‘Sleep Occupies No Space’: The Use of Public Space by Street Gangs in Kinshasa

Abstract

This article deals with issues of territoriality, public space, the microphysics of power and street gang life in the current urban context of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this city, a growing number of street children invade the public places. They team up in gangs and scour the streets in search of a location to settle (for a while). Along with their appropriation of public space, these gangs encounter several actors such as the city authorities, shop owners, tenants or rival street gangs. Before any settlement, deals have to be closed since every inch of the city is negotiable. All participants get involved in these negotiations, for no one is considered marginal, certainly not the street youth who are inextricably bound up with Congolese society. This contribution considers this dynamic field of negotiations through a focus on space and analyses it from a Foucauldian angle. It explores how gang members develop particular ways to control their territories and exercise power in them. Additionally, it examines how street youths manage to construct a home in the streets and make sense of their urban environment in the process.

INHABITING OCULAR GROUND: Kinshasa's Future in the Light of Congo's Spectral Urban Politics

“…Among those who first fell victim to the state's effort to “sanitize” and recolonize the city, rewrite the city's public spaces, and redefine who has a right to the street and to the city, were Kinshasa's street children and youth gangs, commonly referred to as bashege, pomba, and kuluna. 4 In an attempt to stamp a new material and moral scale onto the city's surface, the urban authorities started to organize operations such as Kanga Vagabonds (“Grab the Vagabonds,” an operation reported by Geenen 2009), to expulse street children from the city's public eye 5 . But this urban policy went much further than purifying the streets of unruly kids or prostitutes.…”

Becoming and Coming Undone on the Streets of Dar es Salaam

“…In these sites, men congregate to seek out and engage in informal work, to socialize, and to sleep. Similar to other kinds of youth-appropriated spaces that have been described in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa (Geenen 2009;Masquelier 2013;Weiss 2009), maskani are geared toward masculine forms of labor, leisure, and performance, and embedded with economic, social, and affective possibilities oriented toward the immediate and more distant future (Kerr 2015(Kerr , 2018Moyer 2005Moyer , 2006. They are places of intense self-fashioning, meaning making, and imagination, which can be found in the city's center and its sprawling, densely populated outlying areas (uswahilini).…”

New social bandits? A comparative analysis of gangsterism in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa

“…Gangs and their associated challenges are a global phenomenon. As Hagedorn (2005: 153) pointed out, ‘[G]angs are a significant worldwide phenomenon with millions of members and a voice of those marginalized by processes of globalization.’ Gangs are found in various degrees in various regional contexts, whether they be developed countries such as the USA (see, for example, Curry and Decker, 1998; Howell, 2012; Klein and Maxson, 2006; Vigil, 2002), Canada (see Rollwagen and Beland, 2012) and the UK (see Bartie, 2010), or developing countries such as those of the Northern Triangle of Central America (see Savenije and Van der Borgh, 2014), the Democratic Republic of Congo (see Geenen, 2009) or Indonesia (see Kadir, 2012).…”