key: cord-272412-vhznzg1x
authors: Kimari, Wangui
title: Outlaw Nairobi versus The Pandemics
date: 2020-06-03
journal: City Soc (Wash)
DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12305
sha: 
doc_id: 272412
cord_uid: vhznzg1x

nan

poverty and the lack of sufficient critical care units and ventilators), activists point to another "pandemic" that has impacted Kenyans more than COVID-19 during this time --the government, and in particular the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) who coercively took over the County of Nairobi on February 25. 1 Certainly, even as poor urban residents have to fight both "pandemics," at this time, the city's administration is proving to be a much more dangerous disease.

In the first three weeks of May, two months into the lockdown that has devastated livelihoods for the vast majority of the city, the Nairobi Metropolitan Services evicted close to 7000 households --destroyed homes with no compensation or alternative accommodation provided --in the parts of Nairobi that in my own work I call "outlaw spaces." These are areas, usually in Eastlands -the East of the city, which have been, through an intentional colonial urban governance, been made outlaws in two senses: they are intentionally pushed outside of the law since they are not habitually privy to the most basic rights enshrined in the Constitution, and are outlawed -consistently criminalized.

The longue durée colonial urban planning processes of Nairobi have therefore ensured that residents of these outlaw spaces can be evicted at whim --without prior notice or adequate if any compensation --and their spaces deprived of basic provisions such as water and sanitation services. This consistent and formal marginalization is also connected to an over policing and criminalization of residents, ensuring that those who don't have water are the same ones who are being killed by the police; combined sinister processes seemingly established in morphology and (re)producing ecologies of exclusion (Kimari 2019).

As the epigraph by a powerful young activist in Nairobi that began this article states, the government is currently competing with COVID-19 to see who will "finish Kenyans first."

Currently, many parts of outlaw Nairobi are dealing with no water, even at a time when the need to wash hands is particularly imperative. In addition, Kenya's version of a mini-lockdown (where work stops but government-sanctioned essential services continue, and movement is contained within the curfew hours of 5 am -7 pm) is policed so severely that no less than 20 people have been killed for being outside during these hours. Victims of these extrajudicial killings include a 13-year old boy, Yasin Moyo, who was shot while on his balcony at 7.20 pm in the outlaw space of Kiamaiko, Mathare, and a boda boda rider, a motorcycle taxi operator, who was killed after taking a neighbor to hospital. What's more, scared to leave their homes after 7 pm, pregnant women have died while giving birth without access to maternal health care, and those who find themselves sick at inconvenient times have to suffer through the night before they can get medical assistance. These events are coupled with and exacerbated by the loss of livelihoods for many of those who are 60% of the city's residents, but who live on only 7% of the city's surface area. Since this demographic survives by engaging in informal day to day labor contracts that can no longer take place because of the lockdown, many households are eating one meal a day.

In view of this situation, community organizers in areas like Kayole, Githurai, Dandora and Mathare are asking whether the government wants to angamiza corona [get rid of corona] or citizens. These critical demands are made by residents who are embedded in particular spatialized histories that delineate those who are able to "work from home" (and use the 4G internet Google balloons officially launched by the president for this purpose) from themthe majority of the city that lives in small and often impermanent dwellings. Certainly, these claims can be cartographically overlaid onto geographies that were never meant to exist. Before Nairobi became Nairobi, the aspiring colonial and then postcolonial "green city in the sun," and was Enkare Nyrobi --the place of cool waters, it was a site within a complex of rivers that provided a meeting and trading place for a number of neighbouring ethnic groups. Following the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where European countries divided the continent commensurate to one's power (and ego), this geography with its situated socio-ecological practices became further embroiled in the machinations of racial capitalism; in 1899, with its new status in a British declared "East African Protectorate," it became a mid-point railway centre between Kenya and Uganda.

Its founding as a railway agglomeration, a node in the business of transporting goods enabled by imperial 'trade' from Uganda to England and beyond, also functioned to demarcate distinct racialized zones in this nascent city. And these initial racial imprints would have salience long after Kenya's independence. This original zoning saw whites harboured on the dryer, cooler and elevated grounds that were free of malaria and offered vantage points for surveillance (basically, the setting for the film Out of Africa). South-Asian descendants, brought over to build the railway under torturous conditions at the end of the C19th, would be settled in the lower and less green sections of town, effectively the buffer between whites and blacks. Africans, who were not formally allowed to live in the city until the end of the Second World War (they were only meant to be here if they had a job, and African women were not meant to live in the city at all --they could only be imagined as the biocultural vectors of African life in rural areas) were informally recognized in the "twilight" areas of town that were established in low-lying malaria prone flood plains (Otiso 2002; Hake 1977; White 1990) .

At independence, these parts that were formerly the native city, Fanon's cite indigene, and governed by the racialized formal and informal dictates of the colony, would continue to be offered none and barely, if any, services. The stain and stigma that derived from colonial urban governance actions --an assemblage of social, economic, political and ecological practices and ideas-would linger, even as the 'post-colonial' city is said to have replaced race with class in determining who could live where (Owuor and Mbatia 2008; Hake 1977; Kimari 2019) Now, according to some foreign observers, it is the capital of the "silicon savannah," a moniker referencing Kenya's position as a technological hub, primarily due to M-PESA, a mobile money transfer service, and the abundance of technology driven social enterprises that have sprung up everywhere. It is this kind of acclaim that, according to a recent CNN article, makes Nairobi "the fastest city on the planet" a "thriving metropolis" that is the only "city with a safari park on its while there is pride for the city, and feelings of home, most residents also consider Nairobi a mélange of life and livelihoods patched together through various alliances of struggle and determination, and, somehow, still, holding on.

The people of Nairobi, have, however, a way of defying the most hopeless situations by adopting simple yet unorthodox expedients

And outlaw Nairobi must, definitely, try and hold on. Writing about its former native city over forty years ago, Hake (1977) detailed a space that despite the evictions and neglect by the city administration was determined to survive. It was, he called it, the self-help citya geography of mutual aid, among selves, that was necessary in view of its abandonment by the state.

Currently, as both pandemics persist --COVID-19 and the colonial urban governance regime of the Nairobi Metropolitan Services, residents of Nairobi's poor settlements are making demands and finding collaborative ways to "self-help" each other.

Since not wearing a mask in public can now attract a fine of KES 20,000 [$200], local organizations are coming together to mass produce these masks, and share them with the most vulnerable, the elderly, differently-abled, sick and young. In addition, those who have been evicted and sleeping out in the rain are the recipients of small but consistent solidarities from their neighbors and broader city residents. Domestic workers who have been locked out of neighborhoods like Eastleigh, since it is seen as a coronavirus hotspot, are bribing the policemen manning the roadblocks at the entrances and exits of these now enclosed neighborhoods, so that they can get in and wash clothes or clean houses for 200 Kenya shillings [$2]. These monies, less than the daily minimum wage, will allow them to purchase food and necessities for the day.

At the same time, artists are using graffiti to imprint coronavirus messages on tenement walls to help citizens remember to keep safe, and community-led groups, most recently in Kayole, are simultaneously protesting at the local office of the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company to demand clean, safe and affordable water, and finding ways to provide free hand washing stations wherever possible in their neighborhoods.

And as poor urban residents continue to demand dignity, the right to life and basic services, they prove Hake's observation from sixty years ago: "the people of Nairobi, have, however, a way of defying the most hopeless situations by adopting simple yet unorthodox expedients." Indeed, even if they are fighting not one but two pandemics, outlaw Nairobi will survive. Figure 3 : Picture of justice center activists after they were released from a police station following their detention for organizing a protest at the local division of the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company. Picture Credit: MaryAnne Kasina

African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City

The story of a pump: life, death and afterlives within an urban planning of "divide and rule

Post-Independence Development of Nairobi City, Kenya. Paper presented at Workshop on African Capital Cities organised by CODESRIA

The problem with predicting coronavirus apocalypse in Africa

Colonial Urbanisation and Urban Management in Kenya

Nairobi: The fastest city on the planet

The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi


