War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi

ABSTRACT

In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those who live within the margins of the city experience every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its progenitors in the margins of this city.

KEYWORDS:

• War-talk
• Sheng
• Nairobi
• youth
• Mathare
• police violence
• Eastlands

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many youth in Mathare whose life experiences, shared with generosity, shaped my arguments about “war-talk.” I am also grateful to the Urban Studies Foundation for the International Fellowship that provided me with the time and resources to complete this article. Many thanks, as well, to the co-editors of this special collection, Luke Melchiorre and Jacob Rasmussen, Henrik Ernstson for the constant support, as well as the JEAS editorial team and the anonymous reviewers of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Translation of both song excerpts is mine.

2 Nyairo, “(Re)Configuring the City.”

3 Ibid., 88.

4 Since 2015, I made note of the combat references I heard in Mathare and defined them as war-talk. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to note that Arundhati Roy, writing about the militarization of everyday life in India and globally in her book War Talk (2003), makes use of the same term twelve years before it became part of my own research project. Notwithstanding this, akin to Roy’s (2003) focus on militarization in India, I reflect on the normalization of brutal physical violence in Mathare and how this standardizes war vernacular and practice here and in other ecologies of exclusion. I am very grateful to Wenona Giles for directing me to the Roy (2003) citation.

5 Githiora, “Sheng, Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular.”

6 Ibid., 170.

7 Ibid.

8 In the Special Collection Introduction, we critically reflect on the category of youth. I build on the definition and the critical discussion of youth offered in the Introduction within this paper, and so prefer not to rehash these here again. See Kimari et al., “Youth, the Kenyan State and a Politics of Contestation,” this issue.

9 During these raids, there was wide speculation that the main objective of this exercise was to reform alcoholic Kikuyu men who were not being productive (and reproductive), and thus leading to broken homes as well as a low birth rate among Kikuyu families.

10 See https://twitter.com/FoundationGf/status/1112792395152875523?s=20. [Accessed 29 September 2020.]

11 Hake, “African Metropolis.”

12 In the Daily Nation archives in Nairobi I went through articles from 1959 to 2015 that included the word “Mathare.” Using Mathare as my key search term brought up articles on themes as diverse as elections, government tenders for urban development (none that appeared to bear fruits) and even funeral announcements. Nonetheless, even in this coterie of pages dedicated to Mathare, the majority focused on criminal activity and overwhelmingly reaffirmed what is seen as the poor character of its residents.

13 Rasmussen, “The City is Our Forest,” 25.

14 For more of this argument see Kimari, “The Story of a Pump.”

15 For this in France see Fassin, “Enforcing Order.”

16 These are Pangani, Muthaiga, Kariobangi and Huruma police stations.

17 See Mathare Social Justice Centre, “Who is Next”; Kimari, “Activists, Care Work and the Cry of the Ghetto.”

18 Interview with Akinyi happened on March 9, 2015.

19 See Mathare Social Justice Centre, “Who is Next.”

20 Jones et al, “Only the People.”

21 Fassin, “Enforcing Order,” 41.

22 Ibid.

23 Graham, “Switching Cities Off,” 388.

24 Ibid., 394.

25 Mwangi, “Run Kijana Run.”

26 Kimari and Jones, “The Insecurities of Security Provision in Nairobi’s Margins,” 2017. We conducted these surveys as part of a project examining informal security actors in Mathare.

27 A manager at the local Mathare / Eastleigh branch of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported attending to upwards of 200 new cases of sexual assault every month. This number is not inclusive of the other roughly 200 persons they see who come for follow-up treatment and counseling. This allows for a total of at least 400 persons seeking treatment for sexual violence related incidents every month (Wariera, personal communication).

28 Kimari and Jones, “The Insecurities of Security Provision in Nairobi’s Margins.”

29 Interview with Nyaboke happened on August 12, 2015.

30 Garmany, “Space for the State?”

31 Price et al “Hustling for Security.”

32 Garmany, “Space for the State?”

33 Ibid., 2014, 1243, quoting Herbert 1996, 567.

34 Mbembe and Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” 324.

35 Githiora, “Sheng, Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular.”

36 Mbembe and Rendall, “African Modes of Self-Writing.”

37 In this work I use the Swahili and English terms interchangeably in both singular and plural forms.

38 Ralph, “Renegade Dreams.”

39 Honwana, “A Time of Youth,” 86.

40 See Hake, “African Metropolis”; Kimari, “Nai-rob-me, Nai-beg-me, Nai-shanty”; Anderson,“ Histories of the Hanged.”

41 Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan its Cities.”

42 Matigari is a Gĩkũyũ language expression that, notwithstanding its much older provenance, now has a symbiotic relationship with the Mau Mau people and movement, in that it identifies those who “survived the bullets” of colonialism and is extended to encompass Kenya’s poor who have not received any of the benefits of independence. See, Wa Thiong'o, “Matigari.”

43 Operation Anvil took place in 1954 and was one of the colonial military operations to control the Mau Mau rebellion during the emergency period (1952–1960). One of its masterstroke activities in Nairobi involved the clearance of Kikuyus from the city and therefore also from Mathare valley. The impetus for these displacements was that Mathare was a Kikuyu stronghold, and documented as being the site for large amounts of Mau Mau activity (oaths, courts and storage of firearms). It was due to this perceived association with the Mau Mau movement that the colonial administration saw fit to bulldoze the settlement and send many of its predominantly Kikuyu residents to detention camps. For more on this see Anderson, “Histories of the Hanged.”

44 See also, Githiora, “Sheng, Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular.”

45 See Mathare resident in Van Stapele, “Respectable ‘Illegality.’”

46 There are a number of cases where young people who wear flashy jewelry have been detained by the police for allegedly possessing “bling” they cannot afford. Many of these young people have even been shot and killed during these interactions with police officers. Muiri, personal communication, 2016.

47 Interview with Pendo happened on October 7, 2015.

48 Hake, “African Metropolis,” 208.

49 See more of this in Angira, “Interior Cabinet Secretary Outlaws 89 Criminal Gangs.”

50 Korogocho in Eastlands is home to the largest county garbage dumpsite in Nairobi. About 2 tonnes of garbage are dumped there every day, and over 1000 people are said to live in and make their living through this dumpsite

51 PASGR, “Dandora E Case (Video).”

52 De Boeck and Plissart, “Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City,” 40.

53 Ibid., 35.

54 Ibid.

55 Kimari, “Mo-Faya.”

56 Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures,” 4–5.

57 Kimari, “Mo-Faya.”

58 Interview with Adoyo happened on February 1, 2014.

59 Cahill, “Negotiating Grit and Glamour.”

60 Wacquant 2008, “Urban Outcast,” 210.

61 Epstein, “Politics in an Urban African Community,” 138.

62 De Boeck and Plissart, “Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City,” 119.

63 Schubert, “Working the System,” 2018, 169.

64 Mazrui, “Slang and Code Switching.”

65 Wacquant, “Urban Outcast,” 12.

66 Kurtz, “Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears,” 84.

67 Caldeira, “City of Walls.”

68 Ochoa, “Versions of the Dead,” 479.

69 Hunt, “An Acoustic Register.”