Daniel Agbiboa, Presentation of the book “They Eat Our Sweat. Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria”, 15.09.2022, 5:30PM-7:15PM

Sciences Po, Online via Zoom*, Compulsory registration

Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.

Speaker
Daniel E. Agbiboa, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University

He was previously Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. His research uses mobile ethnography to understand on how state and nonstate forms of order and authority interpenetrate and shape each other, with particular focus on the political economy of everyday life in urban Africa.

His articles have appeared in major academic journals, including Public Culture, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Current History. His books include They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022); Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press, 2022); and Transport, Transgression, and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge, 2019).

He is the recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award.

Discussant
Tim Gibbs, Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) in English Studies at the Université Paris-Nanterre

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