A friend recently recalled—laughing as she did—her personal clash with the Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner, the most senior presidential appointee within Tanzania’s commercial capital. The friend in question resides in one of Dar’s (in)famous informal settlements, where she organizes with a co-op of wavujajasho—working people, or literally, “those who sweat.”

She had been invited to an official meeting where the Regional Commissioner, as guest of honor, advertised a new government loan scheme to some 300 attendees, all hailing from low-income groups. Such meetings are common and often follow a set script. State officials celebrate a new government initiative to help wananchi, ordinary citizens, and wananchi are expected to respond favorably, clapping on cue.

This friend, though, upset the script. When given an opportunity to speak, she recalled past loan schemes, often unveiled ahead of elections. People were made to pay expensive administrative fees to banks yet never received any loans. It was, she said, the government and the banks who benefited from these initiatives, not the people.

Her words resonated powerfully, triggering a wave of applause, this time spontaneous. The Regional Commissioner quickly instructed journalists present not to report the incident; the stage-managed event must be brought back under control. Even if momentarily, though, the crowd had changed. It broke with its prescribed role and offered its own, autonomous response.

The friend’s story points to a more widespread—yet often overlooked—phenomenon. There is a growing interest in Africa’s urban middle classes and their political relevance. By contrast, the relevance—even the existence—of working-class subjects is more debated. Certainly, urban working-class identities are diverse and are further complicated by criss-crossing religious, ethnic, and gender cleavages.

But as explored in a recent article with my coauthor, Sabatho Nyamsenda, urban informal workers’ collective identities, self-expression, and group solidarities—their class formation—are a focus of political contestation, including top-down interventions. State actors—like the Dar Regional Commissioner in our friend’s story—seek to manipulate this class formation, variously uniting, dividing, and co-opting urban informal workers.

Why? The contrasting approaches of two Tanzanian presidents, John Pombe Magufuli (2015–2021) and Samia Suluhu Hassan (2021–present), help answer this question. Each adapted their approach to urban informal workers to reinforce their broader strategies of urban and national political dominance, as well as their preferred balance of inter-class relations.

Magufuli, the “bulldozer” president, centralized power at the elite level while making populist appeals to classes of urban poor. Following Magufuli’s death, Samia soon broke with her predecessor; she reintegrated excluded elite factions even as she oversaw widespread, violent evictions of informal workers from the streets. Only later, amidst fears of falling popularity, did her government moderate its approach.

What did this look like in more detail? We argue that, in a manner reminiscent of colonial efforts to control a then-emerging “urban mass,” leaders today adapt approaches to regulating labor informality—especially workers’ access to urban space and their symbolic recognition—that then influence class formation.

Magufuli granted informal workers unprecedented access to urban space and appealed broadly to wanyonge—the poor, or literally, “the hanged.” Urban informal workers responded to their shared material conditions—open access to the street—and their official recognition by affirming a more encompassing collective identity, a shared “we,” and an appreciation for Magufuli. “Truly, Magufuli looked after the weak,” commented one moto-taxi driver, while another agreed, “He helped the low down,” adding, “not high-class people.”

Samia’s government meanwhile—after the initial wave of evictions—has segmented urban space, recognizing certain “respectable” categories of workers while excluding others. This differentiating and co-opting strategy has encouraged “micro-hierarchies” among informal workers. Focusing again on moto-taxi drivers, some with access to formally recognized parking areas may now self-identify as “transport officers,” adopting a new, state-sanctioned label. These “transport officers” then distinguish themselves from drivers without official recognition who remain wahuni (hooligans) and occupy “another level,” presumably a lower level.

Far from irrelevant, then, class formation among urban informal workers remains a focus of top-down manipulation, a key aim being to reinforce incumbent leaders’ political dominance. These efforts are part of balancing inter-class interests and adapting legitimation strategies accordingly. Crucially, though, top-down class manipulation makes sense only as a response to bottom-up action and reaction—to urban protests, to fears of electoral retribution, to strikes, and the like.

An appreciation of the political relevance of class manipulation has important implications for how we think about democratic politics—or the lack thereof—across Africa’s rapidly expanding cities. Beyond our focus on Tanzania, a more authoritarian context, a survey of the wider literature suggests that regime type per se may not decisively impact informal workers’ experience of fluctuating state interventions—by turns repressive, by turns co-opting—nor parallel forms of class manipulation. Similar regulatory interventions recur in relatively democratic contexts as well as authoritarian ones. Moreover, both democratic and authoritarian incumbents appear to adapt their regulatory interventions to reinforce their political dominance.

There is also a danger that conventional measures of democracy versus authoritarianism, while not clearly explaining variation in the treatment of informal workers, actually obscure class-differentiated experiences of freedom and repression in the city. Tanzania offers an example of this. President Magufuli’s authoritarianism was rightly decried, both at home and abroad, albeit with little attention paid to the experience of informal workers. By contrast, many initially welcomed Samia as a would-be democratic reformer, again though, largely overlooking urban workers’ testimony of dispossession and loss of freedom, or her later divide-and-rule strategies.

There are various ways of accounting for this persistent oversight. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant refers to a “dictatorship over the poor” and qualifies even established democracies as “centaur states”—humane to the affluent on top and beastly to the poor at the bottom. Yet where scholars distinguish cleanly between more democratic and authoritarian rule, there can be no “centaurs”; indeed, such clean distinctions—which also tend to focus on national rather than subnational levels—do not encourage a study of how states stratify citizenship along the dimensions of race, class, and geography.

Top-down class manipulation is one important way that incumbent leaders may stratify citizenship. They balance interests across class even as they seek to manipulate class formation among informal workers; they variously unite, divide, and ultimately seek to constrain class as a basis for more autonomous claim-making, or “popular” democracy.

Amidst Africa’s rapid urbanization, class manipulation may become ever more relevant to strategies of both city- and national-level political dominance. It deserves our attention—not only to understand the exercise of political power, but also to capture contestation over working-class subjectivities, and to make visible class-differentiated experiences of the state, including where democratic regimes may conceal an authoritarian underbelly.