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| Title: | Trustworthy trader or creditworthy debtor? Competing moralities and trader subjectivities at the Kariakoo Market in Dar es Salaam |
| Author: | Brühwiler, Benjamin |
| Year: | 2014 |
| Periodical: | Stichproben - Vienna Journal of African Studies (ISSN 1992-8610) |
| Volume: | 13 |
| Issue: | 27 |
| Pages: | 27-53 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Tanzania |
| Subjects: | traders identity credit loans |
| External link: | http://stichproben.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_stichproben/Artikel/Nummer27/Stichproben27_02_Bruehwiler.pdf |
| Abstract: | Urban Africans in twentieth-century Dar es Salaam made extensive use of credit and debt to create trade networks and respectable identities. Relying on mali kauli trade practices (a form of informal credit based on verbal promises), wholesalers at the Kariakoo market established relationally-constituted identities as trustworthy traders, making obvious the morality at the center of discourses and practices of credit and debt. Moral discourses around credit and debt provided a realm where local views of business practices and creditors' visions of desirable business behavior intersected. When formal loans became available in the 1990s, credit providers used morality as a fulcrum to reform urban traders. Although impelled to become creditworthy debtors, Kariakoo traders preferred older systems of trade to cash-based transactions facilitated by formal loans. The persistence of older forms of morality and relations of trust served as a way to critically evaluate and criticize formal loans and attending moral discourses. Bibliogr., notes, ref. sum. [Journal abstract] |
