Wrecking: the moral economies of cargo salvage on the Northern Corridor

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlong East Africa’s most trafficked commodity corridor, road accidents sometimes make cargo available for salvaging. This paper draws on genealogies of shipwreck salvage – ‘wrecking’ – to explore how roadside salvagers distinguish their activities from theft and make them legitimate. In contrast with classic theories of property which ask how unowned things become property, I ask the opposite: how do owned things become unowned – available to claim? Central to the legitimacy of salvage, I argue, is the idea of contingency: it was an unexpected event that made goods available for taking. But contingency is approached in contradictory ways by different salvagers: crash cargo can be interpreted as an accidental ‘find,’ to be freely taken, or conversely as a ‘risky opportunity’ from which savvy entrepreneurs can profit.KEYWORDS: Salvageaccidentriskmoral economyproperty Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 “First Lady Attacks Saitoti Over Tanker Tragedy.” NTV Report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3XKoHG1krw2 See for instance the K24 news report, “Survivors of Sachangwan Tragedy.” Accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YHW2QOP5f43 Thompson points out that even historians who were sympathetic to the rioters tended to understand them as driven by material need into a kind of outburst, rather than as people engaging in socially patterned, legitimate action (Citation1971, 78).4 Ethnicized conflict led to an increased segregation of groups in the Rift Valley, and local Kalenjin-identifying groups desired a trading centre of ‘their own.’ A local politician persuaded the county council to purchase and subdivide land for this purpose.5 Others described the lengths they would go to avoid being blamed for a loss – for instance, arranging severe beatings that could persuade investigators they had not colluded in a theft. In this way, companies’ ‘risk management’ techniques sometimes led to hazardous, and even cruel, outcomes.6 According to the Transported Asset Protection Association, which releases regular global reports on cargo loss, €1,282,465 worth of cargo was lost to ‘theft’ in Kenya in 2020. See http://ace-cargadores.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Boletin_1075/TAPA-EMEA-Incident-Information-Service-IIS-Cargo-Theft-Annual-Report.pdf7 Arguing that the goods were ‘flotsam,’ floating wreckage that still belonged to the ship, rather than ‘jetsam,’ intentionally jettisoned goods that are subject to finders’ claims, British companies argued that wrecks were not gifts or accidents but things that still belonged to them.8 This suggests that what Dua presents as a tension between land and sea might also be fruitfully considered in terms of the tension between movable and immovable property.9 That is, the dead person’s family might need that money to pay off their debts. This insightful observation aligns with contemporary debates around the nature of money and debt, where the transferability of debt is often a key question.10 Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this piece.11 Anthropologists have often studied private property by considering the logics with which it is in tension. With reference to Kenya, the growing marketisation of land has given rise to valuable scholarship on the way land titling disrupts other attachments to and through land (Shipton Citation2009) but anthropologists have focused less on the concerted effort to attached people to private property in Kenyan society at all levels. Here I view private property as an unspoken dominant formation – full of holes, but nevertheless hegemonic in that other ideas of owning and taking are defined in relation to it.12 See, for example, “Residents of Roysambu in a Frenzy after Beer Truck Overturns.” Nation, October 5, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae_jEhrhunI13 Compare to Joshua Reno’s concept of the ‘individuation’ of scavenged goods in a dump site. On the Northern Corridor, the goods are de-alienated but not individuated.14 These are extremely valuable byproducts of the fishing industry on Lake Victoria. Also known as ‘swim bladders,’ they are used to make surgical thread and anaesthetics.15 For instance, when Barack Obama spoke at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi in 2016, unwaged motorcycle workers lamented that they had not been invited to participate, even though they too were ‘entrepreneurs.’