Search

This paper draws from two experiences with decentralisation in Kenya to illustrate the different ways through which the central government has sought to bolster its power at the expense of the local government in the country’s capital, Nairobi during periods of vertically-unified authority. In the first instance, it examines the years between 1983 and 1992 during which the central government appointed a Commission to replace the elected Nairobi City Council. The second period that is examined is between 2017 and 2022 when certain devolved functions were transferred from the elected Nairobi City County Government to a newly established institution appointed by the President, the Nairobi Metropolitan Service. During both periods authority was vertically unified with the ruling parties also being in control of the city. Drawing on a series of interviews with various stakeholders and inhabitants of informal settlements, the paper argues that contrary to what much literature suggests, recentralisation of urban governance not only occurs in situations of vertically-divided authority but can also occur where authority is unified. Some of the conditions that enabled these power consolidation moves together with the outcomes that these generated are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines insights on colonial monetary policies and daily practices of money use, to discuss the impact of international monetary developments on the local usage of money during the rupee crisis in East Africa (1919–1923). To do so, the paper will follow two related lines of investigation. On one hand, it will analyse the protests against the depreciation of East African cents. Even if Africans were excluded from decision-making processes connected to currency, this organized protests offer an example of how Africans could make their voices heard in the official arena in which currency matters were discussed. On the other hand, the article will investigate individual acts of appropriation and rejection of colonial currencies that African societies developed during and after the rupee crisis. These acts partly altered the boundaries of subordination imposed by the colonial regime and made the process of colonial monetization a prolonged and negotiated transition that was, in part, shaped by monetary practices on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact and effects of protracted refugee camps on their host environments in East Africa has been the subject of much academic attention since the late 1990s. Such camps are often viewed as exclusionary spaces that isolate refugees from their host societies. Recent analyses, however, posit such camps as hybrid spaces, with fluid boundaries, that provide socio-economic opportunities and are potential drivers of development. Less thinking has gone into how forms of (humanitarian) governance emanate from such camps and impact their host environments. This paper is based on ethnographic research in and around refugee camps in Kenya and Tanzania. Grounded in a spatial analysis of camp development processes, this paper explores the notion of 'humanitarian spill-over'. It argues that camps' specific governmental processes and bureaucratic power come to co-govern and co-shape socio-spatial relations beyond the boundaries of the camp and the initial targets of humanitarian concern. By analysing the socio-spatial effects of long-term humanitarian governance, this paper contributes to, debates about camps as hybrid spaces and locates experiments with developmental approaches to camp environments in East Africa in a history of a more organic process of spill-over. We show how the spill-over is increasingly posited as intention rather than effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Operation Usalama Watch, a counter-terrorism crackdown that was conducted in Eastleigh, the predominately Kenyan-Somali neighbourhood of Nairobi, in April 2014. Using the response to the operation as a case study, it seeks to build on criticisms of the Copenhagen School by arguing that the notion of the 'speech act' is limiting when considering alternative media through which subtle forms of dissent are channelled and counter-narratives are expressed. Moreover, it argues that conventional securitisation theory has predominately focused on discursive attempts to construct rather than deconstruct security threats. By drawing together, criticisms of securitisation theory, the scholarship on subaltern studies and the literature on youth politics in Africa, the political agency and forms of resistance used by young people that do not resort to overt contestation through speech become apparent. This paper argues that during the operation, young people in Eastleigh used novel and often informal mediums to speak back to power, challenge convention and ultimately contribute to a process of de-securitisation by creating a culture of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in so-called “non-DAC donors” (NDDs), and China in particular. While this is understandable, there is some danger that the diversity of the NDDs is overlooked, and the debate becomes distorted by an overly China-oriented lens. The focus of this paper is India's development cooperation agendas and activities in Africa, and more specifically, Kenya. The paper argues that despite growing “noise” about the wider phenomenon of the rise of the non-DAC donors within “mainstream” foreign aid arenas, the DAC donors in Kenya are only concerned with China. The paper asks whether India's meagre development cooperation relations with Kenya rightly disqualifies it from the attention of the DAC community, or whether the country level is also an appropriate scale for strategically oriented dialogue and possible cooperation, India's modest development contributions notwithstanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the ways in which identities and identity politics between ethnic groups are linked to the way landscapes are constructed and experienced in northern Kenya. Using the cases of the Boran and the Gabra, the paper demonstrates that indigenous religious beliefs, practices and institutions have been central to the construction and experience of landscape and to the development of certain forms of identities and inter-ethnic relations. It explores the way in which, despite profound transformations brought by conversion to Islam and Christianity, the role of religion in structuring relations to landscape and identity remains. The paper draws on the theoretical approaches of Massey and Ingold which implicate social engagements with space in the construction of subjectivities and relations to others. It explores the extent to which Massey's idea of “open” and “closed” spatial systems can be applied usefully to the African context, and help to extend understandings of the development of peaceful or conflict-ridden inter-group relations. Through investigating the connections between religion, identity, landscape and space, the paper seeks to provide explanations for the growing salience of identity politics and inter-ethnic violence in northern Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an urban African context. We demonstrate how urban Africa is being instrumented through the incoming of mobile telephony, but also how the convergence of the digital and the physical is materializing through the everyday use and appropriation of mobile phone-based technologies. We make this contribution through illustrations and vignettes – including Mkokoteni handcart operations, electricity "token" meter connections, and mobile phone kiosk processes – from Buru Buru, an estate in Nairobi. Thus, we place our analysis within recent area studies scholarship, drawing perspectives from science, technology and society studies, infrastructure studies and urban studies. We contend that the variegated infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony challenge ingrained accounts of technological determinism, not least within conventional area studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite only a minority of Kenya's African population being literate at the time of independence, letter-writing constituted a significant form of engagement between grassroots political participants and national leaders during decolonisation. This paper sets out to ask why individuals and collaborative groups of writers sent large quantities of letters to their leaders, what they wrote about, and their expectations of the effect of their correspondence. It argues that these letters constituted a public sphere in decolonising Kenya. Through their letters, Kenyans debated development policy, critiqued the actions of the new governing elite, and set out their hopes and fears for independent rule. Furthermore, letter-writing also provided the opportunity for large groups of authors, often including those without sufficient literacy to write in their own name, to reach consensus among themselves on otherwise contentious issues. Just as importantly, the responses – at first constructive and later suspicious - of state officials to these letters illustrates the continuities and changes in the nature of governance during decolonisation. Letter-writing became less effective and more anachronistic as the post-colonial period progressed as the post-colonial state became reliant upon other rituals of political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the emergence of a relatively strong legislature in Kenya in a region characterized by “rubber stamp” parliaments? And how do the results of the 2013 election affect the chances of continued strengthening and institutionalization of the Kenyan legislature? This paper addresses these questions by situating the evolution of parliamentary strength and institutionalization in Kenya in the context of the country's political history since independence. The argument advanced is that although the codification of the gains in parliamentary strength and independence only began to take place in the late 1990s, the process that led to the realization of these gains goes back to the first parliament after independence. The paper also analyzes the impact of the constitutional requirement of 50% plus one in the presidential race on party structures in different parts of the country. The findings suggest that while the 2013 elections were marked by a heightened sense of inter-regional alliance-building for the presidential race, at the sub-national level the effective number of parties increased in all regions relative to the 2007 election, with the exception of the Central Region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article historicizes poor urban settlements in Nairobi as ruins – the product of systemic ruination from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, it offers the provocation to think 'slum' dwellers as relics: remains of past/present conterminous ruins who are treated as subhuman hauntings of a foregone time and understood to be constituted by the decayed and unwanted material of city margins. In these embodiments they are perceived as ruining the city, even when they have been produced by longue durée political processes of ruination, captured by vernacular identities such as Matigari. Yet, as I show here, like unexpected relics, the inhabitants of poor urban settlements continue to insert vital bids for survival in city landscapes. And, in these layered movements, they act as mnemonic devices that bridge the oppressions of what are seen as separate times, while shedding light on often normalized colonial city and national governance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork conducted over multiple seasons between 2012 and 2015, this paper explores aspects of the socio-economic and political history of the Marakwet of Kenya. It does so by focusing on a particular material culture category – pottery – and tracing transformations in its production, use and exchange over several generations from the early twentieth century to the present day. This approach serves to unearth a series of personal and quotidian narratives that not only comprise a unique account of Marakwet's past, but also shed light on the material consequences of various ongoing processes of infrastructural and economic development. Complementing our previous work on Marakwet farming, landscape and ecological change, we here demonstrate the multiple ways in which change has been dynamically negotiated and enacted throughout the last century via various shifting daily practices. The historical innovations, adaptations and movements that we explore attest to a resilience deeply rooted in Marakwet society that continues to be articulated in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Court's ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a crucial test for the new dispensation established under the 2010 Constitution widely held to have broken with the authoritarian and unaccountable regimes which dominated Kenya both under colonialism and after independence. The paper critically reviews the reasoning of the Supreme Court on six key issues raised in the petition attending to the broader normative and political implications of the judgment. We argue that both in its substantive conclusions and in the style of reasoning adopted, Odinga v IEBC is inconsistent with the transformative ambitions underpinning the new constitution. Through its emphasis on evidential and procedural rules, rather than principled analysis, the judgment tends to reinforce the powers of the executive and the model of a unitary state beyond the reach of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the extent to which other domestic political matters and post-colonial ties to Britain shaped the Kenyan Government's actions in northern Kenya between independence in 1963 and the death of President Jomo Kenyatta in 1978. The paper has a particular emphasis on the Shifta War of 1963–1967. Disputes between rival nationalist leaders at independence and doubts about the loyalty of the armed forces meant Kenyatta concentrated on protecting his regime from the threat of coups and other challenges than he was with using violence to extend state authority in north-eastern Kenya. That same calculation meant Kenyatta looked to Britain for support, in particular in the form of military backing for his government in the event of a coup or invasion from Somalia. The paper argues that the compromises made between British and Kenyan actors allow us to understand the particular nature of the Kenyan state's actions in north-eastern province over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kenyan election campaigning took a novel turn in 2013 with the introduction of televised presidential debates. The two debates were widely celebrated as signalling a positive turn in Kenyan campaigning, from the politics of personality and ethnicity towards a more sober, issue-based form of electoral competition. Organised by the nation's main media houses, the debates offer a unique lens through which to consider the role the media defined for itself during the election period. This paper argues that the debates were staged as part of the media's broader project of ‘peace promotion’. In this way, actual debate between the candidates was of secondary importance to the spectacle of having all eight candidates amicably share the debate floor. This paper's approach thus emphasises the theatrical nature of the performances and the deliberate way in which they were designed to present a portrait of Kenya's maturing democracy. The paper concludes by situating these media spectacles within what is perceived to be a broader trend in Kenya whereby seductive images of the nation's future are produced and projected, thereby distracting from present realities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines Western countries' pressure – or lack thereof – for peace, justice and democracy in Kenya. It analyzes the period since the 2008 National Accord, which defused the 2007–08 post-election crisis, focusing on the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the 2013 elections. The paper draws extensively on interviews conducted in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013 with Western officials based in Nairobi, as well as informed Kenyans. It argues, first, that recent Western pressure is the latest iteration of a consistent pattern of donors not enforcing stated conditions for future support, causing diminishing returns. Second, donors not only have been reluctant to use potential leverage over the Kenyan government, but also have consistently underestimated it and erred by publicly threatening to use it only at the least strategic moment and not when it could have been most effective. Third, Western officials have continued to make short-term decisions favoring stability or peace that actually undermine basic principles of democracy and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peacekeeping training centres in Africa are numerous. These centres are part of broader military assistance programmes provided by bilateral or multilateral donors and are completely funded from outside. The intent is threefold: to improve peacekeeping; to professionalise national defence forces in African states through training and instruction in international norms and to provide areas of socialisation between African militaries in order to foster bonds and forge ties in the hope that the potential for regional conflict will reduce through these elite relationships. This paper argues that few of these intended outcomes are achieved. Using peace support operation training in Kenya and an analysis of organisational functionality it is argued that African militaries reflect the broader socio-political dynamics of the state and are typically patrimonial in nature. By providing patrimonial military institutions with significant external resources such as training centres, foreign donors can actively exacerbate internal patrimonial dynamics. This will, of course, take different forms depending on the nature of the military and the nature of the state. What is common, however, is that foreign military assistance in Africa is subverted for national and usually internal reasons as opposed to the intended and more outward-oriented aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the Mau Mau rebellion that gripped Kenya in the 1950s, the British colonial government created a network of detention camps across the country that imprisoned a significant proportion of the native population. To justify and legitimise such widespread incarceration, the Nairobi government introduced a much-publicised rehabilitation programme in an attempt to transform Kikuyu inmates into loyal and productive citizens upon release. However, the conditions in the camps were not conducive to a programme that sought to educate and transform its participants into supporters of British rule. Using a range of primary sources, including previously unseen archival evidence, this paper contributes to the relatively sparse historiography on Kenya's detention camps. In particular, it explores the divergence between the intended rehabilitation programme and the conservatism and brutality of its implementation. Whilst the colonial government lauded its achievements and impressive release rates, this paper argues that rehabilitation transformed into a programme that repressed the Kikuyu population that it was meant to be reforming and only served to speed the process towards independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional history of the Dassenech is based almost entirely on oral sources. An amalgam of peoples who identify themselves as members of territorial sections, clans and sub-clans, the Dassenech came together as a people over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper reviews these various traditions and notes the particular role played by environmental and ecological disasters in causing individuals, families and larger groups of people at certain times to migrate and at other times to be absorbed as new immigrants by neighboring communities. Also considered are the mechanisms that facilitated these movements. More contemporary research makes clear that traditions, which recall such interethnic relationships, are still acknowledged and drawn upon in times of present-day violence and rapid change. However, as the last section of this paper notes, there is a serious lack of evidence from the period after 1925 as to the particular mechanisms that allow individuals, families, or larger groups of people to actually shift identity. Can the Dassenech still respond as they once did, and by extension the other peoples in the South Omo, to contemporary environmental and/or ecological crises such as are now posed by the dams of the Gilgel Gibe project on the Omo River? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how Kalenjin popular music, played mainly on the Kalenjin language KASS FM Radio based in Nairobi and also broadcasting on the Internet, participates in the consolidation of Kalenjin identities by recasting the collective national space - as governed by the nation-state - as a sphere of influence potentially injurious to imagined Kalenjin cultural and economic interests. It becomes a music of identity that deploys history, mythology and narration as a means of reshaping Kalenjin self-definition and culture. But while paying attention to these forms of ethnic self-definition, and how they are used to counter the homogenizing and hegemonizing logic of the national space, this paper also addresses the contradictions that circumscribe the music's gesture towards the pure ethnic while operating from a space that is already hybrid and multicultural, shaped by a confluence of non-Kalenjin ways of life, values and ideas. The conclusion shows how the emergence of new sites of power brokering has challenged the nation-state's governance of the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the controversy between Kenya and Uganda over the ownership of Migingo Island in the shared Lake Victoria waters, in the context of general debates regarding African boundary disputes. The Migingo controversy brings to the fore unresolved issues around the emergence, nature and transformation of African borders generally, and their significant role in addressing pertinent questions of territoriality, citizenship and nationhood. Like other border controversies elsewhere in Africa, the Migingo case challenges the perception that border areas are marginal spaces that can be ignored. Migingo's troubles underscore the realities of Africa's colonial borders, bringing into focus the border populations and the social, cultural and economic relations they generate across the dividing lines. While challenging eastern Africa's states to view local communities as important agents in fostering change along common borders, the paper emphasizes the need for harmonious border relations as a barometer in testing good neighbourliness and regional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-election violence in Kenya in December 2007 through to April 2008 was reported extensively but erratically in the British media. While BBC News Online, the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent gave regular coverage with online updates on their websites, other mass circulation media like Sky, the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail were more sparing in their coverage. But a common factor to all was a tendency to rely on simple, all-encompassing descriptive and analytical language to frame the reporting of the conflict - focusing on tribal and ethnic issues to the virtual exclusion of broader and deeper analyses of factors involved. This paper examines the coverage and compares and contrasts that coverage with some of the more thoughtful and in-depth analyses produced by experienced journalists and academics. The paper looks, too, at the journalistic processes and habits that may have led to this concentration on, in particular, the “tribal” and ethnic explanations of the violence. The study will draw on an analysis, quantitative and qualitative, of the content of British media coverage from December 2007 to April 2008 and on the author's first-hand experience of covering Africa as a BBC journalist and a writer for specialist African publications over 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production and consumption of informal sector alcohol continues to excite much popular debate in Kenya. This paper, based on limited survey work and extensive observation, explores two of the facets of this phenomenon: palm wine in Mombasa and chang'aa - illicitly distilled spirits - in Naivasha. It discusses the patterns of sociability associated with these beverages, and suggests that these may distinguish them from one another, and from formal-sector beverages. An effective decriminalization has allowed the trade in palm wine to grow in size, but seems not to have led to any significant developments in scale or technology, and most of those involved in the trade derive very limited income from it. While the production and sale of chang'aa remains illegal, so that both traders and drinkers are vulnerable to police action and fines or demands for bribes, some of those involved in this trade seem to have accumulated a modest degree of wealth. The study provided no definitive evidence on consumption levels, though it would seem that palm wine consumption has probably increased in recent years on the coast, and that in Naivasha “new generation” drinks (mostly, flavoured spirit-based beverages marketed in the formal sector) now account for a very significant part of overall alcohol consumption. While there have been some public calls for the “legalization” (in itself a problematic term) of informal sector beverages, the paper suggests that while there are arguments for this, it is not in itself likely to solve the problems which may be associated with alcohol consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya's 2013 election was supremely important, but for a reason not normally highlighted or discussed. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto's run for president and deputy president as International Criminal Court (ICC) indictees was a key strategy to deflect the court and to insulate themselves from its power once they won the election. The paper maintains that the strategy entailed a set of delaying tactics and other pressures to ensure that the trials would not take place until after the election when their political power could be used to maximum effect to halt or delay them. However, unlike in 2007–08, the 2013 election did not result in mass violence. The Kenyatta–Ruto alliance united former ethnic antagonists in a defensive reaction to the ICC. The analysis has implications for theories seeking to explain why countries ratify and comply with treaties. It develops an alternative political economy argument to account for outliers like Kenya and has implications for international criminal justice and democracy in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is some truth in the statement that in Somalia the periods and regions least affected by struggles about the state have provided better living conditions than the ones more affected by statehood. It is also true that the state, especially in the final stage of its existence leading up to its collapse in 1991, was of a predatory nature and, rather than contributing to development, affected it adversely. There is no doubt that no state at all is better than some of the experience the Somali have made with actually existing statehood (but not in comparison with many alternative courses history could have taken). In some recent writings about Somalia, however, the advantages of statelessness have been grossly overstated, and the disadvantages of not having a functioning nation-state in a world of nation-states have grossly been neglected. Especially the Somali customary law (xeer) has been romanticized and praised as a cost-efficient mechanism for the provision of ‘justice’ in the absence of statehood. This paper examines the actual working of customary law and finds it to be based on negotiation, often between unequals with a number of structural advantages for the demographically, economically and militarily stronger side.Xeerdoes regulate the use of violence to a degree, but it does not produce ‘justice’ in the universal or Western sense of the term, as some of its advocates seem to assume. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kenya is the home of over 40 ethnic groups of different cultural backgrounds. In pre-colonial times each of these groups had its own belief system, incorporating natural sites to which they ascribed cultural significance. Many of these “natural sacred sites” have been destroyed or severely degraded over the last century, while others survive and continue to be preserved. Over time, the meanings of such sites have changed, as has their management and control, especially since the political changes in Kenya of the early 1990s and with the increasing strength of the global environmental movement over the same period. This paper traces the history and recent development in four clusters of natural sites of cultural significance: the kaya forests of the Kenya coast; Mount Kenya and related sites of the central Kenya highlands; cultural sites in the Lake Victoria basin, including Ramogi Hill and Kit Mikayi; and highland sites in northern Kenya occupied primarily by pastoral nomads, including Mount Nyiro and Forole Hill. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the social and legal context of policing in colonial Kenya before 1950, drawing on a range of archival sources in Britain and Kenya. It considers the methods of policing, its objectives, the difficulties it encountered and the social and political terrain on which it operated, a conflicted terrain shaped by geography, race and the existence of other sources of authority and control. Kenya can be divided into a number of zones of policing, from areas that were fairly closely policed, in which there was an increasing expectation that crime would be detected and punished, to areas where the police could do little more than attempt to keep the peace between local communities, all of which had strong traditions of self-help and no confidence in or wish for external intervention. Until 1920, the Kenya Police had a very uneven reputation, but, during the inter-war years, the force grew in numbers and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the promise that new trade corridors in Africa lead to political stability and state control, this article presents a contradictory case. In the context of the implementation of the LAPSSET corridor, Moyale at the Kenyan–Ethiopian border has been undergoing a transformation. The formerly marginalized border town is today envisioned as a major trade hub for the region. However, this development has been recurrently disturbed not only by trade barriers and import regulations but also by violent clashes between local communities. Moyale’s history, economic rivalries, and an intra-federal boundary dispute make the new corridor a specifically dangerous setting for the local population, while alternative smuggle routes are perceived as more reliable and secure. The text provides insights into ethnographic research in a particular violent surrounding. Qualitative interviews and participant observations were conducted with locals and border officials in Moyale during clashes between the Borana and Garre communities in 2018. The article aims to understand trade and security strategies on the ground, which are far from being controlled by state monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 15 July 1961, the first eight African officers were commissioned into the King’s African Rifles in Kenya. This was very late to begin Africanising the colonial military force. The colonial army, even more than other institutions, was neither anticipating nor preparing for independence until it was imminent. Then, Africanisation was dramatically sped up to try and match political progress. This article explores how the first African officer corps was created in Kenya. Using lists of commissions published in The Kenya Gazette, it shows what types of people were commissioned, focusing on ethnicity, age, experience, training, education, and promotion. Three types of servicemen were commissioned: effendis, with years of colonial experience; non-commissioned officers, who were briefly trained in Britain and rapidly promoted; and direct-entry officers, better educated, younger, and trained in Britain. The article argues that the opportunities that military decolonisation and Africanisation offered to these varied groups of men had an impact which lasted for decades, as these first commissioned officers became and remained the leaders of Kenya’s military. Understanding the process of Africanisation therefore helps to explain the trajectory of Kenya’s military after independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shadow of election violence has hung over Kenyan politics since 2008, when post-election violence erupted across the country. These events paved the way for major national reforms, including the devolution of central government, designed to counteract tendencies of ethnic patronage and violence. Kenya's subsequent election cycles have not seen the same explosion of nationwide violence, and therefore little has been written about election violence in Kenya in the post-devolution years. However, this article draws attention to the arid, pastoralist-dominated north, where there have in fact been significant episodes of violence that are election-related. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores the case of Samburu, Isiolo and Laikipia counties during the 2017 and 2022 election cycles, when mass movements of armed pastoralists and herds forced their way, often violently, into targeted areas of land, resulting in widespread clashes, killings and displacement. The article investigates the endogenous elites and machinations within nomadic Samburu communities involved in and affected by this violence, using a 'public authority lens'. It argues that ongoing governance changes in this region have created opportunities for political elites to mobilise territorial violence for strategic, political ends in advance of elections, including through a previously undocumented practice of "vote shipping". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, much future-making in Kenya is taking place in ruins of unfinished promising projects, failed capitalist enterprises, and decades of colonial and postcolonial exclusion and marginalization. When discussing future-making in Kenya specifically and Africa more generally, especially in the context of vision-driven developmentalist narratives that rely on visions of linear progress and growth, analysts and social scientists need to account for ways that futures emerge from ruins and rubble of undelivered and uncertain promises, collapsed industries, and colonial and postcolonial dispossession of land and rights. This article establishes the overarching argumentation and framing of the "Living with Ruins" special collection, outlines key theoretical concepts like ruination, infrastructuring, and future-making, and examines ruins and ruination in key economic and political domains that make claims to Kenya's future: capitalist boom-and-bust economies, mega-scale infrastructure projects, and urban development. In all these domains, futures are emerging through assemblages of people's everyday practices of maintenance and the ruins that surround them, complicating facile proclamations of Africa's rising or abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of Kenya's Vision 2030 development plan, the Kenyan Northern Rift Valley recently became the playground for new stakeholders, interests and speculations. Large-scale development projects, such as the geothermal exploration in Tiaty East sub-county, is one of them and is described as game-changer in a formerly marginalized area. This article explores the case of Mt. Paka, a dormant volcano, where the Kenyan Geothermal Development Company (GDC) recently finished their exploratory drillings and established a road and water infrastructure for the geothermal project and the adjacent communities. Drawing on ethnographic research, this contribution examines the dynamic processes of ruination, reappropriation and negotiation along the newly built water infrastructure. While GDC is constantly trying to counter the ruination of pipelines with maintenance and retrofitting, local communities utilize leakages along the infrastructure, maintaining it in its ruined state to satisfy their own needs. This study highlights how the water infrastructure at Mt. Paka materializes in unexpected ways and shows its transformative potential in two directions: the ruination and the reappropriation of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural parts of Kenya are undergoing or are expected to undergo massive social-ecological change as a result of the government's ambitious development agenda driven by infrastructure and extraction. The pastoralist rangelands near the dormant Mount Suswa volcano in Narok, Kajiado and Nakuru counties have witnessed the creation of a modern railway and a geothermal project, and plans for further geothermal developments are expected together with a large inland port and industrial park. Other scholars identify structural, discursive, organisational and directly violent frontier characteristics which occur at the interface of two social orders and are well recognised in parts of northern Kenya. This article considers how these phenomena play out in a frontier inhabited by marginalised pastoralists but 'on the doorstep' of Nairobi and other urban centres. It concludes that most frontier phenomena are also present in marginalised areas closer to the centre and as such, the frontier is not necessarily geographically determined. However, formations of violence and dynamics of policing are different to the north and proximity to the economic and political centre makes a difference, allowing the state to remain more in control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are few questions of greater significance in African international relations than China's actions in and engagement with other states. Chinese infrastructure, businesses, and people have blanketed the continent and revolutionized lifestyles, transportation, and political economies. The advantages and detractions of such developments, in turn, have shaped local attitudes. African attitudes towards China, nevertheless, remain largely the subject of conjecture. This article explores the contemporary attitudes of Kenyan university students to China through surveys and contributes empirical data to the literature. Combined with a comparative textual analysis of the main Kenyan newspaper, the article sheds light on largely unknown—but generally assumed—attitudes of Kenyans towards China. The findings question a stereotype of China in Kenya and, by extension, the actions and reactions of other Africans and African states towards it. They also uncover nuanced attitudes that confound the mostly negative Western narrative about China in Africa. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as debt, perceived racism and unfair labour practices, Kenyan university students' attitudes and discourse in the elite media have become less positive. There is, in addition, the broad perception that it is Kenya's leadership that benefits from the relationship and not so much its ordinary citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines transitional justice in Kenya, drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors of the post-election violence of 2007–2008. Focusing particularly on the experiences of women and internally displaced persons (IDPs), it explores how survivors understood and negotiated waiting for reparations and analyses the effects of temporal uncertainty (around timing and scope) and of inequality (in relation to waiting times). Uncertainty and inequality contributed to survivors' senses of passivity and exacerbated their feelings of marginalisation. To delay reparations for an uncertain time contributes to senses of continuity with the past, which transitional justice precisely seeks to disrupt. However, the study also demonstrates that waiting is not only endured, but at times actively resisted or rejected, which might be understood as a claim to ownership of local peace and exercise of peacebuilding agency but also as resistance against the dominant temporality of transitional justice. By framing survivors' experiences with the scholarship on time and power and the "politics of waiting", the research contributes to the literature on local experiences and understandings of transitional justice and to recent debates around its temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa's international borders have been sites of inter-ethnic and inter-state relations and media for material and cultural exchange. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the article illustrates how decades of cross-border insecurity and violence from livestock raiding and tension over pasture and water resources have entrenched a consciousness within a marginalized Turkana community that critiques the role of the modern state as protector and provider. Their views are reinforced by a colonial legacy of marginalization of Turkana based on a hostile geographical environment, a vulnerable pastoral economy, and Turkana's peripheral location relative to the center of political decision-making – Nairobi. Starved of development and provision of necessities since colonial times, Turkana have appropriated episodic insecurity from cross-border violence to underline the need for government to protect and provide basic infrastructure. In the process, the article reflects on the weaknesses or incapacities of the modern African state to deal with legacies of colonial administrative and development challenges in areas considered peripheral to the mainstream state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that Kenya is made up of 42(+) tribes is widespread, but the origins, nature and consequences of any list are not well-known. This article compares ethnic classifications in all Kenyan censuses to demonstrate the origins of the '42' in (only) the 1969 census, and the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting. To make sense of why the 42(+) remains significant, I argue a cultivated vagueness provides a sense of consistency, linking a national past to present and future, while providing the basis for both numbers-based competitive politics and more inclusive politics. Moreover, it avoids engaging in politically risky work of making legible sense of shifts in ethnic identities, classifications and numbers, and avoids having to resolve their relation to the nation, which benefits both state and citizens. Extending literature on the political utility of uncertainty, I theorise this cultivated vagueness as magic, backed by opaque forces, potentially dangerous or beneficent, which deters interrogation or certainty on all sides. To further clarify this awkward relationship between vagueness and certainty, I argue ethnic classifications are intelligible via the social imaginary of the 42(+), but not especially legible, contesting the literature on census practices as tools of legibility and governability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi's poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and politicians; dynamics informed by differently situated understandings and diverse experiences of democracy. We follow the emic use of the term kupona (Kiswahili word meaning recovery or healing) to approach youth's political engagements along lines of participation, recognition, and re-distribution, which all in different ways express demands for social recovery. Empirically, the article draws on events and examples from the primary elections in 2017, which provide a privileged frame for investigating local politics and responses to the recently initiated devolved government structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'youth bulge' that has been observed across much of the Global South has resulted in the drawing of young people, especially young men, as a threat to social order. In Kenya, the 'spectre of youth radicalization' is particularly prevalent, and young Somali males have been singled out as a volatile youth demographic. While explanations for the correlation between political instability and violence and young men within youth bulge theory tends to focus on economic, political and social structures, this article uses the Kenyan case to emphasise the historical dimensions of the state construction of problematic Somali youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Kenyan youth comprise the majority of the Kenyan electorate, they are typically either stereotyped as criminals or marginalized, rather than taken seriously as politically important actors. The importance of youth in Kenya, and the gaps in our knowledge about this group, prompt us to investigate their views at the cusp of political becoming. Reporting on a survey of 4,773 secondary school students in Nairobi, we argue that understanding this youth population's perspectives and relationship to the state – 'seeing like students' – is critical to any understanding of Kenya today and its future. Our study shows empirically that secondary school youth in Nairobi are perceptive about the challenges facing the country, civically engaged, and hopeful about the future. With views that often differ by ethnicity, gender, or socio-economic background, our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging youths' complex on-the-ground realities and challenging dominant discourses about youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory Budgeting (PB) experiments in municipalities across the world have yielded varied results as there are municipalities. The Kenyan experience of participatory experiments has not fared any better. Following the 2013 elections, which initiated county governments in line with the 2010 constitution, Makueni County emerged as a unique case for study having experimented with its very own participatory budgeting mechanism. The qualitative study reported in this article examined how Makueni's PB framework is designed and implemented. The emerging outcomes of institutional design and implementation are then contextualised to Makueni's socio-political and cultural setting. The study discusses two sets of PB outcomes: outcomes on public participation (questions of inclusion, exclusion and quality of participation in PB) and outcomes of PB (concerned with the end-line developmental products of the PB process). The purpose of this article is to recentre the often-ignored considerations on the socio-political and cultural in PB experiments in Kenya's devolved governance structures and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewed interest in spatial development plans that link mineral exploitation, transport infrastructure and agricultural commercialisation. While these development corridors have yielded complex results – even in cases where significant investments are yet to happen – much of the existing analysis continues to focus on economic and implementation questions, where failures are attributed to inappropriate incentives or lack of 'political will'. Taking a different – political economy – approach, this article examines what actually happens when corridors 'hit the ground', with a specific interest to the diverse agricultural commercialisation pathways that they induce. Specifically, the article introduces and analyses four corridors – LAPSSET in Kenya, Beira and Nacala in Mozambique, and SAGCOT in Tanzania – which are generating 'demonstration fields', economies of anticipation and fields of political contestations respectively, and as a result, creating – or promising to create – diverse pathways for agricultural commercialisation, accumulation and differentiation. In sum, the article shows how top-down grand-modernist plans are shaped by local dynamics, in a process that results in the transformation of corridors, from exclusivist 'tunnel' visions, to more networked corridors embedded in local economies, and shaped by the realities of rural Eastern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past four decades, the small town of Naivasha in Kenya has attracted tens of thousands of labour migrants. These migrants are looking for employment on one of the many flower farms located on the shores of Lake Naivasha. This article examines how the migrants, who mostly do not settle in Naivasha permanently, carve out space for themselves in the residential areas where they rent housing. These settlements were not planned for by the government or the flower industry, and are commonly interpreted as hopeless 'slums' that are the outcome of sheer neglect. In contrast, this article analyses the settlements as 'transient spaces': spaces that are particularly volatile, and that are shaped by the highly mobile practices of their residents. In dialogue with literature on East African urban and informal space, this article thus draws attention to the – partly translocal – agency of settlement residents in shaping their living environment. The article is based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016, which included a survey among settlement residents, archival research, and biographical interviews with migrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To attract investments in mineral extraction, physical infrastructure and agricultural commercialization over a vast swathe of Northern Kenya, national politicians and bureaucrats are casting the area as being both abundant with land and resources, and as, conversely, 'backward', 'unexploited' and 'empty'. Drawing on evidence from Lamu County, and focusing on the planned Lamu Port and South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor, this article contends that such high-modernist and 'new frontier' discourses are usually complicated by the realities on the ground. Based on common perceptions about land and ethnicity, and how these are intertwined with the politics of belonging and redistribution, these realities exemplify complex economies of anticipation – through which networks of patronage, alliance, and mobilization are being created or entrenched in advance of major investments. This article argues that it is these anticipations – more than official designs – that will determine the future direction of LAPSSET, especially in respect to who will get what, when and how, within its promised prosperous future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community policing has been a popular paradigm for local anti-crime activities in Africa since the 1990s and spread rapidly across the continent. Humanitarian agencies have increasingly embraced versions of the framework to administer refugee camps and ostensibly foster security, protection and peaceful co-existence among residents. This article demonstrates that the deployment of community policing in Kakuma camp in north-western Kenya has been far more contested. Aid organisations and Kenyan authorities have competed in determining the orientation and implementation of community policing at a time when the government was intensifying both securitisation of refugees and counter-terrorism measures. Kakuma's Community Peace and Protection Teams (CPPTs) were therefore torn between humanitarian conceptions of localised refugee protection and more illiberal forms of security work which bound them closer to the Kenyan state. The permanent negotiation between these parallel 'technologies of government' was reflected in contestations over uniforms, trainings and everyday practices. Powerful institutions attempted to script refugee conduct and thus discipline the camp's pluralistic social networks and forms of counter-organisation embedded in a 'deep community'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article illustrates that governing refugees through community policing blurs the lines between humanitarian protection, domesticating local systems of governance, and expanding the security state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geothermal development in Kenya's Rift Valley will reap enormous energy benefits for the nation as a whole. But its impacts upon local communities, in this case in the Ol Karia area of Nakuru County, are often negative, and geothermal expansion has led to many divisions and conflicts over equitable resource use, environmental degradation, health impacts on humans and animals, forced resettlement, access to benefits including jobs, houses and profit sharing, human and land rights, and community representation vis-á-vis the geothermal companies. Many questions have been raised about the role of the state and international financial institutions (IFIs). Accusations abound at grassroots level of nepotism, corruption and discrimination, and some indigenous residents accuse the majority Maasai of doubly marginalising them in the scramble for rights and benefits. Against a background of historical continuities, land injustices, and global struggles for indigenous and marginalised peoples' rights, this article examines the conflicts and complexities surrounding geothermal development at Ol Karia and its environs, and describes how people on the ground see the prospects for future peaceful co-existence with extractive industry on their lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Supreme Court's decision to annul the August 2017 Kenyan elections, many commentators – including journalists, academics, politicians and non-elite Kenyan voters – criticised international election observation missions on the grounds that they had declared the election 'free and fair'. This article argues that specific allegations of incompetence and bias fail to acknowledge how international observers' preliminary statements restrained from offering final verdicts or commenting upon the tallying process in which the problems emerged. Rather, due to a combination of the media environment and popular expectations about observers' work, the complexity of their statements was lost as their findings were disseminated. This suggests that a fairer critique of international observers would focus on how they communicate, including when they decide to make their statements. It also shows that both the circulation of information relating to observers and popular perceptions of observation missions are important issues, despite being relatively overlooked by scholars working on election observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic journalists covering Kenya’s 2013 General Election worked in an exceptionally challenging media environment; one which was significantly shaped by the 2007 election and post-election violence (PEV). Rooted in literature on peace journalism (PJ), we examine how the PEV of Kenya’s 2007 presidential elections informed and shaped journalists’ practice around the 2013 Kenyan General Election. The article is based on qualitative interviews with 16 Kenyan print journalists and editors at the Daily Nation and Standard newspapers as well as interviews with 6 Kenyan media specialists. Our analysis finds the 2007 PEV significantly constrained journalistic practice in three ways: first, journalists witnessed violence in 2007 which anchored their 2013 coverage; second, interviewees felt a ‘collective guilt’ at journalism’s failure to provide responsible coverage in 2007 creating a ‘culture of restraint’ and third, journalists felt compelled to ‘sanitize’ potentially inflammatory language creating a tension between journalists’ duty to inform and strong desire to avoid contributing to conflict. This article concludes by siding with a growing critical chorus of PJ scholars critiquing its often “individualist” approach and calling for greater attention towards structural factors such as perceived social constraints when conceptualizing and theorizing the agency of journalists working in post conflict environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Administrative limits do not ordinarily constitute internal boundaries, yet this is the case of the Gucha and Trans Mara boundary between the current counties of Kisii and Narok Countries in south-western Kenya. This boundary which served as a tool for political and administrative control has had a lasting impact on land settlement. Kenya’s territorial heritage proved resilient. It confined the Gusii and the Maasai on either side of the boundary until the 1970s, when the easing of the boundary led to a new phase in the Gusii agricultural frontier to the South, later stopped when land registration started in the 1980s in Trans Mara. The introduction of legal privatization created renewed tension which took a violent turn during the 1990s politically instigated land clashes. ‘Indigenous’ territorial claims coincided with these inherited colonial divisions. Contrasting population densities are found on either side of the boundary with high population densities in the former Gusii reserve compared to the neighbouring Trans Mara. The agricultural frontier was observed in a detailed survey conducted in 1997 and 1998 at the height of politically instigated land clashes. Along this boundary, in half a century, land use was transformed from occasional grazing to intensive agricultural use, with two harvests a year, depending on the political context. The 1990s violent crises lent new vigour to the internal boundary and contributed to the rise of a semi-permanent agricultural frontier located along the boundary itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marakwet and Pokot communities of northwest Kenya are keen farmers, known notably for their creation of extensive pre-colonial irrigation networks. Over the last century both communities have been subjected to a range of external agricultural interventions but Marakwet and Pokot farming remains largely based on practices with a deeper history. We argue, however, that this continuity through time also masks smaller-scale innovations, movements and changes that attest to a dynamic, yet hidden ‘cultural resilience' spanning several centuries. We explore this deeper history through a range of archaeological, ethnographic and historical data and use this analysis to re-think the various agricultural narratives and interventions previously employed in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]