Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi
| Author | Annie Pfingst,Wangui Kimari |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211041845 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Legacies of Empire |
Carcerality and the legacies
of settler colonial
punishment in Nairobi
Annie Pfingst
Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
Wangui Kimari
Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape
Town, South Africa
Abstract
From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration
criminalizedKenyans.Even now, colonialmodes of punishment,incarceration,closure, inter-
rogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are
deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya.
Initiallyassumed to herald a rupturefrom colonial modes of criminalization andpunishment,
the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and
visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that e ngendered the
legacyof a seamless system of control,containment,and punishment evidentin the ‘afterlives’
of empire. Theseare settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonialcorporeality,and capital-
ism. Thepaper attends to the violenceand brutality thatendures in the very geographiesthat
were the urbantargets of colonial siege and links the carceral practicesof 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.
Wetake up a critical encounterwith colonial files to both discernthe continuity and lineage
of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive
files assembled. Thepaper includes archival and authoredphotographs:
Keywords
Carcerality, Nairobi, settler colonialism, punishment, structure of violence, afterlives,
Kenya, Mathare, imperial formations, injury and harm
Corresponding author:
Annie Pfingst, Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK.
Email: a.pfingst@gold.ac.uk
Special Issue: Legacies of Empire
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(5) 697–722
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745211041845
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Early in the Covid-19 prompted lockdown in March 2020, the police killed a
thirteen-year-old boy in Mathare, Yasin Moyo, who was on his balcony twenty minutes
after the 7 pm night curfew began. Over the next few months, more would be killed and
injured as part of the ‘enforcement’of coronavirus measures in this poor area and across
the country, highlighting the extreme nature of containment measures. While, in other
more prosperous sections of Nairobi the price for non-adherence to the rules could be a
bribe or less, here, as in other poor settlements, the overzealous and violent policing of
the lockdown curfew, initially from 7 PM –5AM, led many to declare that ‘they have
killed us more than corona’(Sperber, 2020).
Curfews, as part of covid restrictions, are authorised under the provisions of the Public
Order Ordinance that dates from the British colonial administration of Kenya. Although
ostensibly neutral, they are more steadfastly implemented in the historically poor black
geographies of Nairobi, the former ‘native city’, echoing the carcerality of the colonial
emergency period of the 1950s. Here, we understand carcerality to underpin the logic
of settler colonialism, defining and determining criminality and authorising spatial, tem-
poral, and material modes of punishment. The punitive, according to Mbembe, was a
founding ethos of colonial sovereignty, wherein the ‘lack of justice of the means, and
the lack of the legitimacy of the ends, conspired to allow an arbitrariness and intrinsic
unconditionality that may be said to have been the distinctive feature of colonial sover-
eignty’. Certainly, and as we put forward, the post-colonial Kenyan state has inherited
this unconditionality and the regime of impunity that was its corollary (2001: 26).
Within this paper we trace the endurance of the curfew and similar colonial modes of
punishment in Kenya, principally in the former ‘native’areas of Nairobi, and take up a
non-linear approach –employing flashbacks between the colonial past and present –to
demonstrate how these spaces, and Kenyans broadly, continue to be located across car-
ceral geographies that both materially and through narrative chronicle ongoing modes of
colonial punishment. This assemblage of punishment, which includes inordinate surveil-
lance, arbitrary detention, zones of separation, and the most recent iteration of the curfew,
we argue, is deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial
Kenya. We centre carcerality as a useful analytical guide from which to theorise enduring
colonial injury and harm in Kenya. Heretofore, while there has been important interdis-
ciplinary literature that registers the endurance of colonial affects and effects in Kenya, as
but two examples see Wa Thiong’o (1987) and Branch (2011), carcerality, as a vehicle
through which to understand ongoing socio-spatial and political relations, has not been
extensively considered. In this regard, many critical reflections have established the con-
tiguity of particular spaces with state violence. However, they have not substantially ela-
borated on the intersecting punitive logics that are imprinted on many Kenyan
geographies, and which allow for both the steadfast concomitant implementation of
boundaries and the carceral social relations that obtain in such spaces of control –that
is, an assemblage of punishment constituted by surveillance, containment, separation,
and curfews, as but a few examples, intent on causing injury and harm to particular
bodies and minds.
698 Punishment & Society 23(5)
Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI
Get Started for FreeStart Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
