Translocal mobility and globalized trade in East Africa

Abstract

This paper argues for translocality as a useful concept in studying how international industries and global trade take shape locally. Research with a translocality lens can moreover provide a more holistic understanding of the experiences of wage workers and informal petty traders in globalized trade.

This paper discusses two East African case studies where globalized economic sectors are intertwined with translocal mobility patterns. The first case is the export-oriented flower industry in Kenya. The, predominantly international, flower farms have tapped into historically-developed translocal networks of labour migration for recruiting labour. Moreover, the experiences of wage labourers in this industry are not only shaped by the labour conditions on the farms set within the global value chain, but also by the labourers’ enduring translocal connections. They for instance tend to cope with partly difficult conditions of labour in the industry because of the financial stability the farms provide, which enables workers to regularly remit some money to rural family members.

The second example is the trade in second-hand clothes on Tanzania’s southern coast. The global part of the value chain of these clothes has received due scholarly attention, but the distribution from international ports of arrival to secondary towns and village markets has hardly been studied. This is the more remarkable, since the trade second-hand clothes reaches far into rural and disconnected markets across the African continent. This case study shows that in the case of Tanzania, the distribution of used clothes is largely informal and is channelled through existing translocal networks of labour migration.

Translocal movements and the increased interconnectedness of urban and rural areas are by no means a new phenomenon on the African continent, yet they become ever more significant for African everyday lives and livelihoods. The two East African cases discussed in this paper illustrate that international trade and globalized flows of goods do not reduce the importance of translocal connections, but rather intensify and re-shape translocal mobility patterns.