Policing, Fakes, and Policing Fakes

To help frame what kind of policing surrounds the trade in unregistered sex enhancers, let me first address the literature on policing and performativity, and policing in Africa. The tweet I have cited exemplifies Manning's ‘drama of policing’ (2001: 317). Invoking dramaturgy, Manning advocates for ‘a perspective that emphasises the use of symbols to convey impressions to an audience’ (ibid.: 316). Impression-management frontstage distracts from a backstage where policing fails to live up to expectations. This pretence evokes a clear sense of what police should really be. It represents police as public servants enforcing law. The dramatised frontstage also distracts from extrajudicial acts that deliver what people expect from police. As Walter Benjamin (1986) notes, police deploy extrajudicial means to produce their own law and strengthen their own authority. They are not just enforcers but makers of law. Yet even when the extrajudicial violence of policing is acknowledged, a line separates what they should and should not do.

In contrast, scholarship on policing in Africa tells a different story about this state institution (e.g., Beek et al. 2017) and how it is entangled in social particularities. As such, policing (and not only in Africa) is unstable, blurred, and contingent (Diphoorn 2016; Loader 2000). Julia Hornberger (2004) shows in her ethnography of policing in Johannesburg how people appropriate personal connections with police to serve their own parochial interests. These studies are mainly concerned with the distribution and appropriation of sovereignty, authority, and the use of legitimate force. When it comes to monetary gain, police practices are generally discussed under the normatively overdetermined category of corruption. Exceptional here are works that show how postcolonial African policing is driven by projects of survival (Bayart 1993; Sardan 1999).

Within this context, policing is also shaped by what Julia Hornberger and Sarah Hodges (2023) refer to as ‘fake-talk’. The category of fakes is unstable and malleable and can be mobilised for very different purposes. As Patricia Kingori (2021: 239) says, ‘The fake is controversial and is best understood as a site of contestation in which questions are continuously asked and boundaries pushed’. David Mills et al. (2021) talk likewise of the ‘fragility of authenticity’. Who then defines and makes claims about fakeness? What is the role of police in this, when they themselves are accused of not really policing? What opportunities or challenges do fakes provide to police who are themselves struggling for survival?

Finally, the policing of fake pharmaceuticals takes us to what Maziyar Ghiabi (2022) calls ‘the everyday lives of drugs’. Interactions around unregistered medications bring together traders eking out a living, customers trying to boost their own sexual performance, and a bureaucracy ostensibly trying to clean the streets of unregistered drugs deemed dangerous. The streets where this unfolds are sites where interactions produce a monetary income, relationships among traders, and with this all the bureaucracy that manages it. Police busts feebly attempt to present an image of professionalism and efficiency, but this very impression management is busted by an avalanche of commentary. This interplay directs us to the proliferating forms of policing that thrive in an environment of bans and suspicions informed by concerns about fakeness.

One form that such concerns assume in Africa is that health officials routinely speak of the continent as a dumping ground for substandard, counterfeit, or otherwise spurious drugs (Goodman, this issue). Viagra in particular is deemed ‘one of the most widely counterfeited drugs’, and the proliferation of fake sex enhancers in Africa is dubbed ‘a worrisome trend’ (Ojo 2016). Sex enhancers play a peculiar role in the policing of pharmaceuticals. While global public health officials are most concerned about the possibility of life-saving drugs being fakes, fake sex enhancers play a much bigger role in what anti-counterfeit policing actually finds (see Hornberger, this issue). In turn, cases of fake sex enhancers play the role of a proxy form of evidence in global public health discourse. Zimbabwe's ban of over-the-counter sales of sex enhancers must therefore be understood as part of a global campaign driven by the securitisation of health and the policing of intellectual property held by pharmaceutical corporations (Hornberger 2018). In the Zimbabwean case, claims that unregistered sex enhancers were unsafe and dangerous to the public justified policing of the streets.

On the eve of the ban, there was not simply a public health warning but also a public outcry over sex enhancers ‘flooding’ the capital city and ‘being sold openly at bars, open-air entertainment joints and even in central Harare’ (Dube and Wurayayian 2012). Yet, instead of ending the trade in unregistered sex enhancers, the ban fanned a shadow market. Members of the public are suspicious of the informal market, but my interlocutors rarely talked about fake sex enhancers. MCAZ deregistered the products on the grounds that they were inauthentic and therefore dangerous, but only in this indirect way did fake-talk shape policing. When I asked traders if there were fake drugs in the market, an emphatic and outraged ‘no’ implied that the question was an insult. My next question was if enhancers always worked as expected. I was told they did not, but that efficacy was not to be confused with authenticity, rather being a problem of compatibility (Kufakurinani 2022). In the market, then, fake-talk dissipates. Yet suspicions of fakeness resurface in new ways when there is money to be made from them.

That is to say, the story of the trade in sex enhancers is part of the broader story of the Zimbabwean economic crisis that has generated widening unemployment, and a deepening informal sector dubbed the ‘kukiya-kiya economy’ (Jones 2010; Masawi et al. 2023). Kukiya-kiya means making do with what is available to get by in an economy of survival. It is a double verb based on the English word ‘key’, here signifying the key that unlocks opportunity but also locks away misfortune. This economy created a productive space for police and for opportunists such as imposters, alongside traders themselves. In contemporary Zimbabwe, the informal economy is the economy. In 2014, informal employment was 94.5 per cent of total employment (Pikovskaia 2022). In 2022 the informal sector made up approximately 60 per cent of the total economy, and some 90 per cent of those considered employed were in this sector (Luiz 2022). The informal economy props up the formal economy as well. Even those formally employed, such as teachers, have side-hustles using their workplaces to sell merchandise.

Both the trade in and the consumption of sex enhancers must be understood within the above broader context. Popular commentary suggests there is increased uptake of sex enhancers by young and middle-aged men, which links to the sense of a crisis of masculinity caused by economic difficulties. This came up in my conversations with traders and consumers, as well as with married women. If masculinity is based on men's abilities to provide for their families and partners, failure to provide is emasculating (see also Hunter 2010). To compensate, men are said to opt for sex enhancers which might prop up an alternative masculinity expressed in sexual performance. A tweet in Shona from 2022 translates as: ‘What's happening boys, low self-esteem or what? Someone is going to die for wanting to make a name from delayed ejaculation’. A respondent presenting as a woman replied that ‘Engine² has no power because of stress’, and later added: ‘Of course, engine wants enough blood supply plus messages from the brains. But the head is full of messages about debt, hunger, and rent is due, etc.’.

Sexual dysfunction threatens the sense of manhood (Kufakurinani 2022) and the boisterous names of products such as ‘Strongman’ or ‘Maxman’ betray how sex enhancers are expected to save such fragile masculinities. Sex enhancers thus have both economic and social functions. The informal trade in them as well as their use by customers both emerge as ways of dealing with a broader national crisis. As long as that crisis persists, they will remain in circulation. So, what is the policing of them about?

‘Where There Are the Police, There is Money!’

In 2020 and 2021, I spent almost six months doing fieldwork on the street trade in sex enhancers around the Five Avenue Shopping Centre. This shopping centre lies at the Avenues: a residential and commercial area on the outskirts of Harare's CBD, which is also notoriously a redlight district (Kufakurinani and Uledi 2020). Alongside sex enhancers there are informal trades in items such as cell phone chargers, men's belts, car mats, food, and even currency, among others. Traders in sex enhancers, mostly young to middle-aged men, are spread around the adjacent streets. Their numbers suggests that this is a brisk, lucrative market. One can encounter more than thirty traders in these enhancers within a radius of one kilometre, even though, as noted above, one especially popular site for the trade is directly across the street from a police station. Traders advertise with signs as well as empty but labelled boxes to attract passing customers.

Using both WhatsApp chats and time spent with traders on these streets, I explored how the trade in sex enhancers continued, albeit illegally. At first, being accepted into this setting was hard. Traders saw too much unnecessary risk in fraternising with a stranger who was neither a customer nor planning on being one. As Sasha Newell notes of research interlocutors engaged in illicit activity, ‘they have good reasons to be suspicious about the effects of engaging in social science at little personal gain’ (Ross 2019). One trader later confessed to me that he normally would not entertain strangers for fear that ‘they could be infiltrators or undercover police out to get information for their next bust’. Eventually I won the trust of two respected traders, and from there established further contacts. Kundi was a seasoned trader with over five years’ experience and claimed to be well connected with the police. Misheck also became a major interlocutor. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Harare he paid five US dollars for a fake letter that identified him as an essential services worker. Others likewise found ways around policing during that period.

These interactions gave me an increasingly differentiated understanding of the policing of sex enhancers. In early fieldnotes I referred to the relationship between traders and police as cat-and-dog. I picked this up from a friend's comment that by engaging in this fieldwork I had ‘decided to dance with the cats’ and would have to dodge the doggishness of the police. Indeed, the first impression I received from traders about police was acrimonious and antagonistic. Traders in sex enhancers were constantly policed by a variety of different units and forces because their street trade violates not just the national ban on the sale of sex enhancers over the counter but also a set of municipal bylaws. Traders are thus at the mercy of both the municipal police and the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP), particularly its Narcotics and Drugs Section. Both often carry out uncoordinated patrols on the streets. Municipal bylaws and national laws prohibit, first, the sale of sex enhancers without prescription; second, the sale of sex enhancers without a licence; and third, the sale of unlicensed sex enhancers. Municipal police can target informal traders with clauses on trading without a valid licence, trading outside specified areas, and trading in prohibited goods.³ The ZRP can use regulations on the sale of unlicensed medical products or the 2013 ban on the sale of over-the-counter sex enhancers instigated by MCAZ.

Busts are therefore a frequent menace. Like most traders, Misheck and Kundi often complained about police ‘visits’. These ‘visits’ took various forms. Sometimes they were raids by uniformed national and city police; at other times they involved undercover officers patrolling in civilian clothing. Traders shared with me stories of their encounters with the police. Often these were brief encounters where police would take bribes of two to five US dollars to leave the traders alone. On other occasions, however, busts could be intense. Police trucks would round up traders, taking them to the main police station where they would have to pay a fine that day or the next to be released. Busts meant significant losses at several levels: first, a loss of trading time as traders had to disperse until the dust settled; second, those who were not so lucky as to evade being caught would have to part with bribes and fines; and third, traders could lose their merchandise to police confiscation. In the worst-case scenario, traders could spend up to two days in remand prison.

Traders also saw busts as being of dubious status even in terms of official motivations. Sometimes, traders told me, real police could make fake busts, in the sense that they acted without an official command to raid. At another level, even sanctioned busts did not always see traders actually apprehended, and when they were, almost never were they taken to court. They were simply made to pay fines (and unofficial bribes) to be released back into the streets. The most common experience was of uniformed and plainclothes police just collecting bribes without arrests. Spurious policing thus became a lucrative enterprise for police.

Traders used many techniques to avoid arrest. One such is a warning system on the WhatsApp platform. Misheck told me about the WhatsApp group of twenty-two members then where traders alerted one another of police presence in the vicinity. Traders were spread around the shopping centre at strategic locations. Those who were on the WhatsApp group communicated updates to colleagues who were not. Communication about the presence of the police was usually done through voice notes describing the direction from which police would be coming and going. Voice notes helped the traders to keep their eyes on the streets instead of having to look at the phone while typing. Police officers on a sanctioned bust usually travel with a police-labelled truck that would later be used to ferry arrestees to the police station. Trucks are easy to detect from afar, so their presence could be announced quickly on the shared platform. There were many occasions of false alarm too, as police-labelled trucks were seen passing by but were actually en route to other locations. Finally, confidence was also critical when it came to dealing with the police. How one responded to police visits was key. ‘If you are confident’, Misheck remarked, ‘you can even put a price to the bribe you will pay’.

Finally, as one trader told me, ‘visits’ from the police were not just a practical menace to manage. They were also an opportunity to exploit. The unlucky would be caught and lose out on earnings. But those who escaped arrest and returned to position before most others could had a temporary monopoly and could charge inflated prices for that period.

All in all, these engagements reveal that what had initially seemed to me a one-sided cat-and-dog game was in fact animated by a dynamic that traders captured in a popular expression: ‘Pane mupurisa ndipo pane mari’ (Where there are police, there is money). Police were present because traders had identified a lucrative enterprise: one which they had to protect with vigilance and endurance against police onslaughts. Because of this lucrative trade, meanwhile, police raids proliferated in forms ranging from the casual ‘visit’ to the large-scale raid conducted for public consumption in the media, thereby reaping their own share of the market.

This meant that the critical tweeting about police raids with which I began the piece, was actually quite close to an accurate accounting of policing sex enhancers, post-ban. Police had their own investments in the survival of the trade despite their official mandate to close it down. Traders and police even shared implicit understandings of how to bracket enforcement of the law as such. The policing of the Avenues was more about channelling the circulation of money and opportunity than it was about the law itself. Avoiding police was also less about avoiding the law than about negotiating the value of the trade with the police and making value out of policing itself. That neither police nor traders considered sex enhancers fake, even though bans had been put in place in the name of their fakeness, was also helpful. No one felt that laws to protect public safety were being violated.

As this suggests, the complex economy of policing that I have described so far is not built simply on the performance of antagonism between traders and police. That performance of antagonism is matched by performances of intimacy and friendship, in both directions. When I once asked Misheck why he was not afraid of the police stationed right across from his stand, he proudly replied that ‘those ones are ours’. By this he meant that the police across were their friends. As such they were innocuous and ultimately not a problem.

Mischeck's claims about the particular police across the street echo Hornberger's account (2004) of the policing of Johannesburg's inner city during her fieldwork with state police in the early post-apartheid years. Reflecting on the unintended effects of an official shift to a new mandate of ‘community policing’ or policing in cooperation with the policed, she sums up a particular dynamic of this policing by citing a popular phrase that marks the use of police by participants in local conflicts: ‘your police—my police’. The expression ‘my police’ refers here to a situation where ‘a person successfully ‘captures’ a police officer through some relationship of familiarity, friendship or indebtedness or the concurrence of particularistic interest’ (Hornberger 2004: 216). Like ‘my police’, the expression ‘those ones are ours’ implies a relationship of friendship or even ownership. Such utterances reveal ‘a relationship marked by possessive qualities and announces an imaginary of the state police as private police’ (ibid.). In the Harare case, traders had become familiar with officers at the station across the street and would time and again exchange greetings and conversations with these officers through the day. Through these ongoing intimate relationships, they were also sometimes privy to alerts from friendly officers about pending plans for busts.

I witnessed this social capital at play when one policeman came round to traders and advised them to go home early that day as there was going to be a bust on violations of the COVID-19 lockdown. Kundi boasted of having an excellent working relationship with the police. He even made a serious offer to get his police connections to arrest me so that I would spend a night in prison to have ‘an authentic research experience’. Such levels of social capital proved critical to traders in many ways including being advised on pending busts or patrols and also paying fewer and smaller bribes or nothing at all when visited by the police. Here it becomes even clearer that the police were a part of the market and not its destroyers. In turn, traders’ personal relationships with police qualified the circulation of profits and shares in that trade.

‘Where There Is Money, There Are Fakes’

Both the trade in sex enhancers and the policing of it have become lucrative enough to create their own spin-offs. As one could also put it: where there is value, there is fakery. Consider this account from Misheck about his experiences with two imposter policemen. Two policemen came to Misheck and his colleagues and accused them of breaking the law. They threatened the traders with immediate arrest. Misheck relayed to me that his intuition told him these were not real police. He and fellow traders happened to have an official policeman alongside them on the streets who was trading in currencies, another informal activity that is common in Zimbabwe (Mawowa and Matongo 2010). Though illicit, the trade in currency is generally ignored by police and has come to be accepted as a necessary evil. After reaching out to this policeman peer, the traders turned the tables with his help and began to harangue the raiding policemen with questions. Together they quickly established that the latter were imposters.

Police are expected by law to show their IDs and even to give their names and force numbers when they deal with suspects. Yet the existing power relations and the vulnerable position of traders effectively mean that asking police to identify themselves could create a confrontation that would compromise the trader's bargaining power when the bribe to be paid is subsequently negotiated. Fake police were not unusual, I was told, but only occasionally would traders gather the courage to demand identification and verification. On this particular occasion, perhaps because of the presence of a real policeman, Misheck had the courage to confront and question what turned out to be imposters. The officer and the traders dragged the two to the station across the street. The policemen-traders confirmed that they were indeed faking it. According to Misheck they were dismissed after they apologised to the police for posing as officers.

The figure of the imposter offers insights into the social relations and cultural forms of settings in which it emerges (Rodrigues, this issue; Woolgar et al. 2021: 3). This is evident in the encounter just described. Misheck was trading his illicit merchandise alongside a policeman who was himself engaged in an illicit trade in currency on the streets. Both took the imposters to the police station without worry that they would be themselves interrogated for illicit trade. The local traders had developed a close relationship with police across the street whom they met and greeted every day. This context helps us to understand why Misheck and colleagues had the confidence to take the imposters to the station. The traders had also become familiar with the municipal police: when they saw them, they would just give them the expected bribe without fear or threat of arrest. Familiarity with the real police was important for traders and allowed them to distinguish imposters. Because the market in sex enhancers was lucrative, it also attracted not just the traders and police who sought to make money from it but also the imposter. Imposter police should thus be understood as a part of a larger system of value extraction. In the case where policing fakes is a lucrative business, so too the faking of police follows the value stream. Again, as the fakeness of sex enhancers faded into the background, it nonetheless produced a proliferation of policing, including fake policing itself.

Finally, traders also policed themselves in ways that also add to the profitability of their business. This self-policing turned on a set of tacit rules among traders that were meant to enhance their chances for making money. The traders knew that they had to manage themselves, not just the police, if they were to manage their market effectively. Such self-policing was critical for the collective and therefore the individual survival of traders’ businesses. As we shall see, this collective self-policing also turned in certain ways on the spectre of the fake.

To give an example of one such form of self-policing, the traders I worked with had developed a rota system that they called ‘sticken’. This system called on traders to restrain themselves and take turns in an agreed-on order to sell their sex-enhancing merchandise to customers passing by. Between four and seven, traders sharing a trading position would take turns one by one to rush to potential customers as they came. When a trader sold their merchandise, for whatever amount, they would rejoin the others and the next in the rota would take their own turn with the next customer. But not all traders practiced this system. I was told that in the Avenues only Misheck and his colleagues used it. Elsewhere in the streets, the laissez-faire competition for business was sarcastically called ‘Temple Run’, after a video game in which the player runs ceaselessly while dealing with various obstacles and enemies.

Misheck and his peers offered several reasons for adopting this rota approach. One was that when traders tried to outcompete one another, they had to reduce their prices and therefore their profit margins. If four traders offered similar products to a customer, this increased the bargaining power of the latter and thereby compromised the traders’ profits. Misheck and his colleagues tried to avoid this by allowing only one trader to approach customers at a time. Most customers came by car and would park at a distance, where traders would approach them. Another reason was to provide a sense of civility and order in an otherwise-chaotic environment. Some clients did not take kindly to being crowded by traders. Despite these benefits, the rota system was not consistently efficient for Misheck and his fellow traders. When the market was poor, for example, it took longer than usual before the next trader had a turn to sell. Some would grow impatient and force their way through, bringing traders into conflict with one another.

Traders also counselled one another on codes of conduct for interacting amongst themselves and with customers. On one occasion I witnessed traders touting their merchandise to a customer. One called out about another's product: ‘Do not buy that China product. It's fake. Buy Tadalafil I have on me which can be found in pharmacies, but I sell it cheaper here, you can even Google it’. Another said: ‘This one has power and also many grams. Look [showing the product to the client], it is a powerful drug’. Another claimed, extending his product to the driver: ‘Mine has more power even though the grams are lower’. Yet another called out, ‘Mine is herbal, no side effects my friend’. They continued to compete: ‘Mine you can have half of the pill or whole and still have same results’. Eventually the one who had said his products were pharmaceutically genuine, not from China, landed the sale—albeit at a lower price than usual.

Other traders did not take kindly to this use of the allegation of fakeness in order to take a transaction away from competitors. As soon as the customer left, they took their colleague to task for spoiling the collective reputation of their business. Challenging him to prove that he was not himself selling the very products he had called fake, they threatened to search him. It was clear that calling a colleague's products fake was just a marketing ploy. But fellow traders did not take this lightly as it propped up popular rumours about the ubiquitous presence of fake sex enhancers in the street trade. The streets were already treated with suspicion, as trade in these spaces was considered illicit and full of unregistered and dangerous drugs. Within this context, fellow traders felt that calling another's products fake, especially in the presence of a customer, was an unacceptably self-defeating gesture. It could only entrench suspicion about the trade in sex enhancers as a whole. Traders police themselves to protect the ‘good name’ of their market and therefore its profits.

Let me rehearse the multiple ways in which fakeness and policing animated the other in this crowded marketplace. Imposter police emerged to capitalise on the way that police could make money off enforcing the ban on fakes against traders: raids, bribes, and connivance. Here it is possible to watch a proliferation of forms of policing—beyond the formal institution itself—authorised through the invocation of fakeness. It is also possible to see the traders policing fakeness in their own management of business practice. In the everyday practice of trading and its policing, fake-talk is therefore made present mostly through the enforcement of its absence. It emerges not directly around sex enhancers but when it might threaten the trade as a space for making money. Fakeness here matters insofar as it sometimes threatens and at other times enhances and extends the profitability of the trade—whether for traders, police, or their imposters.

Conclusion

Zimbabwe's 2013 ban on the over-the-counter trade in sex enhancers came about as part of a broader global regime of drug security, wherein these products play a pivotal role as standing in for evidence of fake pharmaceuticals in general. Despite the ban, the market for these products remained and, in fact, expanded unabated. The Zimbabwean economic crisis gave rise to an informal economy of survival that provided a healthy environment for the spread of an illicit trade in sex enhancers. The same period also saw a growing demand for these products, linked in part to a crisis in masculinity as widespread unemployment and poverty threatened the model of men as providers for their households and partners. Instituted initially on the grounds that such products are fake and dangerous, this ban produced an array of productive policing.

I began this article with an official ZRP tweet about the fruits of policing the trade in sex enhancers. This communication immediately attracted a mocking audience that reveals the complexity of policing deregistered sex enhancers. Such policing also involves many figures, including non-police such as traders who police one another. Police themselves appear in a range of roles from enforcer to enabler to potential imposter. Police busts are part of a wider economy where fakeness, policing, and profit intersect in many ways. The spectre of the fake creates policing in the name of the ban, but this opens up a particular mode of policing that is ultimately grounded in shared interests in the extraction of profit from trade. On the streets, the complicated relationships between police and the traders are informed by their shared need for income. Where the figure of the fake surfaces, traders know it must be banished. The idea of the fake both creates and threatens their business. The fake creates a revenue stream, particularly as the claims to fakeness recede from view in the interests of sustaining business. In a deteriorating economic environment where survival is negotiated in informal and illicit trading spaces, the policing of the fake is thus unstable as well as fluid. While a lot of the police scholarship on Africa stresses the multiplication of forms of authority and sovereignty, what I found here is that those concerns move to the margins. Even the emergence of the imposter police is not seen as threat to their authority. By focusing on accounts of how the fake creates opportunity for profit, rather than punishment, we see the form of the police multiplies in endless variations of itself to take advantage of new opportunities to extract revenue.

The question of the fake scrambles the notion of what policing is about. What we see in this account is that policing is about constituting a revenue stream, the quest for which deploys endless forms of official as well as unofficial policing. The traders even police themselves, in the service of maintaining the market and their own revenues. Policing assumes a multiplicity not just of forms but also of possibilities and purposes. Whereas police are classically seen as representatives of the state's official monopoly on legitimate force, here the use of violence becomes secondary to the policing of commodity markets, both for the primary market of sex enhancers and for the secondary market of rentier streams of value. Policing here is the protection less of health than of markets both official and illicit. Police reproduce these relations by both targeting and protecting an illegal market, thereby ensuring its worth for producers, for distributors, for retailers, and for themselves.