On chisokone and what a market actually is
i have been to shopping centers in several countries.
i have pushed trolleys under fluorescent lights past products in identical packaging and scanned items at self-checkout machines and left with a bag of things and the specific feeling of having completed a transaction.
it is efficient. it is fine. it is nothing like chisokone.
chisokone market in kitwe is a place that is fully, loudly, completely alive in a way that most built environments are not. it has its own sound β a frequency of commerce and conversation that you feel before you hear it, that tells you before you arrive that something is happening here, something with pace and purpose and people at the centre of it.
the women who run it have been running it for years. some for decades. they know the price of everything not as a fixed number but as a living negotiation between what things cost and what people can pay on a given wednesday morning in april. they extend credit to customers they trust. they remember who paid back last time and who didn't. they know the difference between someone who is bargaining because they enjoy it and someone who is bargaining because they genuinely cannot afford the first price.
this knowledge β specific, relational, accumulated over years of daily practice β is not recorded anywhere. it lives in the people.
i think about this when people talk about african economies as though they are simply formal economies with the paperwork missing. as though the market auntie at her tomato stall at 6am is doing something less sophisticated than the person in the office building down the road.
she is not doing something less sophisticated.
she is doing something more human.
the zambian market is not a gap in the modern economy.
it is a reminder of what the economy is supposed to be for.
happy wednesday. go to a market today if you can. buy something. talk to someone. pay attention to what is actually happening there. πΏπ²
