Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums

This paper reflects on doing and writing ethnography on the urban margins, where uncertainty and provisionality mark the everyday city. The discussion is situated within a postcolonial approach to ethnographies of ‘hustle’ in Nairobi slums, critically reflecting on methodological choices made to facilitate the licence to linger in intimate and interstitial spaces of neighbourhoods often closed off to visitors. The paper argues that while urban ethnography is foundational to postcolonial scholarship on African cities, it is also vexed with tensions between ethnographic experience of the provisional and uncertain lived reality in which ethnographers seek to embed themselves for periods of time, and the ethnographic representation that emerges in the form of ethnographic authorship. The paper engages with the methodological tactic of engaging in waste work as an ‘apprentice researcher’; and with the theoretical choice of deploying the very vocabularies and expressions of struggle of interlocutors living and working in the ‘slums’ of Nairobi

Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation, and the presidential election of 2013

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

Violence, decolonisation and the Cold War in Kenya's north-eastern province, 1963–1978

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