There is a large literature on informal economies in Africa, a continent which remains the most informalized region in the world today—with, in many countries, 80-90% of people working informally.  Much of this literature, especially in policy studies, retains a strong bias against informal modes of work and remains analytically distanced from the practices it purports to study. In order to add nuance to this literature and address some of its shortcomings, I have been engaged in an ethnographic study collecting in-depth data from informal entrepreneurs in two African countries, Togo and Kenya. This study draws on key themes and debates in the informal literature in designing a project that enables an empirically-based theorization of burgeoning African informality while paying special attention to vernacular economic understandings and practices.

While describing some of this study’s findings—which overturn several apple carts in the informal literature and gesture toward the value of a more qualitative, anthropological approach—this presentation introduces a decolonial reading of informality and suggests that the persistence and ubiquity of informal work on the continent represents a critique of colonial modernity and an alternative to capitalist labor & accumulation practices. The paper also asks: what is the nature of critique that is unnamed as such and originates in a site of everyday practice?