understanding of the way these changes in interaction have influenced the performance of car importation, the next section presents a case study detailing the day-to-day lives of some Nigerien traders in Cotonou.
97 These cars are usually shipped in containers to Antwerp, from where they are transferred to ships sailing to West Africa. 98 This is even more striking in view of the fact that about a quarter of all immigrants in Bénin are from Niger, see MPRE-INSAE (1994). 86 Cotonou’s Klondike
A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIEN CAR TRADERS This section gives an account of the response of a group of Nigerien car traders in Cotonou following the return of one of them, the well-established and renowned trader, Taybou. Close observation of their actions over the space of about one and a half days reveals not only with whom the Nigerien collaborate, and on what basis, but also the dilemmas they face in the car trade. The main figure in the story is Taybou’s eldest son, Hadj Hamidou, a Fulani in his early thirties. Hamidou was born and raised in Niamey, where he worked most of his adult life as a taxi driver. In this capacity he was fairly successful. For instance, while still a teenager he himself managed to arrange a marriage (with a paternal cousin). And not much later, after the birth of their first child, he succeeded in securing housing in an uptown area in Niamey - close by the central market. Around this time Hamidou’s father started frequenting Cotonou, firstly to buy cars for the expanding taxi company. Later he moved into reselling cars in the port. Needing a driver to transport the cars between different markets, he called upon Hamidou who then came down from Niamey. Over the next few years, Hamidou alternated increasingly long stays in Cotonou, where he lodged in simple guesthouses to keep down expenses, with occasional visits to his family in Niamey. Hamidou’s installation in a rented apartment in Cotonou about three years ago coincided with two other important changes in his life. First, he started handling the car sales after his father ventured into European business trips. Second, Hamidou completed a pilgrimage to Mecca – hence the honorific prefix ‘Hadj’ to his name. Although the religious enterprise depleted most of his savings, nonetheless after several fortunate sales late last year Hamidou could afford to buy an inexpensive moped. After a mechanic friend of his fixed the worn-out engine, Hamidou put it into service as a taxi-moto – bringing in a small, but steady, flow of cash to cover day-to-day expenses.
Of friends and family: Hamidou the car trader One Friday afternoon early in 2003, Hamidou looks at me and then heaves a deep sigh while he stares at a virtually desolate car market. We sit alone in his paillote, a plank-and- pole construction, elevated on stilts and roofed with a corrugated iron sheet, and leans listlessly against its railing. The yard surrounding the paillote, about a quarter of an acre in size, is almost fully covered by a few dozen cars neatly parked for display. A few hours still remain before closing time, yet Hamidou has already written off what remains of the day, ‘I’ll stick around ‘till closing time, but I’d rather go home now’, he says. Business has been slack for some time now, but Fridays are especially notorious for poor car sales. With the main prayer completed a few hours ago, and with most of Beyond supply 87 his employees dozing off in the shaded mosque beneath the paillote, Hamidou decides to pay a visit to Soumana Oumarou. This young Hausa, one of Hamidou’s closest friends, had unexpectedly travelled to Niamey a week earlier after the sudden death of his firstborn baby boy. Hamidou had not heard from him since, he tells me, and is anxious to know his whereabouts. While climbing up to his friend’s nearby paillote, Hamidou notices el Hadj Mamani, a middle-aged man with a long, untrimmed beard and wearing a pair of dark glasses. Sprawled in a worn-out car seat, Mamani is busy making a phone call andpaillot thus fails to notice Hamidou’s presence. Both men originate from the same Fulani- speaking village in the south of Niger, and Hamidou quickly picks up on the conversation. Hamidou afterwards explains to me that he heard Mamani talking to his main business partner, a cousin called Alfa, who nowadays lives in the United States. According to Hamidou, the men apparently discussed the purchase of a car for shipping to Cotonou. Mamani tried to dissuade Alfa from accepting a seemingly good bargain - a dark-coloured minivan with mirror glass. Mamani later recounts that from his experience in the States he knows that such vehicles are widely appreciated there; but his brief stay in Cotonou has taught him to stick to plainer cars. Clearly dissatisfied with the outcome of the conversation, Mamani abruptly rings off, stows his mobile phone away and turns up the volume of his pocket radio that is broadcasting Zongo Radio Station.99 ‘Hama’, a familiar voice then comes from below, ‘A salaam Aleikum’. When Hamidou looks down into the paillote’s shadow, he spots a figure leisurely lying on a prayer mat. Once he recognises the contours of his friend Soumana, Hamidou descends and sits down with him on a nearby mat. After they have exchanged pleasantries for a while, Soumana falls silent. Then, without him looking at Hamidou’s face, I can hear Soumana ask in a casual fashion: ‘Did anything special happen here?’ Hamidou, who is clearly aware that this indirect question is driving at the settlement of business he conducted in Soumana’s absence on his behalf, nods affirmatively. While inconspicuously peeking around for possible onlookers, Hamidou stretches out and from under his boubou produces a wad of bank notes. Briefly gesturing toward the yard, Hamidou then says: ‘That is for the clean one, the small Toyota’. I see how he hands over part of the wad, and hear how silence settles between them, only interrupted by the rustling of the notes slipping through Soumana’s fingers while he counts the money.
99 Popular radio channel among Muslims in Cotonou, playing religious songs and sermons, often recorded in large, famous mosques in Arab countries. 88 Cotonou’s Klondike
Halfway through the wad of notes, Hamidou looks around and notices how a new model Mercedes with characteristically blue and white Nigerien licence plates detaches itself from the entrance to the car market, and steadily moves towards them. Hamidou’s expression reveals surprise: with little difficulty he has recognised his father’s car. Without awaiting the result of Soumana’s counting, Hamidou rises to his feet, smoothes his garment and hurries towards his paillote. Moments later the beige Mercedes halts at the edge of the yard. The front door opens, and I see Boubacar – a clean-shaven, young rural relative – get out. He opens the back door of the car and helps an older man alight. Boubacar’s faded garment and patched up shoes contrast sharply with his companion’s outfit. Smartly dressed in an impeccable white boubou, complemented with a matching cap, the man, Hamidou’s father Taybou, is an impressive figure. His right hand routinely fingering a string of prayer beads, he greets his eldest son with a curt nod and climbs up the paillote. While Hamidou stays down below, his father sits down on the only seat available. From here he commands Hamidou’s most veteran employee, his cousin Himou, to fetch several buckets of cleaning water to wash his car. Then he instructs Boubacar to start brewing a kettle of strong tea. The two men reluctantly get up to carry out their tasks, while casting reproachful looks at Hamidou. Next, I see Hamidou that saunters towards an old van where the prayer mats covering the mosque’s floor are stored at night. Parked some distance from the paillote, and equipped with tinted windows, the van provides an ideal spot to make an unseen phone call. Here, Hamidou dials the mobile number of his younger half-brother, Siddo, who lives in Europe, and briefly speaks with him in a low voice. Later, Hamidou explains to me that they discussed the remittance of money in exchange for invitation letters. These letters are skilfully fabricated by Siddo and then sold by Hamidou to West Africans aspiring to make a trip to Europe. Earlier that week, Siddo had promised to send another batch of letters to Cotonou, but Hamidou’s mailbox had thus far remained empty. Hamidou pushes for a clarification from his younger brother, but Siddo instead responds evasively, claiming that he has not yet found the time to send the letters. Their dialogue therefore ends inconclusively, leaving Hamidou irritable: ‘Siddo’s telling stories all the time’, he says, ‘I need these papers to carry out my business here; why doesn’t he follow what I tell him?’ After finishing the phone call, Hamidou walks across the yard towards the mosque, carefully avoiding his father’s inquisitive gaze, and stretches out to await the end of the day. The following morning, not long after dawn, I find Hamidou in a place known among Cotonou traders as ‘Consulvit’. This is one of several fenced areas adjacent to the port where cars are parked shortly after their arrival from overseas. Although originally designated as a spot for distributing cars to the various markets, in Beyond supply 89 day-to-day practice the car trade already starts here. Hamidou has come to this part of the port to receive a shipment. He usually leaves this tedious job, involving a great deal of waiting, to his employees, but today he has decided to join in himself. Seated in the back of an L200 minivan belonging to a trader friend, Hamidou tries to decipher a scrap of paper listing the details of the shipment. He explains to me that, late last night, Taybou had passed it on to him, accompanied by the off-hand remark that the cars due to arrive today should be sold quickly, and for a good price. This remark and the prices Taybou had scribbled on the list have greatly worried Hamidou, for he now faces the problem of refunding his father a considerable sum in the short run. He voices his concern as follows: ‘The market is asleep these days, and, even if the clients show up, they don’t carry along enough money’. Later that day, after Hamidou has received the six cars marked on his list – all expensive models, carrying licence plates from countries across Europe - we return to his house. The car markets are closed at weekends, so there is little chance of finding a buyer in the port today. Because he has no empty parking space around his paillote, Hamidou leaves all the newly arrived cars behind – even though he knows that this involves paying an extra parking fee. Fortunately, the administrator of the Consulvit market grants him a respite of payment so that Hamidou can keep the little cash he still has left from the transaction with Soumana in his pocket. At home, Hamidou confirms with a brief glance at the empty indoor guest room what he had hoped for all day long: his father has already returned to Niamey. Although in good conditions Niamey is about a full day’s drive from Cotonou, based on previous experience Hamidou reckons that his father will come back at some point during the next few days. Nevertheless, his father’s absence provides a convenient delay, enabling him to collect the cash required to fend off the further difficulties with which Taybou will probably confront him, ‘if he gets back here, I’m sure he’ll ask for the money’, Hamidou explains. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, he turns around and leaves the front door. Outside, we see how several men have congregated underneath the leafy tree that casts its shadow over the courtyard. All of them are Nigerien living in the same neighbourhood who have come to pray in the simple mosque situated in the far corner of the yard. Hamidou joins the men; in a few minutes evening prayer will commence, marking the ending of a troublesome day for him.
THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF TRANSNATIONAL CAR TRADE Nigerien car traders operating in Cotonou today face a market in decline with stagnating sales and falling prices. Whereas previously car sales would minimally return running costs, my informants reported that in an increasing number of cases selling 90 Cotonou’s Klondike cars leads nowadays to financial losses. Strikingly, these losses have not resulted in important changes in the way traders carry out the car business. The traders sustain their efforts to source second-hand cars abroad and to market them in Cotonou, which is exemplified by Hamidou’s continued travels to Europe to buy more cars even though selling them at a profit in Cotonou has become increasingly problematic. Information flows appear to play a crucial role in understanding this seeming indifference towards the economics of the car trade. It appeared that in Nigerien business firms information about the conditions of supply and demand are distorted, so that they operate under an exaggerated image of business profitability. This distortion is intricately linked to the social organisation of Nigerien car business as a trade network with personal contacts with friends, relatives and peers functioning as a channel for capital, knowledge of administrative procedures, personnel and market information (Mitchell, 1973; Long, 1979; MacGaffey & Bazenguissa-Ganga, 2000). I will therefore start my analysis of Nigerien business by looking at important organisational elements of this network.
Trade network organisation The Nigerien are footloose; the combination of trade with travel (perhaps trading by travelling is a more apt description) presents a familiar and common practice for them. Itinerant traders provide the linkages in the Nigerien trade network, and the case study indicates that these are mainly arranged as family enterprises. Such enterprises are characterised by relatively stable business relations (forged by kin ties) and by limited exchange of personnel between them. Displacing personnel within enterprises is more common. This is exemplified by Boubacar's relocation: previously working as a guard for Taybou in Niamey he was recently recruited as a driver in Cotonou. Nigerien traders travel mainly between towns that represent the nodes of their trade network. The empirical findings suggest that Niamey is the principal node, or hub. Most of the Nigerien traders spend some time in Niamey prior to their stay in Cotonou; Niamey presents the first point of arrival for returning Nigerien. An important reason for the centrality of Niamey in the trade network is infrastructural: here we find the country's only international airport and, for those using public transport, minibuses travelling further afield. Another reason is social: the Nigerien prefer to attend to family affairs (marriages, funerals) there; think, for instance, of Soumana's journey after his baby boy’s death. A final reason is economic: Nigerien traders sink their surplus capital into the construction of houses. Even affluent Nigerien, such as for instance Taybou, do not buy houses in Cotonou, but rent accommodation instead. The distance from Niamey to other, smaller, nodes in their trade network is considerable. Whereas West African towns can be reached by motorcar, destinations overseas (Europe, US) require air travel. Distance and length of stay seem to be related. Beyond supply 91
While Nigerien traders roaming West Africa's markets may be away from home for a number of months, those staying overseas are usually absent for a longer period of time – typically a number of years. These stays do not usually diminish the Nigerien' involvement in trade. Mamani's telephone call, for instance, makes clear that distance merely changes the way business is carried out – there is a move towards indirect forms of contact: telephone and nowadays the Internet. Geographically spread nodes and the multilateral nature of the linkages point to a tightly integrated trade network. The organisation of the trade in (long-distance) networks therefore limits Nigerien traders’ room for manoeuvre to carry out business between individuals with multi-stranded ties. This is consistent with an important observed quality of Nigerien social life: people do not normally meet by chance. Yet, to explain their actual, day-to-day economic behaviour, we need to delve into the social dynamics of the linkages constituting the Nigerien trade network.
Functioning of business contacts Nigerien traders seldom operate outside the scope of relatives. The Nigerien concept of relatives involves a broad range of kinsmen, giving scope in principle for individuals previously unacquainted to work together. Thus, the more spread out this family network, the larger the area an individual can in principle venture into. Yet, in their daily practice of the car trade, Nigerien enterprises consist mainly of first and second- degree male patrikin. The number of family members thus defined can still be considerable, but usually confines social interaction to intimates with a shared history. In that sense, Nigerien car business is an example of ‘insider trading’. Perhaps as a result of this reduction of potential business partners to smaller groups, kin-based collaboration in Nigerien car trade presents an intensive form of social interaction. Its most visible aspect is the practice of sharing accommodation. Boubacar, for instance, lived with the Amadou family after he moved from the countryside to Niamey. Another example is Hamidou's cousin, Himou, who stayed for a while in Hamidou's place following his coming to Cotonou. Even when relatives do not share accommodation, they tend to commute together to the car markets. Thus, Hamidou and his men drive off together in the morning and return together at the end of the day. Kin-based collaboration in the car trade can easily spill over into other forms of economic activity. This is illustrated by the contact between Hamidou and his younger half-brother, Siddo. A few years ago, Siddo settled in Belgium following a political asylum procedure after his enrolment in the family enterprise brought him into contact with his father’s business partners in Brussels (members of a Lebanese company). Contact between the two half-brothers currently revolves around the sale of 92 Cotonou’s Klondike invitation letters. Such letters are part of European business visa procedures in Cotonou. West African visa applicants, in addition to handing over proof of solvency, are required to present an invitation letter from a EU-based company. Most local businessmen lack the overseas contacts needed to get such letters. Hamidou therefore has an advantageous position on the Cotonou market through his contact with Siddo. The sale of such letters can be a lucrative supplement to revenues from trade. A single letter fetches up to €300; by comparison, three-quarters of the cars traded in Cotonou fetch prices between €1,000 and €3,000. Although the presence of the (extended) family dominates Nigerien enterprise, the case study shows that collaboration is not exclusively confined to kinsmen. Particularly among older traders, business contacts tend also to be organised according to village of origin. The presence of Mamani in Cotonou is a clear case in point. He lived in Greensboro for several years, where he did odd jobs for the local Proctor and Gamble factory. With savings from his salary, Mamani started buying second-hand cars in Greensboro's environs. He first shipped them to distant relatives in Niamey, but after Mamani returned to West Africa, he started handling the car sales himself. Lacking the necessary contacts to obtain a selling pitch in Cotonou, Mamani turned to Taybou, a (former) village friend. Through this contact, Mamani succeeded in negotiating parking space for several cars in exchange for a commission (about €100) per successful transaction. For younger traders in Cotonou, business contacts with peers with whom they have developed a friendship have grown in importance and mark a shift away from the kin-dominated enterprise. These contacts are usually rooted in past social interaction, for instance in a shared occupational background. Soumana and Hamidou present a clear example. Their friendship goes back to Niamey, where they met more than a decade ago. At the time, Soumana worked as a mechanic in the garage servicing Taybou's expanding taxi fleet. Most of the time, Hamidou came in with the broken down cars, awaited their repair, and even provided assistance when needed. The men got along well, and, after Soumana started frequenting Cotonou a few years later, first to buy spare parts, and later to assist a distantly related Nigerien trader, they rekindled their friendship. Contact between peers shapes everyday life in several ways. Most commonly, friends often pray together in a nearby mosque. Also, young men give each other wake- up calls to ensure timely presence at morning prayers. Further, those owning a television set (preferably with a satellite dish) will occasionally organise movie sessions – an important element in their leisure-time repertoire. Commercially, their collaboration is limited to standing in for each other. During Soumana's absence, for instance, Hamidou handled his sales; the reverse occurred when Hamidou was on a trip Beyond supply 93 abroad. The case study shows how in the day-to-day practice of the car trade this form of collaboration is surrounded by secrecy. Hamidou and Soumana carefully tried to conceal that money was passing between them. To understand the secretive nature of these social contacts it is needed to uncover the cultural elements associated with it, in particular the way conformism come into play in day-to-day life.
Culture of conformism Kinship among the Nigerien is hierarchically organised. Social relations within generations are mainly structured by age; between generations they are shaped by genealogical distance. Thus, an older brother exercises in principle control over his younger siblings, and fathers have a say over their sons. This hierarchy has a strong authoritarian flavour, illustrated by the list of instructions that Taybou leaves to his son Hamidou. Further, Nigerien traders in Cotonou do not as a rule (publicly) contest the judgement of a person of superior rank. Hamidou explains: 'I cannot talk to my father freely; he has to see with his own eyes what goes around here - even if I disagree'. The case study suggests further that the Nigerien usually respond to hierarchy and authority in a conformist manner. Hamidou, for instance, is pessimistic about the prospects of selling their cars in the short run, yet he follows his father's instructions and handles the shipment in the port. His European stay should also be seen in this light. To some extent, this response is a function of the closed nature of Nigerien society that makes it difficult to evade specific persons. The fact that the Nigerien live and travel together is reinforced by their propensity to pray collectively. Though most Nigerien men prefer to pray at the large mosque in the centre of Cotonou on feast days, day-to-day prayer is usually carried out in a nearby mosque. After prayer is finished, the men tend to hang around the mosque. Spending time together is thus not limited to their free time, usually evenings and weekends, but can also occur during the idle moments marking life in the car market. In this fashion, the Nigerien tend to spend their leisure time and working hours with the same set of social contacts. This conformism appears further related to the proximity of social superiors, as voiced by Himou’s following remark: ‘Hamidou never allows me do work for myself, he always has his eyes on me’. The return of the pioneer traders to Niger therefore changed the way authoritarian control is exercised in Cotonou in two ways. First, the Nigerien pioneers developed a habit to come to Cotonou without giving notice. Hamidou’s response to his father’s appearance at a time when he least expects this (a quiet Friday afternoon) shows how this practice of control sends waves of anxiety through the trade network. Second, the absence of the pioneers, though erratic, created some room for younger traders to develop their own economic activities with their preferred set of business contacts; yet, due to the high capital requirements of the car 94 Cotonou’s Klondike trade, most of them had to seek opportunities in other, less cash-demanding, economic sectors. In so doing, these younger traders follow a pre-established pattern of embedding trade into other economic activity. For instance, the Nigerien pioneers started their business with money made outside Cotonou, including profits from West African cattle trade (Taybou) and savings from wage labour (Mamani). This embedding practice creates the possibility to transfer capital between different economic activities, depending on their respective performance. In the case of the Nigerien in Cotonou, this created room to a specific form of social manoeuvring. Hamidou’s behaviour presents a clear example. Though he is well aware of how slack the Cotonou market has been for some time, he does not share his concerns with Taybou. Rather, he uses money made outside their car business (notably visa mediation and selling cars for Soumana) to compensate for losses incurred in their car trade. Thus, Taybou is presented with an exaggerated image of the profitability of their commercial activities and, accordingly, instructs Hamidou to continue purchasing cars on Europe’s car markets. Hamidou’s complaint at the beginning of this chapter gives a clue as to why young Nigerien traders are so keen to mask their losses: their actions are informed by a strong desire to live up to their (older) relatives’ expectations. This conformism started to act upon the car business following the (recent) geographical separation of capital (Taybou) and day-to-day management (Hamidou). It introduced a new phenomenon: the necessity to exchange (market) information between business partners. The case study aims to show how this exchange is at odds with the propensity of the Nigerien to withhold displeasing news from their social superiors. In this fashion, the Nigerien undermine their prospects for profitable business. Rather than flexibly adapting their trade to changing market conditions, the absence of trust between them generates inflexible business contacts. This characteristic contributes to the uncertainties of commercial enterprise, because stagnating sales and dropping profits then easily come as an unpleasant surprise.
EXPECTATIONS IN ECONOMIC DECISION-MAKING The preceding pages showed that the way Nigerien businessmen have come to operate their car trade reflects a form of economic decision-making that is difficult to reconcile with current academic literature on the working of firms. To bring out a few points of divergence, I will briefly review this literature by successively discussing two noted contributions: the commodity chain perspective and the behavioural theory of the firm. Both approaches draw attention to the way institutional factors shape the organisation Beyond supply 95 and performance of commercial firms. However, they tend to emphasise the significance of goals in directing economic decision-making, which appears problematic in the light of this study. Reasoning in terms of goals is useful to appreciate the stated motivations of second-hand car traders, yet observing their actual behaviour uncovered that a cultural factor - conformist response to hierarchy and authority – shapes their business organisation. In seeking to accommodate this important finding, my argument therefore builds on a sociocultural perspective, focusing on the role played by expectations in economic decision-making. The second-hand car trade is characterised by a marked division of labour, separating, on the one hand, day-to-day management from investment, and, on the other, the sourcing of second-hand cars overseas from their retail in West Africa. It thus seems to integrate different forms of economic activity in a commodity chain - with capital, knowledge of administrative procedures, personnel and market information flowing from one end to another (Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994: 4; see also Schmitz & Knorringa, 2000, and Henderson et al, 2002). In this perspective value extraction, promoted by innovation and competition, is thought to drive economic exchange, placing a larger volume of surplus value, or profit, into fewer hands as it travels along the commodity chain (Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1994). In Hamidou’s case, however, quite the opposite appears to happen: while representing the next link in the chain, he is not successful in structurally drawing a profit from the car trade and ultimately becomes dependent on other economic activity. This is not an isolated incident; the dissipation of capital between sourcing and retail is indeed common for the Cotonou car trading community at large. I argue therefore that a focus on value is not the proper way to understand the nature of economic transactions in the second-hand car business. The strained social relations that shimmer through a facade of family solidarity that we witnessed in the incident with Hamidou (his references to ‘we’ and ‘our’) suggest focusing on intra-enterprise dynamics. This topic is addressed by the behavioural theory of the firm, which views enterprises as a ‘coalition of individuals whose interest conflict from time to time’ (Cyert & March, 1963). From this perspective follows that firm performance results from a complex bargaining process over a multiplicity of objectives – of which profit maximisation may be just one. Key to understanding bargaining within the firm involves a number of institutional factors, with information search being the most important. Search activity occurs when information is needed to define a new range of business possibilities, and the order in which the environment is searched determines the nature of decision-making (March & Simon, 1994). Furthermore, particularly in complex, information-rich business environments, decision-makers appear to follow a strategy of satisficing; that is, they look 96 Cotonou’s Klondike for a course of action ‘that is satisfactory or “good enough”’(Simon, 1994: xxix). It does not mean that information search is a power-devoid process. Information may constitute a very strategic resource, and, especially in hierarchical situations, individuals may therefore develop a clear interest in not transmitting information at all, or in passing it onto others in a distorted form (Kornai, 1992). Hamidou’s case however shows that, though he follows a strategy of information handling that results in distorted information flows, it is ultimately not beneficial, not for him, nor for his father.100 The behavioural theory of the firm has opened up a rich academic debate on the nature of organizational decision-making of enterprises, stressing the central role of information therein. In doing so, it builds on an academic tradition that leaves room for institutional diversity and the possibility of a variety of outcomes in processes of change. However, while recognising the influence of non-economic factors for the determination of economic behaviour, it does not include cultural factors in its analysis of economic behaviour.101 With this chapter I claim that the way car traders run their businesses is shaped by culturally determined expectations regarding people in authority that shapes day-to-day social interaction. This observation closely follows the work of the British economist J.M. Keynes who argued that ‘Investment is less a matter of rational calculation than of “animal spirits”’ (Keynes, 1936: 145). The quotation indicates that impulses shaped by intuitive judgement of uncertain situations play a prominent role in investment decisions (Skidelsky, 2004). In the case of Nigerien traders it means that investment in the second-hand car trade is directed by a belief of profitability in car business that is no longer grounded in observable facts. This belief surfaced in a situation of organisational change: the recent exit from Cotonou of the Nigerien pioneers in the car trade coincided with their succession by capital-poor junior kinsmen as day-to-day overseers of the business. It geographically separated investment and management and therefore introduced the necessity to exchange crucial information between business partners. However, this chapter has tried to show that information is distorted as it travels through the second-hand car trading firms. While the traders show a distinct concern to live up to the ideal of family solidarity, their social contacts are characterised by conflict avoidance and a tendency to conceal displeasing news from social superiors. This results in a situation wherein junior traders
100 It is important to stress the collective nature of this detrimental outcome, because, as Sen pointed out, the objective of economic decision-making needs not be strictly egocentric: ‘choice may reflect a compromise among a variety of considerations, of which individual self-interest may be just one’, see Sen (1967). 101 My analysis builds in that regard on current critiques on behavioural theories of the firm, such as voiced by Felin & Foss (forthcoming 2006) and Dequench (2003). Beyond supply 97 compensate losses in the car-trading firm with money made outside the car business, which blurs the possibility for senior traders to properly assess the firm’s profitability. Car traders in Cotonou thus operate under a self-denying prophecy of conformism: in seeking to live up to other people’s expectations, they create a false impression of commercial success. This principle prevails more economic considerations of trade: it leads to directing capital into unprofitable avenues, ultimately resulting in failed business. In conclusion, my analysis underscores the importance of kinship and ethnicity in running business in West Africa. Family and other descent groups are a cornerstone in the social organisation of firms, yet to understand their effects on intra- firm dynamics requires continued attention for its associated cultural elements. 98 Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 5 Lebanese trader Khaled with Béninese employee Mathieu. Strangers and immigrant traders 99
CHAPTER 5
STRANGERS AND IMMIGRANT TRADERS: RUNNING MULTIPLE ENTERPRISE OVERSEAS102
‘Listen’, my friend Ahmad, a stout Lebanese second-hand car trader in his early forties, says to me one Saturday night in 2003 while he gently wraps his arm around Aisha, a young and attractive West African girl, ‘Life is nice around here, don’t you agree?’103 We sit in the basement of the Sheraton hotel in Cotonou, capital of Bénin, which has recently been transformed into a popular karaoke bar. The other people in the bar, a mixture of local and foreign faces, are seated in luxurious chairs scattered across the basement floor, mostly engaged in animated conversation. Ahmad looks about him, and I see how he spots several familiar faces among them, mainly fellow car traders. While Ahmad reaches out for a bottle of Black Label on a nearby table and fixes a drink for Mathieu, a young West African man sitting next to him, he adds: ‘Here in this Cotonou, I’m at home, and look how I’m free to do what I want.’ Meanwhile, the thumping music has stirred up quite a crowd and, seconds later, Aisha gets up, holds out a hand towards Ahmad and swiftly disappears with him onto the dance floor. Ahmad’s night out at the Sheraton brings out the central theme of this chapter: the presence of Lebanese immigrant trading communities in urban West Africa today. The study is situated in Cotonou, a West African port town that witnessed the rapid emergence of a large-scale trade in second-hand cars from Western Europe during the 1990s.104 The second-hand car trade in Bénin provides an interesting setting to further our understanding of Lebanese traders in West Africa for the following three reasons. Firstly, it presents an economic domain wherein Lebanese traders operate alongside their West African counterparts on a daily basis. Secondly, the car trade has attracted different types of Lebanese businessmen. Building on a long settlement history in the region, some of the Lebanese were already working in Cotonou and
102 A modified version of this chapter will be published as: Beuving, J. J. Forthcoming. ‘Lebanese traders in Cotonou: a sociocultural analysis of economic mobility and capital accumulation’, Journal of the International African Institute (Africa). An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the European Conference of African Studies, organised by the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (2005). 103 Most of my conversations were carried out in French; this and following quotes were later translated by myself. 104 Trade statistics show an increase in the number of imported second-hand European cars from a few thousand per year in the mid-1980s to about 200,000 by the year 2000 (Beuving, 2004). 100 Cotonou’s Klondike merely changed trades, while others migrated from Lebanon to Cotonou specifically to set up a second-hand car business. Thirdly, the Lebanese in the West African car trade typically exhibit complicated patterns of economic mobility, characterised by fluctuating business revenues, multiple economic activity, and mixed Lebano-African business networks. An abundance of literature debates historical patterns of Lebanese migration and capital accumulation in Africa105, yet far less is known about contemporary Lebanese (migrant) trading communities in urban West Africa. The available academic writing on this topic usually stresses the ‘strangeness’ of the Lebanese by portraying them as a special grouping in West African society. Two lines of thought have been developed to support this view. On the one hand, some authors have stressed the isolation of the Lebanese from wider African society. Bierwirth, for instance, argues for the Ivory Coast that ‘Lebanese (…) contacts with indigenous peoples are limited to the workplace, where they deal with Africans only as employees and customers’ (1999: 95). Others have proposed viewing the Lebanese as a business elite, which seeks patronage from African polity to safeguard control of trade resources (Boone, 1994; Boumedouha, 1990). In stressing the purposiveness of social relations with members of the African host society, both views thus adopt a ‘trader as stranger’ perspective.106 The capacity to act instrumentally towards the outer world is an important factor in this perspective, explaining the so-called business acumen of certain groups of migrant traders107 chiefly because it removes them from social obligations that may lead to disaccumulation and immobilisation of capital (Portes, 1995: 14). However, as Marina Rais perceptively points out, not all Lebanese traders appear equally able to develop profitable businesses: ‘because of their image as successful entrepreneurs it is consistently overlooked in the literature that an unknown number of them did not make it and returned to Lebanon’ (1988: 6). This suggests a more complicated connection between, on the one hand, the way that Lebanese traders relate to African society and, on the other, the performance of their businesses. Hence the objective of this chapter: to re-address the determining factors of Lebanese migrant enterprise in the context of the second-hand car trade in Bénin.
105 Rais (1988) offers an exhaustive bibliographic reference list, which I will therefore not repeat here. 106 This perspective is associated with the work of Georg Simmel, who noticed that ‘Throughout the history of economics the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger’ (Wolf, 1964: 403). 107 The capacity of particular groupings to run profitable business has been observed elsewhere, for instance the Bamileke of Cameroon (Warnier, 1995) or the Otovalo Indians of Ecuador (Kyle, 1999). Strangers and immigrant traders 101
Lebanese traders in West Africa are organised into distinct migrant communities, which are open social entities: its members maintain contacts with other migrant communities, and with the West African society wherein they reside. For most Lebanese traders this means that they interact in their day-to-day lives with a multiplicity of social contacts, comprising marked differences in social class, ethnicity and religious cosmology. It is therefore analytically difficult to establish an a priori relation between the structure of Lebanese social contacts and the working of their businesses. To understand how Lebanese traders handle their business network, this chapter therefore seeks to develop an understanding of Lebanese social contacts ‘from within’. In doing so, the chapter adopts an anthropological perspective that apprehends patterns of social interaction as dynamic arrangements of power and prestige, embedded in concrete, ongoing sets of personal relations, with kinsmen but also including friends (Granovetter, 1985; Schweizer 1997). In this perspective, ample attention is paid to the concrete social situations in which particular relationships emerge, with a view to uncovering the way traders simultaneously coordinate and regulate different economic, political and other social roles (Cohen, 1969: 71-97). The resulting insight into the traders’ social universe, in turn, enables us to understand how they establish a network of personal relations which functions as a channel for resource mobilisation (including learning) and capital accumulation108. In order to understand how Lebanese traders in Cotonou incorporate different social relations into their enterprises, it is first necessary to appreciate the broader organisational pattern of the Lebanese second-hand car business. A description of their main trading practices shows that they have developed an advanced form of vertical business integration that links European to West African car markets and ties traders, shipping companies, cars and bureaucratic procedures into complex chains of relations. It furthermore reveals that Lebanese traders carry out their trade in connection with other, often older, economic activity; their professional lives show a pattern of combining or switching among various economic activities or occupations. This reflects a form of business organisation called a ‘multiple enterprise’: the simultaneous participation of individuals in more than one branch of economic activity (Long, 1977: 123). An important consequence thereof is that changes in economic careers coincide with changes in the network of business contacts. To understand the direction that an enterprise takes, an appreciation is therefore needed of the history of business contacts. In order to illuminate this second essential point, this chapter
108 There is nowadays an abundance of literature in support of this view, which was developed by social anthropologists in the 1970s (see in particular Boissevain, 1974, Kapferer, 1972, and Long, 1979). 102 Cotonou’s Klondike reconstructs in detail the career of an ordinary Lebanese entrepreneur, car trader Ahmad Tannir. This career history draws from about a hundred conversations with two dozen individuals in Cotonou, involving both Lebanese and West Africans, carried out during fifteen months of fieldwork in West Africa between June 2000 and December 2003. Moreover, to reconstruct Ahmad’s career I collected the life histories of several key persons in his business network, complemented with direct observations of their everyday lives in Cotonou. With this narrative of Ahmad’s professional career, I do not claim statistical representativeness from data sampled on a probability basis. Detailed study of one career, however, helps to uncover broader processes of capital accumulation and economic mobility. It therefore allows comparison with other immigrant traders operating in situations characterised by similar or contrasting parameters (Mitchell, 1983). Thirdly, analysis of the career history reveals that Lebanese traders in Cotonou do not generally cultivate their contacts. The social dynamics of their business networks cannot therefore be reduced to a building up of interpersonal trust109, and viewing Lebanese traders as investors in the ‘social capital’ of their business relations is not the proper way to understand their actions.110 This chapter will instead show how the Lebanese operating the second-hand car trade demonstrate a more impulsive form of social relations management. Close study of the case material reveals that it presents a form of contact mobilisation which is informed by an important cultural factor, aptly voiced by Ahmad in the beginning of this chapter: the wish to enjoy life.
LEBANESE TRADERS IN THE WEST AFRICAN SECOND-HAND CAR TRADE Before embarking on the study of Lebanese car traders in Cotonou, we must first establish the dimensions of the Lebanese community there. A word of warning beforehand. It should be realised that people denominated in West African popular language as ‘Lebanese’ appear on closer scrutiny to be a mixture of Arabic speaking peoples of the Mediterranean, in particular, Moslem and Christian Arabs of the Levant (Jordan, Syria and Lebanon). This conceptual obscurity is also observed in official migration statistics: whereas Béninese migration authorities keep impressive lists of migrants’ origins, Arab speaking migrants are usually grouped under the little revealing
109 Attributing primacy to the development of trust relations is a stance widely adopted in studies of migrant traders; see for recent examples Portes (1995), Stoller & McConatha (2001) or Diouf (2000). 110 For similar criticisms see Putzel (1997), Fine (1999) and Johnston & Percy-Smith (2003). Strangers and immigrant traders 103 heading ‘reste du monde’.111 The largely unrecorded nature of Lebanese commercial enterprise further limits more precise assessments of their achievements. Lebanese spokesmen report that, in the late 1970s, about 175 Lebanese were registered as resident in Bénin (pers. comm. Lebanese World Cultural Union [LWCU], 2004). Most of them appear to have been descendents of Christian Maronite families112 who had settled in this part of West Africa during the late 19th century (David, 1998; van der Laan, 1992). Their numbers increased steadily, reaching 300 in the 1980s (Rais, 1988: 4) and 400 by the early 1990s (Igué & Soulé, 1992). The arrival of significant numbers of Sunni Moslem traders around that time, followed by a similar influx of their Shi’a Moslem countrymen a few years later, saw the Lebanese population expand to about 2,500 individuals (pers. comm. LWCU 2004). These demographic figures are quite mundane (less than 0.5 per thousand of Bénin’s population) compared to nearby countries113, yet the limited size of the Lebanese population in Bénin should not be confounded with their significance in Béninese economic life. As elsewhere in West African cities, even the casual visitor roaming the streets of Cotonou is bound to encounter Lebanese men. The more careful observer will regularly see Lebanese keeping shops (mainly groceries, warehouses and supermarkets), running restaurants, managing hotels and operating small manufacturing industries. The densest concentration of Lebanese, however, is found when one walks across one of Cotonou’s numerous car markets. Leisurely sprawled in old car seats marking their selling pitches, or rushing across the market with their briefcases firmly pressed against their chests, or restlessly pacing up and down while telephoning, often coaxing a giggly reaction out of their African auditors close by, these Lebanese traders easily catch the eye. About half of them are Sunni Moslems, they are well established in the car trade, and it is to this specific group of traders that I will further dedicate my attention in this chapter. Their commercial organisation appears to fall into the following two elements. Firstly, the Lebanese have become prominent economic agents on the Cotonou car market today through their numerical prevalence.114 This is most clearly
111 The population census administered in 1992 by the Béninese government (République du Bénin, 1994) gives a figure of 1.6% for this category. Although a third population census was carried out in 2002, its results have unfortunately not yet been made public at time of writing. 112 Maronites is the name of Lebanon’s largest Christian grouping and is an Eastern Catholic Church denomination. 113 By way of comparison, Bierwirth (1999: 85), for instance, estimates the Lebanese immigrant population in Ivory Coast at around 70,000 during the 1990s; Boumedouha (1990: 546) reports a figure of about 30,000 Lebanese in Senegal by the late 1980s; and sources for Nigeria suggest 40,000 to 50,000 persons (Falola, 1990). 114 What little statistical evidence there is on the size of the Lebanese (car) trading community in Cotonou supports this impression. Perret, for instance, found that from all the trading companies registered at the Trade Ministry about one fifth were directed by Lebanese (2002: 39). Although 104 Cotonou’s Klondike noticeable in the widespread practice of import-licence sharing. Veteran Lebanese traders, in particular, hire out these expensive licences115, which are a mandatory requirement for traders to import second-hand cars into Cotonou, and this practice enables West African and Lebanese novice traders lacking sufficient cash to venture into car importation. Furthermore, Lebanese traders have come to control the wholesale second-hand car trade in Cotonou.116 This Lebanese predominance led to envy, particularly among veteran West African traders: ‘They have taken our jobs’, a well-established trader voices the local view of Lebanese as successful businessmen. ‘The Lebanese rule us now! Each vessel is filled with their cars. Our business is big for us, but it means nothing to them’. Nonetheless, large groups of novice African car traders, eager to enter the business but lacking overseas contacts for car importation, increasingly source their cars from Lebanese wholesalers. This trade practice starts immediately on arrival of the second-hand cars by boat in the port of Cotonou where it is common to see African traders crowd round their Lebanese colleagues, looking for a good bargain. Secondly, Lebanese traders integrate crucial nodes of the Euro-West African commodity chain. In addition to the car trade itself, the Lebanese are particularly active in the fields of transport, handling and money transfer. Large European shipping companies owned most of the vessels that brought the second-hand cars to their West African destinations in the 1990s117. This changed when the Lebanese businessman, Abou Mehri, started sailing reefer ships from Antwerp to the West African coast in 1997, followed in 2000 by a similar endeavour by the Tunisian-Cypriot company, ACLN. The Lebanese involvement with shipping is, however, much older, namely, this figure corresponds with the proportion of Lebanese companies registered at the chamber of commerce under the entry ‘Véhicules d’occasion’ (Chambre de Commerce, 2002), the reluctance to adhere to administrative procedures widely found among Lebanese car traders should cast doubt on this figure. Too often I heard remarks such as ‘We Arabs, we don’t like paperwork’, or ‘We avoid the bureaucrats as much as we can’ to give much credibility to official registers. The survey that I administered to alleviate some of this doubt reveals that approximately two thirds of the about 750 trading companies actually present on the Cotonou car market display Arabic names. 115 The annual cost of an import licence equals approximately the purchase price of two second- hand cars, an amount of money that is out of most smaller car trader’s reach. 116 Large Lebanese importers import up to a hundred cars per month; and at the height of the car ‘boom’ in Cotonou around the year 2000 even smaller Lebanese traders still imported a few dozen cars per month – substantially more than most African car traders realise. These results follow from analysis of 2,315 sales receipts, collected in a survey carried out among twenty-five car traders in Cotonou, including ten Lebanese. I complemented this formal database by regular return visits, during which I kept track of sales through casual conversation with the traders and through direct observation of car sales. 117 For instance, the Italian shipping company, Grimaldi, operated the specialised car-carrying ships that arrived in West Africa during the late 1980s. In 1993 the Norwegian shipper Höegh- Ugland Auto Liners (Hual) stepped in, followed in 1995 by the British shipper, OT African Line. Strangers and immigrant traders 105 through Lebanese businessmen acting as shipbrokers - agents specialising in booking idle cargo space. Mostly operating from downtown Brussels, but also found in other European capital cities, these agents at first only dealt with shipping procedures – their profit margin a function of prevailing shipping prices. Later they also began to undertake the transportation of second-hand cars from markets and other outlets to the European ports of departure. Lebanese business contacts thus developed into the organisational base for a significant part of the Euro-West African transport chain. Their contacts also function as channels for money flows. In its simplest form, this consists of a Lebanese trader travelling to a business partner, carrying cash on him. It is a common practice, but a risky one: in Cotonou, stories abound of money couriers being robbed by highwaymen.118 Some of these networks specialised and became money transfer agencies, especially after the introduction of the mobile phone in West Africa, and operate today mainly on a ‘transfer-by-phone’ basis. For the car business, this creates temporary cash surpluses at the West African trade hubs, and so some of the agencies use this cash to issue loans to needy traders, mostly Lebanese. West Africans gain access to this credit system through their personal relations with Lebanese traders. Thus far I have tried to show that Lebanese traders are encountered at most points in the Euro-West African second-hand car trading network. In Cotonou, Lebanese traders are found in most car markets, and their numbers have increased with the expansion of the car trade there. Lebanese traders interact with their West African colleagues minimally through sharing import licences, retailing second-hand cars and issuing credit. To better appreciate the social dynamics of such Lebano-African business relations, the next section examines in detail the economic career of a particular Lebanese trader, Ahmad. The empirical material collected during the fieldwork is organised in a narrative of Ahmad’s professional history, with occasional descriptive asides about individuals connected to him. Careful review of this history shows five distinct episodes, entailing specific sets of (personal) contacts, different places of residence and various modes of economic activity. They are discussed in greater detail below.
118 Local newspapers such as La Nation and Le Matinal offer weekly stories of such ‘coupeurs de route’, in rare cases resulting in a shoot-out. 106 Cotonou’s Klondike
MULTIPLE ENTERPRISE IN COTONOU: THE CASE OF AHMAD
Early days in Beirut, 1962-1987 Ahmad Tannir was born in 1962 into an impoverished Sunni Moslem merchant family of eleven. Both his father and mother originate from Beirut and they lived there after their marriage in the 1950s. Ahmad’s father, Afif, was a local salesman, specialising in dairy products, and he had just purchased land in a suburb of Beirut when he died unexpectedly in 1971. After his death, the family was at first divided among Afif’s family, but a few years later Ahmad and his brother Abu-Zeid, who was five year’s older, moved in with their elder sister Jinan and her newly-wed husband Ali Hijazi in their downtown apartment (for these and other kinship properties, see Figure 5.1). Although Ahmad lived in Ali Hijazi’s house for a number of years, he had little contact with his older brother-in-law during this time. Being the eldest son of a well-established textile trader in Cotonou, Ali Hijazi spent most of his time overseas. The textile trade prospered, and Abu-Zeid, at the age of eighteen, was sent to live with him, leaving Ahmad to fend for himself.
FIGURE 5.1 Concise genealogy of the Tannir family
During these turbulent years Ahmad went to school from time to time, but after his mother’s death in 1980 ended her family’s financial support, he dropped out. Without a trade or sustenance, Ahmad was quickly recruited by Moslem militia and fought for about a year in war-stricken Beirut. Although the militiamen usually received little in the way of military pay, they usually made up for it through different sorts of petty trade. In Ahmad’s case, he ventured into the profitable business of selling chocolate bars among his fellow combatants. Building on cash left from his father’s estate, Ahmad succeeded in gathering sufficient capital to marry his distant relative, Fatina Naja, later that year Strangers and immigrant traders 107
(1982). Photographs taken at the wedding reveal Ahmad’s sorry economic state at the time: we see a simply dressed couple flanked by a handful guests in a battered building. The photographs also show the presence of only a few family members: war and destitution had scattered them. A shrapnel injury prematurely ended Ahmad’s military career. With the little money that remained after the wedding, he tried to reactivate Afif’s former dairy trade. For that, Ahmad managed to borrow Hijazi’s younger brother’s run-down lorry and started to visit his father’s former business contacts in the environs of Beirut. His army contacts allowed him to get swiftly passed the roadblocks that controlled the traffic to and from the besieged inner city. With Fatina keeping shop at the Hijazi’s, Ahmad succeeded in ensuring a steady flow of dairy produce – mostly fresh milk. Retailing the milk proved more complicated. With their clientele fluctuating, and in the absence of a stable power supply to refrigerate the perishable produce, their business soon slowed down. In response to the Hijazi’s objections about the space needed to operate the dairy, in mid-1986 the couple prepared to settle elsewhere. Hijazi’s request for assistance following the return of Abu-Zeid from West Africa later that year drastically changed Ahmad’s outlook. Leaving Fatina in the care of her parents, he then packed and mustered on a cargo ship travelling to West Africa in early 1987.
First stay abroad: Cotonou and Delta state, 1987-1992 Until the late 1980s/early 1990s when Ibo traders took over the textile trade, Hijazi’s enterprise prospered. Hijazi had been one of the first Sunni Moslem traders to challenge the commercial hegemony of much earlier established Christian Lebanese merchant houses of Bénin.119 By the time Ahmad arrived in Cotonou, Hijazi, having peddled textiles and cloth for some time, had secured a market stall at a prominent place in Cotonou’s Misèboh street market. Though Hijazi had rented a spacious house near Cotonou’s international airport, Ahmad moved in with his nephew Mohammed Kabbani – also a textile trader. Their living together proved important for Ahmad’s training as a trader: while he operated Hijazi’s stall during the day, after work the two men discussed the tricks of the West African textile trade. Around the same time, and encouraged by some of Mohammed’s friends, Ahmad started spending his leisure time at El Dordado, a prominent beach club in Cotonou. Young Lebanese men consider this a popular place for socialising, and there they practice outdoor sports, drink and meet with African girls. Ahmad quickly developed a taste for this; so that, despite his limited housing expenses, his profit from the textile business could barely keep up with his new spending habit.
119 Well-known examples include Azar-textiles, the Dorr compagnie, and Fadi-Wehe. 108 Cotonou’s Klondike
The year 1988 marked an important shift in Ahmad’s economic career. Early that year, his father-in-law, Abu Naja, invited him over to Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta state. Abu Naja had for a long time been working for a small subcontracting company specialising in oil pipeline maintenance, and had recently been promoted to workshop manager. In his new capacity, Abu Naja controlled the recruitment of new personnel. Abu Naja had fathered four daughters but no sons, and he wanted a close male relative nearby to handle the workshop’s day-to-day activities. In addition, Abu Naja favoured the newcomer Ahmad for the (prestigious) job, because he had come to know him as a more enterprising young man than the more experienced Mohammed, who had nonetheless seen his textile trade declining. Ahmad’s departure greatly upset Mohammed, who commented scornfully: ‘My brother, he does as he pleases, he thinks he’s become big already’. The division that arose between them determined their social relations for the next few years, and hence would have a profound effect on the course of Ahmad’s professional life. Ahmad’s new job was much to his liking. Pictures from his Nigerian stay show air-conditioned offices, chauffeur-driven cars, and whitewashed, spacious accommodation. Like other Lebanese accounts of this period, Ahmad’s story about his Nigerian years is imbued with melancholy. What is more, he received a fixed salary per month. And although with Abu Naja around Ahmad was required to regularly transfer a substantial sum to his wife in Lebanon, still a significant amount was left to finance a luxurious personal life. During these days Ahmad further learned to speak Pidgin English (and some Yoruba) by dealing on a day-to-day basis with Nigerian employees. Ahmad’s training in negotiating with West African officialdom took shape after he increasingly came to stand in for Abu Naja, whose health deteriorated following a series of illnesses early in 1990. In 1992 Abu Naja was consequently forced to resign, so that he could no longer renew Ahmad’s contract. As Ahmad’s attempts to apply for jobs in Nigeria failed, he then returned to Cotonou. His re-establishment there turned out to be difficult, though. Whereas Hijazi’s textile company had proved more robust than Kabbani’s, under pressure of increased competition Hijazi’s company had gone downhill as well, until bankruptcy seemed imminent. Hijazi then quickly sold the remaining textiles, closed the market stall and left the country soon after, leaving Ahmad little choice but to join him.
Return to Beirut, 1992-1995 Ahmad’s return to Beirut coincided with Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction. Following peace negotiations in 1990/1, money started pouring into the country from Lebanese communities worldwide, reviving the national economy and boosting commerce. The relative abundance of money and unprecedented optimism are therefore the Strangers and immigrant traders 109 background to Ahmad’s next few years in Beirut. Again working through his family contacts, Ahmad started to run his older brother’s (Mahmoud) grocery store. Mahmoud had migrated to Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a cleaner and occasionally sent back some money. Abu-Zeid had operated the store single-handedly during the years preceding Ahmad’s return, and now the brothers worked the store together for some time. Their collaboration became successful following expansion of the shop after they started retailing luxury goods - particularly chocolate bars. It ended in 1993 as a consequence of two significant events: first, Mohammed persuaded Abu-Zeid to return to West Africa, and, second, Ahmad’s wife Fatina gave birth to their first child, a daughter. After his textile business had failed, and lacking business contacts in Nigeria, Mohammed had stayed in Cotonou, restlessly seeking an alternative trade. Through his frequent visits to El Dorado he learned that the well-known Yoruba cotton-exporter, El Hadj Séfou, had plans to open a market downtown specialising in the sale of second-hand cars. Until the early 1990s, the second-hand car trade in Cotonou was an inconspicuous business, dominated mainly by Yoruba ambulant traders. Some of them still remember how their fellow traders loathed their trade, ‘We stayed in the open air all day, the work made us dirty, and on our way home they mocked us’. As nobody desired a repetition of this sentiment, the creation of a properly equipped market quickly proved successful; most veteran traders started to settle there, but it soon attracted novice businessmen as well. It also contributed to this market’s success that Séfou did not demand collateral from car traders, but levied a commission on car sales instead – thus limiting the capital requirements for the trade. Further, the commercial agency that Séfou obtained in 1990 from the worldwide Italian shipping company, Grimaldi, guaranteed smooth port-handling procedures in Cotonou. Finally, ‘Lac d’Afrique’, a Paris-based Yoruba trading company connected to Séfou, sourced an abundance of second-hand cars for its first few shipments, thus creating a temporary surplus of cars in Cotonou. These four elements opened the way for a new category of car traders to emerge in Cotonou – resellers. Mohammed Kabbani and his Lebanese friend, the former textile trader Tony Micha, were among the first Lebanese businessmen to start a business buying and selling cars in Cotonou. In the early 1990s, contacts between Séfou and Grimaldi turned sour over unsettled shipping bills and the payment of port duties. The available evidence suggests that Tony Micha stepped in, first, by skilfully talking Grimaldi out of the business deal with Séfou, and, second, by mediating the negotiations of a group of Lebanese businessmen, mainly based in Brussels and Essen, with the Béninese government to open a car market at a newly designated area adjacent to the port. Given the official Béninese trade policy of ‘import-led economic development’ (Igué, 1999), the tax base 110 Cotonou’s Klondike that Tony Micha had in prospect through creating a large car market was a temptation that the Béninese government, strapped by structural adjustment measures, could not refuse. Most of 1993 therefore saw Tony Micha occupied with coordinating the opening of the new market, but after its inauguration early in 1994 he started travelling to Europe where he helped to organise the collection and dispatch of second-hand cars to Cotonou. Micha’s overseas contacts boosted Mohammed’s career as a car importer, especially after he linked up with a Lebanese shipper known for his favourable credit conditions. Mohammed soon found that sourcing vehicles required a great deal of travelling in Western Europe’s second-hand car belt (roughly confined by the triangle Essen-Brussels-Utrecht). His travels abroad therefore directed much of Mohammed’s time away from his affairs on the Cotonou car market. With his only (younger) brother working as a construction engineer in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed therefore approached Abu-Zeid, whom he knew from their joint episode in the textile trade, to handle his car sales in Cotonou. Ahmad, meanwhile, became acquainted with family life in Beirut. This had two consequences for his stay there. Firstly, after she recovered from her pregnancy, Fatina replaced Abu-Zeid in the grocery. Although Fatina proved an enterprising shopkeeper, to Ahmad’s displeasure the shift in personnel also encouraged Abu Naja’s interference in the course of their business. He regularly dropped by the shop and was never short of a snide remark, often in the presence of customers. Secondly, with his two elder brothers abroad, Ahmad increasingly had to act as head of the family. Thus he was confronted with the pressing problem of finding a suitable husband for two of his younger sisters. In short, family life in Lebanon offered little in the way of the carefree personal life that Ahmad had come to enjoy during his earlier West African stay. Following Abu-Zeid’s optimistic accounts of the opportunities offered by the rapidly expanding car markets in Bénin, halfway through 1995 Ahmad therefore booked a flight for himself, Fatina and their child to Cotonou, and left Lebanon.
Second stay abroad: Cotonou and the Ivory Coast, 1995-2000 When Ahmad came to Cotonou with his family, the car business was unmistakably on its way to becoming the city’s most manifest commercial activity. By then, a significant number of car markets were fully operational in areas downtown, fed by huge car- carrying ships mooring frequently in the port, bringing increasing numbers of second- hand cars from all corners in Western Europe. Likewise contributing to the business’s visibility were the large numbers of car buyers that started to pour into Bénin’s economic centre looking for a good bargain, coming mostly from neighbouring countries, but also from places as far away as Chad, Cameroon and Congo. In an attempt to curb the incidence of traffic accidents caused by speeding cars bound for Strangers and immigrant traders 111 these markets further afield, and seeking to regularise their mostly illegal border crossings, the Béninese government promoted the organisation of the car transports in convoys. The joint broadcasting on Bénin’s national television channel of the convoys’ departure schedules with the timetables of arriving car ships illustrates well how important the car business in Cotonou had become by the mid-1990s. It was an exciting time, Ahmad recalls, ‘there was money in this business, every franc you put into it effortlessly multiplied, those were the days when everyone gained’. After their arrival, the couple briefly stayed at Abu-Zeid’s, but a few weeks later Ahmad found accommodation for his family in one of the apartment blocks built during Cotonou’s modest construction boom of the early 1990s. Ahmad could afford to pay the sizeable down payment for the apartment with money made in the grocery trade. While Fatina did her chores at home, Ahmad joined Abu-Zeid on his rounds of the car market and thus became acquainted with the various aspects of car trading in Cotonou. Abu-Zeid also helped Ahmad to secure the use of a selling pitch in a remote corner of Tony Micha’s market, but later Ahmad succeeded in getting access to a better place near the main gate. These selling pitches play a key role in the informal organisation of the Cotonou market. Originally marked out by narrow passages between lanes of parked cars, car markets constructed after the mid-1990s offered fenced areas, surveyed by plank-and-pole platforms, elevated on stilts and roofed with a corrugated iron sheet. These first paillotes, probably copies of similar structures found in the older car markets of Lomé, were built and used by individual businessmen; yet, with the influx of new traders they increasingly came to function as collective meeting places. In some cases, wealthy traders started constructing paillotes surplus to their own needs, and then handed them out to newcomers to the trade. Thus, when Ahmad wanted to settle as a car trader in Cotonou, he followed Abu-Zeid and moved into the paillote built by their nephew Mohammed a few months earlier. This step shaped the subsequent course of Ahmad’s career in three ways: firstly, Ahmad thus developed close contacts with West Africans; secondly, it brought him into confrontation with Mohammed Kabbani; and, thirdly, he gained access to a circle of prestigious business contacts based at Cotonou’s Sheraton hotel. The occupants of a paillote are generally not a haphazard collection of individuals. Usually, though not exclusively, they present an ethnically homogeneous group, marked by some form of previous contact. This promotes collaboration between them, and for Lebanese traders operating from the same selling pitch it is thus quite common to share the specialist services on the Cotonou car market offered by young West African men, ranging from car cleaners and guards, via metalworkers and car mechanics to clearing agents. Among these was Mathieu, a young Béninese mechanic, who had one day come along with his elder brother to carry out the routine 112 Cotonou’s Klondike job of fixing a broken car door for Abu-Zeid. The young man’s competence impressed Ahmad, so that a few weeks later, when one of his cars broke down at the port, he called Mathieu for advice. To Ahmad’s surprise, the young technician turned up much quicker that he had anticipated, and fixed the defective car in a very short time. In return for the job, the next weekend Ahmad invited Mathieu to his house for dinner, a habit they would keep up throughout their contact. Until 1998, Ahmad earned a living reselling cars, and his business generally followed the upswing of the second-hand car market in Cotonou during the 1990s. In contrast to the growing number of resellers who ventured into the port during disembarkation of the car-carrying ships, Ahmad by and large took over cars from Lebanese traders, first only from Abu-Zeid, but later also from his colleagues occupying the same paillote. This form of trade came to an end with one of Mohammed Kabbani’s rare return visits to West Africa later that year. Shortly after his arrival, he turned to Ahmad and offered him the possibility of handling and trading several cars on behalf of one of his European business partners. Offers to conduct such ‘mediated’ business became increasingly common among Lebanese businessmen by the mid- 1990s. With the short-lived commercial success of the Belgian-based Tunisian-Cypriot second-hand car trading company, ACLN, on their minds120, and encouraged by cheap shipping rates to West Africa and the recently created possibility to pay the freight charges upon delivery at destination, many Lebanese businessmen in Europe sought ways to invest in the West African car trade. Traders like Mohammed could offer them a ready solution through their (family) contacts in West African port towns such as Cotonou. Ahmad happily accepted Mohammed’s offer, unaware that his new European business partner, in order to cut back expenses, sourced his cars in Belgian scrap yards. Although the trade in damaged or otherwise substandard cars became a more widespread practice later on,121 the first shipment of wrecked cars caught Ahmad by surprise. ‘My friends laughed at me’, Ahmad recalls, ‘and they told me that I’d wasted my money’. To Ahmad it was clear that Mohammed had played a trick on him by
120 The company’s prestige peaked after the New York Stock Exchange started trading ACLN shares in 1997. The trade was, however, suspended early in 2002 following accusations by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of financial malversations. For further information, see Trends Magazine, www.trends.be, of 08/08/2002; the SEC’s legal proceedings are published at www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr18888.htm. Mr. F. van der Spek is kindly thanked for pointing out the significance of this case to me. 121 The trade in scrapped cars was discouraged in 1997 following an EU-directive issued that year, aiming to ban the export of so-called ‘end-of-life vehicles’ (see http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/waste/elv_index.htm). The export of damaged cars from the EU, however, continues to the present day. This is because exported cars are generally not subjected to MOT, or some other technical vehicle tests. Strangers and immigrant traders 113 holding back crucial information about his business partner’s sourcing practices. In addition to suffering loss of face, the matter therefore left Ahmad with a deep suspicion regarding Mohammed’s motives for collaboration. Moreover, the arrival of the malfunctioning cars presented Ahmad with the considerable logistical problem of transporting the vehicles from the port to the car market, and then seeking technical assistance there to prepare the cars for resale. Mathieu played a key role in solving both problems, so that his contact with Ahmad became more permanent around this time. Buying spare parts to fix the cars depleted most of Ahmad’s financial reserves, and he turned, via Abu-Zeid, to his fellow paillote occupants for help. In particular, a former El Dorado Lebanese drinking mate responded to his request and advanced him some cash. Contact with this young man, Akram, the son of a former LWCU board member122, further brought Ahmad to the Sheraton hotel, where better-off Lebanese regularly meet for a chat and a drink. A few months later, at one of the Lebanese Sunday matinees in the lobby of the hotel, Ahmad learned that two lorries owned by Lebanese living in Germany had broken down in the nearby port of Abidjan (Ivory Coast). Afraid that the Ivorian customs might seize the valuable vehicles, they needed someone to handle the problem. Ahmad decided to step in, thus heralding a brief, but disastrous, foreign spell. Ahmad’s declining business, and his plans to travel to the Ivory Coast, had put a strain on his relations with Fatina. Their relationship deteriorated during 1999 following Ahmad’s repeated refusal to introduce her to his new circle of contacts, and by the end of the year, just before Ahmad’s departure early in 2000, she flew back to Lebanon with a ticket paid for by her father. Without paying much attention to the issue, Ahmad then travelled to Abidjan in his car, driven by Mathieu. During the preceding months, relations between the men had changed from an occasional, ‘job-by- job’ mode to a more regular labour relationship. Ahmad’s frequent car repairs had brought Mathieu some cash, which he then wanted to invest in the car trade as a reseller. Although he could buy a car from Ahmad on favourable conditions, he did not succeed in selling it at a profit. Thus Mathieu became indebted to Ahmad, and lacking the funds to immediately repay the money due, he offered his manpower in return. Needing someone reliable to pursue his trip to Ivory Coast, Ahmad took his former mechanic on as his right-hand man.123 Recovering the lorries in Abidjan proved a
122 The Lebanese World Cultural Union is a worldwide non-governmental lobby organisation, supporting political and economic interests for Lebanese expatriates; see their website at www.ulcm.org. 123 Ahmad thus ignored the negative advice issued by the Lebanese council a few months earlier to end the widespread practice of Lebanese traders handing out credit to West African employees. 114 Cotonou’s Klondike tedious job, because of the absence of shipping documents and aggravated by difficulties in transferring cash from Germany, yet a few weeks later the lorries could be put to use. Though the intention had been to sell the vehicles, the deteriorating political situation in Ivory Coast made clients shy to buy them. Ahmad instead started running a transport line between town and the airport, until the attempted coup of January 2001 resulted in confiscation of the two vehicles. ‘It was terrible’, Ahmad recalls, ‘the police came, they took the keys and drove off!’ Faced with a revolt that rapidly spread, Ahmad had little choice but to return to Cotonou, where he arrived later that month - destitute once more.
Cotonou today, 2001-2003 The last phase of Ahmad’s professional career is marked by diversification into different economic arenas, accompanied by a number of commercial innovations. At first this seems odd, because Ahmad returned almost empty-handed, with not enough capital to resume his car business. The remainder of Ahmad’s professional history will, nonetheless, show how the interplay of his intimate knowledge of local conditions with his facility to exert moral pressure on family members, and with his (local) business contacts, created a situation wherein he could secure access to cash and credit and thus continue his affairs in Cotonou. Ever since Ahmad had broken off his business contact with Mohammed by embarking on the failed Ivorian adventure, he had sought a new trade. During the first few weeks of his stay in Cotonou, he therefore frequently visited his former contacts, at home, but also at the car markets where he became once more a well-known figure. Hajja Woudjoud, a wealthy (Moslem) Yoruba businesswoman who had established a prosperous wax (cloth) trade during the 1980s124, came to play an important role for Ahmad during this period. Following a number of prestigious nominations125, and having during the foregoing years frequently arranged and financed rallies for the Parti du Renouveau Démocratique (PRD), a political party that largely depends on Bénin’s Yoruba business community for its support, she ran for political office in 2002. Thus, when the Béninese government announced the issuing of a new round of market concessions to expand the area available for car trading in 1999, she was given permission to establish a car market on a stretch of land adjacent to Tony Micha’s. In her capacity as political organiser she had previously met with Mathieu, who had been
124 Muslim pilgrims who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca (Saudi Arabia) are entitled to add the honorific phrase Hadj (Hajja for women) to their name. Wealthy businesswomen, travelling between Europe and West Africa, are locally called ‘Nana-Benz’ (cf. Sengel, 2000). 125 She was elected board member of Bénin’s Chamber of Commerce, and subsequently became a member of the prestigious private-public ‘Association pour la Promotion du Port de Cotonou’. Strangers and immigrant traders 115 an active PRD youth member while still a young car mechanic, and later, when working with Ahmad, he started acting as animateur (MC) at party meetings. Though Hajja Woudjoud met Ahmad through Mathieu, their contact endured because they got along well. In particular, Woudjoud seemed to like Ahmad’s good-natured spirit – quite unlike other Lebanese men she had met while still a wax and clothing trader. His prestigious liaison with Woudjoud helped Ahmad to breathe new life into his contact with the two Lebanese brothers running the German lorry-export company. Although they were at first cross with Ahmad for bungling the sale of the two vehicles, they quickly came round after they appreciated the magnitude of the Lebanese exodus from the Ivory Coast in 2001. Thus they worked out a favourable restitution arrangement, allowing Ahmad to settle the debt little by little. What is more, fuelled by the vibrancy of the Western European second-hand car markets, one of the brothers, Issam, a part-time employee at a Dutch shipper, wanted to set up a parallel trade in passenger cars. For that he first contacted Tony Micha’s men, by now an icon of successful Lebanese car business in Europe. However, in his absence, the Micha market in Cotonou had taken a turn for the worse, and was now commonly associated with widespread car theft and rampant corruption, leaving many new entrants into the car trade little choice but to seek their stock elsewhere. The brothers then started looking around for an alternative, which was presented to them by Ahmad in the form of Woudjoud’s car market, conveniently just around the corner from the Micha market. As a result, in mid-2002 Ahmad received the first German shipment, a handful of top- of-the-range, high-priced second-hand cars. Although he achieved reasonable prices for the cars, Ahmad soon found that subsequent shipments arrived at irregular intervals, and often contained incomplete export documentation – necessitating extensive deliberation with the port authorities. Around the time that Ahmad set up his business in Woudjoud’s market, Fatina came back to Cotonou. The couple had agreed to leave their child in the care of Fatina’s parents, so that she could attend school in Beirut. Hence to Ahmad’s surprise, Fatina showed up not alone but accompanied by their mutual relative Khaled, a polytechnic engineer with some previous work experience in Nigeria’s oil fields. After talks with his paternal uncle (Abu Naja), Khaled had decided to enter the West African car business with the money he had earned, complemented by his share of his father’s estate – in total the substantial sum of about US$ 25,000. Although Ahmad and Khaled had never met before, Fatina knew him from her childhood and had become fond of the young man. Following a common practice among Lebanese families, Khaled stayed for a while with the couple. And although Ahmad was not too keen on having the young man around – he once more dreaded his father-in-law’s interference - Ahmad nonetheless acquainted Khaled with the car business. In particular, Ahmad first handed 116 Cotonou’s Klondike over to Khaled the complicated task of arranging the transport of newly arrived cars from the port to Woudjoud’s market. However, Khaled repeatedly failed to prevent the theft of spare parts that usually peaks when car-carrying ships dock in the port of Cotonou. Consequently, Ahmad became disappointed with his younger nephew, and therefore assigned him the little-liked and tedious job of hanging around the paillote to survey the market in between sales. This was much to the dismay of Mathieu’s brother who had recently started to work, with Khaled as his sidekick; he resentfully remarks: ‘all the time he asks me what to do, or he calls his uncle to tell him what to do: he understands nothing of this business!’ Relations between Ahmad and Khaled were unsettled from the beginning; they never got along well, but their contact rapidly became tense after the following incident. One night while Ahmad was out, policemen came to his house, and they arrested Khaled, just then the only man at home. Oblivious of why he was being detained, Khaled nonetheless agreed to accompany them and was jailed. The following morning he found Ahmad at the gate of the police station to bail him out. Reluctantly, Ahmad later told Khaled that Tony Micha, whose enterprise had recently evolved to operating a shipping line, had wanted to press charges against Mohammed over an overdue freight bill. The available evidence suggests that the downswing of the Cotonou car market (and indeed of car markets in the region) set in motion by late 1999/early 2000 saw an increase in credit arrangements between ship owners and their customers, mostly shipping companies but also large car traders such as Mohammed. With stagnating car sales in Cotonou, payback terms of freight costs often lengthened, and many shipping companies eventually ran into financial trouble. They tried to curb their losses, and in some cases they did not stop short of threatening their debtors’ close family members. While Mohammed Kabbani had gone into hiding in Brussels to dodge his former friend, Tony Micha had tried to pursue his financial claim through Kabbani’s kinsmen living in Cotonou. The incident shook Khaled profoundly. ‘In there everyone sees you’, he comments on the prison cages that are clearly visible from the street, ‘and the food is rotten!’ He also realised that Ahmad’s quick intervention had spared him from a longer stay in prison and hence from further embarrassment. In sum, as a result of the incident Khaled came to appreciate that he needed Ahmad’s support to further his efforts to set up a car business in Cotonou. Khaled’s understanding clearly suited Ahmad’s ambitions. Dissatisfied with his German car imports, Ahmad had sought another activity, and after some time found it in the handling of shipping documents.126
126 This type of document, known as a ‘bill of lading’, is generally seen as proof of ownership and entitles the bearer to collect specified goods at a port of destination. Strangers and immigrant traders 117
With the increase in the scale of car imports into Cotonou came a shift in the settlement of freight costs from payment at the port of origin to payment at destination. Whereas this shift occurred at first along personal contacts between shipping companies and their (larger) clients, the mid-1990s saw specialised agencies handle the collection of the shipping fees in Cotonou. Whereas shipping margins came under pressure during the late 1990s (pers. comm. Mrs. M. Kleinbussink), handling the fees continued to offer two indirect advantages to local agents: first, the right to claim a car for resale if it was not sold within a specified period after arrival; and, two, the possibility to control the transport of cars from the port to the markets – an additional, payable, service. In order to operate a shipping agency in this manner, Ahmad needed cash, mainly to pay the collateral, which usually amounts to about one month’s shipping revenues127, but also to recruit additional manpower to protect and transport the new arrivals. Ahmad therefore called upon Khaled for financial help, who, though reluctant, advanced his uncle the required funds. The transaction suited their changed relations, yet it left Khaled unsettled, ‘I should never have parted with my money’, Khaled complains in retrospect, ‘when this fails, I’ll surely be the laughing-stock‘. Backed with the money, Ahmad next turned to Issam and soon thereafter received the wax-sealed letters, specifying him as the shipper’s formal West African representative. In the shipper’s decision to go ahead with Ahmad, Abu-Zeid’s recent election as World Union board member seems to have played a decisive role. After a few unsuccessful attempts with former customers, the Dutch shipper had become wary of self-proclaimed agents and pressed for, in their words, ‘men of standing’ – a status borrowed from his brother to which Ahmad happily acquiesced. The story of Ahmad’s economic career ends in tragedy a few months later. Halfway through the cloudless afternoon of Christmas Day, 2003, flight 141 from Union des Transports Africains (UTA) crashed on takeoff at Cotonou’s international airport – killing most of its 160 passengers.128 The plane, a Boeing 727, was bound for Beirut, and soon after the accident news agencies reported that it had been carrying Lebanese businessmen returning home for Christmas. A remarkable conclusion, if one considers that most of the men aboard were Lebanese Moslems. The agencies were right to state that most of the passengers were homeward bound, but they
127 During the 1990s, shipping rates from The Netherlands to Cotonou fluctuated between €400 and €650 per unit. 128 The bodies of those killed in the accident were collected by Lebanese authorities and dispatched for burial to Lebanon. The accident killed a substantial proportion of the Lebanese community in Cotonou – at the time of the accident estimated to be around 2,500 adult men (pers. comm. LWCU 2004). 118 Cotonou’s Klondike misinterpreted their motives. Most of the Lebanese aboard the plane were indeed travelling to the Middle East, not to celebrate however, but because they had abandoned their businesses in Bénin shortly before. UTA, a mixed Lebano-Guinean charter company, had watched car sales in Cotonou plummet earlier that year, and rightly foresaw the departure of many a young Lebanese man. By mid-2003 they started to operate a regular service between Cotonou and Beirut, and until the crash most of their twice weekly flights had been fully booked. Most of these young men had come to Cotonou during the late 1990s, undoubtedly encouraged by Lebanon’s high unemployment rate, but especially lured by rumours of quick gains from the car business. Their African adventure was not meant to last however. By the time they arrived in Cotonou, the second hand car boom was no longer in full swing. Most of them suffered considerable losses as a result, and with few financial resources to back them up they felt they had little choice but to return to Lebanon. Among the victims was Abu-Zeid. Not long before Khaled’s arrest, Mohammed had stopped sending cars to Cotonou altogether, leaving Abu-Zeid empty- handed. He then agreed with Ahmad to travel to Europe, via a stopover in Beirut for family visits, principally to settle the bill with the Dutch shipper, but also to track down Mohammed. The crash ended both prospects, taking not only Abu-Zeid’s life, but also the money he had strapped to his body for security reasons – realising Khaled’s worst fear – that of losing his money.
SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF LEBANESE BUSINESS CONTACTS Ahmad’s professional life is an example of a multiple enterprise, which, on close scrutiny, appears characterised by the following three elements. Firstly, his career is not limited to a single economic activity, but is organised as an occupational sequence: moving from one economic arena, or economic activity, into another. Secondly, this movement, entailing nine professions within two decades in Ahmad’s case, is marked by fluctuation: he regularly loses large sums of money, sometimes he gains considerably, yet he never succeeds in securing access to long-term (trade) resources. Thirdly, Ahmad straddles his direct involvement in the car trade (resale or import) with other commercial activity, including parallel trade. I argue that the social dynamics of the business network is an important factor explaining this complex pattern of economic mobility. Business contacts serve therein as channels for cash, access and market information, and therefore determine the outcome of the economic actions that Lebanese traders pursue. The presented empirical material suggests that an important distinction within the Lebanese business network is between dealing with family members and with other contacts - notably with friends and peers. Moreover, it Strangers and immigrant traders 119 suggests that this network presents a configuration of social contacts that is shaped by the ideal of Lebanese traders to enjoy life. These points will be further discussed in the following paragraphs.
Family-based business At the beginning of their careers, Lebanese traders are highly dependent on close family members. In this stage of their professional lives, they usually lack the start-up capital and necessary experience to set up a business, and hence young traders in particular gain access to essential trade resources mainly through their nuclear families. Parents are considered the primary source for that; significantly, most boys receive their first trading experience through working with their fathers. Financially, parents contribute to the costs of marriage and hence help a young man to set up his own household, which is a necessary asset to give the starting enterprise some momentum. As the case history of Ahmad exemplifies, the untimely death of a parent therefore presents a serious obstacle for young traders to develop a business career, since it cuts them off from an obvious acquaintance with the world of commerce and takes away an important source of financial support. The presence of siblings comes next in significance for the organisation of their business. Lebanese men seek support especially from their older brothers. Social relations between brothers operate in principle under a norm of solidarity, yet the tale of Mahmoud suggests that, when they are physically absent, support is often limited to (irregular) remittances. Sisters enter the Lebanese business organisation mainly through their husbands. Although it is not uncommon for young Lebanese men to solicit assistance from their brothers-in-law to set up a business, Ahmad’s story indicates that this is not a self-evident mode of resource mobilisation. In general it appears that the larger the stake, the more a young man’s reputation comes into play. This explains, for instance, why Hijazi recruited Ahmad for his overseas textile enterprise after Ahmad had demonstrated he was a responsible young man by taking good care of Fatina. In this particular case, Ahmad’s recruitment was facilitated by the couple’s childlessness; their children would otherwise have been given priority as future business partners. Marriage brings Lebanese novice traders in touch with what they consider the flip side of family-based business: the promotion of undesirable, yet hardly avoidable, interference of in-laws. This is strongly related to the types of marriages involved. Lebanese first marriages are often with partners comprising a range of distant kinsmen that they indicate with the classificatory term ‘cousins’. Such cross marriages, to which Ahmad’s was no exception (also exemplified by Abu-Zeid’s and Mohammed’s marriages), result in double kinship ties between individuals. Furthermore, their marriages are usually enduring social arrangements; Ahmad’s case shows that marriage 120 Cotonou’s Klondike is often an emotionally unsettling affair, thus leading to temporary separation, yet legal divorce is uncommon (see also Peleikis, 1998). On the one hand, Lebanese marriage therefore prevents valuable resources from disappearing from families following divorce or the death of one party, and thus promotes the integrity of family possession. On the other hand, as Ahmad’s case illustrates, double kinship ties often present a ‘thickening’ of existing social relations that opens up the possibility for close surveillance. Thus, while for young Lebanese men a good marriage is the pivot for their business - it may bring them into contact with renowned entrepreneurial families - it simultaneously presents them with a new set of practical constraints. In Ahmad’s case, Abu Naja’s presence engendered a downward pressure on his personal spending while in Nigeria, and, back in Lebanon, frustrated Ahmad’s wish to expand the shop. Engaging in contacts with more distant family members, such as for instance nephews and (particularly male) cousins, is a common way for Lebanese traders to set up a business overseas; however, Ahmad’s career history shows that it presents a problematic form of collaboration.129 On the one hand, working with distant family members operates under the expectation of kin solidarity, which promotes the practice of family-based chain migration. This practice helps to create a foundation for building transnational businesses, in its simplest form involving accommodation of visiting family members, but also including more elaborate forms of assistance. On the other hand, Ahmad’s career history shows that collaboration, in this case between nephew and uncle, is an unstable arrangement for conducting business. The difficulties they experience, for instance in pooling trade resources, appear to have a strong foothold in the social organisation of Lebanese families. It is common for Lebanese kinsmen to live widely apart over long periods of time, and many of my Lebanese informants explained that they had never seen their (extended) families together. The empirical material further suggests that the more distant family contacts are, the less likely they are to be grounded in a social relation; this, in turn, easily slips into an unbalanced form of social interaction, which, as exemplified by Khaled’s tale, may eventually harden into patronage. This organisational feature reinforces differences in settlement history between individual traders. For instance, while Ahmad had completed an extensive learning trajectory to deal with the complexities of car trading in Cotonou, Khaled had little (trading) experience in West Africa, save a brief spell in Nigeria, and was therefore no real match for Ahmad when the going got rough. It is striking to notice that, despite the different sorts of difficulties that most Lebanese traders experience in dealing with close and distant family members for the
129 See Beuving (2005) for a similar discussion on the problematic nature of kinship in running a second-hand car business in West Africa. Strangers and immigrant traders 121 operation of their business enterprises, these seldom result in a permanent break. My field research suggests that the apparent resilience of these contacts fits into a broader pattern of Lebanese migrants’ ongoing contacts with Lebanon: their mother tongue remains Arabic, they prefer to send their children back to Lebanon for schooling, and they usually marry Lebanese wives. To cope with the disadvantages of family-based enterprise, the Lebanese appear to follow a strategy of social diversification by developing contacts with Lebanese friends and, in the case of Lebanese migrants in West Africa, with Africans. This phenomenon will be analysed in greater detail in the next paragraph.
Other forms of business contacts For Lebanese migrants in West Africa, contacts with peers and friends come to play an increasingly important role for running a business, particularly in the later stages of their professional careers. These social contacts are often created in bars, beach clubs and other places of entertainment, and they are subsequently reproduced at markets, ports or similar centres of economic activity. Usually such friendships are organised as so-called drinking groups. These groups form an important part of the Lebanese leisure time repertoire, whereby especially young unmarried men, or young married men unaccompanied by their wives, of roughly the same age go out together on a regular basis. Their drinking habits are conspicuous; rather than consuming the cheap local beer, they instead order expensive, imported liquor. In the case of Ahmad, these drinking contacts then spilled over into the paillote, where he, like other Lebanese traders, spent much time waiting during market days for his clientele to arrive. Life in the paillote therefore provides ample opportunity for the traders to develop a working knowledge of the behaviour and trading practices of their colleagues. It appears that, when both forms of social contact overlap, they may transform into a source of mutual support; hence Ahmad’s recourse to his former paillote contacts after he returned bankrupt to Cotonou. The importance of these contacts for traders to hold their ground is exemplified by Khaled’s story: the lack of befriended paillote contacts was instrumental to his commercial downfall. The presented empirical material tentatively suggests that activation of contacts with friends coincides with a shift in the operational mode of the enterprise. In the case of Ahmad’s second-hand car trade: from purely carrying out trade to pursuing activities in the service industry. This shift relates to the information function that these contacts fulfil by channelling news and gossip within a specific domain of economic activity and, perhaps even more important, between different economic domains. An important hub in this information network is the Lebanese Union and its members. Among other things, this non-governmental advocacy organisation mediates between 122 Cotonou’s Klondike
Lebanese (traders) and the West African political and business community. Although board membership is in principle accessible to all those interested, my informants explained that in practice it is controlled by a handful of well-established Lebanese families. Getting in touch with members of these families is therefore an important way to tap into a different range of business opportunities; for instance, it brought Ahmad to a new set of business contacts and hence enabled him to adopt a strategy of (economic) diversification. An altogether different domain of social interaction that significantly influences the working of Lebanese commercial enterprise is contacts with West Africans. Ahmad’s life history suggests that these Lebano-African relations stem chiefly from a shared profession or trade. This creates the setting for the incorporation of West African contacts, which often starts by recruitment of employees. A common pathway thereof consists of the gradual evolution of debt ties, mostly with trusted craftsmen or other specialists, into an employer-employee relationship. Lebanese businessmen often have a lot of money out on credit, and in an expanding market settling these debts generally poses no serious problem. However, when the economic tide changes, reclaiming the capital becomes a function of the social relation with their African debtors. The arrangements that arise from lending usually entail a marked intensification of these relations, creating scope for exerting moral pressure on debtors. Although Lebanese traders do their utmost to recoup the money due in this fashion (business disputes are almost never brought to court), a widely practiced alternative consists of offering the debtor a temporary job; this, in turn, expands the labour pool of the enterprise, a factor that is important for its continuation. These arrangements are fraught with conflict and therefore short-lived, not least because Lebanese employers deduct loan repayments from such employees’ salaries. Lebanese traders repeatedly complain about the unreliability of their African employees, who, in turn, are never short of an anecdote stressing the barbaric nature of their patron. However, as the case of Mathieu suggests, it can also transform into a more or less stable arrangement, offering mutual advantage. The stability of such relations appears to be rooted, firstly, in past practice; in particular when a veteran Lebanese trader meets with an experienced African employee, problems are less likely to arise between them; and, secondly, in mutual acquaintance with one another’s domestic circles. Lebano-African business contacts are not limited to an employee-employer relationship; more balanced forms of collaboration exist as well, notably through contacts with the local West African business community. The joint venture charter company UTA is a clear case in point; Ahmad’s liaison with Woudjoud presents another example. Some of these collaborations go as far back as the 19th century when Christian Lebanese families settled in colonial French West Africa. However, for the Strangers and immigrant traders 123 traders sampled for this research it appears a more recent phenomenon. These contacts are an important precondition for the expansion of ongoing enterprise, for they enlarge Lebanese control over trade resources. Ahmad’s story suggests, however, that contacts with African businessmen (and women), though widespread, are generally social arrangements with little else at stake than the transaction they embody. These relations are furthermore difficult to get started; it is often accomplished through the Lebanese person’s African employees acting as intermediaries. With few exceptions130, they are not institutionalised in trading clubs or other instances of frequent encounter, nor are they regulated, for instance though religious practice. Although they regularly surround themselves with the icons of Islam (Quran, framed full-colour photographs of the Hadj in Mecca), my Lebanese informants frequently pointed out that they are not devout mosque-goers, and most of them prefer to carry out prayer and other religious rituals at home. A final category of contacts with West Africans is formed outside the domain of trade and consists of amorous relations between Lebanese men and African women. Marriages with West African women are rare (though some occur), yet for a Lebanese man it is quite common to have African girlfriends. Young men commonly meet up with the girls, locally called ‘petites amies’, mainly at places of leisure (El Dorado in the case of Cotonou), while older men tend to invite the girls to their houses – of course when their wives are not around. ‘In Lebanon, you cannot talk just like that to any girl’, a young Lebanese once explained to me, ‘you’ll need an introduction, first you talk to her brothers, and father, and maybe then you’ll get to go out with her’. Association with African girls is a rich topic of gossip among the Lebanese, particularly when it involves the more hidden domain of love affairs with domestic staff. It is further an important source of marital conflict, adding to the instability of Lebanese overseas marriage. But above all, the love affairs usually drain cash away from Lebanese enterprises. This drain ranges from small-scale expenditure, such as paying for a night out (illustrated by the anecdote at the beginning of the chapter), to more significant spending. Ahmad, for instance, at the time of my fieldwork gave his girlfriend Aisha considerable sums of cash and presents, which culminated in the gift of a (second-hand) car for her 21st birthday. By the end of the fieldwork, Aisha had thus managed to set up a vegetable stall at Cotonou’s largest open-air daily market, Dantokpa, and to run a small transport company.
130 For the second-hand car trade the ‘Union Nationale des Importateurs et Revendeurs de Véhicules d’Occasion au Bénin (UNIRVOB)’ stands out as an organisation that is governed by both Lebanese and Béninese businessmen. 124 Cotonou’s Klondike
The logic of an expatriate lifestyle So far I have tried to argue that the development of Lebanese business entails a shifting pattern of resource mobilisation and changes in social networks. In general, setting up a business appears to be associated with close family contacts; they regulate the first attempts of Lebanese traders to accumulate capital. Running a transnational enterprise depends, in addition, on contact with more distant kinsmen, and, to a lesser extent, on contacts with African employees. A change in direction of the business relates to closer collaboration with Lebanese friends, while business expansion appears to be a function of developing ongoing contacts with the African business community. The analysis has not yet paid attention to the logic of social relations management: why are some contacts preferred, while others appear to be avoided in running a business? To address this important question I argue that it is necessary to delve into the culturally determined motivations of Lebanese traders. Ahmad’s remarks at the beginning of this chapter give a clue as to why he wants to stay in West Africa. Even though acting as a businessman there did not bring him riches, Ahmad has a strong ideal of leading a carefree personal life. Lebanese migrant traders like Ahmad aim to achieve this ideal by settling abroad, in the case of this study, in West Africa. Lebanese businessmen are acutely aware of the instability and unpredictability associated with doing business in West Africa – they complain endlessly about it - yet for them the ensuing insecurity and financial losses do not countervail against a more secure existence elsewhere, particularly in Lebanon. Three important ingredients of this expatriate lifestyle are: firstly, informal contact with African girls and women; secondly, the possibility to indulge in conspicuous consumption, preferably in the company of friends; and, thirdly and perhaps most significantly, the scope to attain independence from kin ties. With this expatriate lifestyle comes a propensity to keep social contacts at bay. The actual way that Lebanese migrant traders lead their lives does not, however, seamlessly fit this ideal but, instead, appears to be the outcome of the three following, simultaneously operating, social processes. Firstly, their attempts to distance themselves from family-based business contacts are countered by their ongoing multi-stranded contacts with Lebanon. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to entirely avoid dealing with family members. However, a prolonged stay abroad entails a gradual dissolution of family contacts, and, in particular, contact with distant kinsmen becomes then increasingly experienced as a single-stranded form of social interaction (only knowing each other in a single, specialised role). It results in more loosely knit social networks and therefore enhances the degrees of freedom that individual traders experience, but it also contributes to the insecurity of doing business overseas. Secondly, the Lebanese business network shows a progressive incorporation of African Strangers and immigrant traders 125 contacts. Although in some cases these contacts pertain to different spheres of social interaction, the general pattern of Lebanese traders interacting with the local business community and with their African employees is one that is experienced as a set of single-stranded social relations. Thirdly, in the course of running their businesses, friendships between Lebanese businessmen appear to gain in prominence, and hence in many observed cases have become an important source of economic security by providing access to key trade resources. However, most of these friendships remain occasional contacts; they continue to be firmly rooted in expensive leisure activities, and therefore drain resources from business activities. The interlocking of these processes results in a restless existence: the careers of Lebanese traders show a rapid succession of different economic activities, and their social lives appear to be in a permanent state of change.
CONCLUSION This chapter discussed the role of Lebanese businessmen in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade. An extensive exploration of one Lebanese trader’s ‘multiple enterprise’ uncovered a situation of change, with fluctuating business performance, regularly involving financial losses. This chapter has therefore sought to disaggregate the stereotype of Lebanese as successful entrepreneurs into different pathways towards capital accumulation. The shifting configuration of business contacts appears to be an important explanatory factor for this interesting business pattern: it starts as mainly kin- based enterprise, but gradually leads to an incorporation of peers and friends. While social contacts are part of Lebanese business success and failure, this increasing preference for more single-stranded, occasional personal contacts is not, however, an instrumental response to avoid social obligations and hence accumulate capital. It follows rather from an important cultural factor found among Lebanese migrant traders: the ideal of enjoying life by adopting an expatriate lifestyle. 126 Cotonou’s Klondike
PHOTO 6 View on a car market, with paillote and neatly parked second-hand cars. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 127
CHAPTER 6
COTONOU’S KLONDIKE: ENTREPRENEURS AS GAMBLERS
The objective of this last chapter is to illuminate elementary principles of entrepreneurship in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade. It is an important theme for understanding this transnational business, because the actions and careers of the individuals in this book draw attention to an economic situation wherein financial losses and declining profits are recurrent themes. A common-sense explanation for this phenomenon would be that these traders are typical examples of substandard entrepreneurs. This implies that the traders have failed to identify promising business opportunities, and that they have been unsuccessful in assessing the financial risks involved. However, viewing second-hand car traders as failures is difficult to reconcile with the impressive expansion of their trade during the 1990s – more than 20% on average per year. I argue that any explanation of this paradoxical ‘expansion without growth’ marking the Euro-West African car trade must start by paying attention to the way car traders manipulate their socio-economic environment, a behaviour otherwise known as entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial behaviour, broadly speaking, is a form of judgmental economic decision making (Casson, 2005: 329) that is fabricated in a complex interaction between structural, social and cultural factors.131 In the following pages I will explore this point by, firstly, trying to show that the collective responses of the second-hand car traders are part of an insecure economic universe that promotes capital scarcity, fragmented market information and widespread business failure. Its emergence went hand in hand with the development a self-negating form of entrepreneurship that motivates the traders to direct capital into unproductive enterprises. In the second part of this chapter I will confront this insight with current economic and sociological literature on entrepreneurship. An examination of two prominent contributions - the entrepreneur as hero and the entrepreneur as social genius – uncovers the strong positive bias towards entrepreneurial behaviour found in
131 The discussion of entrepreneurship that follows is situated in an academic debate broadly known as economic sociology. Swedberg and Granovetter (1992) provide an excellent historical introduction of its claims and propositions; they argue that the study of economic life starts from the notion that economic behaviour is inherently social and therefore subject to sociological analysis. 128 Cotonou’s Klondike this literature, hence its limited usefulness for understanding the actions and modes of economic organisation of second-hand car traders. The empirical material presented in the previous chapters instead suggests the following argument. The Cotonou car market saw the rise of high expectations of entrepreneurship, exemplified by the widespread conviction that ‘car business is good business’. It implies that for many common people the idea of making a career in the car trade became a desirable goal in itself, to be chosen ahead of one of many feasible alternative career opportunities. An important factor in this transformation appears to have been the emergence of the cultural belief that one can gain only at the expense of others – a belief that has led to the institutionalisation of distrust in the economic universe of second-hand car trading. In short, then, the argument that will be further developed in the following pages gives prominence to the role of expectations in economic life. It is an insight that builds on the work of the British economist, Keynes, and the third part of this chapter therefore discusses the merits of adopting Keynesian economics to understand the entrepreneurial behaviour of second-hand car traders. Adopting this approach shows that the distinction between entrepreneurs and other categories of economic actors is not universal; the entrepreneur presents an economic type that varies with changing situations. The fourth, and final, part of this chapter is therefore dedicated to elucidating the emergence of a new economic type that came with the booming West African second-hand trade: the entrepreneur as gambler.
THE ECONOMIC UNIVERSE OF SECOND-HAND CAR TRADING The community of second-hand car traders is a heterogeneous group of people, differentiated along lines of ethnicity, gender, religion and personal history. Despite these differences, the studies in this book registered a marked similarity in the way traders have come to organise and carry out their business. I argue that this is because they occupy the same economic universe, which ‘integrates different provinces of meaning that encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 113). This symbolic space is not necessarily homogeneous: it knows important variations; for instance, the businessmen (and women) who operate the service industry (notably transport and handling) that surrounds the trade present a strikingly successful counter-case to the experiences of most traders. Their presence, however, does not contradict the main finding of this research: the market owners, (Lebanese) shippers, licence-leasers, money transferors–cum–creditors and other economic agents in this industry have escaped the declining tendency of the second- hand car trade, largely by making a career elsewhere. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 129
The economic universe wherein the traders documented in this book live and work today results from structural changes in the social organisation of the car markets during the preceding decades. In the case of Bénin, these changes are embedded in a policy environment that promoted free trade and increasing regional economic integration (Soulé & Obi, 2001; Sindzingre, 1998). Several authors have described situations wherein African states, or their agents, are active economic actors (see Roitman on petrol trade in northern Cameroon [2005], or Guyer [2004] for the creation of a labour market in Nigeria, and Hashim and Meager [1999] for currency trade in Nigeria). However, the influence of the Béninese government on the creation of second-hand car trading was given shape mainly through a number of trade policies, wherein the following two developments stand out. Firstly, while most countries in sub-Saharan Africa adopted economic policies promoting the export of primary (mostly agricultural) products (Leys, 1996), Bénin shifted in 1973 to a politique de réexportation (Igué & Soulé, 1992; Igué, 1983). This policy, encouraged by the regional economic crisis resulting from the Biafra war of 1967-70, and enabled by the creation of a deep sea-port in Cotonou in 1965 (Bio-Sawe, 1995), sought to legalise existing informal trade flows with neighbouring Nigeria and aimed to increase Bénin’s customs tariff (Igué, 1976). Although ambitious in scope, its success was limited: the vast majority of imported goods escaped taxation upon arrival in the port of Cotonou and reached their Nigerian destinations untouched by fiscal measures – a situation that continues to the present day (Galtier & Tassou, 1998). The state’s revenues from trade therefore dropped significantly132 and, exacerbated by the faltering agricultural sector, culminated in the bankruptcy of the national bank in 1988 (David, 1998). Notwithstanding its unfavourable outcome, Bénin’s trade policy gave prominence to the economic function of the port and recognised the importance of trade flows with Nigeria for its economic development. In order to alleviate the economic crisis, the Béninese government signed an agreement with the World Bank in 1989 aimed at economic restructuration (Soulé & Obi, 2001). This second set of policy measures resulted in the removal of quantitative import restrictions in 1988, the abolition of import licenses in 1991 and the elimination of import price lists throughout the 1990s (WTO, 1997; ibid. 2004), by building on existing cross-border trading practices it thus heralded an intensification of Bénin’s economic relations with Nigeria (Asiwaju, 1991; Igué, 1999). In addition to intensifying flows of capital and goods, the 1990s saw the following three changes in the organisation of the second-hand car business in
132 A consumer value-added tax was not introduced until 1991; more than three quarters of Bénin’s tax revenues are collected from imports (WTO, 1997). 130 Cotonou’s Klondike
Cotonou. Firstly, it attracted large numbers of traders from all corners of West Africa, and the expanding trading community coincided with a proliferation of the types of car traders: former dyadic trade relations developed into more complex arrangements, involving wholesalers and retailers. Close analysis of their mutual social relations uncovered a situation of limited collaboration and fierce competition. This left room for the emergence of a host of intermediaries, locally called démarcheurs (market runners); these appear to constitute a category of economic actors that does not contribute to the car trade itself: while presenting themselves as information specialists, they act as obtrusive information manipulators (Chapter 3). Secondly, alongside the expansion of the car business, the location of the car trade became multiform: from a remote corner inside the port, via a few markets downtown to several clusters of car markets scattered across town. The expansion of the second-hand car market therefore brought an increasing fragmentation of the trade, shortly followed by fluctuating prices and diminishing profit margins. At some point car sales even stagnated, while car importers continued to bring in more cars. This self-negating economic behaviour, entailing financial losses, appears embedded in a cultural institution of conformism. It hampers the flow of market information between investors and managers, who occupy the transnational trade networks connecting the local car trade to car markets overseas (Chapter 4). Thirdly, the expanding car business saw the emergence of a large service industry, mainly in the fields of transport, handling and money transfer. This industry became closely associated with the settlement of Lebanese immigrant traders in West Africa. Lebanese business often starts there as a kin-based enterprise focusing on a single economic activity, but gradually incorporates peers and (African) friends when expanding into a multiplicity of activities. Close analysis of this practice uncovered a preference of the traders for single-stranded (interaction limited to a single, specialised role), occasional social contacts, and, in the case of the Lebanese, this reflects an ideal to enjoy life by adopting an expatriate lifestyle (Chapter 5). The economic universe that resulted from these historical changes is highly insecure, characterised by capital scarcity, information fragmentation and business failure. These important elements, which have given rise to a particular form of entrepreneurship, will be further discussed below.
Capital scarcity The second-hand car trade is characterised by large financial stakes. From the perspective of individual traders, second-hand cars are expensive, with a purchase cost easily exceeding the annual income of most people in the trade. From a sectoral perspective, while the second-hand car trade had been a rather inconspicuous phenomenon earlier on, during the 1990s much capital became directed to the car trade Entrepreneurs as gamblers 131 itself but also to activities surrounding it: transport, repairs and retailing spare parts. A large share of the capital thus invested in the car business came from private funds (mainly individual savings), but also involved capital coming from groups of investors. A quick calculation reveals that in this manner at the height of car imports a yearly investment equalling a staggering 14% of Bénin’s GDP was made - this figure roughly doubles when we include the value of the import tax involved.133 The slump in the second-hand car trade in the early 2000s had an important financial consequence: it locked up a substantial amount of cash in unsold stock. It furthermore coincided with a drop in selling prices, thus putting a downward pressure on returns from investment. As I showed in Chapter 4, and contrary to the predictions of local observers, the slump did not result in a massive shakeout of unprofitable businesses. To some extent, the impossibility of quickly recouping cash motivated many traders to stick around, hoping they could either try to sell their cars at a loss, or await better times. More often, however, it led to patterns of resource mobilisation wherein capital scarcity came to play an increasingly important role, introducing the necessity to rely on credit and on revenues from other economic sectors. The increased scarcity of capital in the second-hand car trade is not, however, only a matter of an objective lack of cash. It also relates to the overstretched ambitions of the traders who tend to invest their funds, not in a step-by-step procedure whereby the next transaction is determined by the additional costs involved, but rather in what seems an ‘all or nothing’ attempt to direct as much cash as possible into trading cars. This means that, rather than building on previous profits, the traders tend to engage in credit arrangements in an attempt to maximise the number of cars purchased. This worked well when the second-hand car market was expanding and profits were still common, but it resulted in a large number of unsettled bills when the car boom turned to bust. The economic practice of continued investments in the face of financial losses is informed by the widespread belief that something larger is at stake in the car business than immediate financial gain alone. From my analysis it follows that, in the eyes of many, the car trade offers the possibility of establishing oneself as a businessman, dealing with one’s own capital, independent of social obligations, and with the prospect of windfall gains. This is most clearly exemplified by the wish of Lebanese traders to enjoy an expatriate lifestyle (Chapter 5), or the image control practiced by the Nigerian démarcheurs to shake off their kinsmen (Chapter 3). The specific combination of these values transformed the car trade into an economic domain that is locally considered to
133 This figure was arrived at in the following way: 1,690 (average f.o.b. second-hand car price in 2000, see Table 2.1) times 204,676 (the number of cars imported for that year, see Figure 4.1, divided by 2.41 billion (Bénin’s Gross Domestic Product, UNDP 2002). 132 Cotonou’s Klondike be very prestigious, and hence enticed aspiring businessmen to get down to the port following the arrival of a fresh load of used cars in order to get a business started. A focus on prestige brings into the discussion the question of the way values interplay with the economic decision making of entrepreneurs. In the case of this study, the traders appear to display a distinct eagerness to be associated with the second-hand car business. This eagerness resembles what the anthropologist Geertz called a ‘deep play’ experience: ‘where the amounts of money are great’, he argued, ‘much more is at stake than material gain, namely esteem, honour, dignity, respect – in a word status’ (Geertz, 1973: 433). What traders stand to gain (or lose) in the business is therefore no less than their identity as a trader, so that, in a sense, they put their social lives on the line when mobilising capital, time and other resources to engage in trading cars. From the perspective of a trader, losing money is therefore dramatic, not only because of the value of the losses incurred, but principally because it diminishes his or her prospect of continuing to trade in second-hand cars. As I argued in Chapters 2 and 3, the boundaries of that prospect are set by the dominant career pattern in the second-hand car trade: for a bankrupt car importer, for instance, it is usually possible to re-enter the business by operating as a démarcheur, and hence to keep alive the prospect of success in the second-hand car trade.
Fragmented information Second-hand car trading in West Africa has become an increasingly insecure business due to fragmentation of market information. This means that car traders devote significant portions of their time and energy to finding out who is selling what, for what price and under what conditions. It complicates the planning of their businesses and makes it therefore difficult for them to anticipate profitable opportunities. The increasing technical complexity of the cars plays therein an important role: car markets in Cotonou, but also elsewhere in West Africa, have seen an impressive growth in the number of makes and models of cars. Traders therefore require a larger stock of knowledge regarding car specifications. Moreover, though most of the cars imported into West Africa at the time of this study were built between the mid and late 1980s, and hence predate the electronic revolution marking car technology of the 1990s134, several experienced African mechanics pointed out to me that cars in West Africa have
134 The electronic revolution in car technology involved mostly fuel and ignition systems, which enabled the widespread adoption of catalytic converters and promoted the use of unleaded petrol. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 133 become noticeably more advanced, and hence more difficult to maintain and repair.135 For most traders, these developments mean that it is now more difficult to predict the quality and life expectancy of an old car than when they started their careers in the business. To some extent, the traders have developed ways to reduce the degree of technical uncertainties; remember for instance how démarcheur Emmanuel patted the bonnet of a car to inspect its sheet iron work (Chapter 3), or how the traders in the Utrecht market attentively listened to the vrooming of a car engine to assess internal mechanical damage (Chapter 1). Other traders have come to rely on specialist technical knowledge, replacing technical uncertainty with a reliance on trust relations, for instance in the case of Ahmad’s collaboration with car mechanic Mathieu (Chapter 5). A second aspect of the increasing fragmentation of information that the traders face relates to the economic complexity of the car business, exemplified by the multiplicity of price regimes that characterises the Cotonou market. This complexity is a function of the organisation of the trade: whereas in earlier times individual traders, or small groups of them, worked in a limited number of homogeneous markets, today the markets are numerous and segregated - largely along ethnic and family lines. It creates white spots of information for the traders, meaning that they have limited knowledge of what is going on in terms of prices and products in different parts of the market. The transnational nature of the car trade adds to this characteristic: it has introduced the need to transfer reliable business information from one person to another. Although the speed of this transfer has increased under the influence of the use of mobile phones and the Internet, the quality of the information thus transmitted continues to depend on the social contact between business partners. The increased complexity of second-hand car trading enhances in this manner the potential for information asymmetries to arise, favouring some market agents, while disadvantaging others; yet, as I have shown in the previous chapters, it does not result in a structural predominance of specific trading groups. The fragmentation of both technical and economic information is strongly related to an important sociological characteristic of the economic universe of second- hand car trading: business contacts tend to be shallow, conflictive and short-lived. This reflects the attempts of the traders to resolve the tension between, on the one hand, knowing a basic set of people to access elementary information regarding the state and distribution of socio-economic resources, while, on the other, keeping them at bay in order to create what they experience as sufficient room for manoeuvre. This is because
135 In the absence of advanced equipment, local mechanics dealing with modern cars show an amazing ability to replace modern, electronised car parts with old-fashioned, mechanic parts; the more complex the cars, however, the higher the costs involved. 134 Cotonou’s Klondike information regarding, for instance, prices or agreements with third parties, or the technical state of a car, is at stake in the trade. Rather than attempting to share information, the traders make a concerted effort to monopolise information, thus hampering the transformation of their network of business contacts into smoothly functioning communication channels. Information fragmentation and other distortions are thus the logical yet inadvertent outcome of a complicated pattern of manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring between business partners who operate in a sphere of suspicion.
Business failure When the second-hand car boom turned to bust after almost two decades of uninterrupted expansion, a large number of trading firms went bankrupt. What stands out in the economic universe of the second-hand car trade today is not the extensiveness of negative profits, increasing debts and other forms of business failure marking the turning point in the trade, but the continued efforts that bankrupt traders have been making ever since to try and remain in business.136 This relates to the way traders weigh their pay-offs: rather than painstakingly collecting (historical) price and product information to ensure a proper balancing of costs against benefits, their investments in the trade are informed by a striking optimism concerning the risks involved in the second-hand car business. In the ideal world of economic models, risk management governs the entrepreneurial decisions of traders, such as whether or not to invest in the purchase of a good; or whether to stall or pursue its sale. Economic decision making in this model is a clear-cut procedure involving the following three steps: firstly, to assess the distribution of prevailing prices; secondly, to evaluate it against the current price level; thirdly, to sell when prices are high and to buy when prices are low. This approach works well when the range of possible outcomes can be established in some way, and it is therefore a suitable method to appreciate simple decision problems, for instance when choosing between a limited number of alternatives with unambiguous consequences (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). In the daily practice of the second-hand car business, however, most traders find it difficult to assess financial risks accurately. Although this difficulty originates in the opaqueness of the car market, advanced forms of what one could call image control
136 Pedersen and McCormick, in seeking to explain the strikingly low degree of industrialisation in Africa, argue conversely that firms in Africa actually almost never go bankrupt since ‘they will continue to own the fixed assets of the enterprise because nobody is interested in taking them over’ (1999: 118). This argument does not, however, apply to the second-hand car trade: property from bankrupt traders is very much in demand locally. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 135 practiced by members of the second-hand trading community aggravate the risk they run of losing money in the trade. Image control appears to come in one of the following two forms. Firstly, the traders go to great lengths to cover up their losses, exemplified for instance by trader Abdul in Chapter 2, who acquires cash elsewhere rather than admit failure and thus maintains his image as a respectable trader; or by trader Hamidou who seeks to withhold displeasing information from his father by making up losses from their trading firm with private funds. This reinforces the collective belief of ‘car business is good business’. Secondly, in seeking to act as independent businessmen, traders try their best to disguise with whom they collaborate and on what basis – note for instance how démarcheur Terrance tried to dissimulate his acquaintance with Doctor in Chapter 3. For most traders it is therefore difficult to accurately assess the social arrangements that lie beneath day-to-day trading practices, and this makes it more difficult, for instance, to identify a weak spot in a crucial credit line on time, or to accurately discriminate between gossip and fact. Even when the risks of trading cars come out into the open, for instance when a renowned trader goes bust, it does not generally discourage other traders from continuing their business. This is because their economic universe is less determined by individual risk calculation than by a form of herd behaviour that revolves around mimicking and imitation: Cotonou car traders tend to tune the organisation of their businesses to the way others do it. It is a tendency that explains, for instance, the abundance of practices with limited practical function, such as collecting carbon copies of sales receipts even though they are never consulted, or drawing up cars in battle array on the selling pitches even when there is no demonstrable lack of parking space. An important consequence of this herd behaviour is that the start of something new by a small number of traders is quickly adopted by many; it is therefore difficult to get a head start by being innovative. My informants pointed out that the practice of importing damaged cars, for instance, or using second-hand cars as cheap containers for spare parts, tires or domestic appliances, was taken up by many traders only months after their introduction in Cotonou. In effect, it engenders a downward pressure on innovations, so that the second-hand trading community as a whole becomes increasingly inflexible and unable to anticipate changes in business opportunities. To sum up, kinship and ethnicity appear to be key social institutions in the economic universe of car trading in Cotonou. Since a wide range of socio-ethnic groups are involved in the car business today, solidarity – for instance based on shared interests or values - is limited in the car trading community at large. This leads to antagonistic trade relations that promote market segmentation and limit capital mobility. However, solidarity is not a prominent feature of smaller organisational units, such as family firms of multiple enterprises, either. This is because operating with kinsmen or with members 136 Cotonou’s Klondike of the same ethnic group does not generally result in trustworthy business contacts. The absence of interpersonal trust, even between social intimates, relates to the high stakes that the traders have come to associate with trading cars during the boom of the 1990s: the prospect of individual expansion promoted opportunism, and hence helped spread the belief that one can gain only at the expense of others. Thus the car traders experience business as a zero-sum game that compromises collaboration – for instance by pooling money, experience and contacts. In this worldview, secrecy plays a prominent role: it is information itself that is at stake. Rather than making information accessible to a wider circle, for instance regarding prices and product qualities, or the reputation of a business partner, traders are therefore anxious to keep even the flimsiest shred of unconfirmed rumour to themselves. This social practice of secrecy has consequences for the way risks come into play in economic decision making. Lacking sufficiently reliable information to properly assess the (negative) effects of their choices, traders in this universe have come to resort to chance and fortune as their beacons. The next section aims to connect these findings to current academic discussions on entrepreneurial behaviour.
THE ENTREPRENEUR: HERO OR SOCIAL GENIUS? The study of entrepreneurial behaviour knows a long and rich tradition in the social sciences. What stands out in the debate is the widespread positive bias towards entrepreneurship. Success narratives are popular in entrepreneurial studies, with prominence given to words suggesting increment, such as ‘accumulation’, ‘growth’ and ‘progress’. Such optimism is not a mere academic matter; the preceding chapters have shown that it strikingly matches local notions of the possibility of making a fortune in the second-hand car trade. This seems odd in the face of the insecurity and the financial losses that the car traders themselves commonly experience. In an economic universe that is almost defined by business failure, a focus on organising practices leading to success does not therefore seem helpful in understanding the behaviour observed here. The intellectual debate that developed within the field of entrepreneurial studies saw a focus on two related themes. The first consists of attempts to identify psychological predispositions conducive to capitalist enterprise. In a famous passage, Joseph Schumpeter notes, for instance, that entrepreneurs are innovating individuals, doing things in novel ways.137 For an entrepreneur to be successful, s/he requires the
137 As Langlois (2003) explains, an innovation in Schumpeterian economics is more than technological change; it also includes the introduction of a new method, or a new way of organising economic activity. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 137
‘will power adequate to break down the resistance that the social environment offers to change’ (1947: 157). This heroic boldness of heart is, of course, reserved for only a few individuals, whose effects on business performance are significant (Swedberg, 1991: 171-177). It presents a mode of thought that is increasingly applied to the topic of small business development138, yet it seems especially common in (mostly journalistic) studies of tycoons and other business elites139. This book has pointed out that particular innovations have been central in transforming the scale of the second-hand trade from a predominantly local affair before the 1990s to the transnational hub it had become at the time of my fieldwork. Significant in that respect are the large traders who were instrumental in creating the freight payable at destination arrangement (Hadj Séfou being a case in point – see Chapter 5); it strongly reduced the capital requirement of the trade and hence encouraged many aspiring traders to enter the car business. Viewing the entrepreneur as the engine for economic transformation thus underscores the importance of the ‘African initiative’ in understanding the directions that their trade has taken. However, the effect of technical or financial innovations in the second-hand car sector is limited by the observed tendency of traders to quickly replicate novel ways of doing things, thus limiting their potential to act as a springboard towards more profitable enterprise. A focus on the genesis and dissemination of particular innovations is therefore of limited value in understanding the forms of entrepreneurship that are associated with trading second-hand cars. A second perspective in entrepreneurial studies focuses on the morphology or the structure of social relationships that surrounds entrepreneurs: entrepreneurial action is therein linked to certain relational configurations (Callon, 1998: 9). Significantly, discontinuities in the social structure offer possibilities for entrepreneurs ‘to link hitherto unconnected individuals with control over specific resources’ (Burt, 1992: 31). Negotiation of fragmented information (and other socio-economic resources) is the key concept in this model of entrepreneurial behaviour: it suggests that free information inhibits the emergence of entrepreneurs (Aldrich & Zimmer, 1986). In that sense, successful entrepreneurs act as brokers, who manage crucial sets of contacts in disparate ‘spheres of exchange’ (Barth, 1969), and hence attain individual or collective gain. This perspective gives therefore prominence to identifying the efforts that entrepreneurs put into developing and maintaining trust relations with different economic agents (Granovetter, 1995), or how they enter into relations of control that
138 Work carried out by Andreas Rauch and Michael Frese is particularly instructive in this respect (Rauch & Frese, 2000). 139 I kindly thank my colleague Eelke Heemskerk for pointing this out to me. 138 Cotonou’s Klondike lead to structural dependencies in a business network (Guyer & Belinga, 1995). Thus this perspective seeks to uncover the strategies of entrepreneurs in taking advantage of their social position. According to proponents of this perspective, entrepreneurs do so by ‘maximising certain preferred values by making decisions about the use of rules, resources and relationships in their environment’ (Long, 1977: 128). This perspective views entrepreneurs as social geniuses: they show a high consciousness of the configuration of their social contacts and a well-developed awareness of the socio- economic opportunities that surround them. The case studies in this book have emphasised the importance of social contacts for running a second-hand car business. Car trading takes place in a complex economic environment, and to gain access to, for instance, information and capital, traders appear to depend on one another. These dependencies, however, rarely take such a form as to offer structural advantages for particular types or categories of traders. For instance, the Nigerian démarcheurs, who are perhaps the clearest example of brokers in the car trade discussed in this book (see Chapter 3), show a carpe diem attitude towards social relations management; this inhibits them from securing a stable gain from the car trade. This observation suggests that it would be more rewarding to study the logic that drives social interaction shaping trade networks rather than to focus on the position that traders hold in such networks. In brief, the entrepreneurs in the Euro-West African second-hand car trade appeared as neither heroes nor social geniuses. Rather, my historical reconstruction of the trade uncovered the emergence of a form of entrepreneurship characterised by the dream of making a fortune through striking gold, which enables one to lead an independent and otherwise carefree life. Such high collective expectations of entrepreneurship, typified as ‘Klondike’ in earlier chapters, became increasingly instrumental in directing a large flow of cash towards the car-trading sector, exemplified by the rapid capitalisation of the trade during the 1990s. It furthermore drew large numbers of aspiring businessmen from across the sub-continent, and even beyond, for instance from the Middle East, Europe and the United States, to West African trade hubs – including Cotonou. Subsequently it provided a strong motivation for them to stay in business when the car boom eventually turned to bust during the late 1990s. These high expectations are therefore central to understanding the working of the Euro-West African second-hand car trade, and in the remaining pages of this chapter I will therefore further investigate the significance of this phenomenon. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 139
EXPECTATIONS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: RETHINKING KEYNES One of the first economists to systematically draw attention to the way people’s understandings of future events inform their economic decision making was the British economist, Keynes. In Keynes’ thinking, economic decisions are principally informed by shared and long-term ideas of how the economy works, these ideas being stabilised in social conventions (Skidelsky, 1992). Keynes himself argued in a famous passage that ‘our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain’ (1937: 213). Hence a reliance on expectations presents in this view a way to handle the uncertainties of economic life; it implicates that market agents base their decisions, not on the calculation of possible, known results, but on expected outcomes of their actions (Butos & Koppl, 1997: 342; see also Fontana & Gerrard, 2005). As a result, the propensity of consumers to save – or, of major interest for this study, the inducement of capitalists to invest - is informed, according to Keynes, by the views that people hold about the future (Togati, 2001). The willingness of entrepreneurs to invest capital (in equipment and trading stock) is therefore shaped by the state of confidence they experience regarding the returns thereof; if entrepreneurs are optimistic about what the future will bring, they will invest their money in business, otherwise they will keep their money in their pockets. Before I proceed with the argument, I would first like to resolve a possible confusion of ideas: drawing from Keynesian economics does not entail the adoption of Keynes’ philosophical and economic thinking in national economic and fiscal policies of the 1950s and 1960s known as Keynesianism. Keynesianism is an equilibrium model of the economy, linking savings, investment, income and interest rates in a series of equations – the so-called ‘IS-LM’ model (Kerr, 2005). This model, developed by econometrists, analyses the factors determining output and employment levels, and thus gives a first approximation for understanding a real world economy. However, it suffers from two basic weaknesses that strongly reduce its adequacy for this study. Firstly, in seeking to determine the pattern of economic cycles, it builds on (economic) variables with a known, objective probability distribution. This implies analysis of economic phenomena based on empirical frequency tables indicating their statistical chance of occurring. It thus ignores the fundamental uncertainty regarding the future that Keynes thought essential to address in the study of economic decision making (Kriesler & Nevile, 2002; Dequench, 2003). Secondly, the model exogenises long-term expectations and hence does not consider that shifts in the ‘IS’ or ‘LM’ equations create new expectations which affect the variables of the model beyond the control of the analyst (Love, 1992). The development of Keynesianism is for these reasons regrettable: it reintroduced the universalistic interpretations of economic behaviour that Keynes had sought to avert by replacing the ‘high finance’ of laissez-faire classical 140 Cotonou’s Klondike liberalism predating Keynesian economics with an equally mechanistic image of the post-war economy, this time giving prominence to the state’s monetary policies aimed at curbing inflation. Introducing into economic theory the factor of people’s subjective responses to an experienced reality is an insight that sets Keynes apart from other economic perspectives. For instance, in current micro-economics economic actors are viewed as individuals who operate under conditions of scarcity and choose between alternatives based on their utility. In utility theory, budgeting plays a paramount role: economic actors weigh pros and cons against the background of their given preferences (Douglas & Ney, 1998: 19). Entrepreneurs, in this perspective, aim at minimising the marginal costs of risk bearing; they operate in a step-by-step procedure, whereby the next transaction is determined by an assessment of the chance that things will go wrong, including the ensuing costs involved (Baumol, 1990; Bianchi & Henrekson, 2005). This model, with profit maximisation as ultimate objective, appears useful to evaluate the stated motivations of entrepreneurs. However, its focus on the price-responsiveness of entrepreneurs operating in perfect, or perfectly known, markets makes it less suitable to understand actual entrepreneurial decision making. Furthermore, its portrayal of entrepreneurs as rational calculators in a situation of economic opportunity is at variance with more speculative forms of behaviour that appear to be associated with entrepreneurship. Although presenting a revolutionary break with other academic economics, Keynes did not develop his ideas regarding the centrality of expectations in economic life into a concrete actor-model of economic action. It chiefly remained a broad framework for macro-economic analysis that revolves around aggregate (social and economic) factors (Abdelal, Blyth & Parsons, forthcoming). However, the collective quality of expectations that Keynes observed (‘shared ideas’), and the way they stabilise economic decision making, seems to offer a good starting point for that. It brings the social life of economic actors into play and, significantly, provides room for sociological analysis of economic practices. For the study of entrepreneurship, adopting a perspective along the lines of Keynesian economics therefore enables attention to be directed to social and cultural elements associated with entrepreneurial behaviour, as follows. First of all, in seeking to understand the significance of entrepreneurship in economic life, we should develop an eye for the way it is instituted in day-to-day social practice. This builds on the realisation that what we witness today as a conventional way of doing business, which the actors involved regard as self-evident, commonly originates from a provisional practical arrangement that is to a large extent informed by situational characteristics (Douglas, 1986: 45-53). For instance, the proximity of the port to downtown Cotonou facilitated a concentration of business activities, whereby Entrepreneurs as gamblers 141 traders could easily monitor one another; this, in turn, resulted in a downward pressure on the creation of information monopolies and hence became instrumental in the development of a form of entrepreneurship organised around information management. Secondly, however, entrepreneurship as an institutionalised form of behaviour cannot be viewed outside the cultural framework in which it is produced; this legitimises what people view as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ forms of entrepreneurial behaviour. Understanding the social situations in which particular forms of entrepreneurship arise therefore entails exploring the goals that entrepreneurs value and, more broadly, how their organising practices are grounded in a cultural framework of meaning. As a consequence, the way entrepreneurship is appreciated by economic agents, and thus embedded in economic life, does not necessarily coincide with a specific category of economic actors. It varies instead with changing social configurations that engender particular value orientations that give meaning to day-to- day economic practices and organisational forms. In the case of the second-hand car trade, the rise of high expectations of entrepreneurship during the 1990s, exemplified by the widespread belief of car traders that ‘car business is good business’, relates to a cultural framework esteeming opportunistic speculation. My historical reconstruction of the economic universe of second-hand car trading suggests that it paved the way for a new economic type: the trader as gambler. The next section further discusses the consequences of stressing the gambling aspect of entrepreneurial behaviour.
COTONOU’S KLONDIKE: ENTREPRENEURS AS GAMBLERS The large insecurities that characterise the economic universe of second-hand car trading, and the strong wish of these traders to stay in business, produces in many cases a form of economic behaviour that resembles gambling. That is, in exercising little effective control over the outcome of their actions, the traders operate in the dark; chance and fortune are therefore an important context of their day-to-day lives. Although this insight came early in this study – I identified a strong resemblance between the behaviour of second-hand car traders and the gambling mentality of gold diggers in the Klondike after my first fieldwork in 2001 (see Chapter 2) - it proved more significant than I originally anticipated, for the following two reasons. Firstly, subsequent in-depth fieldwork between 2001 and 2003 among different groups of businessmen in the car trade confirmed the importance of gambling for the community of car traders at large. That is, as a form of behaviour it appeared consistent with my observations in hubs elsewhere along the Euro-West African trade network, including 142 Cotonou’s Klondike other West African markets (Accra, Lomé and Niamey) and markets in Europe (notably Utrecht and Brussels).140 Secondly, while reading about other forms of economic booms, I came to realise that viewing traders as gold diggers is a relatively underdeveloped perspective on entrepreneurial behaviour that has significance beyond the domain of its discovery and might therefore be worthwhile for further exploration. This insight was not always easy to convey to others, since it met with resistance, often arising from disbelief. An important reason for this response is that viewing car traders as gamblers challenges the idea of progress in the economic sense – the gold fields know few winners and many losers - and hence runs counter to widely held popular beliefs about the profit-making capabilities of economic agents. To an important extent this disbelief relates to a lack of conclusive evidence: gambling as a form of behaviour has thus far been understudied. Most references that I found in the field of gambling studies came from psychology, which tends to view gambling as a mental disorder and hence focuses on the pathological trajectories that lead to addictive forms of gambling (lively discussions are found in several specialist journals). Sociological studies of gambling are scanty, and most of them show a tendency to focus, from a systemic angle, on forms of gambling which are institutionalised in particular betting games - such as in lotteries, casinos and racetracks (cf. Frey, 1984). The work of Geertz provides an inspiring exception in this academic field. In a classic study he shows how people on the Indonesian island of Bali passionately bet large sums of money on the unpredictable outcome of local cock fights. From this case it follows that gambling behaviour is not limited to one domain of society, but instead penetrates all aspects of people’s everyday lives. By focusing on the symbolic meanings that the Balinese attach to the cocks, Geertz points out that the fights are a mirror-image of society itself: ‘the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects (…) where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated’ (Geertz, 1973: 443). Some economists seem to devote similar attention to the way excitement, bravado and other non-economic values associated with gambling play a role in economic decision making: for instance, in the field of betting it has been pointed out that ‘the motivation for purchase of lottery tickets is fun or pleasure from gambling activity’ (Forrest, Simmons & Chesters, 2002: 486). In discussing the motivations of entrepreneurs to invest their money in commercial enterprise, an insightful comment in that regard comes from Keynes, who stated that
140 News coverage from informed media largely confirm this observation; for an insightful interview with a Dutch second-hand car trader, see Kagie (2005); a good impression of life as a West African second-hand car trader was presented in a widely televised documentary by Bénin’s national broadcasting company, ORTB. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 143
‘If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance (…) there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation’ (Keynes, 1936: 150). This necessarily brief review of current academic literature suggests that gambling as a form of economic behaviour has thus far been discussed in a sketchy way. In order to contribute to bolstering the place of gambling in sociological and economic decision-making theory, this epilogue aims to bring out what I have come to understand as key analytical elements of gambling behaviour. This exercise completes the analysis running through this book, which started with a number of case studies recording a specified set of events and incidents in the second-hand car business, then proceeded to identify the main social and economic principles driving them, and now ends by briefly exploring the possibility of comparing this research with studies of other economic situations. In order to set gambling apart from other forms of economic behaviour, I will start by briefly pointing out what it is not. Firstly, gambling is not a stochastic form of conduct. That would imply a much larger variation of behaviour in comparable social situations than that which I observed during the fieldwork. What seems a collection of randomly colliding economic agents in search of a profit conceals on closer scrutiny a resilient pattern that is instituted by a collective belief in prosperity. Secondly, gambling is not an entirely programmed behaviour, defined by structural laws and independent of one’s volition; this is clearly illustrated by the diversity in forms of entrepreneurial behaviour, as witnessed by the case studies. Gambling, broadly speaking, is ‘throwing good money after bad’; gamblers keep on putting cash into speculative affairs, hoping for the best, even through they faced the worst on numerous occasions. To them this seems a normal thing to do; this normality is part of a collective experience that is shaped by ‘the singularity of the social trajectories of individuals who share the same economic and social conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 60). Like other forms of (economic) behaviour, gambling is therefore the logical result of structuring social interaction in ways that actors are not aware of. The word ‘logical’ is of importance here, since it analytically distinguishes gambling from gaming. In game theory, the interaction between economic agents is viewed as regulated by ‘a set of rules for each participant which tell him how to behave in every situation which may conceivably arise’ (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1964: 31). This offers the obvious advantage that complicated dilemmas faced by economic agents can be expressed in a few variables, and this facilitates a quick evaluation of economic choice situations. However, in doing so, game theorists usually insist that the actions economic agents pursue are goal-directed – they maximise utility or, in complex situations, follow a strategy of satisficing (Sugden, 1991). This is a rationalist stance that has drawn widespread criticism, for instance from scholars pointing out that game 144 Cotonou’s Klondike theory should ‘seek behavioural regularities, without presuming that these have a coherent rational reconstruction in the mind of the agent’ (Hollis & Sugden, 1993: 29). My analysis of the behaviour of gamblers builds on this insight: while gambling may be seen as a logical form of behaviour, it is not necessarily a rational response and is hence difficult to reconcile with current game theory analyses. Actual behaviour in real-life situations is seldom as pure as our scientific models propose. Nonetheless, while acknowledging a certain degree of variation in observed behaviour, I argue that, from the previous discussion, a number of behavioural elements of gambling can be drawn: it is egocentric and self-confirmatory, as well as opportunistic. The remaining pages of this chapter will further seek to clarify these elements. Firstly, gamblers exhibit a well-developed sense of individual agency; the capacity to make a difference in a situation appears a central experience in their lives - hence their expectation of individual progress. This is a form of egocentrism that causes gamblers to systematically underestimate other people’s capabilities and therefore discourages reliance on other people; this state of affairs is marked by an overall presence of shallow social relations that are driven by conflict and distrust. A strong sense of individual agency appears, however, to be at odds with actual forms of agency that come into play in everyday life. This research has demonstrated in many different ways that the possibility of running a business in a complex environment requires some sort of collaboration with fellow economic agents. In the gamblers’ universe, however, business success is not a function of teamwork, which they view as a troublesome obstacle, but is to a large extent defined by chance. Secondly, gamblers strongly exaggerate their chances of winning, and equally strongly underrate their prospects of losing. Furthermore, gamblers do not understand (financial) losses as an incentive to stop or otherwise alter their actions; losing money acts as confirmation that one is still in the game - it confers one’s identity as a gambler – and it is experienced as a mere practical problem that needs a short-term resolution. Taken together, gamblers thus exhibit a behaviour that reflects a certain state of ‘cognitive dissonance’: they all operate under the same uncertainties, and hence stand the same chance of winning or losing, yet each individual gambler reckons his own situation to be more favourable than that of others. Gamblers thus assume that their prospects of winning or losing are independent of the outcome of other economic agents. This assumption leads to self-confirmation and therefore has an important consequence for the way gamblers explore the world around them: it discourages them from putting an effort into assessing what might be happening beyond the range of their immediate environment, and accordingly from shifting their expectations. Entrepreneurs as gamblers 145
Thirdly, gamblers experience their business as a zero-sum game wherein one man’s gain causes another man’s loss; this results in a pattern of social interaction defined by constant scheming and counter-scheming, motivated by personal gain that is attained at the cost of another. Their opportunism produces a sense of urgency not to miss the boat, which, in turn, discourages the innovation of existing practices or experimentation with social relations. It promotes instead imitation and mimicking of economic agents close by, and is manifested by a high state of vigilance. Gamblers therefore dedicate their time and energy to the surveillance of their social environment, at the cost of seeking new, and perhaps more promising, avenues elsewhere. In doing so, they tend to follow short-term planning, characterised by few operational rules and ad-hoc responses to change; in short, it is a restless existence that they face. Once gambling becomes established as a dominant form of entrepreneurial behaviour, and once it gains sufficient institutional momentum by acting as a role model in people’s everyday lives, it may push ordinary economic situations characterised by composed deliberation into a speculative frenzy that strikingly resembles a gold rush. Well-know instances – the dot.com bubble is a modern large- scale point in case (Cassidy, 2002), but it also encompasses historic examples, such as the 17th century tulipomania in The Netherlands (Dash, 2000), or the 19th century infrastructure booms in Tropical Africa (White, 1993) - suggest the possibility of a variety of trajectories leading to the underlying idea of a ‘free for all’ scramble for individual opportunity. However, as the lives and works of the persons featuring in this book to some degree or another have testified, once the underlying cultural pattern promoting opportunistic speculation has become established, there is no easy turning back.
* * * 146 Cotonou’s Klondike
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SAMENVATTING
In West-Afrika vormen personenauto’s en minibusjes de ruggengraat van het stedelijk en plattelandsvervoer. Deze voertuigen komen van ver, meestal uit Europa. Daar worden zij door handelaren gekocht op tweedehandsautomarkten, bij garages en van particulieren, om vervolgens per schip naar hun tropische bestemming vervoerd te worden. Hier worden zij opnieuw verhandeld: eerst op lokale markten aan de kust, vandaar gaan zij richting het Afrikaanse binnenland. In dit proefschrift wordt deze ‘Euro - West-Afrikaanse’ tweedehandsautohandel onderzocht. Hiertoe zijn de handelswaar en de handelaren gevolgd op hun reis. Al enkele decennia rijden er auto’s in Afrika rond. Diverse wetenschappelijke studies hebben inmiddels aspecten van (lokaal) autogebruik belicht, maar de autohandel zelf is tot nog toe nauwelijks aan bod gekomen. Dat is niet zo vreemd als het in eerste instantie lijkt. De autohandel van Europa naar Afrika werd pas zichtbaar in de negentiger jaren van de vorige eeuw, na een periode van snelle groei. Op het hoogtepunt (rond het jaar 2000) werden enkele honderdduizenden auto’s per jaar verhandeld. Tijdens deze periode van hoogconjunctuur voerden de meeste West- Afrikaanse landen onder druk van de Wereldbank een beleid, gericht op economische liberalisatie. Dit bevorderde de toestroom van geld en goederen en gaf dus een impuls aan het lokale zakenleven. Een belangrijke vraag in dit proefschrift is derhalve: in welke mate is de snelle groei van de tweedehandsautohandel het gevolg van steeds vrijere (internationale) handel? Tijdens het veldwerk voor deze studie, uitgevoerd hoofdzakelijk in Nederland, België en Bénin, maar ook in Ghana, Niger en Togo, bleek dat de tweedehandsautohandel ondoorzichtig is. Een groot deel van de handel vindt plaats buiten officiële kanalen om, en handelaren geven niet snel de details van hun onderhandse verkooppraktijken prijs aan buitenstaanders. Het bleek dan ook nodig om een onderzoeksaanpak te hanteren die erop gericht was de handel van binnenuit te begrijpen, door een vertrouwensband op te bouwen met de handelaren. Om te ontdekken hoe dezen zelf het reilen en zeilen van hun autohandel zien, werd met name gebruik gemaakt van kwalitatieve onderzoeksmethoden zoals informele gesprekken en (participerende) observatie. Dit veldwerk heeft in totaal anderhalf jaar in beslag genomen. De resultaten van dit onderzoek zijn vastgelegd in vier met elkaar samenhangende wetenschappelijke artikelen, die elk een specifiek aspect van de tweedehandsautohandel belichten. Dutch summary 161
In het handelsnetwerk van tweedehandsauto’s tussen Europa en West-Afrika speelt Cotonou, de hoofdstad van Bénin, een centrale rol. Het tweede hoofdstuk141 laat zien dat begin jaren negentig van de vorige eeuw verscheidene rijke (met name Afrikaanse) zakenlui hier automarkten openden: eerst rondom de haven, maar later ook in de stad zelf. Uitbreiding van het aantal markten luidde een verandering van de handel in. Eerder was deze vooral gericht op de lokale Béninese vraag, maar nu nam de doorvoerhandel met Nigeria een hoge vlucht. Daarnaast trok de zich uitbreidende handel steeds meer zakenlui uit omringende landen aan, met een uiteenlopende sociale, professionele en etnische achtergrond. Daaruit ontstonden uiteindelijk verschillende groepen autohandelaren, onderverdeeld in tussenpersonen, detailhandelaren en importeurs. Oppervlakkig beschouwd lijkt de autohandel in West-Afrika tegenwoordig te bloeien, maar nauwkeurige bestudering van heersende handelspraktijken laat zien dat geldgebrek en grote financiële verliezen aan de orde van de dag ziin. Voor de meeste handelaren betekent een faillissement evenwel niet het einde van de handelscarrière. Meestal bouwt men via neveninkomsten en eigen (familie)contacten opnieuw kapitaal op, om daarna de autohandel weer op te pakken. Dit hoofdstuk betoogt dan ook dat de autohandelaren niet als rationele rekenaars beschouwd moeten worden. Een ander idee over hun economische gedrag is nodig om de autohandel goed te begrijpen. Een gedetailleerde beschrijving van een dag uit het leven van tussenpersoon Abdul laat zien dat de sociale contacten tussen zakenpartners in Cotonou worden gekenmerkt door zelfzucht en wantrouwen. De meeste autohandelaren delen hun kennis, winst en kapitaal liever niet met elkaar, maar spannen zich in om hun sociale contacten te manipuleren. Dat is niet alleen het geval bij zakencontacten tussen verschillende socio-etnische groepen, maar zelfs bij meer intieme familiecontacten. Deze neiging tot ‘alles-of-niets-concurrentie’ is geworteld in de sterke (en opportunistische) overtuiging dat men op een dag een grote klapper in de handel zal maken. In dit hoofdstuk wordt duidelijk dat dit gedrag trekken heeft van de manier waarop goudzoekers opereren. En net zoals tijdens de grote ‘Klondike goudkoorts’ in de 19e eeuw in Noord-Amerika, zijn de grote winnaars in de autohandel niet de handelaren zelf, maar de verschepers, financiers en andere dienstverleners.
De negentiger jaren van de vorige eeuw lieten in Cotonou een sterke toename zien van het aantal automarkten, die ook steeds meer langs etnische en soms religieuze lijnen werden gesegmenteerd. Op deze markten werden niet alleen steeds meer, maar ook
141 Verschenen als: Beuving, J. J. 2004. ‘Cotonou's Klondike: African traders and second-hand car markets in Bénin’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 42: 511-537. 162 Cotonou’s Klondike steeds meer verschillende auto’s verhandeld. Het derde hoofdstuk142 laat zien dat de handel steeds ingewikkelder werd. Het werd daardoor voor handelaars steeds moeilijker om aan goede informatie te komen over de beschikbaarheid en de prijzen van diverse automerken, modellen en de technische staat van een specifiek exemplaar. Tegelijkertijd nam het aantal tussenpersonen in de autohandel sterk toe. Meestal betrof dit Nigeriaanse jongemannen die in hun levensonderhoud proberen te voorzien door marktpartijen in Cotonou bij elkaar te brengen. Deze jongemannen, lokaal démarcheurs genoemd, vormen een belangrijke schakel in de handel. Zij blijken echter geen betrouwbare en heldere marktinformatie door te geven. Daarom is een ander idee over het economisch gedrag van deze démarcheurs nodig om hun prominente positie in de tweedehandsautohandel te begrijpen. Een gedetailleerde beschrijving van het dagelijks leven van de démarcheurs in Cotonou laat zien dat zij meestal in groepen opereren. Deze groepen zijn etnisch gemengd, en worden bij elkaar gehouden door multiplexe sociale relaties, waarin familiebanden echter geen rol spelen. Naar eigen zeggen spenderen zij veel tijd aan het vinden van een geschikt exemplaar voor handelaren die in Cotonou op zoek zijn naar auto’s. Nadat zij eenmaal hebben achterhaald hoeveel geld een dergelijke handelaar te besteden heeft, gaan zij voor hem (autohandelaren zijn meestal mannen) op pad op één van de lokale markten. Onderlinge geheimzinnigheid blijkt echter het sociale leven van de démarcheurs te bepalen: ze houden hun kennis op het gebied van tweedehandsauto’s liever voor zich, en lopen niet te koop met hun zakelijke contacten. Hierdoor is slagvaardige samenwerking problematisch en zijn ruzies over de te volgen zoekstrategie, evenals conflicten over het verdelen van winsten en verliezen dan ook wijdverspreid. De reden dat handelaren in Cotonou toch met deze démarcheurs in zee gaan, ligt in hun alomtegenwoordigheid. Voor een autohandelaar in Cotonou is het niet goed mogelijk om de démarcheurs te vermijden: onder protest samenwerken lijkt daarom de beste optie.
De meeste ondermeningen in de tweedehandsautohandel in Cotonou zijn familiebedrijven. In de wetenschappelijke literatuur worden diverse voordelen hiervan genoemd: handelspartners beschikken over een gezamenlijke taal, zij onderhouden nauwe sociale banden en putten uit hetzelfde culturele repertoire. Dit wordt als noodzakelijk gezien om handelscentra die ver van elkaar verwijderd zijn, met elkaar te verbinden, zoals bij de autohandel tussen Europa en West-Afrika het geval is. Andere
142 Dit hoofdstuk is ingediend als: Beuving, J. J. ‘Institutional change in a West African second- hand car market: the case of Nigerian démarcheurs’, in Gewald, Luning & Walraven, eds. Motor- vehicles and people in 20th century Africa. James Currey publishers. Dutch summary 163 onderzoeken laten zien dat familieleden van Afrikaanse ondernemers graag een graantje meepikken van het zakelijke succes en zo op de winsten van het bedrijf drukken. Familie wordt dan juist gezien als een rem op de motor van (economische) ontwikkeling. Met dit debat in gedachten, buigt het vierde hoofdstuk143 zich over de vraag welke rol familierelaties spelen in het West-Afrikaanse autobedrijf. Een analyse van het sociale leven van Nigerese migrantenhandelaren in Cotonou laat zien dat hun sociale relaties overwegend hiërarchisch van aard zijn. Daarbij is men geneigd om individuen die hoger in rang staan, niet van betrouwbare informatie te voorzien, maar juist te behagen met gunstige berichten. Zolang bedrijfseigenaren directe controle uitoefenen op hun eigen bedrijf, vormt deze culturele factor geen groot probleem: veranderingen op de markt worden snel door hen in de bedrijfsvoering opgenomen. Maar wanneer het dagelijkse management van het bedrijf wordt gedelegeerd naar familieleden en eigenaren daardoor niet meer bij het dagelijkse reilen en zeilen van het bedrijf zijn betrokken, raken informatiestromen verstoord. Door de sterke verwantschapshiërarchie leidt de tegenwoordig gangbare scheiding van eigendom en management bij veel West-Afrikaanse familiebedrijven dan tot het nemen van ongunstige zakelijke beslissingen, soms met vèrstrekkende gevolgen. Analyse van verkoopcijfers en importgegevens voor Cotonou laat bijvoorbeeld zien dat het onverwachte wegvallen van de lokale vraag naar tweedehandsauto’s rond 2001 en 2002 niet leidde tot een aanpassing in het aanbod ervan uit Europa. Hierdoor stagneerde de autoverkoop, wat leidde tot dalende winsten en tot kapitaalgebrek in de handel.
Eind negentiende eeuw vestigden Libanese zakenlui zich in West-Afrika. Sindsdien houden zij zich daar bezig met allerlei vormen van economische activiteit. In Cotonou zijn de Libanezen tegenwoordig te vinden als kruideniers, horecabazen en kleine industriëlen. Het vijfde hoofdstuk144 laat zien dat deze interessante groep handelsmigranten echter het meest prominent aanwezig is op de lokale automarkten, waar zij er halverwege de negentiger jaren van de vorige eeuw in slaagden om een prominente positie op te bouwen, met name in de groothandel, het (zee) transport en de importagentuur. Door deze ontwikkeling raakten de Libanezen enerzijds geleidelijk in competitie met gevestigde Afrikaanse importeurs, die dan ook geregeld mopperen op het vermeende succes van hun allochtone collega’s. Anderzijds hebben Libanese
143 Een verkorte versie van dit hoofdstuk is gepubliceerd als: Beuving, J. J. 2006. ‘Nigerien second-hand car traders in Cotonou: a sociocultural analysis of economic decision-making’, African Affairs, 105, 419: 1-21. 144 Dit hoofdstuk zal verschijnen als: Beuving, J. J. 2006. ‘Lebanese traders in Cotonou: a sociocultural analysis of economic mobility and capital accumulation’, Africa 76 (1). 164 Cotonou’s Klondike zakenlui vaak Afrikaanse werknemers in dienst en verkopen zij auto’s op krediet aan Afrikaanse kennissen. Veel startende Afrikaanse handelaars zien de Libanezen dus als een mogelijkheid om zich te vestigen op een overvolle markt. Dit hoofdstuk houdt zich dan ook bezig met de vraag welke rol de Libanezen hebben in het West-Afrikaanse zakenleven. Uit de gedetailleerde analyse van de carrière en levensgeschiedenis van Libanese auto-importeur Ahmad blijkt dat Libanese zakenlui zelden op één paard wedden: het autobedrijf wordt vaak gecombineerd met andere (vaak oudere) vormen van handel waarbij een scala aan zakencontacten wordt ingezet. Ogenschijnlijk lijkt een dergelijke multiple enterprise een heel rationele oplossing voor de (financiële) onzekerheden van het migrantenbestaan: door slim sociale contacten in te zetten krijgt men dan toegang tot kapitaal en marktinformatie. Verdere bestudering van diverse Libanese levensgeschiedenissen laat evenwel een ingewikkelder patroon zien. Aan het begin van een Libanese carrière blijken familiecontacten essentieel voor het verkrijgen van een positie in de handel. Maar eenmaal in West-Afrika aangekomen, verwateren dergelijke intieme familiecontacten geleidelijk en maken plaats voor meer doelmatige contacten met Libanese en Afrikaanse kennissen. Dit is bijvoorbeeld goed te zien in de wijdverbreide seksuele relaties tussen Libanese zakenlui en (jonge) Afrikaanse vrouwen. Dergelijke contacten verschaffen de Afrikaanse vriendinnen vaak een startkapitaal voor het opzetten van een eigen bedrijf. Voor Libanese mannen draagt een relatie met een Afrikaanse vriendin sterk bij aan het ideaal van het vrije migrantenbestaan. Veel meer dan het maken van winst blijkt juist dit ideaal een doorslaggevende rol te spelen in de beslissing van Libanese jongemannen om voor zaken naar West-Afrika te gaan.
Met de uitbreiding van de tweedehandsautohandel tussen Europa en West-Afrika in de negentiger jaren van de vorige eeuw werd het voor de meeste handelaren steeds moeilijker om genoeg te verdienen. Paradoxaal genoeg bleef men tijd en geld in het kopen en verkopen van auto’s stoppen. Kennelijk spelen daarbij dus andere overwegingen een rol dan het maken van winst alleen. Om deze ‘expansie zonder groei’ van de tweedehandsautohandel gedurende de afgelopen vijftien jaar beter te begrijpen, inventariseert het zesde hoofdstuk de principes die ten grondslag liggen aan het ondernemerschap van de autohandelaren. Hierbij worden de uitkomsten van deze studie verbonden aan bredere wetenschappelijke debatten over economisch gedrag. Veel ondernemersstudies benadrukken het vermogen van ondernemers om geld te verdienen. Daarin worden ondernemers enerzijds beschouwd als tegendraadse vernieuwers die tegen het heersende tij in en op innovatieve wijze nieuwe markten aanboren. Anderzijds worden zij gezien als sociale genieën die, door het opbouwen van Dutch summary 165 vertrouwensbanden, individuen van uiteenlopende pluimage bij elkaar brengen in een productieve combinatie van economische mogelijkheden. In het economisch universum van de tweedehandsautohandel in West-Afrika blijkt het vermogen van ondernemers om te vernieuwen of te bemiddelen echter een relatief kleine rol te spelen. De grote ambities die handelaren koesteren blijken veel belangrijker voor het verloop van de handel dan het binnenhalen van veel geld; kapitaal wordt hierdoor veelal in een ‘alles-of-niets-poging’ geïnvesteerd. Daarnaast blijken de sociale relaties van de handelaren vaak kortstondig en conflictueus; het is hierdoor moeilijk om aan betrouwbare informatie te komen die nodig is om te weten wat zich op verschillende lokale en internationale deelmarkten afspeelt. Ten slotte zorgt de geconstateerde neiging van handelaren om verliezen te verdoezelen en ongunstig nieuws achter te houden ervoor dat de tweedehandsautohandel ten onrechte een succesvol imago kreeg. Al met al opereren de autohandelaren in een zeer onzekere economische omgeving. Hun zakelijke beslissingen krijgen daardoor steeds meer de trekken van gokken. Dit is een vorm van economisch gedrag die bij nadere beschouwing uit de volgende drie elementen blijkt te bestaan. Ten eerste hebben gokkers een sterke verwachting van het individuele handelen en zijn zij ervan overtuigd dat juist zij het verschil kunnen maken. Ten tweede overdrijven gokkers hun vooruitzichten om te winnen, en beschouwen zij verliezen niet als een prikkel om te stoppen, maar juist als bevestiging dat men nog steeds in business is. Ten derde zijn gokkers opportunistisch: winst gaat ten koste van anderen, die dus als tegenstanders worden gezien op weg naar de grote zakelijke klapper. Dit proefschrift besluit met de constatering dat de snelle groei van de tweedehandsautohandel tussen Europa en West-Afrika minder het gevolg blijkt van vrijhandel, dan van een cultureel patroon dat opportunistisch speculeren bevordert. Het hieruit volgende ‘Klondike’ ondernemersgedrag is niet beperkt tot de tweedehandsautohandel, maar speelt mogelijk ook een rol bij andere economische hoogconjuncturen met goudkoorts. 166 Cotonou’s Klondike
CURRICULUM VITAE
Jan Joost Beuving was born on 12 June 1971 in Amstelveen, The Netherlands. After his final exam (Atheneum-B ‘Augustinus College’, Groningen) in 1989, Joost spent two years working in Norway and Israel. In 1991 he started his study Tropical Landuse at the Wageningen University. He specialised in natural resource management after conducting agronomic research in Ecuador (1994/5), crop modelling in Wageningen (1996) and anthropological fieldwork in western Nepal (1997). Following his graduation in 1998, he started working with the advocacy organisation ‘INZET’ in Amsterdam, first as a volunteer, then as a policy officer and finally as a project manager. In 2000 Joost submitted a research proposal to the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). With this grant, Joost enrolled as a PhD student at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR) and wrote this dissertation. In 2005 he taught ‘Research methods’ at the University of Amsterdam and at the HvA Institute for Interactive Media. Currently Joost works as a university lecturer ‘Qualitative research methodology’, Free University, Amsterdam.
Cover: A view from a car-carrying ship on the crowd waiting at the quay, port of Cotonou Cover design and lay-out: Annechien van Litsenburg, photography: Jeroen Bruggeman Language correction: Catherine ‘O Dea (English) and Nel Korstanje (Dutch) Printed by: Febo Press Enschede