Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (African Issues (International African Institute).) - Hardcover

MacGaffey, Janet; Bazenguissa-Ganga, Remy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0852552610 ISBN 13: 9780852552612

Publisher: James Currey Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

This study of transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe focuses on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville who operate across national frontiers and often outside state laws. Excluded from other social and economic opportunities, participation by traders in this international second economy challenges and resists the constraints on their lives in both Africa and Europe. Their trading activities are unmeasured, unrecorded, often outside or on the margins of the law, and are sustained by complex networks through which their commodities are circulated. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but to shine? What kind of networks do they rely on? And what implications does their trade have for globalization? The authors consider these and other questions in this study.

About this title

About the Author:

Janet MacGaffey is Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University, author of Entrepreneurs and Parasites, and coauthor of The Real Economy of Zaire.

Re[acute accent over the e]my Bazenguissa-Ganga teaches at the Centre d'Etudes Africaines, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is author of Les Voies du politique au Congo: Essai de sociologie historique.

Review:

Congo-Paris is another book in the impressive African Issues series, and it combines the high standards and frank realities that have characterised the series...a meticulous and illuminating empirical case-study, based on a thorough set of research methods. - Khalid Koser in JOURNAL OF ETHNIC & MIGRATION STUDIES This fascinating book explores a neglected topic in African studies: petty transnational illegal trade between central Africa and Europe. Congo-Paris is unusual in at least three ways. First, it is concerned with the informal sector, focused as it is on the commercial activities of young traders who seek their 'fortune' by setting up links between France and Africa. Second, it discusses in some detail the question of African identity as it evolves in the course of such a long bi-continental roving existence. Finally, it examines the relationship between seemingly insignificant trading activities and the evolution of globalization - as it applies to Africa ... based on a relatively new form of anthropological research... - Patrick Chabal in INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ...an impressive illustration of the vigour of coping in the most daunting conditions of economic and political collapse - Nigel Harris in DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW ...intriguing book... AFRICAN BUSINESS The strength of the work is in ethnographic detail and argument. ASAAP

About this edition

• Publisher: James Currey Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0852552610
• ISBN 13: 9780852552612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 190