I was in Lusaka on Wednesday for a whirlwind tour of downtown to purchase connectors for our waterline that is starting to resemble the Great Wall of China in project duration.
For those of you not familiar with Lusaka, it's essentially a series of neighborhoods that straddle or parallel the main roads in and out of town. Each neighborhood has it's certain demographic, characteristics, etc. For example, Kabulonga and Woodlands are where you'll find all the wealthy, elite Zambians, ex-pats; Longacres, most of the foreign embassies; Emmasdale is where the South Asian business community resides; Mwandevu, the city's gritty northern gateway where the illicit charcoal from the forest reserves all gets dropped off; Mutendere, the shanty compound where half of everyone seems to live on top of each other; and Kalingalinga, one of the sadder places in the universe where you can see old women and little kids breaking stones with hammers for a pittance.
Downtown (or "town" as it's known in the local vernacular) is the great beating heart of Lusaka. It is essentially four streets wide by 10 long that parallel the line-of-rail and the famous Cape-to-Cairo road [Cairo Road] wherein lie endless marches of shops. There is no apparent pattern to the place to the untrained or inexperience mind, but five years of wandering in and out of the place looking for stuff leads to a semblance of geography. However, there is a very simple business concept you have to swallow before you can grasp it [or the market in Zambia] which I term "clustering".
You see, from the smallest market of the side of a dusty road all the way up to Downtown Lusaka, people sell similar items in clusters. For example, if you want tomatoes, you find the place where they sell tomatoes and you find something like 40 women sitting side-by-side with identical piles of tomatoes arrayed in front of them, selling tomatoes at nearly identical prices. It goes the same for beans, dried fish, meat, auto parts, hardware, plumbing, etc. If you (like me) are looking for polypipe connectors, there is a stretch of Freedom Way northeast of the Mumbwa / Lumumba Road junction that has a number of stores that carry plumbing supplies at nearly identical prices right next to each other. Fascinating, too, how these stores operate ... you wander in and are immediately met by a 20-something guy who figures out what you want, and knows instantly whether the store has it or not. If not, he assures you that he'll be right back and sprints off into the mass of people on the sidewalk. A few minutes after staring into the same mass, he reemerges carrying something. With some clarification, he sprints off again; more staring, and then confirmation of a part, or a sad shake of the head that means the part doesn't exist within his circle of influence / associated stores. It works surprisingly well; you might pay a slightly higher price for a particular part (sort of the finder's fee, if you will), but you save a lot of footwork and time. I didn't get exactly what I was looking for, but we were able to improvise a number of single connectors from two or three different pieces.
The point of all this is that often, the superficial view of Zambian market views is that it is a relatively chaotic mass that lacks organization, order, rules, etc. However, there is a hidden order; many of these clusters serve as mutually beneficial entities. For example, if one of the ladies selling tomatoes needs to rush somewhere for something, another lady will look after her small child(ren) and watch her stand. If there is a good wholesale of tomatoes, that information gets shared out to others, so that a relatively small group of women can corner that sale and set a mutual price on tomatoes in a certain area. It's not a system that supports individual competition; if you set out on your own, you risk ending up a pariah, ostracized, etc. In our relatively introverted [Western] society, this is acceptable ... you can exist on your own penned up within books, Ipods, existing online through an avatar, etc. Here, it is akin to shunning; Zambian society is based on mutual dependencies that allow an individual to survive through association with a group, be it familial, tribal, locative, economic, etc. The closest parallel I can figure in our context would be deep-sea fisherman; though they are in a sense competing with each other, they look out for each other, sharing engine parts, fishing information, etc. less out of a sense of altruism rather than a sense of mutual obligation. If I don't give Captain So-and-so a hand when he's in a pinch, word might get around, and then what do I do if I end up in a tight spot? Neither a wise course in either the literal or figurative sea.
It's tough for Americans [the land-based ones] to wrap their heads around this. For us, reared in the tradition of the Puritan ethic, Horatio Alger, and so forth, it is the individual through her/his luck, skill, shrewdness, determination, perseverance,or a combination of such that get Ragged Dick into a decent life. Here, it's not that you only have to work hard ... you have to look out for your neighbors. That's sort of the reason why development projects that target individuals seem to have little success; they might get ahead for a bit, but jealousy can cause that person to suffer social ostracism, so the advancement has a limiting factor. This is particularly evident where projects seek to help a specific demographic in a "community" (i.e. female-headed households, orphans and vulnerable children, etc.) without recognizing that the remaining demographics in the "community" might be upset over the recognition, support, material goods, etc. that they cannot access.
I'll try to flesh this idea out more as I move along; it's a tough one and I lack much of the equipment to accurately characterize it, but it's worthwhile for me to explore its corners.
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