In 2015, the Zimbabwean government announced that street vendors had one week to clear the streets or the national army would be deployed against them. This was part of a long-standing campaign of disavowing and displacing vendors. Yet street vendors are integral to economic life in Zimbabwe. In this paper, I examine vending and its policing. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Zimbabwe to ask what underlies the vitriol and violence targeted at vendors. I propose that vending is more than a constellation of individual traders and that its politics extend beyond the conceptions of (il)legality that often characterize debates around street trade. Rather, vending has weaved itself into an infrastructure of economic life in Zimbabwe, facilitating vital flows and undergirding an economy rocked by economic turmoil. Yet vending operates as an infrastructure of disavowal at the nexus of citizenry and spatial politics, as "unwanted" persons operate in unauthorized spaces. Recognizing vending as infrastructural opens up consideration of a decolonial approach to infrastructure and urban governance in African cities.
Kathryn Takabvirwa (2024) studied this question.