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Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public

Transport in an African Metropolis Matteo Rizzo. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2017, pp. xx +215 (ISBN 9...

Article in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography · September 2018

DOI: 10.1111/sjtg.12264

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Book Reviews

Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public

Transport in an African Metropolis Matteo Rizzo. Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2017, pp. xx +215 (ISBN 978-0-19-879424-0)

Akin to its title, in this book, the author, Matteo Rizzo, literally takes his readers along
on a journey through a mundane yet important world of informal public transport in
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. However, contrasting to the Tanzanian state, he does not take
the readers for a ride but introduces them to an overwhelming underworld of transport
service providers by revealing their everyday practices. Tracing historical developments
in transport policies of the Tanzanian state, he unearths a neoliberal project that has
transformed Dar es Salaam’s transport since 1983. Through detailed ethnographic field-
work with dala dala (minibus) workers between 1996 and 2016, he tries to demolish
the conventional understanding of informal labor as a homogeneous group of self-
employed small-scale entrepreneurs. Discussing the complexities of informal labor,
Rizzo attempts to reveal ‘the shortcomings of “all structure” and “all agency” narratives
on the city and on the informal economy…’ (p. 175).
Examining the politics of public transport provisions between different actors rang-
ing from dala dala workers to the World Bank, Rizzo unearths the complexities
between agency and structure in policy practice in Global South. While such analysis
ordinarily seems to be building from Giddens’s theory of structuration (cf. Giddens,
1984), Rizzo adopts a different theoretical framework, that of ‘actually existing neolib-
eralism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Neoliberalism is considered a state restructuring
project which attempts to alter the institutional infrastructures of (formal) governance.
Under their framework, Brenner and Theodore privilege contexts and path depen-
dency in the unfolding of neoliberalism. However, Rizzo’s adaptation of this framework
seems confusing. It is definitely a robust framework that reveals a great deal about
localized power practices between macro and micro elements in policy making and
implementation processes. However, this framework’s basic premise is to privilege the
capitalist structures within the society, which tends to fall under ‘all structure’ theories,
which Rizzo appears to be critiquing.
The book is empirically rich and comprises eight chapters. The first six chapters cap-
tivatingly take the readers from macro-level policy issues with public transport provi-
sions to the micro-level picture of everyday dala dala operations and the lives of its
workers. The final two chapters direct the readers’ attention towards the tensions
between micro and macro elements in public transport policy implementations. The
book presents a convincing critique of contemporary urban and labour theories, which,
for Rizzo, either paint a dystopian picture of cities in Global South (e.g. Mike Davis) or
romanticize its informalities (e.g. de Soto, Simone). For him, such unsubstantiated
scholarship ‘crowds out an understanding of the concrete realities they [the people at
the grassroots] face…’ (p. 7). He questions these scholars’ understanding of economic
informality as ‘a teeming mass of undifferentiated, self-employed entrepreneurs’
(p. 53). Revealing different informal arrangements between the bus owners and
workers, and amongst the workers themselves, Rizzo demonstrates that within the
informal economy, there are a variety of forms of employments, which give rise to var-
ied forms of wage labour.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 40 (2019) 173–177

© 2018 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
174 Book Reviews

Revealing the changes in public transport provisions for the city of Dar es Salaam,
this book provides a comprehensive understanding of the functioning of the Tanzanian
state and neoliberal shifts within it since its independence. Discussing the changing face
of neoliberalism from ‘roll-back’ to ‘roll-out’ mode, Rizzo documents the gradual with-
drawal of the state from public transport provision in later parts of the twentieth cen-
tury, and its attempts to regain control since 2001. He exposes the tensions between
different agencies within the state in rolling out of neoliberalism and explains how
such tensions come to subvert the state’s own neoliberal project. Further, discussing
the resistance from the informal actors towards the state’s policies, he presents these
developments as a case study of actually existing neoliberalism in Tanzania. He rightly
argues for developing a contextual understanding of the circumstances faced by Africa’s
urban poor to develop alternatives for the better future of African cities. However, one
must question the extent to which such contextual understanding can be developed
through a linear understanding of the state as the focal point to all urban processes, as
presented by Rizzo.
Rizzo brings the readers’ attention to the limitations of concepts developed in other
environments (in most cases—the Global North) to understand the ground-realities of
urban processes in African cities. Discussing the 2006 labour force survey conducted by
Tanzanian authorities, he shows how the literal translations of English words used for
the survey led to a situation where the people could not properly understand the dif-
ferent categories of employment. It meant that the data collected by the authorities
was erroneous and led to inaccurate interpretations. While the limitations of language
to understand ground-realities using imported concepts gets exposed through such
cases, it is puzzling that Rizzo limits this critique only to linguistic concerns. Such
instances also present the opportunity to question western understandings of certain
concepts, which are often developed in the Global North and unquestioningly applied
in the Global South. For example, the contract system between the bus owners and
workers in Dar es Salaam, as explained in the book is substantially different from the
formal understanding of contracts in the West.
The book provides a powerful account of tensions between different actors in the
operation of dala dala. Rizzo discusses the capitalist microstructures between bus
owners and the workers that flourish within the capitalist superstructure between the
state and dala dala. He reveals the exploitation of dala dala workers by the bus owners
through high charges for their operation, ephemeral contracting, and negligible wage
security. He explains how the workers tried to overcome these exploitative conditions
by forming associations between themselves, tasting moderate success. He also dis-
cusses the use of muscle-power by daily-wage workers through formation of gangs and
their attempts at intimidating regular workers. For the readers, Taken for a Ride provides
a glimpse into the everyday strategies of dala dala workers as they try to overcome
structural barriers and discuss how their strategies either succeed or fail.
Overall, though a powerful account of everyday power struggles of informal labour
in an African city, the book leaves its readers wondering as to how to make sense of
the rich empirical data that has been captured in its pages. Rizzo makes it clear that he
neither concurs with an apocalyptic reading of African cities nor does he agree with
romanticizing informality in a bid to understand and celebrate actual urban processes.
Yet, he does little to provide a theoretical understanding of the complex nature of such
urban informal markets in the Global South, which moves beyond the sensibilities
developed for Global North. Demonstrating the Tanzanian state’s complexities, Rizzo
suggests to the readers that the unfolding of the state in Tanzania is a different form of
 Book Reviews 175

neoliberalism than what is experienced in many other countries. However, he does not
satisfactorily demonstrate how such a comprehensive account of a well-grounded
research can help the readers understand urban processes in other African cities/con-
texts, if not beyond. Nonetheless, the book is definitely a stimulating account of infor-
mal public transport provisions in a Southern city, helping its readers to unpack
conventional understandings of both public transport and informality.

Gaurav Mittal
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Accepted: 2 May 2018

References

Brenner N, Theodore N (2002) Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Anti-
pode 34 (3), 349–79.
Giddens A (1984) The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Polity Press,
Cambridge.

Geography: History and Concepts. 5th Edition. Arild Holt-Jensen. Sage

Publications Ltd, London, 2018, pp. xxi + 276. ISBN 978-1-5264-4014-3 hbk, ISBN
978-1-5264-4015-0 pbk.

As we speak, humanity faces geographical questions of unprecedented scale and scope.

From climate change to inequality and urbanization, geography potentially offers cru-
cial insights. The perennial question is, however, whose geography? The positionality
of the geographical imagination determines what is important, included, theorized,
recorded in the disciplinary annals, and what is neglected as triviality. If discipline
building is an academic project, how can we ensure that all are included as part of that
project (Christopherson, 1989). Or viewed dynamically, how do we maintain coherent
disciplinary dialogues while simultaneously keeping an open mind to include unex-
pected contributions, as suggested by the practice of engaged pluralism? (Sheppard,
2015). Such a practice needs to unscrew itself from the Anglo-American primacy that
has dominated the discipline in the last decades, yet retain communication between
past and present (Hassink et al., 2018a; Van Meeteren, 2018). This review resolutely
pleads that Holt-Jensen’s Geography: History and Concepts is the perfect undergraduate
textbook to advance that disciplinary agenda.
Geography: History and Concepts unapologetically advocates a holistic geography that
includes the physical- and human-geographical families. Thinking geographically
(Sheppard, 2015), fosters the ‘homo geographicus’ (Sack, 1997), and the geographical
discipline is habitus for that remarkable viewpoint. Taking climate change as the over-
arching example why geographers need to stick together more than ever gives the
book a remarkably fresh yet familiar flavour in an age of disciplinary subspecialism
fragmentation. The book makes its case filled with a contagious excitement for the geo-
graphical profession. Geography’s outward-looking interdisciplinarity is imagined as a
life-raft in the sea of knowledge (pp. 16−17). Instead of policing the discipline’s bound-
aries we need to widen the circle. The book’s ‘basic intuition’ to approaching geogra-
phy (page xiv) is to acknowledge that science entails simplification and that a single

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