Resisting imperial erasures: Matigari ruins and relics in Nairobi

ABSTRACT

Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article historicizes poor urban settlements in Nairobi as ruins – the product of systemic ruination from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, it offers the provocation to think ‘slum’ dwellers as relics: remains of past/present conterminous ruins who are treated as subhuman hauntings of a foregone time and understood to be constituted by the decayed and unwanted material of city margins. In these embodiments they are perceived as ruining the city, even when they have been produced by longue durée political processes of ruination, captured by vernacular identities such as Matigari. Yet, as I show here, like unexpected relics, the inhabitants of poor urban settlements continue to insert vital bids for survival in city landscapes. And, in these layered movements, they act as mnemonic devices that bridge the oppressions of what are seen as separate times, while shedding light on often normalized colonial city and national governance processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Ruins
• Nairobi
• Matigari
• relics
• ruination
• Kenya

Nairobi is the home of ‘modern ruins,’¹ whose genealogies are the ‘slum and squatter’ situations so reviled by the colonial administration. These corrugated iron and uneven concrete homes are the residence of generations of city dwellers and over generations. Though in existence for decades, the ‘territorial stigmatization’² that shapes these locations allows them to be considered ‘stains’ on this aspiringly modern metropolis, even as they remain, and they do endure as, ‘a defining feature of the urban landscape.’³ And what of their residents? Framed, across decades by lack, an inhumanity, they take on subjectivities assigned to those long considered ‘out of place’ and out of time in the city.⁴

This paper draws on theorizations of the ruin and ruination to reflect on the negative discursive framings, with grave material effects, of low-income urban spaces and their residents in Nairobi. In thinking of these regions as ruins, especially in the context of prevailing ‘world-class’ and even ‘smart-city’ discourse,⁵ I aim to highlight the longue durée political processes of ruination, the ‘laying waste,’ that (re)produce them. Using ruination as a useful but not total analytic to think about systemically marginalized spaces in Nairobi, I illustrate the particular ways that ruins are seen to bring about specific subjects, that of outlaws – as I have reflected on in earlier work⁶ – and also, correlatedly, (in)human remains. Here, I reflect on ruin(ed) subjects, these (in)human remains, as relics, corollaries of the figure of Matigari, which is a self-ascribed identity long adopted in Mathare – the low-income urban settlement where I ground my arguments, by, principally, young Kikuyu residents.

Why think from ruins? Or, put differently, what do ruins have to offer Mathare? In this article I build on a number of anthropological literatures⁷ to highlight what I understand as the ruinous articulations emerging from the co-constitution(s) between the material and discursive conditions of ‘slum’ spaces in Nairobi. Ultimately, I would like to account for what I argue is an externally perceived symbiosis between Mathare space and its residents, a ruin and its relics, upheld through bureaucratic performances, both oral and tangible, and everyday life registers. Certainly, these interlinked fora – policy spaces and public discourses – conjointly co-produce these geographies and their residents primarily through deleterious narratives about them, and that is coupled with their omission from formal spatial governance interventions. In such maneuvers, Mathare residents are interpellated through a space portrayed as decaying and degenerate, and narratives of the area are filtered through what are seen as the problematic subjects(itivites) that dwell in them. At once, therefore, these spaces and subjects are both ruins and ruining – casting a long shadow over Nairobi’s present prosperities and futures filled, such is the anticipation, with ‘potential – a something waiting to happen.’⁸

Since this adverse co-constitution of residents and their geography(ies) is established over decades in formal and informal sectors, both space and subjects have historically always been under threat,⁹ despite their imperfect work to make evident the ‘durability’ of and their vulnerability to ‘imperial duress’¹⁰ in the city. Yet, if, in the words of Smith, ‘as a landscape of accumulation, Nairobi is a material assemblage gradually deposited across time, through the churn of urban development in which substances and forms can endure or be erased,’¹¹ those who survive the exclusions of ‘urban development’ somehow manage to craft repair, over years, from within the decades of accumulated rubble generated by long-term racialized and classed differentiated city processes. And, in their evasion of erasures, they seek to emerge from the ruins of, first, a ‘colonial capital,’ and now ‘world class city,’ by becoming ‘substances and forms’ that will stubbornly attempt to withstand the exclusionary churnings of this African metropolis. I suggest here that a corporeal articulation of these persisting ‘substances and forms’ can be considered the relic, the embodiment of the ruin, which is in dialogue with local enunciations of remainder such as the figure of Matigari.

Informed by the obstinate efforts of Mathare residents to endure over a century, from its beginnings as a colonial quarry and ‘squatter settlement’ to present day ‘slum,’ I reflect on what thinking with ruins and relics can add to present day discussions about ‘informal(ized)’ low-income urban communities in Kenya. Here, my goal is not to rehash multiple developmental or academic submissions about the sinister articulations of poverty, notwithstanding the criticality of some of these endeavours, but to map out what thinking with ruination can add to these discussions; what ruins and relics can push us to see in our urban forms. In addition, since I understand Matigari – registered here as a Gĩkũyũ expression capturing those who have remained despite colonial erasures and enclosures – as related to the figure of the relic, I draw on local evocations of this term to further elucidate situated gesturing towards what Stoler and others develop as ruination; a political laying waste – layered, durable but not total – that is echoed in the many lamentations, and, above all, demands I have heard over the last fifteen years spent learning as a ‘convivial’¹² stranger in Mathare. While agency is no longer taken for granted in the contemporary records of lives lived in the city of Nairobi, particularly that shown by the 60% of residents who live on only 6% of Nairobi’s surface area,¹³ still, I contend, the intentionality and abiding nature of the structural injustices that stricture these urban existences, particularly in the post-independence period, is often in question. In contrast, within this paper, ruination is understood as

more than a process. It is also a political project that lays waste to certain peoples and places, relations, and things. To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present.¹⁴ (Emphasis is mine)

Therefore, in taking the conditions in Mathare less as the collateral outcome of long-term unequal distribution of, for example, income and basic services and, rather, as an intentional political project, I would like to document how ruins and the relics within them persist despite multiple enclosures. Instead, even within the tangible rubble of city ‘churns,’ these sites and their people become the ‘ground on which [urban] histories are contested and remade’¹⁵ since they evidence, contest and charge against structural processes of ruination articulated within and beyond formal urban governance regimes. And in these difficult, vibrant and imperfect everyday acts they, surely, reach towards alternative city futures that, despite what is seen as their ruining, are ‘waiting in the wings, nascent, perhaps pressing.’¹⁶

I develop these arguments over three main sections. The first section, titled Ruins, situates Mathare as a political project of ‘laying waste’¹⁷ canalized through, as but one example, a formal urban governance neglect over decades that invests this geography with a ‘negative time and space made present by an ideal’¹⁸ and derives from what Aalders terms ‘the ruins and the debris of the colonial project in Kenya.’¹⁹ In addition, I discuss the grave socio-spatial conditions that have been launched in Mathare against other ‘ideals’ that dominate and permit this region to embody all that the city wants to move away from as it looks towards ‘2030, 2040 [and] 2050.’²⁰

Following Ruins, I develop the figure of the relic, a corporealized form of the ruin, whom I theorize as the composite of what, across decades, have been understood as the prevailing form of Mathare subjectivities. Relics, certainly, emerge from ruins, are generative embodiments of them, thus explaining their adaptation in this paper as their symbiotic products. To contextualize them further in the particular histories of Mathare, I think them together with the self-ascribed identity of Matigari; an iconic self and community framing popularized by the 1987 Ngugi wa Thiong’o novel of the same name. A discussion of Matigari and how it relates to ruins and relics is the foundation for the third section in this paper, even as I acknowledge that relics and Matigari would not map out neatly on each other – may have a transversal rather than a parallel relationship. Yet, I argue that thinking them together is productive and helps to further emphasize the political (re)productions of ruins, and the in-situ adaptation of specific personhoods that can be taken up to bear witness to and contend with these violent processes. Towards this, Matigari and relics are theorized as, at once, products of a systemic ruination in longue durée, and, simultaneously, crucial challengers of its hegemony in this city through their role in shedding light on its imperial provenance and contemporary reinstantations. Certainly, Matigari functions as an intentionally adopted identity that condenses a situated understanding of history, bridges ostensibly separate times, while also embodying a vital survival project. Likewise, while a provocation emerging from my extension of ruin theorizations, and whereas the relic is a figure that is not explicitly enunciated but gestured towards by an external bias that informs and is informed by ruination, it, too, congeals situated political histories, maneuvers and junctures. Therefore, in this section, I make evident how Matigari subjects, here understood as a form of relic, are the ‘social life of ruins’ which, though seen as ‘trespass,’ grave infringements on the world class or ‘smart’ socio-spatial aspirations of Nairobi, remain ‘socially important.’²¹ In the Conclusion, I bring together these reflections on ruins, relics and Matigari to further demonstrate the ways in which they collectively and symbiotically emerge from the debris of imperial temporal and spatial processes to, at once, question the status quo(s) and assert their right to endure.

Methodologically, the arguments in this paper are informed by various periods of fieldwork over ten years, including that conducted for a PhD project between 2013–2015. Combined, during these phases of immersion in Mathare, I was fortunate to have conducted hundreds of interviews, dozens of focus groups and participatory research activities. Above all, I was privileged to be incorporated in many everyday individual and collective rituals that, though mundane, were critical fora that revealed and continue to make evident the grave remains of imperial duress in this location. Residents’ persistent struggles to acquire water, which resonate in the colonial archival record that documents hydrological bias towards formerly white and currently middle and upper-class spaces,²² and the never materialized promises of adequate housing for the poor over decades, are but only two examples of conditions that point to the political abandonment that has long structured this community. This paper draws on these varied periods of research to anchor and interject in this primarily theoretical discussion, and the specific fieldwork moments included here, while point to ruination, also make evident the mobilizing of ‘ruin(ed)’ selves and community through specific personhoods that refuse to be buried in the ‘debris’ of reinstantiating colonial projects.

Ruins

Ruins are made in Mathare every day. Certainly, from the still smoking debris of houses burned by frequent conflagrations – arsonist bids to deterritorialize and reclaim space or the unanticipated ravage of a candle accidentally dropped on a flammable mattress (Figure 1), to a County bulldozer driving over the only home of an ‘illegal’ resident, or even the force of floods barrelling through a narrow lane of lean to shacks during the long rains; without a doubt, materialities in Mathare are perpetually undergoing various modes of ruination.

Figure 1. Still smoking ruins from house fire in Bondeni, Mathare in 2014. Picture taken by Author.

The ruins we focus on in this paper, while acknowledging continuous material decomposition of local infrastructure, what Smith has captured, in reference to scholarship of the same in Africa, as a ‘crumbling backdrop’²³ of various city progressions, are more than an inevitable decay. As the instances conveyed above register, here, ruins are tied to but also distinguished from an expected decline. Instead, in a double gesture informed by Stoler and others, I adopt ruins as both process and product – a political undertaking that intentionally ‘lays waste,’ as well as the resulting ‘waste.’ These combined meanings are brought together in the following statement by a young Mathare interlocutor when she says:

I think the people responsible for Mathare are the British because they are the ones who took land away from the communities. They forced them to establish a slum in Mathare. I also think the leaders who came immediately after independence are responsible because they did not return the land back to the original owners. And politicians to date, they keep promising people that they will change issues but they don’t, so I think they are also responsible.²⁴

Indexed in this statement is an imperial process of ruination that in its ‘laying waste’ – via colonial dispossessions and an incomplete independence – creates waste: ‘a slum in Mathare.’ Ultimately, this ‘ruinous form of attention’²⁵ leads to home landscapes such as those described below by a Mathare author, when he states:

I’ve lived a good part of my life in Mathare 4A, part of the larger Mathare slum in Nairobi. The houses on this side of the city tell a sorry tale. By any standards, they are not housing, but shacks made of iron sheets, plywood, mud, and a few bricks. They are built on any space available: over open trenches, piped water passing in the same trenches and illegal electricity connections passing below and over these trenches.²⁶

The narratives from both residents affirm the produced and not inevitable decay. And, more importantly, connect it to other longue durée processes: ‘sorry tale[s]’ of an enduring ruination, imperial refrains.²⁷ For the second interlocutor, the years of his life in Mathare 4A chronicle housing that is ‘not housing,’ but dilapidated shacks constituted using vestiges from the larger city. This ruin, gestured to in his emic description of home, simultaneously represents the present, past and future. And in all of these concomitant tenses is seen to be a space that ‘drag[s] a city down, liabilities that limit its economic and social potential’²⁸; constituting an anachronous ‘negation[s] of linear progress and development.’²⁹

To be sure, Mathare, as other low income urban settlements, is the anti-city that Nairobi, in its former position as a ‘colonial capital’ and its current anticipation to be a ‘world-class’ and ‘smart city,’ has never formally sanctioned.³⁰ Against the hegemonic global ideals that are the ‘regulating fiction’ for our current moment,³¹ and whose ‘symbolic geopolitical infrastructures’³² – the super-highways and hyper-modernist buildings that gesture towards the twenty-first century – articulate the ‘developmental impulse’ that has become the spectacular hallmark of Kenya’s neoliberal vision,³³ Mathare’s infrastructures barely change.

Nairobi’s ruins then, in both effect and affect, become like the analytical category of Blackness that Simone deploys: ‘the freight of all that must be dredged and evacuated in order for a sense of stillness and sufficiency to hang as atmosphere on the infrastructures of the urban.’³⁴ Consequently, their ‘potential for generation’³⁵ is submerged within layers of negative associations that are reappropriated within a formal spatial governance that (re)produces geographical disparities, and, in particular, the materialization of urban grids that equate privilege with morality (and humanity) and ‘deficit geographies’ with degenerate subjectivities (and disposability).

But these sites of produced decay contain possibilities of redemption;³⁶ are ‘always broken, but always resounding’: coincide a ‘double inhabitation’ of both ‘enforcement and freedom.’³⁷ This generative tension between death and regeneration implicit in ruins captures what I am continually (re)learning about Mathare and other low-income settlements in Nairobi: that, despite the violence of ruinous attention(s), there is a vitality that remains immanent in the fabric of everyday life. Evidencing this is the staunch refusal of Mathare to disappear, despite unrelenting state bids for its erasure over the last century.³⁸ For these reasons, like Stoler, I move to consider ‘ruins as epicenters of renewed claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects.’³⁹

In their agentive efforts to live in this space, I suggest that residents of ruins take on characteristics of what I expand on below as the relic. Relics, certainly, are derivative of the ruin, but do more than accrete in these locations: beyond being fundamental vestiges of geographies of debris, they are, I argue, its ‘spirited voice’; the channels through which ‘new possibilities’ and ‘unexpected political projects’ are launched.

Relics

The people here are poor, unskilled and their housing is rundown. There is no tap water, roads, electricity or garbage disposal. Health care and education, if they exist, cannot cope with the influx of people because of natural population growth and rural urban exodus. This is Mathare, where there are rats, crowded dwellings and day labourers. Here too, desperate and broken souls are to be found. I went to Mathare which is a mere 10 minutes drive from the city centre. I arrived at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. The area was already clustered with people looking for something to start the day. There seemed nothing in the rundown shacks to provide much employment. Dazed, sad and dangerous slum life was already in action at 9 am. Unemployment, poverty and delinquency stare back at you wide-eyed. Problems buzz around here like flies around a carcass. Walking through Mathare, I saw a portrait of a typical slum-dweller; it is a young adult, a school dropout usually under-employed or employed in manual jobs, and although informed about politics, is highly distrustful of it. Life here seems to proceed smoothly, but a closer scrutiny shows that the crime rate is high. There are more drug addicts, the percentage of those infected with venereal diseases is high and infant mortality too. This is not surprising as poverty has erected obstacles in the path of human development. Only a few avenues are open to them. For the young people, the only option is crime.⁴⁰

I complement the metaphor of the ruin with a figure I term the relic. Embedded in whichever debris, any material sedimentation over the years, we expect to find relics – the ‘substance and stuff’⁴¹ of ruins. Besides the obvious genealogy that traces relics to ruins, common evaluations of Mathare subjects treat them as ‘outmoded’ versions of humanity. Or, as the excerpt from the 1988 Letter to the Editor cited above puts it, persons who are facing ‘obstacles in the path of human development.’ I suggest that this diagnosis of Mathare residents is a pronouncement of both their physicality and life chances: a declaration of their foreignness from what is understood as humanity (in this case a moral urban citizen), as well as the inadequacy of their surroundings and the opportunities this affords. Indubitably, then, they – ‘desperate and broken souls’ who encompass a ‘delinquency stare[ing] back at you wide-eyed’ – are remnants of an unwanted city who have biologized the detritus – ‘rats,’ ‘dangerous slum life,’ ‘venereal disease’ – of these discarded parts of the urban. In these assessments, they are, perhaps, even ‘ex-human’;⁴² the unstable and distrusted artifacts of a once-upon-a-time humanity.

This reproducing stigma leads residents to pose similar questions about themselves. In one instance, one of Jones’s interlocutors was quoted as saying:

Life is not fair when we have seen some other people living the good life and us, here, it is like not living. I don’t feel we are existing. Whereas other people are humans, are we humans? We see ourselves as like nothing.⁴³

And though their ‘resilience’ in this ‘not living’ is recognized, empathized with and even applauded from time to time, for the most part, like relics in a museum, they are not celebrated but confined. This encampment is a former quarry, one of ‘the most difficult urban environments in East Africa,’⁴⁴ which is home to close to three hundred thousand residents considered aliens in their own city; figures who are always being hunted even if they sustain the very backbone of this urban agglomeration.

In speaking to similar racialized and low-income spaces in New Orleans, in the United States, Dawdy⁴⁵ details how ‘allowing ruins to be dismissed as negative spaces allows their inhabitants to be written off as mutants and specters.’ Mathare relics are Nairobi’s mutants and specters, no doubt seen to personify the social and epidemiological transgressions imagined as persisting in this city. This habitual mapping of space to bodies and vice-versa popularizes specific spatial languages about their ‘conditions’ and interiorities analogous to other poor and racialized populations globally, such as the Black faveladas attended to by Alves.⁴⁶

The metaphor does not end there; the very landscape of Mathare is built using non-human relics – many houses are constructed with what is other people’s debris hunted and gathered from a wide range of city geographies, such as the lids of old metal garbage cans taken from the central business district, cartons abandoned by supermarkets, and recycled mabati corrugated iron sheets. When assembled, these artifacts fabricate the iconic infrastructural centerpieces of this ruin, further embody the life histories of this space, and are agents involved in creating socio-spatial meaning.

In their situated maneuvers located at the intersection of many grave conditions – facing consistent threats of eviction, a lack of basic services and police violence,⁴⁷ relics work on surviving in their abandonment. These actions often do not bode well with the formal ‘order(s)’ established in the city. Indeed, like the vital remains of the African Burial Ground in New York,⁴⁸ they show up when they are not meant to, are known to take oaths against the government⁴⁹ and get in the way of ‘development.’ And, despite the constant de-and-recomposition of this geography, the neverending rubble, they have managed to persist for more than a century.

Evidencing residents’ durability is the significant population of elderly women in Mathare who are more than 80 years old – far surpassing the national average of 67 years.⁵⁰ While conducting fieldwork in Village One in 2014, I was surprised to encounter a noteworthy cluster of elderly females who lived here and continue to be active matriarchs in their households and communities at large. In a country known for its youth, and in a setting where life expectancy is significantly lower than the national standard, the perseverance of this demographic is remarkable. Some came to Mathare as early as 1948, and all of them have survived eviction threats and eventualities, police violence, rampant house fires, natural disasters, election conflicts, and the horizontal violence that can descend upon one here in many sinister ways. We even met a frail grandmother in her late eighties as she navigated through a narrow alleyway strewn with mud and almost impassable. Legally blind, this matriarch’s hands clutched at the walls of the housing that lined this pathway, her movements directed by decades of muscle memory and a situated knowledge of the terrain.

The survival of these elderly women, despite the consistent ‘laying waste,’ not only illustrates their longevity but, as well, the capacity of relics to navigate intense courses of ruination; that they have ‘learned to live with incessant transience, quickly deciding how to recoup opportunity from sudden detours and foreclosures’; ‘learned to traverse the built environment in ways that infrastructure would normally prevent.’⁵¹ It is these qualities – personified by an elderly woman that is still here despite the widespread ‘obstacles to human development,’ still determinedly clutching her way through ruins – that allow me to connect relics to the Matigari identity taken up widely in Mathare.

Matigari

Mathare people are Matigari; we are the people who have remained who have the bad blood of Mau Mau and that is why they have forgotten us, because our blood is bad. Especially these children of single mothers, they say we need to go. But we come together, and that bad blood is running through our veins.⁵²

One late afternoon in 2015, as we were walking up an uneven incline of this former quarry, Maina, a local interlocutor, stopped to point at the shacks which surrounded us. As he touched the rough, rusty copper colored mabati sheets of the house closest to his right, he said to me and a friend, ‘people call these houses shanties and that is why we call ourselves the people of shanties.’ This was not the first time Maina had blurred the material and metaphoric when describing his connection with Mathare; he was the very same person who had earlier announced: ‘If I cut my wrists and my blood drips on the floor it will spell G.H.E.T.T.O.’

Without a doubt, local ideas of self in Mathare may draw on and invert the larger framings imposed on them. These, as is corroborated by Maina’s speech above, are then layered and transformed, becoming multi-level signifiers of the different spatial histories and architectures understood as of and from their community. As Biehl and Locke put forward, ideas of self may assemble and disassemble in a ‘complex play of bodily, linguistic, political, and psychological dimensions of human experience, within and against new infrastructures.’⁵³

Thinking with modern ruins and relics, at once old and new infrastructures, helps situate the complex vocalizations by Mathare residents that they are part of a long process of neglect – have been ‘forgotten.’ One vernacular locus used to symbolize and intentionally corporealize these experiences of ruination is Matigari. As an identity marker, this referent operates concurrently as a visceral descriptor of one's position in society, a mnemonic device and as a call to action.

Though it has provenance in a mundane Kikuyu term for ‘leftovers of food or dregs in drinks,’⁵⁴ Matigari is now a heavily politicized expression firmly embedded in postcolonial Gĩkũyũ oral practices. This is, certainly, a consequence of being most famously theorized in the literary work of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o⁵⁵ of the same name. Through this poetic portrayal that begins when Matigari ma Njiruungi, a former Mau Mau fighter, leaves the forest (the foremost battle terrain of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army/Mau Mau), we understand that he represents the majority poor in Kenya who have been duped into a neocolonial scheme by those who collaborated with the British – the Ngati, Gikunia and their descendants. Matigari, therefore, refers to those who survived the formal colonial period, ‘patriots who survived the bullets,’ but are still immersed in its duress because independence has not brought them truth and justice. This term conveys that this is the contemporary condition of the Mau Mau and their descendants. And they have endured and continue to witness its violence, overwhelmingly, in rural and urban ruins.

The protagonist of Wa Thiong'o’s tale personifies these struggles; the daily strife of those who made sacrifices for Kenya’s freedom only to find that it meant the continuation of empire, albeit with African faces at its helm.⁵⁶ While explicitly indicative of a class positioning, Matigari is also a cultural framing – the ethnic provenance and tenor of this identity is reified amongst Mathare’s large Kikuyu population. Similar vernacular strategies are witnessed in Kinshasa⁵⁷ and New Orleans⁵⁸ where (hi)stories are part of an active creation of the present in poor neighbourhood. This recollection creates ties to the past in order to make sense of the present-day, while also charging modern situations with a more urgent emotional valence.

Considering oneself Matigari, therefore, entails a ‘speech of returns,’⁵⁹ which is essentially a conversation about the long-term nature of colonial situations. In its insertion into popular narratives, Matigari discourses document an existence where ‘nothing [is] strictly time bound, nor fenced off about the Mau Mau conflict of the 1950s’⁶⁰ in Mathare. As a result, there is an interplay between a ‘deeply felt’ collective story and one’s everyday experiences that contribute to and draw from this shared identity.⁶¹ This intentional self-positioning thus forms a social field for ‘mediating subjective worlds and social realities’ that ‘not only represents who “we” are in relation to others, but who “we” are in relation to ourselves through time – past, present and future.’⁶²

I heard numerous interlocutors in Mathare reference the bad blood that they imagined animated them, and the epigraph at the beginning of this section is but one example of these statements. In these accounts, a Matigari identity implies different streams of the same Kikuyu blood; is a material and semiotic shorthand that establishes biological difference between those in power and the real Mau Mau now living in the detritus of Nairobi. Such reflections about self/ves reveal more than just ancestry and class; they concomitantly speak to the perceived colonial logics that organize Nairobi – a political project of ruination. Correspondingly, in theorizing the popular recovery of Matigari, Gikandi⁶³ relates that this figure has ‘become a signifier of ‘Mau Mau’ and [come] to function, on a higher discursive level, as a trope mediating the colonial past and the postcolonial moment.’

What’s more, since much of the urban fight against the Mau Mau took place in Mathare and elsewhere in Eastlands,⁶⁴ residents’ evocations of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army through Matigari are not mere nostalgia; they are intentional enunciations to index entanglements in what are locally narrativized as the same battles, on the same sites, fought by the Mau Mau. The now mundane recursive speeches through which the Kenya Land and Freedom Army and coloniality are called up texture experiences of social space, and further anchors the Matigari identity. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mathare is the only place in Nairobi where there is a Mau Mau Road and, from my knowledge, one that has existed for decades.

It is through these situated experiences and temporalities, which travel back and forth, that Matigari can nuance the figure of the relic in Mathare and offers a local and embodied metaphor to account for the persistence of ruination projects. When brought together, ruins, relics and Matigari offer an analytical frame that captures the particular but, as well, makes comparable Mathare residents’ narrations of empire in their space and across the tenses of their lives. More importantly, these connected metaphors demand that we foreground everyday responses to durable foreclosures; center local and vital projects that ‘undermine the stability of modern, progressive time and simultaneously alter our perceptions of [their] contemporary space.’⁶⁵

Conclusion

The principal objective of this paper was to illustrate that Mathare residents are not ruining the city, but are, rather, engulfed in widespread processes of ruination – a political project that is ‘lay[ing] waste’ to their homes and person. In the contemporary reinstantiations of these violent dynamics, modern ruins like Mathare are reproduced through instruments such as formal urban governance regimes. Yet, ruins always emerge relics – remains that while ‘outmoded,’ are vital. And in their many unanticipated movements, relics such as Matigari interrupt ‘the present with incessant flashes of the past,’⁶⁶ and provoke a ‘break in linear time.’⁶⁷ This is intentional. Of concern is the need not only to survive, but to highlight enduring ‘obstacles’ and to ‘animate new possibilities.’ Here, this requires specific memories and subjecthoods to be sutured to everyday experiences and may explain why Mathare is the only neighborhood in Nairobi that has a Mau Mau Road – a topographic (amongst many others) defiance.

As we speak of the afterlives of ruins and relics, their de-and-recomposition amidst the rubble – a ‘resistance to decay,’⁶⁸ this is not to romanticize situated conditions that are extremely challenging. As Smith argues in her discussion of the former ‘native’ housing complex of Kaloleni: ‘there is no ruined enchantment to these residues, they are not often beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but they reveal the way in which a landscape can be inscribed with multiple ordinary histories as they accumulate in the estate.’⁶⁹ Unquestionably, such accumulations in Mathare accrete in particular ways: they generate an environment that is one of the most difficult in East Africa. But against this ruinous attention, ruin(ed) subjects painfully, tragically, and often in singular ways, alert us to enduring historical forces of empire, its ‘active positioning’ and ‘reappropriations’ in the present.⁷⁰

Two critical scenes in Wa Thiong'o’s 1987 novel depict Matigari children scavenging among garbage heaps and sleeping in the rusting remains of cars in the peripheries of the city. These vistas concentrate in them the exchanges between ruins and their subjects: relics and Matigari. Nevertheless, they also make clear how, despite the durability of empire, these difficult conditions can be repurposed as ‘opportunity zones for alternative urban life.’⁷¹ Surely, when brought together, ruins, relics and Matigari offer a window into local narrative practices that speak of abandonment, but also of possibility.

Against the backdrop of recent master planning blueprints in Nairobi and new global urban agendas that persevere as exclusionary, it befits us to listen to how the majority of residents encounter this city; to be attentive to what they see as its changes but also its violent remains. Their stories show us how they live through ‘recursive histories’ – simultaneously partial, modified and amplified experiences of empire that ‘circle back and implicate one another again’⁷² – while continuously seeking to etch a vital existence on the landscapes where they dare to stay. By remaining, they also gesture to other issues connected to but larger than their geography: the need for national land reform, more inclusive citizenship and social justice, as but a few examples. Since these multi-scalar topics are incorporated as references in the variety of collective and subjective itineraries that residents use to live and enunciate, the people of Mathare, in the words of Simone, ‘remain ruined and generous in their capacity to remake the times to come.’⁷³

Acknowledgements

I continue to be grateful to the many Mathare residents and organic intellectuals who have made time to speak with me over the years; you inspire my thoughts and praxis with your determined struggles to endure and resist. I am also grateful to the conveners of the Special Issue, the article reviewers, and the Editors at JEAS.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology.”

2 Wacquant, “Territorial Stigmatization”; “Urban Outcast.”

3 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology,” 762.

4 McKittrick, “Demonic Grounds.”

5 See, for example, the work of Myers, “A World-Class City-Region?”, Guma, “Smart Urbanism?”, and Guma and Mondstadt, “Smart City-Making?.”

6 As but one example of this earlier work, see Kimari, “Outlaw Nairobi.”

7 I borrow from various approaches within anthropology, including the anthropologies of empire, violence, urban spaces, and other related postcolonial academic and non-academic works to develop the figure of the relic, and to situate discussions of the ruin in Nairobi.

8 Stewart, “Weak Theory,” 72 (italics in original).

9 See, Hake, “Self-Help City”; White, “Comforts of Home.”

10 Stoler, “Duress.”

11 Smith, “City of Icebergs.”

12 Nyamjoh, “Incompleteness.”

13 UN, “Kenya: Nairobi Urban Profile.”

14 Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 196.

15 Stoler, “Duress,” 355.

16 Stewart, “Weak Theory,” 80.

17 Stoler, “Imperial Debris.”

18 Yarrow, “Remains for the Future,” 568.

19 Aalders, “Building on the Ruins of Empire.”

20 During an event celebrating World Habitat Day in 2015, the former deputy mayor of Nairobi, Jonathan Mueke, spoke about how the city is planning for “2030, 2040 and 2050,” but did not speak of the parts of the city that were still living within the inequities of the past.

21 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology,” 776.

22 See the work of Nilsson and Nyanchaga, “Pipes and Politics”, for example, on this.

23 Smith, “City of Icebergs.”

24 Esther, Personal Communication.

25 Collins, “Ruins, Redemption and Brazil.”

26 Gathanga, “Homelessness and (Un)Affordable Housing.”

27 Stoler, “Imperial Debris.”

28 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology,” 776.

29 Yarrow, “Remains of the Future.”

30 Myers, “A World-Class City Region?”; Manji, “Bulldozers, Homes and Highways”; Robinson, “Trouble Showed the Way.”

31 Robinson, “Global and World Cities.”

32 Kimari and Lesutis, “Symbolic Geopolitical Infrastructures.”

33 Manji, “Bulldozers, Homes and Highways.”

34 Simone, “It’s Only a City After All,” 6.

35 James, “From Slum Clearance.”

36 Stoler, “Imperial Debris”; “On Ruins and Ruination.”

37 Simone, “Its Just a City After All,” 2–7.

38 Archival material demonstrates the existence of Mathare settlement, a former stone quarry, from at least 1921: see Chiuri, “Mathare Valley.”

39 Stoler, “On Ruins and Ruination,” 198.

40 Hilary Araga, “Letter to the Editor”, Daily Nation, 2 December 1988.

41 Fontein and Smith, “ Introduction.”

42 Biehl and Locke, “Deleuze and the Anthroplogy of Becoming,” 318.

43 Jones, “Silhouette City,” 15.

44 Muungano Support Trust, “Mathare Zonal Plan,” 4.

45 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology.”

46 Alves, “Anti Black City.”

47 Manji, “Bulldozers, Homes and Highways”; Price, Megan, Peter Albrecht, Francesco Colona, Lisa Denney, and Wangui Kimari. “Hustling for security. Managing plural security in Nairobi's poor urban settlements.” (2016).

48 Rothstein, “A Burial Ground.”

49 This was the case in both the Mau Mau period, and more recently in formations such as Mungiki, as well as activist spaces.

50 See, the World Bank database for more information on this: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=KE.

51 Simone, “It’s Only a City After All,” 7–8.

52 Muigi, Mathare Interlocutor, Personal Communication, 2015.

53 Biehl and Locke, “Deleuze and The Anthropology of Becoming,” 323.

54 Gikandi, “The Epistemology of Translation.”

55 Wa Thiong'o, “Matigari.”

56 Wa Thiong'o, “Matigari”; Gikandi, “The Epistemology of Translation”; Wa Mungai, “Matatu Men”; Rasmussen, “The City is Our Forest.”

57 De Boeck and Plissart, “Kinshasa,” 103.

58 Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory.”

59 Ochoa, “Versions of the Dead,” 473.

60 Jones, “Silhouette City,” 7.

61 Rasmussen, “Mungiki as Youth Movement.”

62 White, “The Comforts of Home,” 496.

63 Gikandi, “The Epistemology of Translation,” 161.

64 Anderson, “Histories of the Hanged.”

65 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology,” 762.

66 Ralph, “Renegade Dreams,” 61.

67 Wa Thiong'o and Jaggi, “Matigari as Myth and History,” 247.

68 Walsham, “Relics and Remains,” 11.

69 Smith, “Accumulating History,” 122.

70 Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 196.

71 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology,” 776.

72 Stoler, “Duress,” 24–7.

73 Simone, “Waiting in African Cities.”