Preta looked over from an array of open windows on his desktop. “Gospel,” he said.
“Ya, gospel! Give me some of that gospel.”
“Ya, no problem.” Preta trailed off and began clicking through the archives, and the man lit up as Preta played him a sampling, interjecting approvingly. “Ya, ya—that one’s goooood.” This is the most profitable line of Preta’s business. Beginning at eight each morning, the studio receives a steady stream of visitors—overwhelmingly male—who come in to request music à la carte. Songs cost 5 meticais, a little more than 10 cents, videos twice that. Often, customers bring their own cell phones or USB keys to make the transfer. A burned CD is $2.
A boy in his school uniform hums a song from Angola. It’s the one about a party, he says, a fast one, with a girl singing. Preta frowns at the screen, wipes his forehead with a clean white rag. Double-clicking steadily, he seems to pull files at random. Two seconds of one song, then another. The boy looks on quizzically. Miraculously, the song in question is found inside of a minute. The boy gives Preta Dany his SIM card and 5 meticais and leaves a few seconds later, with his favorite song buzzing from his cell phone. The efficiency is almost hard to believe. In a place without running water or piped sewage, where crops are grown without animal traction or fertilizer, the intellectual property of an entire planet is at his fingertips.
Mocuba is a gritty crossroads of a town known, according to Lonely Planet, for “dirty water and for being nobody’s favorite Mozambican town. Do what you can to avoid overnighting here,” the guidebook advises—more, I suspect, out of concern for the possibility of boredom and discomfort than for any risk to visitors’ safety.3 The most traveled intersection in town, the strip by the bus depot, is a riot of activity. Mototaxi drivers come and go on $300 Lifan bikes to form a buzzing scrum of metal and young men at the entrance to the municipal market. Piles of coconuts, pineapples, and mushrooms spill onto the sidewalk in front of dark storerooms. Small girls bearing baskets of overripe cucumbers on their heads dodge traffic and ward off catcalls with blank faces. Phone chargers and electric fans hang from the rafters in the converted shipping container shops that line the street. Preta seems to know everyone.
Most of the work that animates this scene would fit under the banner of the ballooning unemployment figures often featured in the news. Beneath an Al Jazeera headline bemoaning Mozambique’s “dire youth unemployment crisis,” for instance, you’ll read that 70 percent of Mozambicans under thirty-five “cannot find stable employment.”4 The World Bank puts the total unemployed for ages fifteen to twenty-four around 40 percent.5 And while those numbers do a fair job of describing the problem—most people don’t have jobs, per se—they can also be a bit misleading. Most people considered unemployed in the United States or the United Kingdom don’t spend twelve hours a day carrying a bucket of frozen water bottles back and forth through traffic, or rise at five each morning to weed their cassava fields. Yet that, too, is a fair description of unemployment.
It was a debate over the meaning of “unemployment” in the developing world that first gave rise to the concept of an “informal sector” of the economy. The term was introduced by the anthropologist Keith Hart, who was trying to account for all the messy work arrangements that defined life in the ramshackle market neighborhood where he lived in Accra, Ghana, in the late 1960s.6 People there were certainly not “unemployed,” and yet, they weren’t exactly employed, either. They were in between, toiling long hours for low returns and without job protections, or cobbling together streams of “informal income opportunities.”
A half century later, economists are still wrestling with how best to describe the size or shape of the workforce in the developing world. No matter how you parcel out the economy, “formal” and “informal” are mixed, sometimes contradictory categories.7 There are formally licensed construction firms that hire day laborers under the table, and big-time timber brokers who organize their businesses on the margins of legal industry; unlicensed beauty salons that pay steady wages and have set hours of operation, and self-employed porters or market sellers who pay municipal taxes.8 A phone credit salesman is, in a way, like a franchise operator. Agusto, whom Preta had gotten started selling phone credit in Mocuba, had no ties to MCel or Vodacom, yet here were the terms of the deal: he contributed sweat equity and start-up costs, and the corporation provided the materials, pricing, and back-end system that constituted his business.
One day, at a bus stop outside Nampula, I made a note of everything vendors carrying their shops on their persons tried to sell me and my fellow passengers in an open-back truck during the ninety minutes we waited to get on the road:
•New and used shoes
•Bottles of water, refilled at home and frozen solid
•Fluorescent SunnyD-like bottles of “juice”
•Backpacks
•Bags of bread—rolls and loaves
•Dragon energy drink
•Peanut candy
•Hard-boiled eggs
•Perfume
•Body lotion
•Belts
•Sunglasses
•Clothespins
•Long, tan bars of laundry soap
•Beauty soap
•Leather wallets
•Thermoses
•Cream crackers and assorted cookies
•Fried dough balls
•Toy cars, police and civilian
•Scrub brushes
•Plastic beads
•Capulanas
•Angola brand toothpaste
•Phone credit
Each of these has its place in the hierarchy of buying and selling that forms a career path of sorts in markets all over Mozambique. Gender and age are often dividing lines, along with the amount of cash required to get started. Fried dough balls call for nothing more than a dollar or two of ingredients—oil, flour, sugar, water—and a place to put them together, along with enough charcoal to cook. For cold drinks you need some kind of access to a refrigerator, at someone’s store or at home. Cell phones, shoes, and textiles require more capital.
This is the world where Preta has made his living all along, straddling the fence between survival and entrepreneurship. With luck and more than a little grit, this kind of selling gradually opens the door to expanded inventory, more expensive goods, higher volume, or an entirely new line of business—but not, in all likelihood, a job with fixed hours or fixed pay.9
One way to divvy up the workforce is based on who buys the service of your labor. In that scenario, the economists Sam Jones and Finn Tarp suggest, the “informal sector” might be considered everything other than wage work—both self-employment and unpaid household or farm employment—which actually constitutes the vast majority of work done in Mozambique.10 As such, they write, “In rural areas only 5% of jobs are plausibly located in the formal sector; this rises to a little over 30% in urban areas. . . . Only 12% of all workers report receiving a wage, of which almost 80% are men.”11
With so much work taking place outside formal hourly or salaried jobs, the most useful distinction is not employment versus unemployment but full employment versus underemployment: essentially, full-time versus part-time work.12 In urban areas, the rate of formal employment has stagnated even as Mozambique’s growth has soared. Jones and Tarp put the urban unemployment rate at 6 percent, but they estimate another 26 percent of people can’t get enough work. Just one out of three is fully employed.13 Mozambique’s farms, which employ some 80 percent of the country’s workforce, represent a staggering amount of labor for very little income. In rural areas, Jones and Tarp find that fewer than one in two hundred people is unemployed, but close to half are underemployed. There is only so much work family farmers can do without access to credit, fertilizer, irrigation, or animals to help them plow.
* * *
Preta spent his early years in the provincial capital, Quelimane, part of the exodus from the countryside that took place across Mozambique during the civil
war. When the peace was signed, he and his mother went to live with his stepfather in the countryside. Davane chafed at the change. The local school, held under a tree, stopped after third grade, and Davane, who’d had the benefit of actual desks and chairs in Quelimane, wanted badly to continue to study.
He barely knew his father, but he’d been told he had an older sister and an uncle in Mocuba, some fifty miles away. When visitors came from out of town, Preta says he would tell them, “I’m going to go back to Mocuba with you.” The first person to take him seriously was the husband of one of his mother’s relatives, who came to visit periodically on his bicycle. Around his ninth birthday, Davane left home while the man was still in town. He told his mother he was going to pick beans for a neighbor. Instead, he walked the few miles to a church along the main road and found a group of kids playing out front.
“Which way to Mocuba?” he asked.
“It’s very far,” they said, pointing out the way. “What will you eat?”
“I remember, I was carrying three pieces of boiled cassava,” Preta told me. He held up his hands to mime the exchange, an irresistible grin spreading in anticipation of a punch line.
“‘If Jesus could survive for more than a month without even cassava, then I will be able to make it to Mocuba,’” he said. It was another forty miles or so to the city. He set out under a light rain until the man overtook him that afternoon and brought him to live with his uncle in town. Davane began to sell things as soon as he could manage. He bought his fourth-grade pencils and notebooks by selling corn and okra he picked for a neighbor. When his uncle gave him 50 meticais to buy a pair of sandals, he used the money to buy peanuts instead, which he roasted and shelled and turned into 70. At school, a teacher took the money, saying he hadn’t paid his school fees. Davane returned home with no sandals and no money. “You see?” his uncle said. “That’s exactly why I can’t have you staying with me.” But he didn’t go home. Preta remembers being so impatient to be a grown-up that he glued hair clippings to his upper lip and went around town with a fake mustache. He sold cashews and gasoline measured out in glass soda bottles. Once, a transit policeman gave him 10 meticais, which he used to buy cigarettes he resold one by one, until he had multiplied the money fivefold. When he saw the cop again, Preta recalled with a laugh, he practically taunted him: “Do you see what your 10 meticais has become?” he cried out. Cassette tapes would come soon after.
Preta is slight but well fed, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He wears a thin mustache and scraggly goatee and has big, persistent eyes that give him a look of concentration whether he is frowning or showing all his teeth in a wide grin. He speaks softly, doesn’t drink, and tips his hat to the grace of God in the way that some people say “you know?,” as in “By the grace of God I had a good breakfast,” or “By the grace of God business is good today.” By his own accounting, Preta sleeps just four hours a night. Under the spell of hot weather, beer, and the fatigue of speaking a foreign language, I’ve always found it hard to carry on a conversation in Mocuba much past ten p.m., but Preta likes to sit up at night in a plastic chair outside his house, reading or simply looking at the stars. This, he says, is when ideas come to him.
There are two businesses, both now well established, that Preta takes credit for pioneering in Mocuba: burning CDs and running motorcycle taxis. Neither involves any particular original insight other than the notion that Mocuba was ready for something new. But the same could be said of every hardware store, restaurant, and movie theater launched in a small town that previously went without. “Someone once asked me,” Dany told me, “‘How do you think of all this stuff?’ I told him, ‘Whenever I see something nice they’re doing in big cities, I just try and figure out if there’s a way to bring it to my town.’” He let out a long, full-throated laugh.
The problem, of course, is that Preta’s main advantage was simply being months, or perhaps a year, ahead of the curve. The “prevalence of perfect, or rather . . . near-perfect competition” is one of the key features economists have used to describe informal work.14
Writing in 1954, the St. Lucian economist Arthur Lewis described the dynamics of work in developing economies with what he called an “unlimited supply of labor.” “The workers on the docks, the young men who rush forward asking to carry your bag as you appear, the jobbing gardener. . . . These occupations usually have a multiple of the number they need, each of them earning very small sums from occasional employment; frequently their number could be halved without reducing output in this sector. Petty retail trading is . . . exactly of this type . . . each trader makes only a few sales; markets are crowded with stalls, and if the number of stalls were greatly reduced the consumers would be no whit worse off.”15 Mozambique’s workforce is set to double by 2050, with more and more restless young people moving into cities and towns like Mocuba all the time.16 The supply of people continues to outstrip the supply of jobs.
Chinese-made motorcycles started arriving in Mocuba in large numbers shortly after Preta began renting his Honda out by the day to a friend who took paying passengers. The good times lasted only long enough to pay for a second motorcycle. The business’s margins soon collapsed under the weight of its popularity. Soon, there were fifteen mototaxis working in downtown Mocuba; today, there seem to be hundreds, mostly sitting idle while their teenage and twenty-something—universally male—drivers backslap and wait for the next ride. Now the town has once again reached an inflection point: xapas, or minibuses, have begun to ply a couple of main routes in Mocuba, thanks to another entrepreneur who saw something in the big city and found a way to bring it home.
Over the years, Preta has tried to move into businesses that aren’t so easily disrupted or replicated. His forays into shooting videos and recording local musicians have been steps in this direction—there are even a couple of Preta Dany–penned ballads making the rounds—but there are only so many singers in Mocuba whose ambitions justify the expense. In 2009, on a trip to Maputo, Preta signed up for a computer and photocopier repair course and brought the trade back home. Now, he says, his late nights are often spent peering into the bowels of scanners and trying to coax Dell desktops back to life.
Opportunity in Mocuba had always seemed circumscribed, even compared to Quelimane’s or Maputo’s relative development. The reason Preta had moved to Mocuba from his childhood home was so that he could continue his education. But when he finished high school, he’d gone as far as he could go in Mocuba. In 2010, when the Universidade Mussa Bin Bique opened a branch there, Preta jumped at the chance to go to school without leaving home. Mussa Bin Bique is a private college christened for a precolonial ruler of Mozambique Island whose name Vasco da Gama reportedly garbled into “Moçambique,” giving the region, and later the country, its name.17
Preta enrolled to study business as part of the first cohort and spent more than $1,000 on tuition in his first year. A few months into his second, the campuses in Mocuba and another Zambezia town, Pebane, closed without warning. After weeks of protests over unfinished classes and lost tuition, it ultimately took nearly a year for students to learn that the college had been operating with unlicensed faculty and without approval from the Ministry of Education.18 The next closest place to earn a bachelor’s degree was an hour and a half away, in Quelimane, so Preta rented an apartment there and made the trip every weekend. Finally, he became a doutor, as people with BAs are often called in Mozambique, with a thesis on internal audits. All that stood between him and a diploma when we last spoke was $2,000 in assorted fees.
On my most recent visit, the street-facing side of Preta’s music business—a tiny wooden stall cut into the front wall of the building where he keeps his studio—had been reinvented as an ice cream shop. The booth itself has just enough room for a man to stand and turn freely, so the new tenant stood with a soft-serve machine plugged into the wall in the building behind him, pivoting carefully to hand out cones over the counter.
“Deixei, deixei,” Preta sai
d. “I left it.” For years, this booth had provided a soundtrack for the intersection, with a VCD player and a tiny TV pumping out Malawian music twelve hours a day under the eye of an associate. But after almost twenty years of scrimping and selling to boost his buying power and diversify his lines of business, Preta had finally gotten what most everyone in Mocuba wants: a job. In 2014, he was hired as a teller at the local branch of Barclays Bank, and he put his businesses aside. He liked the regular hours, the pay. Dealing with the customers came naturally to him. Then, just over a year later, the bank was badly damaged in an electrical fire and closed for several months. When it reopened with a new manager, most of the staff was replaced as well.
Preta returned to the small-town hustle. Two thousand fifteen had been a rough year, he told me. After years of mounting discord with his in-laws, he had separated from his wife and moved out. His brother had been badly injured in a motorcycle accident, drawing the whole family into paying what they could for his treatment. The music business, meanwhile, had slowed considerably while Preta’s focus was elsewhere. “I’m restructuring,” he said. “I’m in a rebuilding phase.”
The first order of business is a house. Preta now lives in a tiny unfinished apartment with soccer posters nailed to the walls, next door to the construction site where his house is going up. There’s a high school across the street. Originally, Preta says, he bought the lot hoping to build a computer school, but he’d had to scale back his ambitions.
The location continues to serve him well. When he moved in, Preta arranged to put a photocopier behind the counter at the soda, soap, and crackers store his landlord keeps in the front room of his house. Many classes are taught without the benefit of textbooks, so teachers compensate by drawing up twenty- or thirty-page booklets the students must then find a way to copy. Preta approached teachers with the promise of a reliable copy machine just steps from the schoolhouse door and keeps the originals of each packet on file. At 2 meticais a page, each booklet brings in about a dollar. On days when he has nothing else to do, Preta sits in his front yard and sells ice pops—fruta gelo—branded with a line drawing of Snap, Crackle, and Pop lifted straight from the Rice Krispies box. Photocopies, burned CDs, and ice pops are gradually building Preta’s house.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 4