War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi

Kimari, Wangui

doi:10.1080/17531055.2020.1831847

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Ultimately, these practices that are 'motion in motion' (Vigh 2009) since are enacted in a changing environment, are enrolled to keep safe both in the present and future, and are important in areas of significant social, socio-economic and cultural dynamism (Nyairo 2006;Wa Mungai 2013;Kimari 2020), and, also, where there are high levels of poverty, police surveillance and criminalisation, crime and sexual and gender-based violence (Swart 2012;Jones et al 2017;Kimari 2017). It is in these contexts of the other-a difference that is produced through structural violence and the attendant problematic tales that narrate into being othered subjects and their spacesthat kupenya and kujitoa tactics are most pronounced.…”

Section: Kujitoa and Kujifichamentioning

confidence: 99%

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

Kimari¹

2022

JBA

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How do grassroots activists in Kenya protect themselves from torture and related forms of violence when formal protection mechanisms are not guaranteed? In answering this question, this article details the diverse tactics activists use to keep safe while doing unsafe work. Informed by the concept of social navigation, I explore two broad Kiswahili emic terms that capture what I refer to as their tactical retreats and confrontations in the face of torture and violence: kujitoa and kupenya. By elaborating on these tactics to keep safe, key gaps and tensions in the implementation of formal protection mechanisms in Kenya are made evident, while also highlighting the importance of grassroots activism(s) as the first line of defense in the protection of communities at risk in Kenya.

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Section: Kujitoa and Kujifichamentioning

confidence: 99%

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

Kimari¹

2022

JBA

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“…They were, for example, subject to rations and curtailed access to food, displacement, the carceral mapping of space and, during the years of the emergency, demolition of homesteads and villagisation, corporal punishment, screening, interrogation and incarceration, exile and detention without trial, and the executions of capital punishment. These conditions continue to obtain in Mathare, where residents, though within a 'post colonial' temporality, endure colonial afterlives: continue to be deprived of basic necessities, live under constant threat of eviction as have no tenure security, and with police violence looming both as real and in the shadows (Kimari, 2020;Van Stapele, 2015).…”

Section: Injury and Harmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, in Mathare, consistent contemporary raids, whether, ostensibly, about illegal alcohol or for security reasons, have echoes of Operation Anvil, and broader colonial surveillance and harassment of 'natives': the requirement that young poor bodies should have and consistently show an identity document, for example, makes many recall the infamous colonial kipande system, and makes evident the haunting purchase of 'loyalty certificates'. 14 Furthermore, the use of armed force to disconnect what are considered 'illegal' water and electricity connections by the county administration, sustains feelings of enduring siege in Mathare (Kimari, 2020). Ultimately, in this location, as in the colonial period, the police and armed forces function as de-facto urban infrastructure and planners (Kimari, 2020(Kimari, , 2021; certainly, they are the vectors through which the most restrictive carceral borders and punishment are operationalized.…”

Section: Injury and Harmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 Furthermore, the use of armed force to disconnect what are considered 'illegal' water and electricity connections by the county administration, sustains feelings of enduring siege in Mathare (Kimari, 2020). Ultimately, in this location, as in the colonial period, the police and armed forces function as de-facto urban infrastructure and planners (Kimari, 2020(Kimari, , 2021; certainly, they are the vectors through which the most restrictive carceral borders and punishment are operationalized.…”

Section: Injury and Harmmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

Pfingst

Kimari

2021

Punishment & Society

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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:

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“…As political geographer Stefan Kipfer argues, Fanon regarded racism “as an alienating spatial relation, treated colonization as spatial organization, and viewed decolonization in part as a form of transforming spatial relations in the colonial city and constructing nationwide sociospatial alliances” (2007: 703). By centering Fanon, I hope to highlight both the enduring coloniality of urban space—constituted, for instance through processes of economic, infrastructural and social abandonment (Danewid, 2020; Gibson, 2012; Kimari, 2020; Márquez, 2012)—and ongoing insurgent spatial practices that resuscitate “conditions of marronage” (Bledsoe, 2017: 42) making Black urban life possible.…”

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confidence: 99%

Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

Alves¹

2021

Environ Plan D

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This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

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War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi

Cited by 9 publications

References 17 publications

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

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