“The Ultimate Hustlers”: Markets, Single Mothers, and Radical Care Praxis in Kampala, Uganda

In this article, we examine precarious labor geographies via a feminist analysis of care and social reproduction. To do so, we center the lives of women traders working in the busy downtown market spaces of Kampala, Uganda. We examine their creative and collective business strategies, and the broader networks of family, friends, and other dependents they support. Through their testimonies, we trace the legacies of colonial capitalist histories and the more recent but connected impacts of neoliberal disenfranchisement. We argue that their hustle, grounded in and made possible via structures of care, not only makes life livable for low-income residents but is foundational to the national economy and the financing of city futures. We view hustle and care as connected practices of social reproduction in postcolonial African economies. In doing so, we aim to build on long-standing feminist Marxist economic geographies via Black and African feminist futurist scholarship. Doing so recognizes how women traders bear the burdens of aggressive neoliberal austerities as racialized women in the global economy. Yet it also traces the complex ways they manage, make do, navigate, and dream within and beyond its violences. Pairing the work on hustling with African and Black feminist theorizations of radical care, we foreground how women, their labor, and their sustained investments in the city are not only a strategy of survival but are integral to disruptive and transformative urban life.