Using the example of Nairobi, this article calls for planning practitioners in, and scholars of, ... more Using the example of Nairobi, this article calls for planning practitioners in, and scholars of, African urban spaces to reflect on the role of the police as infrastructure and managers in cities on the continent. While this function is recognized, to a great extent, in other regions of the globe, I argue that both formal urban practice and scholarship on African cities have not duly accounted for how the police are involved in city processes in ways that far exceed their mandate to 'serve and protect.' Such recognitions, I contend, will allow for an urban governance that is not only cognizant of and shaped by the experiences of the majority, but also one that seeks to limit the increasingly normalized and problematic urban functions of the police.
Kilamba, the first and most well-known of the new satellite cities or "centralities" in Angola, i... more Kilamba, the first and most well-known of the new satellite cities or "centralities" in Angola, is increasingly visible in recent urban scholarship about Luanda, further establishing it as the symbol of both the "new" postwar Luanda and the "New Angola." Within these discourses of local progress and development, the political ecologies of "petro-urbanism" and the attendant size, novelty, and modern aesthetics of this new centrality have been the primary focus, while little attention has been directed towards understanding the actual contributions of its workers, particularly the women who spend a significant part of their day working in Kilamba's apartments. In this paper we combine a social reproduction framework with infrastructure studies to trace the labor of Kilamba's predominantly female domestic workers, in order to demonstrate how their everyday practices uphold the status and functioning of this centrality, even as their work is invisibilized. In doing so, we highlight and privilege their daily negotiations within this centrality, and understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through descriptions of their home materialities, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities deemed central to the political-economic present, as well as mainstream narratives about the inclusivity of the "New Angola."
Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only w... more Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for ‘justice’ but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask ‘whatever happened to empathy?’, but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists...
You know you are a failed state when in the middle of a pandemic the government becomes an even b... more You know you are a failed state when in the middle of a pandemic the government becomes an even bigger pandemic. Is the government competing with COVID-19 on who will finish Kenyans first? We must rise up! Njoki Gachanja, Social Justice Centers Working Group (SJCWG)-Kenya There were meant to be bodies everywhere. Everyone was predicting the huge swathes of people that COVID-19 would infect in Africa, and with deadly consequences, mostly as a combined result of high density poor urban settlement ("slum") populations, insufficient access to clean affordable and adequate water, and struggling health care systems (cf Okereke and Nielsen 2020). Even locally in Kenya, soon after the first case of the virus was confirmed on March 13, the government predicted that there would be 10,000 cases by the end of April; we are currently close to the end of May, with 1161 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. As it stands, Africa is the continent least affected physiologically by the coronavirus: cumulatively all 54 countries have about 100,000 cases and close to 3000 deaths between them. While the infection and death rate are still significant, and the risk factors persist (for example,
In this paper we combine infrastructural studies and black radical traditions to foreground how i... more In this paper we combine infrastructural studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these infrastructural initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how contemporary infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologizing and resistance to it on the continent.
ABSTRACT This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conver... more ABSTRACT This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation of more plural understandings and narrations within the discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship. Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire, and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized K... more From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialis...
Not a day passes in Kenya without one hearing a casual reference to 'China' or 'the Chinese' in a... more Not a day passes in Kenya without one hearing a casual reference to 'China' or 'the Chinese' in any number of settings. Certainly, China and 'Wa-China' ('the Chinese' in KiSwahili) have become polysemic terms and can index a variety of phenomena: from donkeys, because of how these animals are now being soldand even being stolen to sellto China for medicinal purposes, as decried by residents in Naivasha, 1 to fish, in view of a recent but reversed ban on fish importations from China (see Olingo 2019), to, more frequently, the ubiquitous loans that are said to be an intricate component of China's 'debt-trap diplomacy'. As Mwangi (2019) argues, many of these implied significations of China and 'the Chinese' arise from the new demands and the differential experiences of China by local citizenswhether those citizens are small-scale traders or politicians, hawkers or local construction firms can certainly shape how China is intelligible and remade in everyday lexicons. At the same time, and as I put forward in this article, while the social meanings of China and 'the Chinese' are 'under construction', especially as the forms of China's relationship with Kenya gain new breadths and depths, much of what it now habitually represents gestures towards anxieties that register a complex dissatisfaction with government practices (cf. Sheridan 2018). As a case in point, the two ethnographic snapshots shared below not only point to the increasing everyday references to China and 'the Chinese' by a variety of local actors beyond expected interlocutors (i.e. state agents), but also establish how these terms are informal synonyms, or 'ground-level channels of discourse' (Plummer 2019), for signposting political discontent. Quite clearly, they demonstrate how the term 'China' covers an increasing number of local referents and anxieties both within and outside formal Kenya-China arrangements. Ethnographic snapshot 1: I am waiting to be served at a bank, and one employee is working through her lunch period. Noticing this, one of her colleagues asks her why she is still working despite the break, and she says, 'The loans to China must be paid!' Ethnographic snapshot 2: I am attending an activist meeting in a poor urban settlement in the east of Nairobi, and one young man begins to speak, lamenting the lack of political opposition in the country. He then proceeds to give the example of the new Standard
Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for t... more Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for the most part, these discussions affirming either a ‘for’ or ‘against’ position. Working from a micro-level perspective, this ethnographic article looks at how the everyday associations of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Kenya are increasing, engendering expansive signifiers that proliferate as Kenya's relationship with China deepens. Although I anchor this argument in the local discursive practices that shape the proposed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)–Westlands expressway, I trace how references to China and the Chinese expand beyond construction to take up social meanings that are continuously being assembled. Although the referents may seem unrelated in their diversity, I argue that they index wider local anxieties that de-centre China and re-centre the Kenyan government in practices that place the burdens of ‘development’ on the country's already burdened citizens.
In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in
Nairobi use a vernacular that I ... more In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those who live within the margins of the city experience every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its progenitors in the margins of this city.
This paper introduces the Special Collection ‘Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestat... more This paper introduces the Special Collection ‘Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation'. It focuses on youth and the heterogenous ways this social category responds to inordinate state action. Specifically, we foreground the various roles the Kenyan state has played in the construction and politicization of Kenyan youth across time and space. The introduction frames the papers in the Special Collection within a three-pronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similar experiences of state surveillance and violence warrant analyzing them through a comparative lens. Secondly, we reject ahistorical renderings of youth politics often presented in youth bulge studies, arguing that such analyses have served to disregard and delegitimize the political grievances of Kenyan youth and flatten the diversity of their political activities. Finally we call for an approach to the study of youth politics, which seeks to expand ‘the parameters of the political’, taking oft-neglected informal spaces of youth political activity as important discursive and material sites of investigation. Taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers provide a nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.
This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents
a transnational conversation on... more This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation of more plural understandings and narrations within the discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship. Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire, and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how im... more In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.
Through a story that connects the rhizomatic trajectories of abandonment
in Mathare, Nairobi, I s... more Through a story that connects the rhizomatic trajectories of abandonment in Mathare, Nairobi, I show how the continuities of an imperial planning become territorialized in a water pump in this “slum.” These events highlight the assembling of empire through ideas and practices for politics, ecology, economics and society that produce the city of Nairobi in the longue durée. Notwithstanding the persistence of a “divide and rule” spatial management, I show here how residents of poor spaces struggle for possibilities, however tragic. In dwelling in their stories, this paper argues that Nairobi's coloniality persists and principally in these ecologies of exclusion. The most visible imperial novelty, however, is that the police are used more frequently to enforce city divisions, becoming de facto urban managers and infrastructure. Against the reinstantiations of empire, I argue that the material and enunciatory struggles of slum residents potentiates fugitive possibilities for Nairobi as a whole.
Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and Sou... more Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and South. Everyday life experiences in informal settlements reflect, however, not only residents' urgent need for enhanced security but that the state is unable (and often unwilling) to provide it. Because approaches are dominated overwhelmingly by a focus on young men, our article foregrounds the unseen yet important aspect of security provision: the everyday security apparatus that is constituted by women. The principle argument is that women in Mathare, one of Nairobi's oldest informal settlements, provide security through a variety of practices that highlight the taken for granted and invisibilised emotional, reproductive and socioeconomic gendered labours of women. Informed by an ethnographic study, this article contextualises this women-led security provision, which is overwhelmingly invisible since it does not include the most taken for granted security functions, for example patrolling formations, equipment and the threat of violence. We begin by detailing the major security challenges as expressed by women in Mathare, before discussing the range of actions they engage in to enhance safety for all and the major constraints to doing so. Leading from immediate security challenges, our research identifies the everyday security efforts women engage in for community protection, and demonstrates the interrelated social-spatial issues constraining woman's efforts for safety, which policy security interventions should take into consideration. We suggest that perhaps it is prevailing notions of 'security' that are too narrow, which, as a result, fail to see women's contributions. The woman noise-maker has come, now we have no peace! (Police officer, from an Eastlands Police Station)
Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi's harshest geographies are tasked not only w... more Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi's harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for 'justice' but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask 'whatever happened to empathy?', but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists are then tasked with incorporating intentional emotional and care labors in their everyday material and discursive practices in order to restore empathy in and for their neighborhoods. This article is informed by over a decade of fieldwork in Mathare 'slum,' as well as interviews and participant observation with activists from a cross section of poor urban settlements in the city of Nairobi.
Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs o... more Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the grassroots. A case study from Mathare, Nairobi, seeks explanations for the lack of urgency in addressing EJE and also the limited effectiveness of responses to them that are rooted in the political economy of interests of civil society actors, which tends to perpetuate these 'excluded spaces' of the slum. The authors do so, however, by exploring one particular struggle to show how frustration with civil society is being used by social justice activists to articulate ideas of 'everyday' violence to mobilise for change that disrupts the apparent normalisation of EJE.
Nairobi’s urban settlements offer unique settings in which to examine the interplay between citiz... more Nairobi’s urban settlements offer unique settings in which to examine the interplay between citizens’ need for security, the state’s inability to fully meet that need, and the opportunities this creates for powerful private actors. In Kenya’s capital, this situation has led to a context of plural security provision, in which an array of actors assert claims on the use of force, operating simultaneously and with varying relationships to the state. Despite the proliferation of active security providers, who range from opportunistic enforcers to tireless local guardians, most people in Nairobi’s poor urban settlements are exposed to daily threats on their person and property.
Fieldwork in Mathare, Korogocho and Kangemi provided insights into how settlement residents must rely upon their social networks and personal attributes to ensure access to a combination of protective communities. Unable to call upon the state as the guarantor of public welfare, citizens must ‘hustle for security’, using their wits and their networks to assemble a tenuous patchwork of protection. The research identifed not only the risks this creates for individuals and communities, but also how the propensity to resort to individualised security strategies can undermine the notion and the actualisation of ‘the public good’.
The paper concludes with proposals for addressing the more malign aspects of plural security provision, specifcally, the need to curtail the providers’ power and to work towards consolidating various providers under uniform rubrics of oversight and performance standards. The paper contributes to a comparative research project on plural security in urban settings that draws upon empirical insights from case studies in Beirut, Nairobi, and Tunis.
Using the example of Nairobi, this article calls for planning practitioners in, and scholars of, ... more Using the example of Nairobi, this article calls for planning practitioners in, and scholars of, African urban spaces to reflect on the role of the police as infrastructure and managers in cities on the continent. While this function is recognized, to a great extent, in other regions of the globe, I argue that both formal urban practice and scholarship on African cities have not duly accounted for how the police are involved in city processes in ways that far exceed their mandate to 'serve and protect.' Such recognitions, I contend, will allow for an urban governance that is not only cognizant of and shaped by the experiences of the majority, but also one that seeks to limit the increasingly normalized and problematic urban functions of the police.
Kilamba, the first and most well-known of the new satellite cities or "centralities" in Angola, i... more Kilamba, the first and most well-known of the new satellite cities or "centralities" in Angola, is increasingly visible in recent urban scholarship about Luanda, further establishing it as the symbol of both the "new" postwar Luanda and the "New Angola." Within these discourses of local progress and development, the political ecologies of "petro-urbanism" and the attendant size, novelty, and modern aesthetics of this new centrality have been the primary focus, while little attention has been directed towards understanding the actual contributions of its workers, particularly the women who spend a significant part of their day working in Kilamba's apartments. In this paper we combine a social reproduction framework with infrastructure studies to trace the labor of Kilamba's predominantly female domestic workers, in order to demonstrate how their everyday practices uphold the status and functioning of this centrality, even as their work is invisibilized. In doing so, we highlight and privilege their daily negotiations within this centrality, and understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through descriptions of their home materialities, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities deemed central to the political-economic present, as well as mainstream narratives about the inclusivity of the "New Angola."
Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only w... more Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for ‘justice’ but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask ‘whatever happened to empathy?’, but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists...
You know you are a failed state when in the middle of a pandemic the government becomes an even b... more You know you are a failed state when in the middle of a pandemic the government becomes an even bigger pandemic. Is the government competing with COVID-19 on who will finish Kenyans first? We must rise up! Njoki Gachanja, Social Justice Centers Working Group (SJCWG)-Kenya There were meant to be bodies everywhere. Everyone was predicting the huge swathes of people that COVID-19 would infect in Africa, and with deadly consequences, mostly as a combined result of high density poor urban settlement ("slum") populations, insufficient access to clean affordable and adequate water, and struggling health care systems (cf Okereke and Nielsen 2020). Even locally in Kenya, soon after the first case of the virus was confirmed on March 13, the government predicted that there would be 10,000 cases by the end of April; we are currently close to the end of May, with 1161 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. As it stands, Africa is the continent least affected physiologically by the coronavirus: cumulatively all 54 countries have about 100,000 cases and close to 3000 deaths between them. While the infection and death rate are still significant, and the risk factors persist (for example,
In this paper we combine infrastructural studies and black radical traditions to foreground how i... more In this paper we combine infrastructural studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these infrastructural initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how contemporary infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologizing and resistance to it on the continent.
ABSTRACT This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conver... more ABSTRACT This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation of more plural understandings and narrations within the discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship. Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire, and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized K... more From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialis...
Not a day passes in Kenya without one hearing a casual reference to 'China' or 'the Chinese' in a... more Not a day passes in Kenya without one hearing a casual reference to 'China' or 'the Chinese' in any number of settings. Certainly, China and 'Wa-China' ('the Chinese' in KiSwahili) have become polysemic terms and can index a variety of phenomena: from donkeys, because of how these animals are now being soldand even being stolen to sellto China for medicinal purposes, as decried by residents in Naivasha, 1 to fish, in view of a recent but reversed ban on fish importations from China (see Olingo 2019), to, more frequently, the ubiquitous loans that are said to be an intricate component of China's 'debt-trap diplomacy'. As Mwangi (2019) argues, many of these implied significations of China and 'the Chinese' arise from the new demands and the differential experiences of China by local citizenswhether those citizens are small-scale traders or politicians, hawkers or local construction firms can certainly shape how China is intelligible and remade in everyday lexicons. At the same time, and as I put forward in this article, while the social meanings of China and 'the Chinese' are 'under construction', especially as the forms of China's relationship with Kenya gain new breadths and depths, much of what it now habitually represents gestures towards anxieties that register a complex dissatisfaction with government practices (cf. Sheridan 2018). As a case in point, the two ethnographic snapshots shared below not only point to the increasing everyday references to China and 'the Chinese' by a variety of local actors beyond expected interlocutors (i.e. state agents), but also establish how these terms are informal synonyms, or 'ground-level channels of discourse' (Plummer 2019), for signposting political discontent. Quite clearly, they demonstrate how the term 'China' covers an increasing number of local referents and anxieties both within and outside formal Kenya-China arrangements. Ethnographic snapshot 1: I am waiting to be served at a bank, and one employee is working through her lunch period. Noticing this, one of her colleagues asks her why she is still working despite the break, and she says, 'The loans to China must be paid!' Ethnographic snapshot 2: I am attending an activist meeting in a poor urban settlement in the east of Nairobi, and one young man begins to speak, lamenting the lack of political opposition in the country. He then proceeds to give the example of the new Standard
Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for t... more Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for the most part, these discussions affirming either a ‘for’ or ‘against’ position. Working from a micro-level perspective, this ethnographic article looks at how the everyday associations of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Kenya are increasing, engendering expansive signifiers that proliferate as Kenya's relationship with China deepens. Although I anchor this argument in the local discursive practices that shape the proposed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)–Westlands expressway, I trace how references to China and the Chinese expand beyond construction to take up social meanings that are continuously being assembled. Although the referents may seem unrelated in their diversity, I argue that they index wider local anxieties that de-centre China and re-centre the Kenyan government in practices that place the burdens of ‘development’ on the country's already burdened citizens.
In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in
Nairobi use a vernacular that I ... more In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those who live within the margins of the city experience every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its progenitors in the margins of this city.
This paper introduces the Special Collection ‘Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestat... more This paper introduces the Special Collection ‘Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation'. It focuses on youth and the heterogenous ways this social category responds to inordinate state action. Specifically, we foreground the various roles the Kenyan state has played in the construction and politicization of Kenyan youth across time and space. The introduction frames the papers in the Special Collection within a three-pronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similar experiences of state surveillance and violence warrant analyzing them through a comparative lens. Secondly, we reject ahistorical renderings of youth politics often presented in youth bulge studies, arguing that such analyses have served to disregard and delegitimize the political grievances of Kenyan youth and flatten the diversity of their political activities. Finally we call for an approach to the study of youth politics, which seeks to expand ‘the parameters of the political’, taking oft-neglected informal spaces of youth political activity as important discursive and material sites of investigation. Taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers provide a nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.
This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents
a transnational conversation on... more This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation of more plural understandings and narrations within the discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship. Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire, and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how im... more In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.
Through a story that connects the rhizomatic trajectories of abandonment
in Mathare, Nairobi, I s... more Through a story that connects the rhizomatic trajectories of abandonment in Mathare, Nairobi, I show how the continuities of an imperial planning become territorialized in a water pump in this “slum.” These events highlight the assembling of empire through ideas and practices for politics, ecology, economics and society that produce the city of Nairobi in the longue durée. Notwithstanding the persistence of a “divide and rule” spatial management, I show here how residents of poor spaces struggle for possibilities, however tragic. In dwelling in their stories, this paper argues that Nairobi's coloniality persists and principally in these ecologies of exclusion. The most visible imperial novelty, however, is that the police are used more frequently to enforce city divisions, becoming de facto urban managers and infrastructure. Against the reinstantiations of empire, I argue that the material and enunciatory struggles of slum residents potentiates fugitive possibilities for Nairobi as a whole.
Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and Sou... more Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and South. Everyday life experiences in informal settlements reflect, however, not only residents' urgent need for enhanced security but that the state is unable (and often unwilling) to provide it. Because approaches are dominated overwhelmingly by a focus on young men, our article foregrounds the unseen yet important aspect of security provision: the everyday security apparatus that is constituted by women. The principle argument is that women in Mathare, one of Nairobi's oldest informal settlements, provide security through a variety of practices that highlight the taken for granted and invisibilised emotional, reproductive and socioeconomic gendered labours of women. Informed by an ethnographic study, this article contextualises this women-led security provision, which is overwhelmingly invisible since it does not include the most taken for granted security functions, for example patrolling formations, equipment and the threat of violence. We begin by detailing the major security challenges as expressed by women in Mathare, before discussing the range of actions they engage in to enhance safety for all and the major constraints to doing so. Leading from immediate security challenges, our research identifies the everyday security efforts women engage in for community protection, and demonstrates the interrelated social-spatial issues constraining woman's efforts for safety, which policy security interventions should take into consideration. We suggest that perhaps it is prevailing notions of 'security' that are too narrow, which, as a result, fail to see women's contributions. The woman noise-maker has come, now we have no peace! (Police officer, from an Eastlands Police Station)
Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi's harshest geographies are tasked not only w... more Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi's harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for 'justice' but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask 'whatever happened to empathy?', but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists are then tasked with incorporating intentional emotional and care labors in their everyday material and discursive practices in order to restore empathy in and for their neighborhoods. This article is informed by over a decade of fieldwork in Mathare 'slum,' as well as interviews and participant observation with activists from a cross section of poor urban settlements in the city of Nairobi.
Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs o... more Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the grassroots. A case study from Mathare, Nairobi, seeks explanations for the lack of urgency in addressing EJE and also the limited effectiveness of responses to them that are rooted in the political economy of interests of civil society actors, which tends to perpetuate these 'excluded spaces' of the slum. The authors do so, however, by exploring one particular struggle to show how frustration with civil society is being used by social justice activists to articulate ideas of 'everyday' violence to mobilise for change that disrupts the apparent normalisation of EJE.
Nairobi’s urban settlements offer unique settings in which to examine the interplay between citiz... more Nairobi’s urban settlements offer unique settings in which to examine the interplay between citizens’ need for security, the state’s inability to fully meet that need, and the opportunities this creates for powerful private actors. In Kenya’s capital, this situation has led to a context of plural security provision, in which an array of actors assert claims on the use of force, operating simultaneously and with varying relationships to the state. Despite the proliferation of active security providers, who range from opportunistic enforcers to tireless local guardians, most people in Nairobi’s poor urban settlements are exposed to daily threats on their person and property.
Fieldwork in Mathare, Korogocho and Kangemi provided insights into how settlement residents must rely upon their social networks and personal attributes to ensure access to a combination of protective communities. Unable to call upon the state as the guarantor of public welfare, citizens must ‘hustle for security’, using their wits and their networks to assemble a tenuous patchwork of protection. The research identifed not only the risks this creates for individuals and communities, but also how the propensity to resort to individualised security strategies can undermine the notion and the actualisation of ‘the public good’.
The paper concludes with proposals for addressing the more malign aspects of plural security provision, specifcally, the need to curtail the providers’ power and to work towards consolidating various providers under uniform rubrics of oversight and performance standards. The paper contributes to a comparative research project on plural security in urban settings that draws upon empirical insights from case studies in Beirut, Nairobi, and Tunis.
Youth in the global south share similar challenges, including unemployment, precarious access to ... more Youth in the global south share similar challenges, including unemployment, precarious access to education and scarcity of opportunities to participate in decision-making processes, all of which produce an increasing lack of hope. In this post, Wangui Kimari reflects on Brazilian and Kenyan youth who, despite these problems, engage in civic participation and social mobilization. As an activist and researcher, she shares some insights into why it is important to study these groups.
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Papers by Wangui Kimari
Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech,
anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng,
which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng,
as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal
spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege
that those who live within the margins of the city experience
every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put
forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities
taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what
are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the
police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk
does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed
as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend
vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its
progenitors in the margins of this city.
a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of
urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these
two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we
attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of
their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered
struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation
of more plural understandings and narrations within the
discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across
different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited
lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship.
Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking
jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in
order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire,
and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
in Mathare, Nairobi, I show how the continuities of an
imperial planning become territorialized in a water pump in this
“slum.” These events highlight the assembling of empire through
ideas and practices for politics, ecology, economics and society that
produce the city of Nairobi in the longue durée. Notwithstanding
the persistence of a “divide and rule” spatial management, I show
here how residents of poor spaces struggle for possibilities, however
tragic. In dwelling in their stories, this paper argues that
Nairobi's coloniality persists and principally in these ecologies of
exclusion. The most visible imperial novelty, however, is that the
police are used more frequently to enforce city divisions, becoming
de facto urban managers and infrastructure. Against the reinstantiations
of empire, I argue that the material and enunciatory struggles
of slum residents potentiates fugitive possibilities for Nairobi as
a whole.
Fieldwork in Mathare, Korogocho and Kangemi provided insights into how settlement residents must rely upon their social networks and personal attributes to ensure access to a combination of
protective communities. Unable to call upon the state as the guarantor of public welfare, citizens must ‘hustle for security’, using their wits and their networks to assemble a tenuous patchwork of protection. The research identifed not only the risks this creates for individuals and communities, but also how the propensity to resort to individualised security strategies can undermine the notion and the actualisation of ‘the public good’.
The paper concludes with proposals for addressing the more malign aspects of plural security provision, specifcally, the need to curtail the providers’ power and to work towards consolidating various providers under uniform rubrics of oversight and performance standards. The paper contributes to a comparative research project on plural security in urban settings that draws upon empirical insights from case studies in Beirut, Nairobi, and Tunis.
Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech,
anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng,
which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng,
as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal
spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege
that those who live within the margins of the city experience
every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put
forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities
taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what
are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the
police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk
does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed
as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend
vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its
progenitors in the margins of this city.
a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of
urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these
two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we
attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of
their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered
struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation
of more plural understandings and narrations within the
discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across
different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited
lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship.
Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking
jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in
order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire,
and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.
in Mathare, Nairobi, I show how the continuities of an
imperial planning become territorialized in a water pump in this
“slum.” These events highlight the assembling of empire through
ideas and practices for politics, ecology, economics and society that
produce the city of Nairobi in the longue durée. Notwithstanding
the persistence of a “divide and rule” spatial management, I show
here how residents of poor spaces struggle for possibilities, however
tragic. In dwelling in their stories, this paper argues that
Nairobi's coloniality persists and principally in these ecologies of
exclusion. The most visible imperial novelty, however, is that the
police are used more frequently to enforce city divisions, becoming
de facto urban managers and infrastructure. Against the reinstantiations
of empire, I argue that the material and enunciatory struggles
of slum residents potentiates fugitive possibilities for Nairobi as
a whole.
Fieldwork in Mathare, Korogocho and Kangemi provided insights into how settlement residents must rely upon their social networks and personal attributes to ensure access to a combination of
protective communities. Unable to call upon the state as the guarantor of public welfare, citizens must ‘hustle for security’, using their wits and their networks to assemble a tenuous patchwork of protection. The research identifed not only the risks this creates for individuals and communities, but also how the propensity to resort to individualised security strategies can undermine the notion and the actualisation of ‘the public good’.
The paper concludes with proposals for addressing the more malign aspects of plural security provision, specifcally, the need to curtail the providers’ power and to work towards consolidating various providers under uniform rubrics of oversight and performance standards. The paper contributes to a comparative research project on plural security in urban settings that draws upon empirical insights from case studies in Beirut, Nairobi, and Tunis.