Conclusion

The art of connection concludes with a discussion of what the experiences of Kenyan traders and culture brokers can tell us about globalization, development, and digital-power divides today. As the application of a Fair Trade sticker obfuscates complex economic realities, talking strictly of a digital divide in Kenya distracts attention from the historical formation of social inequality and masks the actions of certain powerful political, corporate, and development elites. Despite the hype for “Africa Rising,” ethnic and political tensions remain important. But the stories in this book are also optimistic and about innovation and tenacity. They also demonstrate that ethnic networks and the Kenyan government alike have the potential to bring security rather than insecurity. While connecting to the global economy comes with all types of new risks, new ethical branding and NGO aesthetics help Kenyans produce a sense of trust and transparency that is otherwise lacking and, therefore, central to maintaining Africa’s connection to the rest of the world today.

Crafting Ethical Connection and Transparency in Coastal Kenya

As connecting to the global economy has torn individual traders from the decades-old co-operative societies, a wave of “witchcraft” accusations and market burnings have helped illuminate the importance of the crafts industry’s moral economy of creativity and innovation and the ongoing debate about what ethical and moral development looks like in Kenya. Ideas of ethics and transparency, as produced through the application of a Fair Trade sticker, strategically erase complex economic and ethical realities while simultaneously indexing ideas of digital modernity and ethical citizenship. A Fair Trade sticker shines a selective light on marketable realities while simultaneously obscuring those inconvenient to marketing crafts. This new wave of ethical branding and NGO aesthetics enables a “race to the bottom” by businesspeople to find and organize the most exploitable artisans (the handicapped, single mothers, homeless children) into workshops and artisan organizations that explicitly market the marginality of the producers.

Negotiating Informality in Mombasa

Traders in Kenya’s handicrafts industry, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s with significant government support, often viewed themselves as members of Kenya’s “informal” or jua kali sector. How traders understood their rights and economic opportunities affected their strategies as they negotiated the economic instability and haphazard regulation of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly following the kiosk demolitions. Detailed ethnographic examples and economic histories demonstrate the effects of government attempts to license and tax coastal handicrafts traders and tourism operators. Stories from Mombasa’s North Coast demonstrate the dangers that can accompany making international connections, including the potential for human trafficking. While largely immobile Kenyans were finding new ways to use digital technologies to conduct business and communicate over long distances, they also recognized that new forms of mobility and new connections came with a host of new risks.

Crafts Traders versus the State

This chapter traces the development of Kenya’s tourism and handicraft industries from their roots in 20th century British colonialism to provide some of the broader history of Kenya’s tourism and co-operative development, their emergence in Mombasa, and their relationships with local governments. I draw on archival as well as ethnographic data collected just before the 2002 demolition of Mombasa’s roadside kiosks, which form the starting point for the larger longitudinal study. I focus on the array of experiences of Mombasa’s roadside traders of diverse backgrounds as they struggle with the privatization and segregation of urban residential and commercial space both before and after the demolitions. The economy was radically altered as the roadsides were “cleaned” and a new wave of economic formalization characterized the relationship between small-scale businesspeople and the state. For many entrepreneurs invested in the global crafts trade, this was the final straw that pushed them toward new technologies, jumping scales into global markets, and investing in export and wholesale businesses that were not spatially dependent upon a connection to the city center.

The Art of Connection

This chapter introduces the research and several of the main characters, their complex ethnic identities, and their struggles connecting to the global crafts business at a time of economic change in Mombasa, Kenya. Framing the larger set of stories within debates surrounding Afropolitanism and the “Africa Rising” narrative, this chapter argues that an exploration of the how Kenyan art traders adapt digital technologies to their businesses allows us to balance the optimism of the “Africa Rising” narrative with the realities of Africans’ struggles to connect but to forge trusting, dependable connections strong enough to be viable alternatives to ethnic and other informal networks. This chapter also uses background on the West’s curiosity with Africa’s “ethnic and tourist arts” to argue that digital technology has largely replaced art today as a means of evaluating African “development.”

New Mobilities, New Risks

While cell phones and other new digital technologies can help struggling businesspeople overcome their immobility and lack of access to urban economic space, new forms of connection come with a host of new risks. Despite the importance of new technologies like M-PESA, risk and insecurity are central to shaping lived experiences of mobility and the digital-power divide in much of the world today. The stories in this chapter illustrate that privatization and deregulation of the economy—especially telecommunications—does not necessarily lead to widespread socio-economic development, poverty alleviation, or business creation. Rather than a story of new global motion and mobility, the lived reality of global interconnection today is characterized by discontinuity, immobility, and awkwardness. The types of risk shape their strategies for jumping scales or staying local and balancing the precarious and often fuzzy boundary between economic formality and informality in Mombasa.

Mombasa Marginalized

The history of social inequality and the conflicting discourses of marginality in Mombasa have shaped the identities and economic strategies of the city’s small-business class. One view shared by many struggling migrants holds that they have been denied their rights as Kenyan citizens. Another represents various coastal communities that have been actively disenfranchised and manipulated by both the colonial and post-colonial governments of Kenya. Both groups make claims to land and political representation in Mombasa—one from a national perspective and one from a regional perspective. This comparison frames a decade of individual stories of ethnic insecurity and the struggle to access co-operatives and municipal markets, local and international economic networks, tourist hotels and beaches, and ethnic neighborhoods and communities. This chapter is important for providing background on ethnic tensions as well as the increasing importance of claims of marginality that are important to NGO aesthetics discussed in later chapters.

From Ethnic Brands to Fair Trade Labels

This chapter discusses how the strategies and aspirations of Kenyan traders and the realities of connecting to the global economy have shaped the aesthetics and meanings of Kenyan arts and crafts. These changes demonstrate the ability of connected and savvy Kenyan traders to adapt to an ever-changing and diverse tourist demographic, including Afropolitans. This chapter explores how Kenyan tourist art and handicrafts have been marketed in new and creative ways—as Fair Trade, of a particular tree species, or as representing modern global interconnectedness. Facing ethnic tensions and insecurities that bring instability to their lives and businesses, traders regularly downplay ethnicity in their branding and often de-ethnicize their products. The art of connection motif and its artistic representation are successful on the market because they portray an ideal of egalitarian, transparent, and even Afropolitan-style of human interconnection acceptable to both tourists and Kenyan artisans and traders.