Life at a tangent to law: regulations, ‘mistakes’ and personhood amongst Kigali’s motari

AbstractThis article concerns the relationship between motorcycle taxi drivers in Kigali and the legal frameworks that govern their business. While motorcyclists commonly subvert legal processes or avoid complying with regulations, this should not be understood in terms of their ‘resistance’ to legal orders. To do so would imply that laws are imposed on their social lives from without; however, I show how illegalities help to structure social life by creating ‘mistakes’ that are the basis of social relations. I argue that motorcyclists do not confront legal orders in the idiom of resistance, but neither are they determined or shaped directly by legality. Rather, partially formed by breaches of rules, law is integral to their lives, shaping them indirectly or tangentially, according to the relationships and connections ‘mistakes’ with respect to law enable. Law does not regulate life by encoding its rules, but by allowing certain kinds of relationships to form.

Illegalitiy; law; motorcycle taxis; personhood; resistance; Rwanda; state

Contact details: Will Rollason, Brunel University London, Uxbridge UB8 3PH; telephone (+44) 1895265041; email william.rollason@brunel.ac.uk

Biographical details: Will Rollason is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University London. His current research focuses on concepts of power and relations of obedience in Rwanda. He has previously conducted research in Papua New Guinea on football and the post-colony.

Word count: 9,501 including notes and bibliography, 7,804 excluding notes and bibliography

Tables and figures: The article contains neither tables nor figures

Acknowledgements: The research on which this paper is based was partly funded by Brunel University’s BRIEF scheme. I am grateful to Nicolas Argenti for his insights on an earlier version of this article.

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André crashes a motorbike

André is a wily and experienced motorcycle taxi driver who has spent fifteen years driving without a

license because he can neither read nor write. One night in 2015, at a bar in Kigali, Rwanda, he told

me about an accident he had had that day. He said that another motorcyclist had turned in front of him

at a turnoff and they had collided and fallen. He clearly hadn't been seriously injured, although he had

big scabs on his hands. The motorbike he was riding belonged to the man he works with. He can’t get

his own because he has no license. That man rides the motorbike during the day and gives it to André

to ride at night. He knows exactly that André has no documents.

When André had his crash, the owner had to come quickly to represent himself to the police as the

one driving at the time of the accident, since André has no license and that would only cause more

problems. However, this put them in a very weak position vis-á-vis the other rider. They couldn't

really negotiate since that rider knew that André was the one driving and that he was not documented.

So, they had to agree to pay 50,000 francs to avoid further penalties.1 André had had to leave his ID

and the carte jaune (insurance certificate) for the motorbike with the police – so they must also have

known that André, and not the motorbike’s owner was riding at the time of the crash. Presumably the

documents would be returned when the 502 was paid.

As it was, the owner of the bike had been able to pay 20 right away, so 30 remained. André was going

to pay 10 and the boss the remaining 20. When I met him, he was working hard to find the remaining

10. However, it seemed that there had never been any question of formal charges being laid by the

police, despite the irregularity of the situation and the transparency of André and his boss’ deception

about who was riding the bike when it crashed. It seemed obvious that the real problem was not about

legality per se, but making a good deal to avoid big costs – a kind of subversion or resistance. There is

thus a strong sense in which André is undermining the authority of the police and their power over

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him in an ‘infrapolitical’ (Scott 1990) game of switched identities and knowing stupidity. Thus André

could be seen as resisting legality, trying to avoid the problems of visibility and legibility (Scott 1998)

that the law imposes, and the risk of serious difficulties that it might entail.

In Rwandan studies, such accounts of people avoiding or subverting legal process are common.

Exactly how they are to be understood, however, is in question. On one hand, the pervasive influence

of James Scott’s work (1985, 1987, 1990) on Rwandan studies means that such subversions are

commonly (perhaps typically) understood as instances of ‘everyday resistance’ (Palmer 2014). More

recent studies of legal orders in Rwanda, however, point to the ways in which Rwandans as persons

are importantly constituted through their engagement with law, and that as Doughty (2016: 26)

contends ‘there is limited utility to an analysis that reduces every interaction to coercion or that

distrusts any performance … as disingenuous’. Doughty’s case is that legal forums, especially new (or

revived) forms of ‘mediation’ which dominate Rwandan grassroots legal practice, are embedded

within social lives at the same time as they provide venues for the renegotiation of the basis of those

lives (Doughty 2014, 2015). In other words, legality is not simply an imposition, but a crucial space in

which people hold arguments about the kinds of obligations they have to one another, the sorts of

communities they belong to and how that belonging is constituted. My case here is similar, in that I

argue that legality is central in certain respects to social life. However, unlike Doughty, I focus on

illegalities and breaches of rules rather than legal forums as resources that are mobilised for the

creation of social relations.3 I thus concur with Doughty that rather than thinking in terms of law as an

imposition and popular culture as a site of ‘resistance’ to it, we ought rather to understand law as

fundamental to Rwandan social life. However, whereas she sees legal forums as places where social

norms are contested within legal frameworks, my material leads me to model the production of social

life not within or according to legal orders, but significantly outside of them, at a tangent to law.

My material for making this case is drawn from ethnographic material that I collected between 2012

and 2015 as part of a project with motorcycle taxi drivers, motari, in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. I

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conducted this research over the course of field trips in 2012, 2013 and 2015, interviewing officials in

Kigali City Council (KCC) and other relevant agencies, as well as leaders of motorcyclists’

organisations and, primarily, by conducting ethnographic work with ordinary motorcyclists in a

‘popular quarter’ of the city (quartier populaire is a common euphemism for a poor district of the

city). I did the bulk of my ethnographic work with a group of motorcyclists who congregated at

junction in the area of Kigali where I lived in 2012-13. Here, the main tarmacked road into town was

joined by a major dirt road heading off down the hill into Kigali’s rural fringes. The junction was thus

a major roadhead for the city, and an important interchange for local busses. At busy times, there

might be twenty or more riders sat on their bikes waiting for fares. It was here, on the stand, that I had

the best opportunities to speak with riders informally and to observe and find out about their daily

lives. This constituted the bulk of my research activity, later supporting a series of about eighty semi-

structured interviews which I conducted in 2012 and 2015. My Kinyarwanda was adequate for day-to-

day ethnographic work, but I was ably supported by a research assistant in conducting interviews and

in clarifying the complexities of the language.

In the following sections, I begin by providing an outline of the motorcycle taxi business in Kigali as I

knew it in 2012-13 and 2015. I then clarify the theoretical issues that the article deals with, fleshing

out the suggestion that we should understand social life at a tangent to law. I then explore this

suggestion through an analysis of the ways in which motorcyclists understand and relate to the very

considerable volume of law and regulation they must deal with in the course of their lives. Finally, I

turn in conclusion to an assessment of how this material might lead us to rethink state-society

relations in Rwanda and more broadly.

Motorcyclists in Kigali

At the end of 2012, there were about 10,500 motorcyclists, abamotari (singular, umumotari),

officially registered in Kigali.4 Motorcycle taxis are extremely significant to the city’s transport

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infrastructure, especially at night, when buses do not run, and at rush-hour, when streets can be

heavily congested. Most of the motorcyclists I knew were young men – the Rwandan government

defines ‘youth’ as people aged 14-35 – with limited education. Around half had rural roots, and many

had come to the city to drive motorbikes, although most aspired to drive cars, trucks and other larger

and more prestigious vehicles. Their backgrounds, however, were varied. I knew a number of ex-

combatants from Rwanda’s 1990-94 civil war, ex-houseboys and market carriers or thieves, but also

high school and university students and assorted tradesmen down on their luck.

Despite their ubiquity, motorcycle taxis are a relatively new phenomenon, first appearing in Kigali

soon after the civil war and genocide ended in 1994 (Goodfellow 2015). At this time, road and

transport infrastructures were in disarray, and the population of Kigali was in flux. The urban

population had both been sharply reduced by an outflow of refugees to Congo at the end of the civil

war, and increased again by long-term exiles from earlier political upheavals returning to Rwanda and

settling in the city (Goodfellow and Smith 2013). Governance was likewise in turmoil at the end of

the war. In this confusing and weakly regulated environment, entrepreneurs or ‘bosses’ bought

imported Indian motorcycles which were then arriving on the market for the first time, and rented

them out to people who could ride them as taxis. At that time, the number of young men able to do so

(with or without a proper license) was very limited, and as a result they could make a great deal of

money.

As the country returned to stability, the ikimotari, as the motorcycle taxi business is called, continued

to flourish, although according to the riders I spoke to, with rapidly growing numbers of riders,

incomes fell and the relative power of bosses to determine the terms of their relations with riders

increased. In 2012, the relationship between boss and rider was central to the social pattern of

motorcyclists’ livelihoods. The majority of riders did not own their own machines, which cost around

RWF 1.2 million, well beyond the reach of most motorcyclists. Rather, they rented them, kuveresa,

from bosses at RWF 5,000 per day. Even those who own motorbikes are always at risk of losing them,

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since they are common targets for thieves, and also quickly break down under the conditions in which

they are driven.5 On the whole, riders I knew were scrupulous in meeting their obligations to their

bosses, even though many of them did not know much about the owners of their bikes beyond their

bank details, having been recommended and introduced by a third party. Regardless of whether riders’

bosses were kin, friends, neighbours, or almost complete strangers, motorcyclists almost always

talked highly of their bosses as the people whose good will and trust made it possible for them to

make a living. Indeed, from a purely material point of view, it is evident that the boss system is the

practical basis of the ikimotari.6

With the exception of people who had previously held better jobs – as lorry drivers or police officers,

for example – almost all of the motorcyclists I worked with agreed that driving a motorcycle was a

good job. They regarded being a motorcyclist as a skilled ‘profession’, umwuga, albeit a dangerous

one, rather than mere ‘work’, akazi, or despised ‘odd jobs’ or ‘casual work’, ibiraka. Indeed,

motorcyclists’ incomes are potentially very good, although they have declined sharply in recent years

as the number of riders in the city has increased. As a benchmark, most of the riders I knew expected

to make a good income of around RWF 10,000 a day or more if they were lucky, although actual

incomes varied greatly, especially between riders who owned their own bikes and those who rented

them from others. Their incomes enabled them in some cases to support large households, to buy their

own houses, and in some cases additional motorbikes which they could then rent out as bosses in their

own right.

In contrast to the situation in neighbouring countries, the motorcycle taxi business is heavily regulated

in Rwanda (Goodfellow 2015). From 2006, the government of Rwanda began to require all workers

in informal occupations, apart from peasants, to organise themselves into co-operatives (Sommers

2012). Co-operatives, as defined by law, were in principle civil society organisations, which people

were free to form and join (Republic of Rwanda 2007). In practice, especially in urban areas, they

have been used as a means to control and oversee the economic activities of the poor, and to render

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them legible for taxation purposes (Honeyman 2016). Since ikimotari has such a significant role in the

life of Kigali, it was the target of particularly close supervision by KCC through a co-operative

federation, FERWACOTAMO (Fédération Rwandaise des Convoyeurs du Taxi-Moto).7

While in principle, co-operative membership is voluntary, for motorcyclists it is compulsory if they

are to be properly documented, since licenses to carry passengers can only be obtained by riders who

can demonstrate their membership of an appropriate organisation – usually a co-op (Rwanda Utilities

Regulatory Authority 2015). Likewise, in order to join a co-op, riders must (in principle) be able to

show a driving license, insurance certificate (carte jaune) and business tax certificate (patente) –

documents that demonstrate their legal right to ride a motorcycle. As part of their role in the formal

regulatory system of ikimotari, co-operatives thus vouch for the legal identities of their members,

promoting the legibility of the sector. To reinforce this role, since 2012 the details of all riders

operating in Kigali have been entered into a database, which also includes the frame- and registration

numbers of their motorbikes and addresses and contact details of both rider and owner. Each rider is

also issued with a unique identifying number, which codes his co-operative, the area he works, and

the taxi stand he is registered to. This code number is displayed on a jacket that the rider must wear

and a corresponding identification card.

Such regulatory structures, however, are clearly frequently subverted, as the story of André’s crash

with which we began demonstrates. To understand the relation between this legal and regulatory

environment and the everyday business of riding a motorcycle, I first critique some prevalent

conceptions of the relation between law and everyday life in Rwanda, before turning to my

ethnography.

Law and everyday life in Rwanda

Separations7

The state and its law and everyday life are commonly thought of as quite different in Rwandan

studies, belonging not only to different cultural traditions, but in many sense talking past one another.

This is perspective is evident in Christopher Taylor’s (1999) analysis of the significance of local ideas

about pathology and misfortune during the Genocide against the Tutsi of 1994.8 On the basis of his

earlier work on healing practices (Taylor 1992), Taylor shows that the symbolism of killing in the

genocide was shaped by local understandings of the flow of life-giving fluids within and between

bodies, and ultimately between the heavens and Rwanda in the form of imana9 (divinity). Tutsis,

understood as beings that blocked these flows were themselves blocked, at roadblocks or by

impalement, for example, and eliminated – in a potent piece of symbolism, by being dumped into the

rivers that flow out of Rwanda. This symbolism, Taylor (1999:145) argues, was not ‘political in the

ordinary and instrumental sense’, but ‘logically prior’ to this instrumental politics, arising from a

substrate of Rwandan cultural forms of long standing. By contrast, he understands state activities

including rules, regulations and orders as representing ‘power in its overt, ideological manifestation’

(Taylor 1999:146, emphasis added). State and law are therefore thought to be 1) unproblematic or

transparent (overt) – that is non-cultural and 2) logically secondary to cultural life proper. State law,

in other words, is not really part of everyday social life.

This modelling of the relationship between laws and cultural life is particularly significant in

understandings of everyday resistance in Rwanda. Susan Thomson (2013) examines the post-genocide

Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government’s policy of national reconciliation and strict laws against

‘genocide ideology’ and ‘divisionism’.10 Thomson argues that peasants generally, and not only

prisoners or genocide suspects, see this policy and its associated judicial apparatus as an imposition.

Members of the majority Hutu population, who have been made collectively responsible for genocide

(Reyntjens 2016; Doughty 2016; Eltringham 2004), feel especially victimised by this process. This is

especially true since they understand that, as Hutus, they are always at risk of being accused of

harbouring genocide ideology or engaging in divisionist politics (Thomson 2011, 2013). Thomson

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understands peasant responses to this predicament through the lens of Scott’s (1976, 1990) notion of

‘everyday resistance’.

Thomson is careful in her definitions of the parties to these relations of resistance. She is keen to

avoid reifying the state as ‘an a priori conceptual or empirical object of analysis’ (Thomson 2013:9).

Rather, she seeks to embed state practices in everyday life through attention to the forms of resistance

that they engender (cf. Abu-Lughod 1990; Foucault 1990). This is appropriate, since, she claims, ‘the

density of the Rwandan state saturates everyday life with its strong administrative, surveillance and

information-gathering systems’ (Thomson 2013:8). However, her application of the notion of

everyday resistance tends to undermine these good intentions. Citing Scott (1990), she conceptualises

acts of resistance as:

… acts that individuals undertake knowing that there is a risk of sanction from “the state.”

This means not that individuals necessarily violate a law against the act in question but more

simply that they take a calculated risk to maintain their position vis-à-vis the state. In the

relationship of power, the dominant group will do what is necessary to maintain its position of

power, which in turn gives the subordinate many grounds to resist the relationship (Thomson

2013:15, reference omitted).

Here, despite Thomson’s attempts not to separate state and society, the notion of resistance compels

her to make a strict distinction, quotation marks notwithstanding. As recent critics of the notion of

everyday resistance have repeatedly remarked (Gledhill 2012, 2014; Theodossopoulos 2014; cf.

Holbraad 2014; Pedersen and Holbraad 2013; Rollason 2017), Scott’s theorisation of resistance

compels such a hard division between ‘the powerful’ and ‘the powerless’ because of the way it

imagines peasants to take power as an object of their calculations. They cannot be part of ‘power’

because they objectify and represent it to themselves.

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This problem is compounded by the way in which Thomson, closely following Scott (1990) envisages

the causes of resistance, namely in the maintenance of dignity. With Scott, she understands the

demands of the powerful, in her case for unity and reconciliation, to result in humiliations of one kind

and another, which directly motivate peasants to resist. Thomson (2013:151, see also 179-80, 182,

186) regards this resistance as ‘a response of ordinary peasants to assaults on their dignity’. A peasant

whose dignity is assaulted by laws, regulations and government directives is necessarily one culturally

formed prior to the imposition of those laws and so on. Dignified peasants can only be ‘prior to

power’, not formed by it; correspondingly, Thomson (2011) seems to regard a ‘sustainable’ life as one

which maintains that dignity and therefore its independence from the state. The architecture of

everyday resistance therefore tends to produce an image of peasants and subalterns more generally as

independent from state, law and government in a way that sits oddly alongside the notion that the

Rwandan state ‘saturates everyday life’ (Thomson 2013:8).

In short, the deployment of notions of everyday resistance involves a specific image of state power

and law. This involves the strong presumption 1) that law is something imposed on ordinary people.

Therefore, in many cases 2) it encodes norms antithetical to the lives of ‘ordinary folks’. It follows

that 3) the significance of law is mainly in what it encodes, its content, in relation to the different

contents of local cultures. This stress on the content of law is consonant with dominant approaches in

legal anthropology. Describing the functions of law in a broad, legally pluralistic way intended to

capture both codified and non-codified forms of law, Sally Engle Merry (2013, 2) declares:

Law defines identities such as citizen or alien, allocates who can use which spaces, provides

belonging through mechanisms such as birth registration, offers security of ownership to land

and houses, and serves as an authoritative source for creating knowledge and history.

Here it is clearly law’s content, the way in which it specifies certain relations, roles or identities that

makes it significant – either because it tells people what to do, or because, as in Thomson’s argument,

it opens up a gap between local life and the letter of the law. 10

Implications

Thomson is by no means alone in positing a hard and fast distinction between peasant culture and the

relations, including law, by which it is governed. Both Catherine Honeyman (2016) and Marc

Sommers (2012), for example, regard current regulations – relating to small businesses and housing

respectively – as impositions on everyday social lives that operate on rather different social or cultural

principles. A similar construction is also evident in sources relating to the pre-genocide period,

notably in David and Catherine Newbury’s (D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000) account of peasant

interests in relation to central government and the late colonial royal court. While in certain cases,

especially where distinctions follow material and cultural divisions imposed by regional or class

origins (as in D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000) these divisions may be warranted, it is a mistake to

assume they must exist (cf. Rollason 2017). It is true that the current regime draws its senior

personnel primarily from a pool of Tutsi families who fled Rwanda in the period of the social

revolution and independence (1959-62), the so-called ‘old case-load refugees’ (Chemouni 2014;

Doughty 2016). Senior government and military figures therefore often form a distinct,

overwhelmingly urban and Anglophone cultural set. However, as Nicola Palmer (2014; see also

Doughty 2016) argues, at a local level, ‘state’ or ‘government’ functionaries are very much part of the

social lives they seek to regulate and control; the state can only be separated from everyday life as an

abstraction, whereas in practice it is fully embedded in cultural life (Hahirwa, Orjuela, and Vinthagen

2017). Law, regulation and government itself might be better understood as being part of, and not

separate from, everyday cultural experiences – and crucially to be involved in the formation of

persons whose (culturally specific) ‘dignity’ must itself be bound up in law.

The notion that people are dignified prior to culture has its own cultural sources. Thomson’s notion of

‘dignity’ arises quite directly from a specifically Western construction of the relation between persons

and power, and therefore of the relationships between legal subjects and the law that constrains them.

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Marilyn Strathern (1988, 388, see also 1985) characterises Thomson’s notion of dignity well when

she observes:

Western culture imagines people as persons existing in a permanently subjective state; this is

their natural and normal condition, and a person can dominate another by depriving him or

her of the proper exercise of that subjectivity… Thus a person may be made to act in such a

way as to deny her or his subjectivity and personhood. A subject can be turned into an object.

From this point of view, Thomson’s (and Scott’s) notion that humiliations, inflicted by an exterior law

for example, result in resistance arise from the ‘Western’ notion that persons in their ‘normal

condition’ are independent, critical and active subjects (and not objects).

Such ‘dignified’ subjects do not need to be at the heart of state-society relations or the operations of

law, however. Jean-Francois Bayart (2009), for example, demonstrates the ways in which African

state systems operate exactly on the basis that the state is not separable from putatively ‘private’

interests. Rather, he regards it as operating by a logic of ‘extraversion’ that uses every possible means

to extend relations facilitating enrichment or other advantages. State power, law or regulation,

therefore, are not necessarily significant because of what they say, or for the way in which their

content imposes, or not, on ordinary people’s lives. They are rather important for the way in which

they enable certain kinds of connections to be formed, connections whose logic systematically runs

counter to any distinction between public authority and the private interests of particular people (see

also 2000; Mbembe and Roitman 1995).

Such a predicament may result in very different forms of subjectivity and power, as Achille Mbembe

(2001) argues. Mbembe regards the post-colonial African state as attempting to define and control the

meaning of everything in the political and social spheres. This arrogant assertion of its supremacy is

not, however, its real mode of operation, since its power is never transcendent, but always brutally

corporeal – commonly located in the person and violence of the ruler – and thus domesticated. This

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domestication takes place because, while the state attempts to be everywhere and control everything,

its omnipresence is embodied in a specific person or people and made evident in violent and

‘excessive’ acts. The personified state, the ruler, therefore makes his way into everyone’s home, but

not in an abstracted form. He rather appears as a person, with whom everyone ‘cohabits’. Practically,

cohabitation with the state is actuated as a series of domestic or household relations, in a manner very

similar to Bayart’s extraversion. Salaries, modes of sharing and gifting, eating and being ‘eaten’, and

other forms of consumption are what binds political power together. There is thus a fundamental

disjuncture between the appearance of statehood (the seals and insignia, the speeches and offices) and

the bodily exercise of control. The formalities of law, as in Bayart, are always worked out in corporeal

form.

In this respect, Mbembe explores in an ‘Africanised’ register Michel Foucault’s (1995; see also

Mitchell 1991) observation that, especially in the modern period, law is not in fact the prime vector of

social control. For Foucault, writing specifically of the extension of psychology and psychiatry into

penal operations, it is not the ‘letter of the law’ but the practices that inhabit legally defined contexts

and activities that control the shape of social life. Law may exist, but it is what is done within and

around codified rules that are socially effective. As in Mbembe, this is an embodied and practical

vision of law, a far cry from the strict separation between law or power and ‘everyday’ embodied

people introduced by the notion of everyday resistance.

It is therefore possible to invert the three points with which we ended the last subsection. Here, 1) law

does not appear as an imposition, but as something internal to its subjects in their everyday lives; law

is domesticated. 2) What law says or encodes is not necessarily significant; the extent to which its

content is in tune with cultural norms is irrelevant. By implication 3) what law says is only

tangentially related to its effects; what it enables is significant. Thus, whereas Thomson sees law as an

imposition on an independent social life, which opposes it through ‘everyday resistance’, in the

remainder of this article, I will make an ethnographic argument for understanding law as producing a

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social life in which it is thoroughly embedded, and which does not oppose it as much as it is formed

in a definite relation, tangential to it. My perspective likewise differs from Doughty’s (2016), as I

noted earlier, since my argument focuses less on the social productivity of legal processes like court

proceedings or mediations, and more on the capacity of illegal acts themselves to create social

relations of certain kinds. It is to the constitution of these relationships that I now turn in the

ethnographic section which follows.

‘Bad behaviour’

Despite the heavy regulation of ikimotari which I outlined above, and the importance of motorcycles

to the city’s infrastructure, officials and co-operative leaders tended to regard them as a problematic

population in need of control. A senior official involved in public transport regulation, although

fundamentally sympathetic to motorcyclists’ efforts to make a living, described them in the following

terms:

Most of them didn’t have good upbringing – because some of them are street children, others

from villages or unruly children who come to sit and maybe learn how to drive a motorcycle

and get a permit… So: we are having all of those problems with them – we try to tell them to

keep on the right side of the road, but they are not doing it – so we have many problems with

them.

Crucially, this official regarded the ‘bad behaviour’ of motorcyclists as essentially a class issue.

Because motorcyclists are poorly educated, often the sons of peasants or members of the urban lower

classes, they cannot be expected to have discipline. This is a common refrain in Rwandan politics; the

government and state agents typically take a paternalistic attitude, especially to peasants, whom they

regard as ignorant and in need of education or ‘sensitisation’ to relieve them of their ‘backward

mindset’ (Ingelaere 2014; Sommers 2012; Thomson 2013).

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This ‘sensitisation’ is achieved by radio broadcasts, meetings and through co-operatives. On the road,

however, it usually takes a punitive form. Motorcyclists’ ‘bad behaviour’ is typically punished by

levying fines. The public transport official understood that financial penalties could seriously damage

motorcyclist’ livelihoods, but thought that exactly because of this threat, they were effective in

disciplining riders:

If we find someone with a motorcycle doing something which is not right then we take

serious measures including fines… sometimes if it is done repeatedly then the motorcycle is

confiscated for a number of days, just to make sure that the fine is hard on them – so that they

are scared doing these things again.

In the branch co-operatives, concerns about indiscipline drew out the connotations of moral hierarchy

implicit in the comments quoted above about class. At the general meeting of KORANEZA, a local

co-operative I was closely in touch with (Rollason 2017), these concerns were woven together by the

co-op president, Jean-Baptiste into an eloquent, moral plea for good behaviour. Addressing the

meeting, amongst other comments, the president highlighted the risks of bad behaviour, as well as his

limited capacity to defend his members. He also demanded that they take personal responsibility for

their actions and road behaviour more generally:

If you drive with two passengers; if you have no driving license or a fake driving license; if

you take drugs or spirits – don't bring me into that. That's your mistake. I can come and speak

for you, but I also have to look for your mistake. You can also contribute – if you see

someone smoking ganja, call me or 112 [the police]. Likewise, if you see someone trying to

abuse someone's rights, call me or the police. Don't just say that it wasn't me and it doesn't

bother me.

Underscoring the personal, moral message of his remarks, Jean-Baptiste concluded,

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Please do what you are allowed to do; other things – don't do them … You have to be an

example. Our co-op has only been working five months [KORANEZA was an upstart

operation] – look at the speed with which we have worked – in the name of Jesus. I hope that

soon, people will say, ‘why don't you work like KORANEZA?’

In locating obedience as a moral imperative – in the name of Jesus – and personal responsibility of his

members, Jean-Baptiste’s address echoed official the official ‘sensitisation’ campaigns and

enforcement of individual responsibility that are a prominent part of the Rwandan government’s

development strategy.11

The policing of ‘bad behaviour’ in ikimotari, then, is part and parcel of a broader rhetoric that

emphasises the definition of proper behaviour and its enforcement through regulation, much as

Thomson might suggest. In the case of motorcyclists, this means obeying rules and laws, and being

subject to punishments when they do not comply.

Making mistakes

In other contexts, however, motorcyclists said that it was impossible to comply with all of the

regulations to which they are subject. On one occasion, I went out to a bar with Abdul, my research

assistant, and a motorcyclist friend named Xavier. Xavier was talking about the problems

motorcyclists can have with the police. ‘If you get stopped by the police it's a problem,’ he said. ‘If

you make a mistake (ikosa), three times they charge you a fine and take the motorbike – but the fourth

mistake, they like to take the license and ban you from driving. That's a problem because all

abamotari have mistakes (amakosa)’. I queried this – why do all motari have mistakes? Is it part of

the job? Xavier said that it was. ‘When there is traffic standing in a traffic jam, a moto will weave its

way through. That's a mistake that could lead to you being caught by the police. But it's also necessary

and everyone does it. All motari have many mistakes.’

16

The prevalence of breaches of rules and laws, or ‘mistakes’ amongst motorcyclists that Xavier pointed

out is only sometimes an effect of their relation to driving rules. In many respects, it is conditioned by

the structure of the whole moto business. Motorcyclists’ livelihoods do not materially depend on the

co-operatives and other structures that regulate their business. Rather, the social and economic basis

of the ikimotari lies firmly in Kigali’s informal economy. Motorcyclists’ simultaneous involvement in

the formal system of regulation of ikimotari and an informal relation with their bosses produces a

crucial tension in their livelihoods. While co-operatives may issue fines to riders without adequate

documentation, a boss who is not paid is likely to take back his motorcycle. Losing access to a

motorcycle is a disaster for most motorcyclists, who otherwise have no way of making a living. As a

result, riders will often bypass laws and regulations in order to ensure that they have enough money to

pay the rental on their machines.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the loan of motorcycles between riders. At the stand where I did

the bulk of my fieldwork, the motorcyclists, as I noted above, congregated at one side of a junction

behind a bar. Behind them, a grassy bank rose up from the roadway, up under the shady eves of the

bar building. Here, another group of men congregated, lounging in the grass, smoking and talking

quietly together, occasionally engaging one of the motorcyclists or another passer-by in conversation.

Such apparently idle groups of men are a feature of Kigali’s popular quarters. Generally, they are

made up of people waiting for an opportunity to work, often as builders’ helpers or in other ‘basic’ or

‘fucking’ jobs (ibiraka). These men, it turned out, were no exception: they too were motorcyclists

without bosses and thus no access to motorbikes. These men are colloquially called abarobyi,

fishermen. They wait until a rider they know becomes tired and needs to rest. This rider will then

allow one of them to ride in his place for a fee (usually RWF 5,000 for twelve hours, or pro rata),

turning over not only his bike, but also his helmets, his gillet and, since abarobyi are commonly

undocumented and unlicensed, his documents and thus his whole legal identity as a motorcyclist as

17

well. The umurobyi takes this indobanyi (that thing fished up) to work for a little money. In the

process he subverts the system of regulation of ikimotari.

Many riders with regular access to motorbikes, however, thought that subversions of this kind were

vital for their livelihoods (naturally they are even more significant for those without bikes). André,

who we met earlier, explained his relationship with a man he commonly borrowed a bike from:

For him, lending me the moto - he's a nice man. He knows I'm a good driver, even if I don't

have a driving license. He knows that the moto will have no problems. He also gets a benefit

from me. He worked during the day and he has the versement [payment for his boss] already.

I will have to give him maybe 6,000, which will leave me with 4,000. I will eat that over four

or five days, just a little here and there to eat. It will help me so that I don't have to beg from

others. So, it's good we are helping each other.

Such relationships of mutual assistance are conditioned by the internal contradictions of ikimotari,

especially between the boss system and co-operatives. Socially, as I have shown, a rider’s access to

work and his primary obligations are not connected to the regulations that allow him to ride, or to the

co-operative he is compelled to belong to. In terms of the way riders practically come to have work,

these are secondary considerations, and often predatory additions to the basic social framework of the

sector. He is rather dependent for work on his boss, and it is usually this relationship that

motorcyclists value most highly. Materially, the boss usually imposes a fixed overhead of RWF 5,000

per working day, which must be paid if the relationship is to continue. Lending a motorcycle as

indobanyi therefore represents a valuable degree of security for many riders, since it allows the resting

time that all riders need to provide the RWF 5,000 fee for their bosses. Because insurance, license and

other documents are tied both to the rider and the bike, if riders are to lend their machines in this way

they must also lend their identities – the subversion is determined by the pattern of regulation. In the

process, the capacity of co-operatives to regulate the sector, and of motorcyclists to operate according

18

to the law and regulations are compromised. As Xavier, with whom I opened this section, insisted, all

motorcyclists have mistakes.

Law and personhood

That all motorcyclists have ‘mistakes’ does not simply represent a failing, however. Rather, such

lapses are closely bound up with the ways in which people typically understand social relations. This

is evident from motorcyclists’ accounts of how they manage the mistakes they must necessarily

commit. The costs of these mistakes can be extremely high, or correspondingly profitable for those

who can find them. Here, I return to Xavier’s discussion of the prevalence of mistakes in ikimotari.

He explained what happened when the police impounded motorcycles for major offenses:

When they take the moto it's a big problem. If they take the moto for 30 days, that's 150,000

for the boss and 150,000 for the rider which is wasted – 300,000 in all. That's a lot of money,

so if you are caught by the police, you can be willing to give a lot of money to the policeman

just to keep the moto on the road. You can give 5, 10 or even 20 to stop him from taking the

moto.

Correspondingly, another friend from the moto stand explained how, as a senior member of the co-

operative and sometime security official, he could directly exploit the mistakes of others. He needed

to do this because, at that time, he had no access to a motorbike. This was either because he suffered

from a curse imposed by jealous people, or because of his bad behaviour, depending on who told the

tale. Speaking to me in hushed tones, he explained:

For me, if you ask me the normal day, on the normal day, I'm just a thief. You see, as

members of the co-operative, we are also allowed to stop others who are making mistakes.

So, I'm just sitting, watching those newcomers. If I see someone making a mistake with a

passenger, like riding without a helmet or a gillet, I can just grab him and get him to give me

19

2000 – I can use that to eat. If he refuses, I can show him this [he shows us his membership

paper from the co-operative] they will charge him more than that for those mistakes.

Indeed, people talk about the police searching for mistakes, looking for something to eat. Another

motorcyclist, Serge, told me at some length and with great animation how he has difficulties with

policemen.

I got stopped recently by the police, asking for my licence and insurance. Sure, I have them,

but the police charged me a fine anyway. The policeman said to me, ‘your boss sent you out

this morning to get money - mine too’. The police may be sent out to get money from folks

like me. You can't have everything. No-one is completely acceptable [without mistakes] so

they can always get something out of you.

What all of these extracts have in common is the sense that another person’s mistake can be profitable

and advantageous for the one who can find it – and represents a corresponding risk for the one at

fault. This is not simply an observation about law or regulation, however, but reflects Rwandan

models of social relations much more generally. Such exploitation of mistakes, failings or difficulties,

as I have argued elsewhere (Rollason 2018), is fundamental to much everyday social life in Rwanda.

People typically get along with each other on the basis of an appearance of amity, undergirded by an

acute sensibility to the risks of being cheated and the advantages to be gained by dissimulating their

inevitable failings (cf. Maquet 1961). Popular wisdom has it that everyone profits, not just from

finding others’ mistakes and using them to extract material benefits, but by maintaining knowledge of

them as a stake or security in an ongoing relationship. An often-cited proverb holds that ‘the mound

of earth makes the sweet potatoes grow’. The proverb means that by tolerating or not openly

acknowledging problems or conflicts with others, the ‘mistakes’ that they have made towards you,

relations can be created and maintained for mutual benefit. As one man observed to me, speaking of

how he refused to act on conflicts with friends, ‘you never know – blessings can come from that way

20

too.’ In this respect it is notable that neither Serge and the co-op security officer turned ‘thief’

describe formal mechanisms for enforcing rules, but the extraction of money from other people rather

than resorting to formal or public processes. Extracting a bribe or other corrupt payment in lieu of a

fine can be understood as a way of ‘covering over’ a mistake, not only to have something to eat today,

but as the foundation of a relationship that can endure as long as the mistake that causes it.

Hence, Xavier explained how the risk of serious fines might move a motorcyclist to pursue mutually

beneficial relationships with police officers.

You have to be cool with the police. Some of them you can joke with and form a relationship

so that you can co-operate. Some of them you can’t. The ones that are cool, if you are cool

with them, you can joke and form a relationship – maybe they can accept something. Others

not. You have to try to form a relationship so that he can trust you and you can trust him –

because he could go to prison for accepting something from you.

Xavier, however was keen to make me understand that he was not suggesting that Rwanda was a

corrupt country, but in the process, underlined the generality of this kind of relationship.

Of course, it's important that there isn't a lot of corruption in high office, and it's true what

they say that the country isn't too corrupt. But corruption is there. But then this isn't really

corruption – it's part of life, it's just the way things are...

The phrase Xavier used to describe the ‘something’ a rider might give to the police was inzoga

y’abagabo. This is the slogan of Turbo King, the brand of beer that Xavier drinks, meaning 'beer for

men'. However, abagabo can also mean witnesses – for example to a sale or in a court case. People

are generally expected to give those who work as witnesses for them something for what they do.

Local leaders are likewise expected to take this ‘beer’. In the most general sense, though, witnesses

(or men) are people who see and know. Their awareness of what you have done binds you to them

21

and renders you potentially useful in their eyes.12 Xavier thus meant to say that while this is

‘corruption’ in a sense, it’s also just part of life and the way things work in Rwanda.

Life at a tangent to law

This discussion of mistakes and their relation to personhood is significant because it demonstrates the

extent to which Rwandan persons are constituted in relation to law. For motorcyclists, laws define

many of their mistakes and thus, in certain connections, the kinds of social relations they will enter

into. On one occasion, André the unlicensed rider, made it very explicit in conversation how the

‘mistake’ of having no license and his dissimulation of it served to construct the social relations

within which he made his living:

Those people we work with, they don’t know that I don't have a driving license. They have

seen me many years driving moto. They see me sitting there and they don't know the secret –

that the reason for having no moto is not having a license because of not being able to read or

write. Only someone like you – my friend – can know this. So, they [the others] can have pity

on me and they can really want to help.

Here, the control of a mistake legally defined enables André to make money by concealing it and

eliciting pity. It also creates or reinforces social relations. This is evident inasmuch as he made use of

my complicity in his mistake to mark my status as someone who might help him, his ‘friend’

(inshuti). From this perspective, it is impossible to see laws and regulations, or the state power that

stands behind them, as an imposition on André and his social life – there is no ‘dignity’ or subjectivity

here prior to rules. It is rather through the mediation of law as an integral component that life and

André’s subjectivity and ‘dignity’ take shape (cf. Doughty 2016). It follows that, the heavy regulation

of ikimotari notwithstanding, motorcyclists’ subversion of rules cannot be understood as ‘resistance’

in Thomson’s sense. Such a reading introduces the notion of a confrontation between ‘everyday life’

22

and laws and regulations, proposing the independence of ordinary Rwandans as persons from the

mechanisms by which they are ruled.

Since André’s life takes shape in terms not of compliance with law but a failure to comply, law shapes

his life not directly, in terms of ‘what the law says’, or even by means of the processes of legality (as

in Doughty 2016), but indirectly or tangentially according to the relationships and connections his

‘mistakes’ with respect to law enable. Law, then, as in Bayart’s or Mbembe’s interpretations, does not

regulate life by encoding its rules, but by allowing certain kinds of relationships to form. Law is thus

domesticated in the fabric of social life insofar as people live or ‘cohabit’ with the state and its rules,

rather than having their activities determined by legality.

To return to the account of André’s crash with which I began this paper, it should now be evident that

reading it in terms of resistance is a mistake: law is not an outside imposition to be resisted, but an

integral component of everyday life. What is at stake in this story is neither compliance with nor

resistance to law, but the control of the relationships that being an illegal motorcyclist can generate.

Those relationships are conditioned by legality, but the law does not determine them directly. Rather,

it defines a series of mistakes on the basis of which relationships can be made in relation to the law.

Thus, rather than seeing the Rwandan state in confrontation with its citizens, a confrontation made

evident in legal and regulatory ‘impositions’ on them, it might be more productive to envision legality

as a source of mistakes, productive of social life operating at a tangent to law.

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1 The Rwandan franc, RWF, was worth around £0.10 at the time of my research. In a pinch, one can live in Kigali on

less than RWF 1000 a day.

2 Ordinary Kigalois normally express large amounts of money in whole numbers of thousands, so 50,000 becomes ‘50’

in speech.

3 This is not a criticism of Doughty’s (2016) work. Many of the cases she studied related to genocide in 1994, and could

not practically have been studied as such.

4 This is almost certainly an underestimate. Around a third of the riders who regularly used the stand where I did most

of my fieldwork did not appear in these records.

5 In 2012, some riders were purchasing their bikes from bosses by instalments, usually also RWF 5,000 per day. This

practice, called gupatana, had increased markedly by 2015, leading to a rise in the number of owner-operators.

However, the short life-span of motorcycles used as taxis meant that the practical difference between gupatana and

kuveresa was limited as by the time a rider came to own his bike, it was usually clapped out anyway.

6 It might be tempting to theorise the boss system in light of historical forms of clientship prevalent in Rwanda, notably

the ubuhake system of cattle clientship (C. Newbury 1988; Maquet 1961). This would, however, be misguided and

needlessly superficial. Most importantly, it lacks most of the crucial dimensions of ubuhake, especially its

intergenerational character and its dependence on cattle, which as Gravel (1968) demonstrates, were a highly significant

medium of social memory in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. This is not to say that clientship in general terms is

not very widespread in Rwanda (Eramian 2018); it is, and the boss system is clearly part of this wider pattern. However,

while it is necessary to recognise that the relationship between a motorcyclist and his boss is not an isolated social form,

it is certainly a mistake therefore to presume that it must be a transformation of some ‘Ur-form’ of clientship in the

shape of ubuhake, whose extent and significance in colonial and pre-colonial Rwanda is in any case unclear (C.

Newbury 1988; D. Newbury 2001; Vansina 2004).

7 A competing form of organisation, based on trade union legislation also operates and is the basis of

FERWACOTAMO’s rival SYTRAMORWA (Syndicate of Taxi-Motos of Rwanda). The overall pattern and effect of

these two forms of organisation are largely equivalent, however, and for the sake of clarity I focus on the co-operatives

that claim the vast bulk of motorcyclists as their members.

8 The terminology of genocide is problematic in Rwandan studies. The Genocide against the Tutsi is the official

designation for the genocide of 1994. Critical scholars generally refer to ‘the Rwandan genocide’ to de-emphasise the

overtly political claim that it was only Tutsis who were victims of genocide or who are properly considered ‘genocide

survivors’. Since no part of the argument of this paper depends on my taking a stance either side of this debate, I

acknowledge the official designation of the genocide of 1994, but for readability, hereafter refer simply to ‘the

genocide’.

9 Using an older orthography, Taylor renders this word imaana, marking the long initial vowel in spoken Kinyarwanda.

I use the contemporary spelling, which does not mark long vowels.

10 The RPF, currently led by President Paul Kagame is the political party whose armed wing was victorious in the 1990-

94 civil war that culminated in the genocide.

11 Such efforts are evident in many aspects of life, but perhaps most prevalent in the institution of imihigo ‘performance

contracts’ in local and national government (Ansoms 2009; Ingelaere 2011). These are probably most significant at the

powerful District level of local government, where District executives enter into an agreement directly with the

President of the Republic. Failure can have severe consequences for officials, who are correspondingly zealous in their

pursuit of their targets.

12 Beer and other alcoholic beverages were, and to an extent still are, the prime medium of such relations in Rwanda

until relatively recently (Taylor 1992). Today, money is more likely to cement relations of trust, but bottled beer bought

in bars is still significant as a gift.