Producing sustainable futures in post-genocide Kigali, Rwanda

Do-It-Yourself Sustainability With the exception of the wealthy few who arrive by air, most people and things enter Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city, at Nyabugogo market and bus depot, the city’s largest commercial center. Thousands of buses, microbuses, and motorcycle taxis amass and disperse in the market, discharging people from all over the region into the city’s streets. Every day, from sunrise to sundown, the market takes form as it accumulates a dense mass of bodies, commodities, and cash that intermingle and circulate through makeshift indoor stalls and an outdoor lot, before bleeding out into Kigali’s regional taxi park. Vendors – some with improvised stands, others with piles of merchandise at their feet, and still others who push through the crowds – sell everything from produce to meat, designer clothes to second hand t-shirts, and cell phones and electronics. Through flexible exchange practices and novel production and recycling mechanisms, Nyabugogo’s vendors and consumers have managed to make the market an organic urban space that is “sustainable” in many senses of the term. Prices are determined by one’s ability to call in debts or access credit, make good on service-for-goods transactions, or invoke fictive or real kin networks at the moment of exchange. Relationships forged in the market do not end at the moment of exchange, but endure and are invoked in other times and places. It is common, for example, for market exchanges to morph into social obligations. Families who depend on the market often assist vendors with major life events, such as wedding costs, and in return receive a lifetime of preferential treatment. At the same time, Nyabugogo market is a site of extreme risk, uncertainty, and some say, criminality. This anxiety governs shopping practices in which Rwandans will avoid buying from strangers whenever possible to mitigate the potential risks of getting stuck with “unoriginal” (counterfeit) products, unfair prices, or picked pockets.