Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City Review

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(More customer reviews)An old Latin saying, Pecunia non olet, translates as "Money has no odor". Originally related to the urine tax levied by Roman emperors upon the collection of urine in public latrines, it means that the value of money is not tainted by its origins. West African street peddlers in New York City use this ancient adage to justify why they sell baseball caps ornamented with foul language, or African statues and masks that these pious Moslems associate with idolatry and refer to simply as "wood". They also feel no qualms about selling bootlegged videos, unlicensed merchandise, and fake fashion goods, but they make it clear to their clients that they are not selling the originals. They believe in honesty in transactions, and avoid everything that reeks of "funny business".
For the tourists and African Americans who patronize their stalls, their replication of an African market in Harlem has a "smell": indeed, the buyers are in for the exoticism, and they want to experience a piece of Africa in New York City. Growing out from illegal stalls and having gone through several relocations, the African street market has become one of the city's tourist attractions. Some African American clients are on a quest for origins: they are looking after their African roots, and West African merchants have turned that longing for African origins into a commercial operation. They sell a commodified version of Afrocentrism, a specific ideological orientation that exerts a profound influence on African American sociocultural life. Associated with the figure of Malcolm X, Afrocentrism has been developed into a body of doctrine by scholars such as Molefi Asante who are tracing its roots to the ancient civilization of Egypt. It has led to the invention of modern rituals and traditions such as the festival of Kwanzaa, a seven-day African American holiday celebrated between Christmas and the New Year. Of course, for West African merchants in New York, the meaning of Kwanzaa has little cultural resonance; it is not so much a sacred celebration as a simulation of Africa that is good for business.
The story of "kente" cloth illustrates how commodities are created and transformed by transnational networks that use the Afrocentric ideology as a source of profit. Kente is the name of a colorful, intricate, handwoven silk cloth traditionally worn by Asante nobles in Ghana on ceremonial occasions. The antique clothes are colored with vegetable dyes of deep blue, yellow, green, and red hues and are stitched in subtle and elegant patterns. Silk and rayon kente strips--handwoven but admittedly inferior to the original cloths--gradually became popular in the United States. Many icons of African American cultural life began to wear these kente strips as scarves--colorful material badges of African identity. Sometime in the early 1990s, enterprising Koreans entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. Working from photographs of handwoven Ghanaian silk kente, they designed a cotton print cloth version--for a fraction of the original's cost. Small textile factories in New Jersey began to mass produce them, and they were then transformed into "kente" cloth caps, sports jackets with "kente" cloth lapels, as well as dresses, skirts, and trousers.
The story doesn't end here: the success of New Jersey "kente" shocked the African textile industry into action. Ghanaian textile factories reproduced the cloth design, undercutting the costs, and shipped it to New York City as well as to other West African markets, where the cloths were transformed in low-cost textile mills. The "Ghanaian" reproduction of kente, whatever its origin, surpassed the New Jersey version in quality at a cheaper price. Asian entrepreneurs in lower Manhattan also bought bolts of fabric from African wholesalers and transformed it into caps and cheap clothing in downtown sweatshops manned by Asian immigrants. And soon African "kente" was back on the streets of Harlem, peddled by West African cloth merchants and street vendors, and sold mostly to African Americans in search of authenticity. As the book notes, "this confluence of symbolic contradiction is a small reminder of how the flow of money, goods, and people across increasingly fragmented spaces is transforming social landscapes, making them less bounded, more confusing."
Paul Stoller, the author of this ethnographic study, is on a different quest. Before conducting fieldwork through participant observation in street markets in New York City, his research experience had been in the rural western region of the Republic of Niger, where he studied symbolic interactions and religious practices in ethnically diverse villages. His familiarity with the Nigerien cultural context, and knowledge of the Songhay language as well as of French, gained him acceptance among the Francophone African merchants, otherwise suspicious of outside interference that may draw attention to their undocumented status. His informants were apparently happy to have him hang around, discuss their lives, and accompany them in various business transactions or administrative formalities. One goes so far as to suggest to him to change career and become a diplomat: "You know, you should come to Côte d'Ivoire or better yet, to Niger, and give out visas. With someone who understands our ways as well as you do, it would be very good for business."

The Africanization of New York City refers to the ways West African immigrants recreate part of their communal life in their new environment. As the author shows, the street markets are organized like many West African markets, where the space is often apportioned and regulated through informal mechanisms. Members of the same ethnic group or place of origin usually occupy contiguous space and sell the same kind of merchandise. In Manhattan, the aristocracy of street vendors is formed by the Senegalese, often members of the Mourid religious brotherhood, who were the first to migrate and who established a lock on informal vending space. Kinship, ethnicity, and nationality also directly affect the density of contacts and degree of trust and cooperation, which is bolstered by Islamic morality. Practices of long-distance trade in West Africa is also reproduced in the United States, where merchants from the same kinship network or ethnic group often pool resources and travel to what they call the "American bush", peddling their wares in African American festivals or Third World commercial fairs.
The author is also interested in describing the global forces that have compelled these merchants to leave West Africa and develop their trade in the streets of New York. Most West African traders come to the United States as single men, leaving behind their wives, children, parents, and complex extended families. Most of them are undocumented immigrants; this means they may avoid going to physicians, postpone English instruction at night schools, keep their proceeds in cash rather than bank accounts, and fail to report the theft of inventory. As the author writes, "they work, eat, and sleep with only the slightest exposure to American social life. They count their days in America, waiting to have made enough money to return home with honor." Having completed this detailed ethnography, the reader may agree with the author that "There is something heroic about this group of West African traders."

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