Lizards of 5th Avenue: Struggles and survival of Bulawayo urban women vendors in post-2017 Zimbabwe

This study explores the struggles of urban women vendors in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, during the post-2017 Second Republic. It employs “Lizards of 5th Avenue”; a conceptual metaphor originating from how vendors characterise themselves, to investigate vendor methods of surviving spatial marginality. To the interviewed, a lizard, Umpankwa, captures how vendors navigate daily livelihoods, always negotiating for space along the street. By employing ethnographic methodologies rooted in vendor articulations and observation, and documentary research, the article concludes that through partnering with ZANU PF, vendors successfully thwarted council spatial dominance, paradoxically turning the council and ZANU into lizards of 5th Avenue.