Inside Zimbabwe's Roadside Currency Trade

Abstract

The 2000s represent a period of unprecedented political and economic turmoil in Zimbabwe's history. This article constitutes an attempt to unpack one aspect of this crisis period: roadside currency trade. Beyond its political dimensions, the Zimbabwe crisis has been accompanied by a highly informal regime of accumulation. While there is a way in which this informality conflates with contemporary analyses of informality, the highly politicised and securitised nature of Zimbabwe's informality exhibits a state–power–accumulation–society complex that poses analytical challenges for more common conceptions of informality. It is argued here that roadside currency trade not only provided a survival enclave for Zimbabwe's urban poor but contributed to the sustenance and reproduction of a schizophrenic, militarised, dictatorial state in the midst of a historically unprecedented crisis. A network of roadside currency trade in the Central Business District (CBD) of Zimbabwe's second-biggest...