https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8590-2094
![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi’s poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and politicians; dynamics informed by differently situated understandings and diverse experiences of democracy. We follow the emic use of the term kupona (Kiswahili word meaning recovery or healing) to approach youth’s political engagements along lines of participation, recognition, and re-distribution, which all in different ways express demands for social recovery. Empirically, the article draws on events and examples from the primary elections in 2017, which provide a privileged frame for investigating local politics and responses to the recently initiated devolved government structure.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the collective research project ‘Securing the Local: The Role of Non-state security groups (NSSGs) in the Struggle against Extremism in Kenya, Nigeria and Indonesia’ under the project number: W 08.420.113.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kagwanja, “Politics of Marionettes”; Mutahi, “Political Violence in the Elections”; Fjelde and Höglund, “Ethnic Politics and Elite Competition.” Despite the attempts at separating political violence from the state, the Kenyan police and other units within the security apparatus are accused of being involved in various kinds of political oppression and other human rights violations, and the political instrumentalization of youth violence doesn’t seem to have decreased the political use of government security forces.
2 Mueller, “The Political Economy of the Kenyan Crisis”; Murunga, Spontaneous or Premeditated?
3 Frederiksen makes a similar point about how local experiences of politics inform different definitions of democracy on the ground, “Politics, Popular Culture and Livelihood Strategies Among Young Men in a Nairobi Slum.”
4 Hansen, “Political Violence in Kenya”; Ngunyi and Katumanga, From Monopoly to Oligopoly of Violence.
5 Cf. Abbink, “Vanguards or Vandals?”; Honwana and de Boeck, “Makers and Breakers.”
6 van Stapele, “Kude? Kudedi!” and “We Are Not Yet Kenyans”; Rasmussen “Outwitting the Professor of Politics?” and “Parasitic Politics.”
7 Kanyinga and Long, “The Political Economy of Reforms in Kenya.”
8 Harris and Posner ask the question “(Under What Conditions) Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters?” and show that there is weak evidence that local electees in Kenya redistribute funds to their political and ethnic allies.
9 Cheeseman, Lynch, and Willis, “Decentralisation in Kenya”; D’Arcy and Cornell, “Devolution and Corruption in Kenya.”
10 De Smedt, “No Raila, No Peace”; Musya, Matanga, and Amutabi, “Effect of Political Mobilization on Political Violence”; Wanyama, “Voting Without Institutionalised Parties”. Similar dynamics are observed in Ghanain party elections by George Bob-Milliar, “Party Youth Activists.”
11 Naomi van Stapele was first to identify the term kupona’s analytical applicability during her work in Kiao Maiko, Mathare.
12 Jomo Kenyatta, “Facing Mt. Kenya,” 299–300.
13 Widner, The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya, 130.
14 Macharia, “Slum Clearance and the Informal Economy,” 229; Haugerud, The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya, 45–6.
15 When we refer to Harambee here, we only refer to the phenomenon in the form where wealthy patrons assist less resourceful individuals or groups. Harambee has also developed as an important and widespread mode of self-help and collective support in Kenyan culture in almost every part of society. Our analytical interest here is less on Harambee as a phenomenon, but rather on the relation between politicians and their constituencies. Some expressions of Harambee are used to facilitate or harness these relations in patrimonial ways, which has tended to blind analytical focus of the mutuality that Harambee also enables.
16 In her research from Niger, Lisa Mueller points to similar insights. In “Personal Politics Without Clientelism?” 48, she argues for the existence of personalised political relations that are not inherently clientilistic, and suggests that this hypotheses is tested in Africa beyond Niger.
17 Mutahi and Ruteere “Violence, Security and the Policing”; Cornell and D’Arcy “Plus ca Change?”; Musya, Matanga, and Amutabi, “Effect of Political Mobilization”; Rasmussen, “Parasitic Politics.”
18 Fraser, “Recognition Without Ethics?”; Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition.
19 Fraser, “Recognition Without Ethics?” 90.
20 Jones, Kimari, and Ramkrishan, “Only the People Can Defend This Struggle”; Van Stapele, “We Are Not Yet Kenyans.”
21 Fraser, “Recognition Without Ethics?” 103–4.
22 There is a considerable volume of scholarship on electoral violence in Kenya that seek to nuance the understanding of patronage by pointing to the fact that youth are exercising agency despite political attempts at instrumentalization. E.g. Chome, “The Grassroots Are Very Complicated”; Mutahi and Ruteere, “Violence, Security and the Policing”; Otiso, “Political Mobilization of Security.” While these points are important and our analysis in some respects departs from similar insights, we attempt to carve out how this type of agency is informed by and situated in particular histories and localities.
23 The vignette from ‘Our Lady of Mercy’ is reconstructed from fieldnotes from the party primaries in Kamukunji April 2017, Rasmussen.
24 Wanyama, “Voting Without Institutionalised Parties,” 80.
25 For similar points see Ruteere et al., Missing the Point; Jones, Kimari, and Ramakrishnan, “Only the People Can Defend This Struggle”; Rasmussen, “Outwitting the Professor of Politics.”
26 The vignette from ‘Kiao Maiko’ is reconstructed from observations and fieldnotes from the party primaries in Kamukunji April 2017, van Stapele.
27 For similar accounts of police brutality against poor urban youth in Nairobi see Jones, Kimari, and Ramkrishan, “Only the People Can Defend This Struggle”; van Stapele, “We Are Not Yet Kenyans.”
28 Retrieved from fieldnotes March 2017, van Stapele.
29 Akare, The Slums; White, The Comforts of Home; Kaarsholm and Frederiksen, “Amaoti and Pumwani.”
30 The conversations and examples in this section are retrieved from fieldnotes late April and early May 2017, Rasmussen.