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ABSTRACT
Using the example of Nairobi, this article calls for planning practitioners in, and scholars of, African urban spaces to reflect on the role of the police as infrastructure and managers in cities on the continent. While this function is recognized, to a great extent, in other regions of the globe, I argue that both formal urban practice and scholarship on African cities have not duly accounted for how the police are involved in city processes in ways that far exceed their mandate to ‘serve and protect.’ Such recognitions, I contend, will allow for an urban governance that is not only cognizant of and shaped by the experiences of the majority, but also one that seeks to limit the increasingly normalized and problematic urban functions of the police.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to James Duminy for his patience and for supporting this intervention, and to the two anonymous reviewers. Above all, much appreciation, as always, for the time, patience, testimonies and encouragement from the many urban Kenyans whose lives have greatly informed this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Owens, “The Urban World.”
2 Waller, “Towards a Contextualisation of Policing.”
3 Ibid.
4 Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), Who Is Next? A Participatory Actions Research Report.
5 See, as but one example of this, Kempe, “ Police Corruption.”
6 Bierschenk, “Who Are the Police in Africa?”
7 Fassin, Enforcing Order.
8 Christensen and Albrecht, “Urban Borderwork,” 386.
9 By urban planning, I refer to, principally, the design and regulation of space, which is part of an urban governance that seeks to launch, implement, deliver and manage these plans, amongst other related services. Often I use planning and governance interchangeably to reference the assemblage of formal forces that seek to produce and regulate urban space.
10 Christensen and Albrecht, “Urban Borderwork,” 386.
11 It is for these reasons that I have submitted this commentary to Planning Perspectives, which is a critical journal for public debates and interrogations of planning history and practice. More specific to the theme of my paper, this journal has relevance for many planners and urban practitioners in Africa.
12 This is an abbreviated and translated version of the following original statement:
Comrades forced evictions ni noma
1) It is conducted in the early mrngs of 3 am to 6 am
2) during cold or rainy days
3) they use the police
4) they have no mercy of how or where u will go, imagine starting life afresh, ustake ona.
13 Kimari and Cap, “Under Fire.”
14 Mutai, “NMS Plans to Evict Hundreds of Families from Public Land.”
15 Kipkemoi, “9 Arrested in Crackdown”; Kimari, “The Story of a Pump.”
16 Kimari, “Nai-rob-me.”
17 Ese and Ese, The City Makers of Nairobi, 145.
18 Kimari, “War talk.”
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Kimari, “The Story of a Pump.”
22 Ibid.
23 Graham, Desai, and McFarlane, “Water Wars in Mumbai.”
24 Fassin, Enforcing Order.
25 Junior, “Riot Police Use Teargas.”
26 Kahora, “Were the Kariobangi North Evictions.”
27 Joseph Kimani, interview, 2022.
28 Owens, “The Urban World.”
29 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 4.
30 As but one example see Alves, The Anti-Black City.
31 For example, Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation.
32 For recent examples of critical work on policing in North America see Camp and Heatherton, Policing the Planet; Burton, “To Protect and Serve Whiteness”; Jefferson, “Predictable Policing.”
33 See for example Fassin, Enforcing Order; Dikeç, “Police, Politics and the Right to the City.”
34 See Elliott-Cooper’s Black Resistance to British Policing, as but one example of such critical scholarship in the UK.
35 See the work of Pithouse, “They Die There, It Matters not Where, nor How”; and McMichael, “Police Wars and State Repression in South Africa” as a few examples.
36 Waller, “Towards a Contextualization of Policing”; Njoh, “Urban Planning as a Tool of Power.”
37 For example Van Stapele, “‘We Are Not Kenyans’”; Kempe, “Police Corruption.”
38 See the work of Al-Bulushi, specifically “Citizen-Suspect,” and Gluck’s “Security Urbanism” as critical examples of this literature.
39 Logan, “Africans across 34 Countries.”
40 Bledsoe, “Methodological Reflections.”
41 Kenya was first a protectorate managed by the Imperial British East African Company (IBEAC).
42 Wolf, “Asian and African Recruitment in the Kenya Police,” 404.
43 Deflem, “Law Enforcement in British Colonial Africa.”
44 Wolf, “Asian and African Recruitment”; Deflem, “Law Enforcement in British Colonial Africa,” 54.
45 Pfingst and Kimari, “Carcerality and the Legacies,” 697.
46 These are Pangani, Huruma, Muthaiga and Kariobangi police stations, as well as the Airbase, and two police posts in “Kosovo” [Hospital Ward] and the Airbase area respectively.
47 Owens, “The Urban World,” 11.
48 Ibid., 14; Christensen and Albrecht, “Urban Borderwork: Ethnographies of Policing,” 387, make similar arguments: they write ‘few ethnographies of police and policing have explicitly explored how police work is produced by and productive of the city, […] the state police is a particularly well suited lens through which to analyze how processes and practices of ordering produce the city.’
49 Mutambo, “How Africa Locked Down Civic Rights.”
50 Cacho and Melamed, “Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police.”
51 Fyfe, “Policing the City,” 773.
52 Kanyi Wyban, “21 Dayz.” This line is my translation from Sheng.
53 Kimari, “War-Talk.”
54 Bledsoe, “Methodological Reflections on Geographies of Blackness,” 3.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Wangui Kimari
Wangui Kimari is a lecturer in the American University - Nairobi program, and an honorary research associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town.