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Devin Smart, "Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City" (Ohio UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books in African Studies. My name is Ifoa Benfikwashi, your host. Today I'm joined by Dr. Devin Smart to talk about his book Preparing the Modern Urban Capitalism and Working Class Food in Kenya's port city. Dr. Smart is an assistant professor of history at the West Virginia University. His research examines the history of the environment and capitalism in modern Africa, with a particular focus on food systems and the history of energy. Devin, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.
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Yeah, thank you for having me.
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So to get started, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and about how you came to the study of capitalism in Africa and food and energy?
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Sure, yeah. I mean, so just going all the way back to the beginning. I'm from Seattle, Washington on the west coast, and I came to the study of Africa mostly through the classroom. So I don't really have a kind of younger personal childhood background, traveling there or anything like that. But I was always deeply interested in history from a very young age. And I think one of the great things about American university education over the last like 50 or 60 years is more and more, at least at the university level, we are consistently teaching and offering courses in African history because, you know, back in high school and middle school curriculums, at least when I was there, it wasn't regularly part of what you learned about in terms of history. And so really was something African History was something I discovered as an undergraduate just being in history classes and kind of just ended up in one. And kind of almost immediately I was really struck by it and found it compelling and just started taking class after class after class. So, yeah, I mean, I. I came to African history through the classroom, and then when I was. I mean, it's interesting that at this point I'm a specialist in East Africa and especially Kenya. But at least originally, my big interest was in the Great Lakes region, like Rwanda and Burundi and kind of like eastern Congo. But when I was an MA student then at Western Washington University, I was just starting to learn French. And so I realized that, like, I wasn't going to be able to, at that stage, do intensive archival research in French. So I kind of, for practical reasons, pivoted over to Kenya because so many of the documents that you can access are in English. And that history just really pulled me in. And I still enjoy teaching Great Lakes history, and I still do that quite a bit. But really, I did my master's thesis on Kenya and haven't looked back. I've been really fascinated in that country ever since then. And obviously subsequently it's transitioned to much more than just something reading in books. I've been able to travel and live there for extended periods of time over the last. Whatever it is, 10, 15 years at this point. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of how I got into African studies. Just kind of taking advantage of the courses that I had available to me as an undergraduate. And then in terms of this topic, I would say, and like the big themes that animate my research, I was quite interested in cultural studies, the history of ideas, when I was more a master's student. But then by the end of that, when I entered my PhD, I really wanted to kind of shift over towards economic history and social history and the history of capitalism, labor in particular, but also just kind of like integrating that with cultural studies and cultural history, like, kind of not losing track of the cultural dimensions of economic life either. And so I think for a lot of the time I was in grad school, just kind of spending time in Kenya reading the historiography. I was kind of in search of a topic where I could kind of work through a lot of these big questions. Questions. And one thing you hear often as you're embarking on dissertation project is, you know, you're gonna. It's. It's gonna. You're gonna be living with that topic for a very long period of your life. And in my case, you know, almost 10, 15 years. And I think, like, a lot of, like a lot of young people in the 21st century, like, food culture has become a very big thing, you know, and so I was really into cooking. And when I would travel to Kenya, I would, you know, eat out at a lot of the street food restaurants and other food options that were available. And just kind of as I was doing that day in and day out, and in particular, while I was on an intensive Swahili language program, Mombasa spent a summer there. It just sort of came together for me that, like, a lot of the big questions about economic history, some environmental themes, that all that was like, bound up in this urban food system that I was just kind of going about my daily life and being a part of while I was there. So, yes, I mean, I think probably, and maybe this comes out when people read the book. Like, I'm probably first a historian of capitalism and labor. Those are the questions that really animate my interests. But I'm also trying to work through that in the context of food studies, I think. Yeah, yeah.
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And I think that really comes through in this book. You know, we all. Most people love street food. Right. Especially if you're. If you grew up anywhere or have been anywhere on the continent. So let's sort of get into it and tell us about the book you've sort of started a little bit. But, you know, Delvin, tell us what it's about. What are the main questions you're looking to answer, some of the themes that you explore. Where are we, first of all? Right, like you've mentioned a little bit, but where are we? Who are we meeting? What are people doing? And what are some of the main interventions that you're making here?
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Yeah, so I think for me, one of the main kind of interventions or questions I'm trying to ask is, I mean, I was kind of already getting it a little bit. Is trying to. Trying to integrate the history of capitalism and labor with food history and food studies. Because for me, I think one of the things that I want to pull out in this book is that in trying to understand how capitalism transformed the modern world, which is like ultimately a question of global history, that studying that through the lens of food systems is one of the, I think one of the best ways to do it. Now, why is that the case? You know, you think about, for everyday people, how did their lives change from the, you know, let's just say the 19th century up to the 21st century as this kind of new modern economy takes root? It's about that transition from, you know, whether it's Africa or any other part of the world, really, that transition from people living in rural communities that to varying degrees, have subsistence food systems, which means, you know, use somebody in your family, a close member of your community is producing directly producing most of the food that that community is consuming. Now, obviously, across time and space that varies in terms of how much, like, local markets and purchasing is going on. But like most people in most parts of the world up until the 18th century are. Are directly producing a large majority of the food that they're eating. And that's certainly the case throughout much of sub Saharan Africa, right? And so, like, from that, from. From that set of food systems and social dynamics through towards. As people start migrating into cities, entering into commercial life, transitioning into capitalist societies, it's that transition from subsistence food systems towards becoming dependent upon the market as the way that you acquire your daily meal. And so for me, that's like that. That is one of the fundamental experiences right to where we are now in the 20th century. Again, whether it's in Mombasa or Pittsburgh to the north of me, or like, you know, wherever it is in the world, most people, and certainly if they live in cities, but even in rural areas, they've transitioned out of subsistence food systems into now becoming largely or even fully reliant on market relations, exchange relations in a commercial economy as the way that they acquire their daily meals. Right. So. And so again, as a way to understand the history of capitalism, studying that process and how food systems are changing from the 19th through into the 20th century in terms of how capitalism is affecting people in their daily lives, I think it's as effective a tool as any for trying to get our heads around what those dynamics actually were. So that's like the biggest question at the heart of the book. And it's also where for kind of my methodology and the things that interest me, I really like these big questions of global history, but, like, grounded in area studies in very localized linguistic environments, cultural environments, like the actual physical and natural environments of a particular place. Right. So, I mean, my study, in a lot of ways is kind of a very much within the traditional historiography of Africa. It's not like transnational. It's not like moving across borders. It's like, I look at a few communities that went from the rural areas and settled into one particular city. So it's like, it's. I try to argue that it's like both a local and a global history, right? Because it's trying to answer big global history questions, but like, very much within the methodologies of Area studies generally, but African studies and African history in particular. And that's also my hope that it's like this will speak both to Africanists who want to understand the specificities of this process within Eastern Africa, but that potentially anybody working on migration, urbanization, the transition to capitalism, and other societies potentially can hopefully find some insights in this study as well.
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I think it comes. It really comes through even as you're talking about it, right? We're talking about these big, you know, you're talking about these big questions or asking these big questions, and you're using this particular place to answer them. And, you know, the book is mostly about Mombasa and this political economy that sort of develops, right? This capital capitalist economy that develops and how sort of, again, adjust to, you know, what their. The rhythms of their daily eating habits, right? Adjust. But then you start, it's an urban history. But one of the arguments that you make is that these rural and urban are connected. And so you begin not in Mombasa, but in the interior. Can you sort of walk us through that? And walk us through, because you lay out what the food system is like as you're. As. As you've been saying, people grew their food, made their own food, right? And that's what people are used to, workers are used to, before they sort of migrate into the city to take part in this emerging new economy in Mombasa. So can you walk us through and then sort of make that connection for us, like as you do in the book?
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Yeah, sure. So. And in kind of making that argument, I'm really drawing on the ideas of both E.P. thompson and Frederick Cooper, who really argue that especially in the early periods of the transition to capitalism and the formation of working classes in the first decade or century where working class formation is going on, uh, it's essential that historians understand that even if they're in cities, even if they're working on a, you know, highly commercialized plantation, that these are effectively, you know, rural people from agrarian societies living in cities and their worldview, their values, their sense of justice, you know, their moral economies to kind of draw on E. P. Thompson, those are shaped by their experiences coming out of these rural communities. So if you want to understand what did it mean to be a worker during the first decades of, whether it's, you know, capitalism in England or capitalism within Eastern Africa, you've got to ground yourself in those rural societies that those people came from. So kind of having that as my point of departure and kind of a methodological inspiration. It was important to me, as much as I could, that this was an urban history. But, you know, as most Africanists will know, that like, you know, over the course of 20th century, migration is a fundamental part of that, a part of that experience, and that continues through. It's not like a single moment of migration in the early 20th century that is unfolding and there's a lot of movement going back and forth. So it was always. Yes, so again, it was always important to me to try to, like, first and foremost, this is an urban history, but there's also a history of rural food systems that I try to keep going throughout the book as well, to sort of connect those two experiences. And again, like, so the reason why I do that is I'm is. Is I'm. I'm ultimate, ultimately interested in what was that experience of being from one of these rural food systems and then entering into this very new commercial and spatial experience of trying to acquire your daily meals in an urban context. So, yes, I mean, as I did that in the early. Like, I mean, I mean, the rural food systems change over time. But at the beginning of the book, I spend quite a bit of time trying to sketch out what food systems were like at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century for kind of that first phase of migration out of those communities into these urban areas. And these were food systems in which they were largely subsistence again, by which we mean that people are directly producing most of their food. And through this, it's a quite gendered rural food system in that men are fairly involved in agricultural work, especially clearing fields and doing a lot of the, like, initial work of, of. Of laying out the area where agriculture is going to happen. But like, once the crops are growing, it's largely the work of women to be tending to the crops, harvesting, harvesting the crops and doing everything like that. And then once that is harvested, the food goes through is a lot of. It is processed in a lot of ways. So drying out the grains, if they have. If they have cattle, turning the dairy milk into various sour and kind of different butter products and things like that. So the production of the food, the processing of the food, and then ultimately the preparation of the food, almost all of this is being done by mothers, grandmothers, sisters in these rural communities. And so if you live in one of these communities, the way that you access your food is if you're, if you're a woman, you're like literally producing your own food. And if you're. And if you're a male child or, or an adult male through your membership in that community, that is how you access your food. Right. And it's getting produced within that communal context. And then in terms of like the actual food itself, I mean, one of the interesting things about rural peasant cuisines, especially here in sub Saharan Africa, is, is they are largely vegetarian actually on a day in and day out basis. Like most of the food people are eating are gonna be plant based foods. To the extent that meat enters the diet, it's, you know, if men are out on a hunt and they kill an animal and that's also like the only point at which men are consistently cooking is when they're out on a hunt killing the animal. At that point they'll butcher it and eat a certain part of it. If there are animals involved in rituals, people will eat, eat them at that point. But animals are really, to the extent that animal fat is entering the diet, it's really coming through dairy products and then in some circumstances also incorporating animal blood into the cuisine. But like meat is not very consistently eaten. The one exception for this, this is where like the ecological context matters is for the Luo along Lake Victoria, they do incorporate fish extensively into their diets. And so fish is a major part of their diets, but for the most part it's going to be plant based foods. It's like most of what people are eating coming out of the fields. And so that then means most of the food getting produced is being grown by women out in those fields. In the way it's both vegetarian genders. It as then the work of women to produce that, to produce that food. And. Yeah, so I can kind of go on and on about.
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Yeah, no, I think you're, you're sort of leading right into then, you know, my next question, which is. So, you know, that's sort of how things happen in the, in these rural communities that you're talking about. And then the transition happens, right, where this labor force comes into Mombasa and then perhaps this is a good place to talk about posho and sort of the politics that develop around it and how then that sort of evolves into. And how that's so different. Right, because you talk about variety, you talk about taste, which I found just fascinating discussions about, about food at this time. So can you talk a little bit more about that, this sort of new industry and how labor, the kind of labor system that's developing here and how that then creates this food system or food way that people have to manage.
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Yeah, and that's why the methodology of linking the world to the urban becomes so important, because as we think about the way people go into migration and start to experience this new food system, what they came from is so essential for how they interpret this experience. And so there's also a point where I can talk maybe in more detail about the cuisine itself, because that matters enormously as well. All right. And so as I said, largely vegetarian, but like the defining characteristic of rural agrarian cuisine is its variety that is driven by seasonality. Right. So what somebody's eating on a daily basis is going to change from week to week, month to month, as new foods are being harvested out of the garden, or, or conversely that you have a store of one type of grain. When it's bountiful, you might produce a particular dish, but as it gets more and more strained and as it, and as it dwindles down, you're going to eat less of that. The way that you're going to prepare it is going to also change as well. Right. And so again, variety driven by seasonality is kind of the way people experience their food in rural areas. And but as they move into labor migration, there's kind of a multi phase history of this where from the early aughts until the 1930s, both in urban and rural areas. So if you're working in Mombasa or out on one of these coastal plantations, the way people are getting their food is as a food ration given to them directly from their employer. And this gets called posho, which is a word that, I mean, it's sort of interesting. Posho has like a, like a much longer linguistic history on coastal East Africa. And it was used for food rations in the early 19th century, as far as I can tell. Like the British didn't draw directly on the rationing systems that were already there. There were actually food rationing systems they were using elsewhere in the British Empire as they're establishing in South Africa and elsewhere. They kind of imported that in the, the one thing they did though is just adopt the local coastal Swahili word for food ration, posho. And so it's interesting, like both in the, both like, like in the English language reports being written by British colonial officers and others, like they're using the Kiswah. Like they don't really use the word ration. They mostly use posho and all those sources. But so, but so, yeah, so people who are entering into these systems. And so, you know, you work out in a plantation, you're working in a city kind of day in and day out as, as an in kind portion of your wage, you're paid, you're paid a very small cash wage. And then, you know, at least a theory of the system is that you also get part of your pay as food given directly. And this kind of emerges out of a kind of a racialized vision of Africans by, by the British that they effectively thought Africans weren't ready for the like fully disruptive effects of a commercialized life in a, you know, fast growing capitalist city that like, it was kind of a paternal, like Patrick Harris has this concept of racial paternalism that it's like they had to provide for their workers in this sort of paternalist labor system, that it wasn't quite ready yet for the full intensity of a, of a market economy. And so within that kind of ideological context, workers are getting their food directly from their employers. And the reality of it is the employers, they want the cheapest and easiest to acquire food. And for a variety of reasons. There's a brief period in the 1910s where that's both maize meal and rice, but by the 1920s it's like entirely maize meal. And so you have a transition from rural food systems to where maize, maize is part of it. And even maize, you know, maize ground into a meal is like part of what they're eating out there. But they've also got sorghum, they've got millet, they've got, you know, again for starches, they've got sweet potatoes, they've got cassava. All this kind of in varying rotations. And that's that sense of that variety that's happening out there towards when you are working in the city or out in one of these plantations for a wage, you are eating maize meal every single day of the week, all through the month, all through the year. Right. So it's this new monotony and uniformity of the diet that is a radical new experience for people. Right. And that, and I mean, I think we can get a sense of like how jarring that was for people in the 1910s and 1920s that like, very quickly it becomes a point of tension, it becomes a point of conflict. And you know, the sources are challenging around there, but like, to the extent that you can pull out the way people are experiencing this, they do find it as a shock. They do organize around it. There's evidence of like desertions happening because the rations weren't good enough. And as they negotiate whether or not they're going to come back and work on the plantation again or work in the City or wherever it is that like, you need to add variety to the diet. And that's actually like the thing they're advocating for, isn't necessarily. I mean, they want a greater volume of food, but they want more variety in their diet. Right. So if you're going to give me a huge mass amaze meal, I need some fish with it, I need some vegetables, maybe some meat, some more salt to like, flavor it up and all stuff like that. So. So yeah, I mean, that's like in terms of like, how people are experiencing this new economic system that is taking root. It's that shocking experience of on a daily basis, I have variety in what I eat. And now I'm kind of forced into eating the same thing day in and day out continuously. This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan.
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Real United Airlines customers.
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We were returning home and one of the flight to asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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It felt like I was the captain.
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Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
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C
So then we sort of move in. So moving from sort of the early 20th century, right? And then because the structure of the book sort of moves us through it this way. And then we get into the 1930s, right, where this is now changing. And as you show, workers do have leverage because of labor shortages to actually negotiate better, you know, conditions with their food. And then you move into more of like a. Okay, well, that paternalistic attitude, right, or posture towards how people get their food changes. You get sort of like the commercial. The commercialization of food now sort of growing, and people start using cash, they purchase their food now the marketplace enters and this is how people get their food. Can you walk us through that? And you know, the sort of that basically the system that develops, right. Street food is available now. People are, you know, into it perhaps maybe like a culinary day in the life. Because one of the things that I find really interesting is the way that you show how lunch, for instance, becomes a thing now. So can you talk more about that? I don't want to give it all away with my question, but yeah, so.
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I mean, there's lots of things going on there. So this posture system kind of dominates working class diets from the early aughts into the 1930s. The evidence on the 30s for some kind of archival and documentation reasons that we could potentially get into, like, the evidence gets quite thin in the 1930s, but it's clear that like in the 20s, partial rations are everywhere. By the end of the 1930s, the documentation is then also clear that like, employers aren't rationing their workers anymore. And there's sort of some interpretations I have of why that is. But for now, that's less important than by the end of the 1930s. Working class people are largely reliant on spending their own cash to acquire all the food that they can get on a daily basis. Right. And that in of itself is like a major transition. Right? And once that happens, you have with within the urban economy a transition from a system where kind of all that potential demand that this working class would have is closed off because they're just having their food provided to them by their employers. But once you transition off of that system and have people purchasing their own food, it basically creates a new consumer class. Maybe not overnight, but over the course of a decade, right. Where, you know, even with their low spending power, there's still the majority of the city. And so once you have that new rising demand for working class food, you have a whole variety of businesses that are going to emerge. So it leads to the increase in dry goods grocers, you know, because before all the food was being or all this amazing meal was provided by the employer, now people are buying it themselves. They need to go to a dry goods grocer to buy that. Right? So it stimulates.
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That's the Maduka, right?
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Yes, yes, exactly, the Maduka shops, right. And then on top of that you have fresh produce vendors that are starting to increase on a greater number. Right? So, and you sort of think about like the composition of the meal. It's like you want your, you want your filling staple, you get that from the dry goods grocer, and then you want to prepare something to add flavor and texture to it. You go to the produce vendor, you go to the meat vendor, you go to the fish vendor. And so that whole economy of raw food ingredients is emerging. But also during this time period, you have the creation, or I shouldn't say the creation because there are antecedents to street food beforehand, but you have the rapid expansion and let's say, diversification of the street food industry from the, from the late 1930s onward. And that's, I argue in the book, street food kind of emerges for two interrelated reasons. The one I've already said is that simply there is now demand for food for working class consumers, right. And so that's going to stimulate some amount of business formation. But equally important, I think, and this is where in the book I really also stress kind of spatial analysis to kind of understand class formation, business formation, the different kinds of cuisines that are taking root. And you can really see it in street food vendors because as the city is expanding and very, very rapidly, right? So I mean, in the 30s and the 40s, in terms of population, Mombasa is growing very, very quickly. And it's growing not just in like quantitative terms, but also spatially. There's a process of neighborhood formation on the island, right? Because Mombasa is actually a island that is just adjacent to the mainland. I mean, it doesn't, doesn't really look like an island when you're on it, because you can see the suburbs, they're right there, the maintenance right there. But there's like a very densely populated island. But, but it had to become densely populated over the course of the, the 30s and the 40s. So people are spreading out on the island. But even increasingly by like the 1940s, 50s and 60s, people are populating the mainland area also. And these are largely working class communities that are out there as well. And so as, as the spatial scale of the city is expanding, it's becoming increasingly difficult or impossible for people during the working day to return back to their home for a meal. But you know, urban capitalism is driven by the idea of at least an 8 hour day, if not a 10 hour day, 12 hour day, and for working Class people. These are very labor intensive jobs, right? And so probably the most famous working class job in Mombasa are these port workers, right? This is very physical labor, you know, moving goods on and off of the boats. I mean, there's people who like their entire job is just to like, shovel coal all day. There are people that are working in warehouses, moving goods around, and then, you know, any number of small manufacturers, there are oil processing companies that are setting, that are setting up shop. Again, all these very physical jobs working from early in the morning until at least late in the afternoon, if not until the evening. Just from like a practical energy point of view, people need to eat substantial and filling food at some point if they're going to keep up the intensity of that labor, not just for one day, but you know, for six, you know, five, six, seven days a week, right? So in order to have that long working day of urban capitalism, these people need to have a substantial meal at some point and ideally in the middle of the day. Uh, and so that all kind of converges together, that there is a dense concentration of working class people in these crowded urban areas. They're all kind of getting hungry around the same point of the day. And that really stimulates demand for somebody or a whole class of, of small business people to provide that food to them. And so, and so we start to see that and it really starts to kind of pop up in the evidence that all around the port area there's lots of descriptions of street food vendors kind of setting up shop throughout the larger industrial neighborhood. And then kind of over time, and we can get into it, like it starts to expand in other parts of the city, but especially early on, there's just kind of a whole industry of street food vendors. And I argue in the book that it's like, you know, they become really essential to like the daily reproduction of the working day, because if they're not providing those calories. Now, of course, theoretically, and this is actually like the model from, from industrial Europe, is that they have a lot of canteens and stuff that like owners, like owners of the businesses take on the responsibility to build out a canteen and feed their workers. Because also in a place like London or Manchester, people are too far to go home for lunch. But for a variety of reasons in Mombasa, employers were uninterested in providing those services. And so it really, really falls on the street food vendors to basically feed these urban port workers, railway workers, warehousing workers in the middle of the day. So they become a really essential part of the urban, of the urban economy.
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C
I think it's really fascinating. One of the things that you do, you're like, you take us, like you said, right through the space of the city, right. And where a lot of this food is actually being sold is also pretty interesting, right? Their homes involved, their street cards, there are all sorts of things. So can you tell us a bit more about the places and then also the question of gender, which you've touched on previously. But how, who's cooking the food and how is that different, you know, from what people are used to? Right. So a lot of food, there's a lot of cooking happening and new people are cooking food and they're cooking it in new places because. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
- [38:03]
B
Yeah, no, and in, in answering that question, I think I can actually go back and answer one question. Yes, before that I forgot to answer. And that's just kind of like the daily routine of people in this city, kind of following them from the morning until the evening. So yes, I mean it's, it's going to depend on the household, it's going to depend on, you know, where they live. But you know, pretty typical, let's say, would be, let's say it's in the 1950s or 1960s and by that point you have quite a few people who are living in these working class mainland communities. So a person will wake up quite early in the morning, let's say 6 or 7am and at that stage they would have a few options. One, they could obviously prepare food at home. And this is where one of the, one of the arguments in the book that I also make that I, that I didn't get to yet is that a lot of these households, a lot of these working class households are composed of men and there are no women in these households. And so again, trying to understand what was the daily life experience of urban capitalism for a lot of men, it was the reality that back in my rural, back in a rural community, mothers, wives and sisters are preparing food for them. But in a city, if they're in an all male household, they now have to prepare all their own food. And so, you know, for the first time and on a significant scale and for, you know, for a lot of these people, a, A, a large period of their life in a way they wouldn't have done back in the rural communities, men are preparing their own food, right? So if it's in an all male household and the men decide that they, as they wake up, that they want to prepare breakfast at home, they're gonna be the ones that are preparing their own food if it's somebody. Now what's interesting though, and the evidence is really both archival and oral is pretty clear on this. If a woman lives in the household and kind of doesn't really matter what the relation is, it could be a sister, a mother, a sister in law, like they will probably be preparing the food for not only their own husband or brother, but like if a guest sustains somebody else. So I think for a fair number of people, like, you know, they just kind of make the decision to prepare food at home and it's probably going to be. The grain of the morning tends to be wheat, right? So I've talked a lot about maize meal as being this kind of dominant urban grain, but wheat as well, especially in the coastal area, but, but also in places like Nairobi too. Wheat is the main like filling ingredient you're eating in the morning. So if you want like a really easy breakfast at your house, you're just going to have plain white bread that you can buy at the Dukkha. And if you have a little extra money, hopefully you can also prepare yourself a tea which in Kenya is called chai. And so that's going to, again, if you have enough money and everything's working out, it would, it would ideally be a very milky and very sweet tea, right? Both tastes good. And it's also more caloric to kind of fill you up a little bit for a long working day. And so that's like a pretty easy breakfast. You can dip your bread in there to make it a little bit more palatable, a little bit more interesting. So if you want to stick at home, if you want to keep it simple, like that's a pretty typical, just like wake up, make some food and you're on your way. Now the thing is though, and this is you were talking about, like, where is this cooking going on, There is a breakfast trade of, of street food as well that as you walk out your front door in one of these neighborhoods, there's a decent chance as you're walking along, you're going to run into a gharia chai, which in Swahili, or rather into, that's that's in Ki. Swahili, translates in the English basis, like a tea cart. And there you can find somebody has already prepared the tea for you, which is quite nice. And they likely would also have mahamri, which are these Swahili coastal donuts that are kind of sometimes are going to have like some cardamom flavor. In it. And again, this is like wheat flour, again, which is kind of the basis of this. Coconut milk is also mixed into it as well. And so again, like the kind of typical way you would do it is you buy the tea, you buy them a hamri, and if you're wanting to kind of play around the texture, you can dip it into your tea as well, which is kind of a nice way to do it. Some women in these neighborhoods are also like building breakfast eateries out of their house. And so maybe you actually walk by somebody's door and a woman will be sitting out on her, would be sitting out on her, on her front steps. And here you might find, here you might find mbazi, which is a. Which is like beans that are cooked down in coconut milk with some like aromatic spices and stuff like that. You might also find chapati as well, like the South Asian flatbread that is also very common, especially in coastal cuisine. But really, even throughout Eastern Africa, you can find chapati. So, you know, if you have money, if you're willing to spend it, you can avoid working, preparing your food for yourself at the house, kind of walk out the door and probably also, you know, have some somewhat more complicated flavors and textures, just like a little bit more of an interesting breakfast, right? So people are leaving their homes, they've either repaired it themselves, they bought it from somebody else, and they're on their way. Depending on where you live, depending on how much money you have, you might have a very long walk to work. Or if you've got enough change in your pockets, you might take a matatu in, sit in traffic for a while. I mean, again, it kind of depends upon what point in history we're talking about here. But the key thing is you've left your, you've left your suburban home and you're. And you're most likely traveling all the way into the island. Like, the large majority of working class people are in the industrial quarter, which again, kind of combines the port, the railway, and then all these like ancillary industries that kind of like feed off the energy. The fact that all the goods and services are moving in and out of this one place. Right. And so they're all sort of confined or they're all sort of working in this one area. And then at lunchtime, as they finish up, they're going to leave the gates of the port, walk out of the railways, start walking to these neighborhoods. And usually within a quite short walk of where they work, they're going to find, you know, not just like one street food vendor, but like depending on the time, dozens and even hundreds of them that have like set up in and around these neighborhoods. And again, it kind of depends how much money you have, what you're in the mood for. If cash is a bit tight, maybe you're just going to get some grilled maize, which is going to be commonly available. It's filling, it's cheap, you can get it quickly. Or if you have a little more money in your pocket, you can go to what are called sort of like, you know, in, in English I call them street food vendors. But in Swahili, the most common way they're described are, are vibanda, which is a Swahili word for kind of like shed or structure. And they're just kind of referring to the fact that like on the side of the road, in a park, some kind of open space, a person will have created a makeshift structure that really comes in a whole variety. It might just be a series of cooking pots and plates and maybe like a stool, maybe maybe a small bench to sit on. But some of them are actually like much larger, like structures with roofs, like a full cafeteria, tables, benches, all that kind of stuff. And I would say in the, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, most of these bigger restaurants are going to be run by women. So the Gharia chai already talked about, actually most of you running those are men. And we can think about this of, you know, the, the cultural context out of which these people are emerging, where in rural communities, even cities, women are being trained from the time they're young to cook a whole variety of dishes, whereas men for the most part are not learning that right. And so both men and women, though, in the city are looking for ways to earn income. They can't find a wage earning job. Maybe they'll open a business. Women have the option at that point to say, well, I can open a full restaurant because I know how to cook all these dishes. Whereas men are not as skilled, at least at that point, but you know, they can boil water to make tea. A lot of the Mahamri, they're selling that, these Gharia chai in these little tea carts. They're not making them themselves, they're actually buying them from women that are preparing them in their homes. Like they buy them in bulk and they sell them kind of retail out on the streets. And so there's also kind of a gendered organization to how the industry is being set up, at least at this point, kind of changes over time. But in the mid 20th century, it's quite gendered in terms of who is running which of these businesses. And then so at these. At these street food industry, at these bigger kind of street food eateries, in terms of what you're eating, whole variety of stuff, they're still. They're still selling chapati in the middle of the day. That's going to be common. Chapati and beans is like a really common meal that people would be eating. Giteri, which is a upcountry highlands dish that was very common from the. Both the Kamba especially, but also the Kikuyu, kind of ate a version of this becomes very popular in urban contexts. And that's basically beans and maize kernel, like, combined together, different textures, different kind of flavors, sweetness and stuff mixed together. So that would have been like a very, very common lunch. And. Yeah, so that's kind of lunchtime. I can keep going on to dinner. I've been talking for a while.
- [48:36]
C
We want to hear what do people do for din? Because then now the journey back. Right. So maybe just very briefly.
- [48:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. So that's so. Right. So people. People file out at midday, they have their lunch, and of course the whole idea is that they go back to work then for the rest of the day. And it really depends on the industry and what they're doing. But we're talking like mid afternoon, rather say late afternoon to early evening. A lot of these shifts are. Are closing down, and then people are traveling back into their. Into their suburban homes. And again, it's going to really depend upon what somebody's situation is. Now, if they. If it's a male worker who is married and their wife is living at home, or again, like, if there is a sister who's living in the house, it is very likely in almost most circumstances. Again, this is evidence from oral interviews and archival sources. Like, they're gonna probably go home to a meal that's been prepared by a female relative and that's gonna be their dinner. But for many people, for. For both men and women. But if we're thinking about male migrants here, a lot of them are just living in. In all male houses now for economic reasons, a lot of people would just go home, try to save money. And in that circumstance, what we see is that when men were of kind of a equal econ, like class or generational position, they're mostly, like, taking turns in terms of who is going to make the food. And so, you know, I have a lot of interviewees who would talk about, you know, one night it would be my turn to cook the Meal and then. And then my friend would do the dishes, and the next night we would, like, switch it up. Right. And so they would get into these kind of routines of, like, moving back and forth. There was an interesting pattern, though, that like. So in like, the 1930s and 1940s, there wasn't a lot of differentiation in terms of, like, what working class people earned. There weren't like, salary scales and things like that worked in. That would come in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And as you start to see salary scales, you would have some men who had been in the city for a while, they'd moved up in terms of their position, getting more regular employment, higher pay, and they would start to build households, sometimes still only with men in them, but they would kind of like, take on relatives and other dependents. And in households like that, you would actually have, like, the man who had the more established position, maybe, maybe he was paying for the food, paying for the rent, that if you were a guest in that house or if you're staying there temporarily, like, it would actually be your job to make the food as kind of the way that you were paying your way living in that house. Right. So there's a whole bunch of men that are going back to their homes and preparing their dinners. But there also is a whole street food industry that emerges, I would say, much smaller than the lunchtime industry because there's just not as much demand for it. But you could go back and you would say, well, I don't want to make an entire meal back at home, but I'll swing by this one vendor who sells fried fish, I'll buy a fried fish, and then I'll go back home and I'll just like, cook up some quick ugali, which is like the maize meal porridge. That's like the main staple in these urban areas. Right. So you're still cooking at home, but it's like a relatively quick, simple process. And you can eat, it's nice and filling, it's a little bit interesting with the fried fish. And then you can go to bed, or you just don't even want to deal with that. You've had a long day working at the port, and you can just go and pay somebody else to prepare food for you, eat your meal out, and then retire back to your house, go to sleep, and do it all again.
- [52:32]
C
All over again.
- [52:33]
B
All again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have this really. It's this, like, there's both, like, a general system that emerges over the course of the 20th century. But depending on somebody's circumstance, their relative class position, the gender composition of their household, and then even just like individual taste and and desire. There's a whole bunch of combinations of people preparing their own food, eating out regularly. But I will say most people at lunchtime who are working in the city are paying for street food is the way that they're getting their food in the middle of the day, right?
- [53:19]
C
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- [55:59]
B
Yeah, so I refer to it as a contradictory politics because there is this contradiction that I think even until today has not been fully resolved within, you know, in this case, Mombasa. But I do think kind of globally, in urban econ, like in urban settings where there are large informal economies, a similar dynamic is going to be at play. And so again, this is the kind of like, you know, local context and very much ground in Mombasa, but I think kind of a history with some insights that are quite applicable in other parts of Africa and even other parts of the world to where we see, like, as we've been talking about up until this point, street food has come to play this essential role, particularly in the middle of the working day, right? To where the port and the railway especially, that are like the central transportation organs of not only Kenya's economy, but like East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, right? This is the choke point where, where so many of the goods that are being produced into Kenya come into Mombasa and then enter out into the world economy. The stuff that is coming in chokes right there in Mombasa and then goes out into various parts of East Africa, right? So Mombasa plays this really important role. And I make this argument in the book that like, it's kind of like it's Kenya's second city because Nairobi is growing as the big political capital. But like, economically, Mombasa might be the most important city in the region, arguably because of the role it plays with the port, right? So like getting port workers and railway workers there in the morning and keeping them there all day, moving all these goods on and off of these forms of transportation is an essential thing to the functioning of the regional economy. And street food vendors in particular, like, they play this role that kind of like holds that working day together. Now, again, in an alternative history, like, employers could have built canteens and that's how they'd be fed, but like, that's not how it unfolded. Like, by the time we get to the post war era, there's just kind of inertia that like, that's what the system is. But the contradiction that then emerges is that a lot of government officials kind of, as you were saying, there's this transition towards I mean, what's really interesting is that until the late 1940s, there are like laws around sanitations and building codes that are like on the books, but they're basically fully ignored. And, and like the officials in the records, they basically acknowledge this. They say, you know, we've got all these laws that basically more, more or less mean the informal economy is, lee. Is illegal by the terms that we've set. But we don't have the ability to enforce our laws. And anyway, we don't really, we can't because they're providing these essential services. And so they basically just like make that concession for a big chunk of the colonial period. But by the time you get in the late 40s and 1950s, there is this drive to modernize and rationalize kind of the bureaucracy of the city and then also the way that like maps onto the aesthetics and physical infrastructure of the city. And you know, the idea is that for the most part, business should be taking place inside of inspected, licensed buildings. And the business owners themselves need to be fully licensed and following all the appropriate sanitary laws. And again, all those laws existed, but they really start to enforce them in the 1940s and into the 1950s. Now the problem though is that you could also say, well, okay, let's just like push through all those laws. We'll, we'll have all the businesses transition to this. But for street food, part of their business model and part of the reason that it works is they keep their overhead extremely low. A lot of them aren't paying licensing fees. A lot of them aren't paying rent or much rent at all. They're not paying to maintain the buildings very much that they're working in. Right. They are out in the open air or if they've got a structure, it's kind of minimal. And so by keeping their overhead so low, that then keeps their prices quite low so that poor working class people can actually afford to eat there. And a lot of these licensing laws, if they were actually strictly followed, would, would compromise that business model because the food would become too expensive for people to actually afford to eat it. Right? So like, that's like, that's like one of the fundamental tensions is that like, because there's such low spending power in the city, these minimalist business businesses kind of had to emerge in order to have it at a price point that is affordable and also just to like locate it as well. Right. Because the fact that they're. All these businesses are not located in these physical buildings, they can all kind of like concentrate around the opening to the port, right. So you get a lot of businesses all in one place. There's a lot of competition. It keeps the prices low, keeps the food interesting. And so that they are informal, that they are avoiding licensing laws and building codes and all these kind of. It's kind of like built into the business itself that is providing this essential service that keeps the working day going day in and day out. And, and what's interesting actually that we see is really even they start to like in the late 40s, the. The city government like really starts to have meetings and kind of experiments with like some clearance campaigns to like move vendors at a certain area. But they like very quickly realize they can't push this too far because it kind of compromises the whole system. But for over the course of the 1950s, the city is starting to expand really, really rapidly. In the post war era, the population is booming. The number of street food vendors is also increasing dramatically. And it kind of hits this tension point in the late 1950s where there are so many street food vendors all over the city. The city's getting so much more crowded. And it's just like infused through this ethic within the city government that like, we need to get control over this industry. They do start some large clearances in the late 1950s, even with the kind of stated objective to basically eradicate street food as it currently exists. And their idea to replace it is that they're going to create these municipal constructed canteens that would be kind of strategically located in and around all of these working class employment sites. And the idea is to move all the street food vendors off of the street and into these city run canteens where they can be licensed, where they can be surveilled, where they can have access to sanitary services. The problem though, with this idea, both in the late colonial period and then it's carried over into independence, is that the scale of the government's ambition to actually follow through and build these campaigns never matches the actual size of the industry and the demand for these services. Right. And so they're trying to move vendors into these, into these canteens, but there's never enough space in these canteens for all the vendors that are within them. Right. So you start to have this dynamic going back and forth where they try to clear vendors off the streets and move them into the canteens, but there's not enough room for them in the canteens. People still want the services, the vendors still need the business. And so it kind of keeps going on outside of all these areas. Here. And it should be said, too. I mean, in the late 1950s, when they first tried to move all the vendors off of the streets and kind of shut down the business or shut down these businesses, very quickly, workers at the port started to. Started to organize themselves together. They started to protest to their employers. And all the port employers basically went to the city and said, you can't shut down these street food vendors. Right. They're. They're actually supplying food to our workers in the middle of the day. And they put enough pressure onto the city government. The city government basically said, all right, we're going to shut down these campaigns. We'll sort of ease. We'll sort of ease off of them for a while. We'll try to build up the canteen system, but in the meantime, we're going to sort of make it quasi legal to be a street food vendor on the city. And from that point forward, they never really fully resolved that tension that the city government desires to move all these people off the street and into some kind of controlled space, but they never fully build out that space for them to do it. And so that tension kind of remains.
- [65:30]
C
And then it's. And I think, you know, I guess moving on in sort of the temporal landscape of the city, then you do get an expansion of the food landscape, right, into restaurants and, you know, hotels. Because the economy of Mombasa is diversifying. You talk about the tourism industry that pops up and then also how some of these new businesses, like resorts and other things, then also introduce a new kind of system, which it almost is a callback to an earlier time. Right. Where if you work in a hotel, perhaps you could eat at the hotel now. Right. Like your employees providing your food. So can you talk more about that? And. And then sort of. So we have this diversifying food landscape. Can you talk more about that and how the street food industry persists? Right. It's. It's a very sort of resilient industry because it deals with this diversifying economy, but also the precarity that you've described, really, of their informal position in the city.
- [66:42]
B
Yeah. So part of what I try to do in the book is kind of, again, if one of my central questions is, you know, how are working class people acquiring their food on a daily basis? Right. And so you have this earlier colonial and then early independence period where the urban economy is largely concentrated on the port. And so that then spatially concentrates both working class life and the businesses like street food that sort of emerge around it in that space. But over the course of the 60s and the 70s, the city is both growing quantitatively and spatially out onto the suburbs in a dramatic way. But also the character of the economy itself is changing as well. So tourism becomes a major pillar of post colonial Kenya's economic development and Mombasa is at the center of that. So it's basically like safari tourism in the interior and beachside tourism up and down the Indian Ocean coast. And so they started to build these really significant resort hotels up and down the north and south coast of Mombasa. And so these then become, you know, as these like large complex institutions, new sites of working class employment within the economy. There are also examples of new, new industries, some with some kind of late colonial antecedents, but like small manufacturing, extractive industries kind of in the peri. Urban area around Mombasa as well. So like, the landscape of like where workers are in the city is really expanding during this period. And what's interesting is that, and as you said, it's kind of a callback almost to the earlier era is that as these businesses quickly expand, they've, they're, they're, they're opening themselves up quite a ways away from the center of the street food industry. So now you have somebody working in a hotel from early in the morning until late at night, or you're working out at a, a cement factory or a, you know, vehicle assembly plant that's like out on the, that's like out on the perimeter. And again, you want that like 8 to 10 hour working day. How are you going to feed these workers? And so we see this is actually a moment where that industrial paternalist model that's like, that actually was more common in Europe. There are little pockets of it that emerge in Mombasa. So at some of these manufacturing era spaces, they actually have formal canteens in these areas where workers are getting their meals. But in these hotels, and this is like, where it's both like spatial but it's also cultural, they are quite isolated and at least at first, there are not street food vendors around in these areas. But there's also just the culture of like the hospitality industry, both in restaurants as well as in hotels, that there is a culture of the staff meal, the family meal that you get as part of that. And that's true kind of around the world and like restaurant and like hotel cultures. And so that also. And so it kind of converges together that they're in this isolated area, they've already got a big commercial kitchen that is like pushing throughout, that is pushing food out for the guests. And so a lot of people that are working in these hotels are starting to eat in these more institutionalized settings and having prepared meals provided by their employers. Sometimes they're free and included as part of their wage. Sometimes you got to pay for it. And there's some kind of controversy around that about the prices and things like that. But also one of the. I think what is interesting, though, in terms of street food's role in this is that there's the employment that happens inside of the hotel industry, but there's all kinds of, again, ancillary industries that start to spring up around it. Right. So if you think of like the. Like, the port is the core of the island economy, and there's ancillary businesses around that, so too, with like the hotel industry, that. That there are taxi services that start to happen, taking people from the Mombasa airport to the hotel, or if they want to go from the hotel into the island and see some of the sites there. There's the curio traders that start to develop businesses along the beach. So there are all these people working long, long days in and around these hotels who don't have access to the food inside of it. Right. See, I mean, you have to work for the hotel to have access for that food. And so we see around that a street food industry that starts to develop on the mainland areas, too, basically reproducing the labor of taxi drivers, reproducing the labor of curio sellers. And so then they're able to stay there from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. Right. And so that same dynamic that emerged in the port area starts to reproduce itself in other parts of the city as well.
- [71:59]
C
Yeah. And I think, you know, I mentioned resilience earlier, but as you sort of go through the book, I think that's something that sticks out. Right. I think that, you know, the adaptability of folks, the folks that built the industry. And you do talk about people who read this book who meet individuals who are in this industry and sort of how they adapt and how essential this industry has been to people building lives. Right. You mentioned school fees is a big one. Right. Women being able to pay their school, children's school fees, and the industry endures. So just to sort of rounded up, can you talk about that aspect of. Of. Of your research and what the landscape looks like even now? Because this is, you know, a place that you're so familiar with and that industry that you've been sort of sitting with for the past, what, 15 years?
- [72:57]
B
Yeah, I Mean, it's a, it's an interesting field for people to work in and as a way to earn their money. Because on the one hand, in a lot of the interviews that I did, people had really positive memories of running street food businesses. That it was, you know, compared to wage labor, which, you know, is very often extremely difficult to get. And even if you get one of those jobs is not going to pay what you want it to. And you know, that's, that's kind of only increased over time. The sort of like slow erosion of stable, secure, salaried, benefited employment. Right. And so people increasingly look to the informal sector as a way to earn income. And again, the people that I talked to were again, quite positive about the experience. And again, in terms of the language they would use, in terms of what it did for their lives, they would talk about the ability. Again, the way they defined success was that I was able to earn enough income to put my children through school, I was able to buy a house. You know, people would talk about using the income they earned to buy rural land and what that meant to them. You know, so like really concrete ways that doing this business improved their lives. But at the same time, it's an industry that from the kind of post war era onward just has this inherent instability built into it that, and, and I didn't quite get into the details of it, but that there is this sort of like tense detente that exists between the city government and the people doing this work. Because this, because the city government knows, and especially like over time, as wage labor becomes less available to people, that the city government is in a position where they mostly have to allow the informal economy to proceed because one, it provides essential services to people on a daily basis. But then as secure wage labor becomes less accessible, it's also just an essential form of income generation for it for a growing increasing percentage of the population. Right. And so the city government more or less is, is reliant on this to create stability within the urban environment. And they know if they push it too hard, I mean, that's going to lead to tremendous instability. Right. So, so most days, day in and day out, people just go and run their businesses and, and, and, and, and go about their routines. But because of this, these dynamics that were created in the late colonial period and carried over the idea that informal economies are illicit informal economies, at least in the mind of many officials, actually don't belong in a modern city. It creates this justifying language that elites have. If these businesses become inconvenient for a Whole variety of reasons. And so we see at different flashpoints over the course of the 20th century where, again, day in and day out, it's a relatively stable business. But there have been these major campaigns that have happened that have attempted to basically wipe out the entire industry. So one of them I look at in the book is, you know, a very serious public health crisis that happened in the 1970s as the seventh cholera pandemic makes its way to. Makes its way to East Africa. There is sort of the threat of cholera on the periphery of the city. By the. By the late 1970s, there are actually cases that are happening within Mombasa. And it's this complicated thing where, like, the. Where the epidemiology of cholera, like, there actually is a connection between eating food that is tainted and contracting it. So, like, there is, like, a rational reason to be concerned about, well, is street food? Is street food a reason this might be spreading in the city? But ultimately, the bigger reason why Mombasa is, and cities like it exposed to cholera is that the sanitation infrastructure, which is the responsibility of the government to maintain, is. Is. Is. Is in a condition where cholera can spread because of the state of the sanitation infrastructure. Right? And so street food kind of becomes this way that the government can show that it's like trying to deal with the cholera crisis. That's a very real crisis they have to deal with. But it's like they are unable or unwilling to, like, deal with the larger sanitation infrastructure question. And so instead, street food vendor like, becomes the cholera, the approach to cholera that the government has. And so there's a point where, like, they effectively shut down and. And demolish and fine and arrest, you know, almost all the street food in the city in the late 1970s. But again, once the crisis subsides and people are going back to their routines, people need those services. People need the income. The street food industry comes back, but that's obviously a jarring experience. People working in the industry for days, weeks, months at a time, they can't get the income they need. It compromises the food system in the city. People can't get the food they also need during the working day. And there are a number of other flashpoints that happen like this. So it's this interesting dynamic for people that work in this industry. It's a really reliable industry. Like, the startup costs of getting into it aren't very high. So it's a way that somebody can quickly and hopefully successfully earn income. But there's always this thing in the back of your head that, like, Someday one of these clearance campaigns might come through and like wipe out your business overnight and create all this instability in your life.
- [79:19]
C
Well, I think we've taken up a lot of your time, but this is a very fascinating book, a great story for people to get into and read about. I said I. Like I said before, a lot of people will recognize, you know, a lot of what you describe, the rhythms of city life and how people eat in the city. But before we go, can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on currently, what we can expect from you next?
- [79:51]
B
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So it's interesting, my second book project, I actually started it before I even started working on this current book that I've already published. Way back when I was a early PhD student, I was quite interested, as I said earlier, in shifting into some more kind of economic, economic themes. And I started a research project on the, on the history of the commercialization of Kenya's fisheries during the 20th century. And I wrote a first year research paper as a PhD student on the kind of rise and collapse of the tilapia fisheries on Kenya side of Lake Victoria. And I kind of put that on the back burner as I got interested in other things. But along the way as I've been doing research in this bigger project, I've been kind of chipping away at that and expanding it into other areas of Kenya. So now I've been able to do additional research on the marine fisheries along the coast on the Indian Ocean coast. I've done some additional research on the Tana river fisheries that were also developing during this time period. So kind of like zooming out. I'm really interested in looking at the history of not just the commercialization of Kenya's fisheries, but thinking about fisheries as a kind of extractive industry. And so a lot of the literature and extractive industries looks at mining and timber and things like that. But I want to think about. Because a lot of the same dynamics that we see in other extractive industries are also at work within fisheries. But there is something different about these live species that live in these aquatic environments that give the, that give it some kind of unique characteristics. So anyway, yeah, I'm trying to work through this economic and environmental history of commercial fisheries in Kenya. And it's fairly far along at this point. So I'm hoping to get some article publications and maybe even the eventual book before too long. So stay tuned.
- [82:15]
C
Yeah, well, we will and we look forward to seeing it. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Devin. We've been talking about preparing the market in meal urban capitalism and working class food in Kenya's port city. Thank you again.
- [82:30]
B
Yeah, thank you for having me. This has been great.
- [82:32]
C
We hope to see you back when. When. When the. When the next book is out.
- [82:36]
B
Sounds good.
- [82:37]
C
All righty. Thank you.
- [82:39]
B
Bye.
- [82:51]
C
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- [82:53]
A
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A
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B
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A
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