Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, this book strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi’s becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi’s fragmented character whilst recognising its contingent coherency.
Rather than a conventional edited volume, in this book we curate an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city’s manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences, and dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, whilst resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi; and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city’s dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways.
If confronting Nairobi’s will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also in part an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.
About the Editors
Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Previously he was director of The British Institute in Eastern Africa (2014–18), and lectured anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (2007–2014). He is currently co-editor of the (IAI) journal AFRICA, a former editor of The Journal of Southern African Studies, and co-founder and former editor of Critical African Studies. He has done long term fieldwork in Zimbabwe and since 2015, in Nairobi, Kenya, and recently published his third monograph entitled The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000–2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits (James Currey 2022). His more recent work focuses on urban materialities in Nairobi, where he has co-curated a series of critical, multi-modal collaborative exhibitions at the National Museum.
Tessa Diphoorn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on policing, security, violence, and power and she analyses these societal and conceptual issues from an anthropological lens. Her ethnographic research is primarily based in South Africa and Kenya. She is the author of Twilight Policing: Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016) and co-editor of the edited volume Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (Routledge, 2019). She is also the co-host and co-founder of the podcast series Travelling Concepts on Air where she and Brianne McGonigle Leyh, explore the notion of travelling concepts in academia.
Peter Lockwood is a Hallsworth Early Career Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID) on Project SALMEA (Self-Accomplishment and Local Moralities in Eastern Africa) and a Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge where he gained his PhD in 2021. He is completing a book about the crisis of “wasted men” in central Kenya: the region’s landscape of masculine destitution, its roots in the collapse of peasant livelihoods and lost hopes for middle-class futures. His published work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Analysis, and African Affairs.
Constance Smith is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where her research explores shifting landscapes of infrastructure, time, and urban change. She has a particular interest in the intersection between scholarship and art practice and collaborative research with communities, artists and urban professionals. Her current UKRI-funded project “High-Rise Landscapes: Afterlives of Tower Block Failure and Rethinking Urban Futures” takes a comparative approach, tracing the material, social, and political afterlives of housing disasters in Nairobi and London. She is the author of Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging (James Currey, 2019).