Le commerce du khat : un pré carré féminin ?
Authors: Lesourd Céline 
Published: April 2023

In Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, it is women who can be seen working the stalls of the khat markets. They separate and air out the bundles, compose the bouquets, and negotiate with consumers who are mostly men. Indeed, chewing khat to for its narcotic stimulating virtues is a largely male activity, but selling khat, on the other hand, is a female one. By observing women khat traders while they were at work we try to better understand the specific feminine aspects of the khat business. The consumption of khat is associated with pleasure, desire, and acts as a backbone of gender norms. Because they are providing khat, women maintain a space-time of intimacy where one’s always expects more from khat : evermore simulating effects for customers, evermore profitable and sustainable margins for female salespeople (Lesourd, 2019). In addition to the technical commercial skills exerted by these female sellers, they also use relational skills (Manry, 2001). By displaying their own assets and representations of khat, women trade promises to men who are expecting, hoping, and fantasizing about a sexual encounter which will probably never come to fruition (Deschamps, 2013 ; Koening, 2016 ; Broqua et al., 2019b). Therefore, amidst this intimate deal during which the debt is never paid off, ties between the seller and the purchaser are bound and linger on. The saleswomen express it in a different way : with time they have to grow a wealth of kindness to gradually replace their assets of beauty in order to retain their customers, despite younger rivals taking hold of the markets. This gendered and sexual specificity provides women with a monopoly that has served as an economic and social springboard, which has ensured employment, income, financial independence, recognition and power. However, on a global scale beyond local markets, the specificity of this business tends to wear off. In the Horn of Africa, women have nevertheless implemented their ability to circulate products by relying on various networks, such as in Djibouti, whether through marriage unions, random love affairs, through corporatist solidarity (railway workers, customs officers), or through situated identity-based collaboration. Still, it should be noted that these men who are engaged in cross-border movements, as either willing accomplices or those compelled to do so by other means, control and regulate access. They have made exchanges easier, expanded the number of customers, or, on the contrary acted as obstacles. In addition to these power relations in handling the routes is the central Ethiopian state’s ambition to transform an informal economy into a formal economy aimed at controlling a peripheral territory and its resources in a region that is not inclined to allegiance. Women, then, come up against the “privatization” or masculinization of the export sector. In this reorganization of the export sector, whether in Djibouti or Somaliland (Gebissa Ezekiel, 2004, 2010b ; Anderson et al., 2007), the transnational capital of the traders, which is linked to the logic of party loyalty, to political complicity, or, conversely, to the marginalization of one clan by upper reaches of power to the benefit of another, constitutes important power relations and calls for dense and more costly strategies that have contributed to the gradual withdrawal of women traders into “their” local territory. In this case, what got the better of women traders is not so much the mechanisms used control the sector at a national level — the limits of which can be clearly seen, particularly through the persistence of effective smuggling networks— but the logic and resistance plurality of local actors. As far as this interplay of scales is concerned, we return to the generalisation of prohibition driven by the “War on Drugs” (Hansen, 2006 ; Carrier 2008b ; Beckerleg et al., 2009 ; Gebissa Ezekiel, 2012), which gradually excludes the most modest export players, i. e. those who do not have the financial means to take risks, such as women. However, while the closure of borders mainly affects men, it raises questions about the prospects of potential future trade and fallback solutions : could women traders resist potential male pressure on their market when the few already established salesmen offer goods at a more competitive price ? Finally, another development is emerging that could also favour the integration of men into the market and harm the female sellers : there are increasingly more female khat chewing consumers and it seems that these female consumers buy their bouquets from men. There is an emergence of male shopkeepers taking on a “woman’s job”, of women consuming a “man’s product”. These reconfigurations would then raise the acute question of the feminine specificity of green trade and the role khat plays in gender relations.