Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

Abstract

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 colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled. The paper includes archival and authored photographs:

Nairobi Becoming

“…The injury and harm rendered through colonial spatiality and governance, including but not limited to the interrogation, screening, and detention of Operation Anvil, continue in the materiality and the spatial configuration of the communities of Mathare, a materiality and spatiality of neglect and abandonment already configured through urban planning, policing, and demolition -Mathare was bulldozed in 1953, prefiguring the expulsions of the following year (Kimari 2017). Injury and harm, what we might frame as the carceral "afterlives" of empire, are evident in the continuity of criminalization, policing, control, and containment found across Mathare and east Nairobi (Pfingst and Kimari 2021). Unlike the usual arduous weekday commute into the city, Thursday, October 19, 2017, was distinctly different.…”

Introduction: African penal histories in global perspective

“…We would like to end by outlining some of the important new agendas and directions in this field. First, the articles by Daly, Mester, and Super reflect the increased attention to postcolonial systems of punishment (Alexander, 2013; Berridge, 2016; Bertlesen, 2011; Machava, 2011, 2019; MacDonald 2012; Bruce-Lockhart, 2018; Mbembe, 2019; Quarshie, 2021; Pfingst and Kimari, 2021) but there is still much work to be done in this area. As Bruce-Lockhart (2022) argues, scholars need to critically analyze why and how prisons and other elements of colonial penal systems persisted after independence.…”

“…To this end, we think there are numerous points where scholars focusing on trends in the United States and Europe could benefit from more closely engaging with African History. For example, those studying electronic monitoring and the close surveillance that attends either bail reform or parole could greatly benefit from studies examining the attempts at close surveillance practiced by colonial and apartheid states (Dlamini, 2020; Pfingst and Kimari, 2021). Similarly, some scholars in the United States have suggested that the racialization of policing and punishment in the United States demonstrates a particularly colonial relationship between the White majority and Black minority, a direction of study that could benefit greatly from the nuanced treatment of race and racial governance that can be found in African Studies (Mamdani, 1996).…”