My Beauty Best Teacher

In Afrch:

...the real challenge for many African cities may be less how to create a city of 'clean lines' with no poor people working in the streets, and more one of how to amplify existing ways of living and working in the city into an advanced regime of higher information density. The anti-hawker and anti-kiosk stance of the political elite and economically mobile hurts many people's livelihoods and lines many policemen and womens' pockets. Alternatively, this active edge of infrastructure and economies can be understood as a future-oriented system of organization for the city—one in which flexible urban ecologies absorb new human material through a network of small-scale and low-tech productive nodes

The unsung unseen salt of the earth, the invisible hawkers we pass by every day.The inimitable Salisu Suleiman writes:

courtesy of NationMedia

Auwal is 27, and sells kola nuts. His heels have worn through his flip-flops. There is no accurate way of measuring the distances he walks everyday peddling kola nuts, but 10 kilometres is not a bad guess. He has a wife and children back home, as well as aged parents he has to assist from time to time. The combined value of his tray and the kola nuts he sells is about N2, 000. He lives from his tray...[continue reading]