For many refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, the question “Wapi kipande?” is synonymous with torture. It is a question that has been used by the Kenya Police to extort money from refugees and those from northern Kenya for many decades now. Wapi kipande? simply means, “Where is your ID?”  A question deliberately asked to a group of people whom the police are aware lack the mandatory Kenyan ID cards because of their status as refugees.

Many refugees from the Horn of Africa who have settled in Europe, North America, and the Middle East left Kenya with the horrors of wapi kipande. I have met some and they tell me that the first thing they remember about Kenya is wapi kipande and the abuse they suffered at the hands of the police. I was not spared this abuse. I have spent time in a dingy police cell despite holding a genuine Kenyan ID, having been born and brought up in the country. If you are from northern Kenya, or Somali or Ethiopian or Eritrean, lacking the ubiquitous one hundred shilling bribe can cost you your freedom.

I am from the north and, like refugees from the Horn of Africa, of Afro-Asiatic heritage, distinct from the majority of Kenyans who are from either Bantu or Nilotic communities. Their physical features make these refugees stand out, easy targets for harassment. In a report published in 2013, Human Rights Watch claimed that Kenya Police “raped, tortured, and arbitrarily detained over 1,000 refugees” with little to no action taken by Kenyan authorities to investigate and put a stop to the abuse. To date, nothing has changed.

Refugees

The harassment of refugees from the Horn of Africa is part of a pattern of discrimination against the people of northern Kenya who live along the border with Somalia and Ethiopia and who are themselves often accused of being “aliens”. Communities living on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia did not end up there by accident. They share cultural traits with communities living in their ancestral homes inside Somalia and Ethiopia. Like the Maasai and Kuria along the Kenya-Tanzania border, and the Luhyas along the Kenya-Uganda border, the northerners found themselves on either side of the border after the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin conference of 1884/5 that established most of the African borders as we know them today.

The Maasai, Kuria, and Luhya communities residing on the Kenyan side have been easily accepted and are treated much more favourably than northerners are. Discrimination against those from the north appears to be inspired by a racist agenda that has affected generations of their kin. For many decades now, there has been a policy of vetting the youth from this region before they are issued with Kenyan ID cards. Apart from those of Arab heritage, youth from other parts of Kenya do not undergo this vetting.

The ID

For the youth, and the people of northern Kenyan in general, the vetting process for the issuance of an ID card or a passport is long, arduous, and intrusive. And it can take years. Delays in the process have been known to impact college starting dates for the youth, who as a result are locked out of employment and are unable to open bank accounts or even own a mobile phone.

The discrimination of people from northern Kenya has now extended to their being termed terrorists by security forces.  Several Somalis and others perceived to be Somali or of Horn of Africa descent have allegedly been kidnapped and disappeared by the police. The blanket terming of northerners as terrorists now also informs Kenya’s policy on asylum and refugees.

In mid-2021, the Kenyan government ordered the closure of Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the north of the country for “harbouring” and “breeding” terrorists without providing evidence to back its claims.  In a move that was bound to breach international law, the government ordered the forced repatriation of Somali refugees back to their country of origin despite the continued instability and insecurity in Somalia, which made it unsafe for them to return.

For the youth, and the people of northern Kenyan in general, the vetting process for the issuance of an ID card or a passport is long, arduous, and intrusive.

Kenya is a signatory to the Refugee Convention of 1951 and the 1967 Protocol. The terms of the Convention are legally binding and a breach of any of its norms is a breach of international law on the protection of refugees and asylum seekers. The forceful repatriation of refugees in the Dadaab and Kakuma camps, had it gone ahead, would have fallen foul of the “non-refoulement” rule, a core principle of the Refugee Convention that stipulates that refugees cannot be returned to a country where they would face persecution based on “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.

In the last few years, Kenya has demonstrated its policy of discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in the way it handles Ethiopian nationals; they are described as aliens and treated like criminals. The humanitarian crisis created by the war in Ethiopia has forced many Ethiopians to flee to safer countries such as Kenya and Sudan. But many of those who have fled to Kenyan have not been processed in accordance with the Refugee Convention but have instead been jailed and fined before being forcefully returned to Ethiopia despite the ongoing war and the political instability.

A lack of asylum processing centres on the Kenya-Ethiopia border and the non-recognition of Ethiopian refugees has forced them to turn to people smugglers. The result is a spike in human trafficking activities along Kenya’s northern border.

When war broke out in Ethiopia, Kenya did not prepare for the influx of refugees and asylum seekers that would cross its borders from Ethiopia and also from Somalia and Sudan.  Instead, it left the door open for people smugglers who have been operating with impunity as they easily smuggle people into Kenya despite the many police checks between the border towns and the capital. Corrupt immigration officers and police are paid to turn a blind eye to the people smugglers. When they are arrested, individuals who, in the legal sense, should be free and registered either as refugees or as asylum seekers and offered protection under international law instead end up in prison. Jailing and fining innocent refugees only ends up putting more pressure on Kenya’s criminal justice system.

Terrorism is also used as an excuse to return “Ethiopian aliens” found in the country. Only recently, local media reported that residents of Kenol, near Thika town, turned on Ethiopian nationals who had just survived a road accident, suspecting them to be terrorists. In the Kenol incident, initial reports suggested that an official of the Kenya Defence Forces was behind the wheel accompanied by another armed soldier who fled the scene after the accident. The picture now emerging is that the smuggling of people into Kenya is the work of government officials working in cahoots with organized criminals. The absence of refugee reception and processing centres at border towns and Kenya’s disregard for the Refugee Convention have created a thriving people-smuggling business between the Horn of Africa and Kenya.

Designated terrorists

The blanket terming of Kenyan northerners and people from the Horn of Africa as terrorists seems to be an extension of the discriminatory policies towards people from the north or those with origins in the north. This discrimination plays into the hands of terrorists who capitalize on the lack of proper procedures and policies for processing those fleeing conflict in the Horn of Africa.  It also plays into the hands of corrupt government officials who extort and harass northerners and refugees for money, or sell ID cards and passports to would-be terrorists for monetary gain.

In the last few years, Kenya has fast-tracked citizenship for the Makonde and Shona communities of Kenya, originally from Tanzania/Mozambique and Zimbabwe, respectively. They arrived in Kenya later than the communities in northern Kenya who are still waiting to be accepted as Kenyan citizens. Children born in Kenya of Somali and Ethiopian refugees who are now in their 30s qualify for Kenyan citizenship under international law, but they have yet to be regularized yet a new policy offers fast-tracked citizenship to investors to spur Kenya’s economy. It is unclear whether the many Somalis and Ethiopians who have heavily invested in Kenya will find it easier to obtain Kenyan citizenship or whether they will still face prejudice and discrimination. Refugees in Kenya, particularly those from Somalia and Ethiopia, have contributed immensely to the country’s economy.  The failure to regularize their status affects not just the refugees’ socio-economic progress but that of Kenya as well because of lack of a proper and effective asylum and migration policy.

The labelling of northerners as terrorists has also led to human rights abuses, with residents facing arbitrary detention or kidnapping by “security forces”, never to be seen again. It is also a label that has alienated northerners, who are treated with suspicion by non-northerners and non-Muslim communities.

Forcing refugees underground is potentially opening the country to transnational crime with illegal arms, drugs, and other contraband goods filtering into the country. However, corruption is also a contributing factor to transnational crime as government officials are known to accept bribes to turn a blind eye to people smugglers and organized criminals. Blaming northerners and refugees from the Horn of Africa for insecurity and illegal trade is convenient when the actual root of the problem is to be found in Kenya’s systemic failures.

It is unclear whether the many Somalis and Ethiopians who have heavily invested in Kenya will find it easier to obtain Kenyan citizenship.

An effective and fair asylum and migration policy would separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak, and help the country to create a database of bona fide refugees. Granting citizenship to long-term refugees from the Horn of Africa is a sure way of integrating them into Kenyan society and a means of protection from harassment by the police and other corrupt government agencies.

The country also needs to speed up the registration of births in the north to capture and maintain data for Kenyan citizens born in the country. This is one scheme that would save time and resources, both and for applicants of ID cards and passports from the north and for the government. Undocumented youth is a demographic that is unable to contribute to the economy or even participate in civic duties such as the upcoming general elections.

A socio-economic malaise born of discriminatory racist prejudice should have been a thing of the past by now. The diversity of tribes in Kenya is not static and is bound to expand as the country progresses. The recent inclusion of the Makonde and the Shona is proof that the ethnography of the country is open-ended. This must now also include refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia who have made Kenya their home for many years and continue to contribute economically. That acceptance may just help in bringing peace to the north and putting an end to the discrimination and human rights abuses suffered by northerners. The move would also shore up Kenya’s standing on the international stage as a tolerant country and one that respects its international obligations regarding citizens of other countries.

As coups reappear on the African continent, there is a growing body of commentary that has problematically sought to juxtapose them with electoral democracy.  So, the question is being asked whether coups do or do not signal an end to democracy—and thus a return of the scary opposite, authoritarianism. Most prominently, the BBC, which officially never publishes opinions, ran a curious opinion piece, “Coups in Africa: why they don’t spell an end to democracy” by Nic Cheeseman and Leonard Mbulle-Nziege. As indicated in the title, the piece aggressively connects coups to authoritarianism and discusses coups as a competitor or threat to democracy. The piece is meant to reassure readers that despite the cheers and celebration for the coups, electoral democracies are still in vogue on this dimly lit continent. A more nuanced, and more empirically useful piece appeared in The New York Times: “Five African Countries. Six Coups. Why Now?” Although the NYT analysis does not directly focus on the drills and labours of democracy, it employs the same dialectic, debating coups against democracy.

Before discussing the ahistoricism and related theoretical limitations internal to these analyses, my contention is that framing coups in juxtaposition with electoral democracies is not only simplistic but is also distractive in the sense that it reduces coups to just a mode of government—problematically viewing them as a highway to authoritarianism.  In truth, coups are much more than a mode of government or a means to power. More theoretical-historically, coups in Africa are a colonial question related to the modern state, and the throes and turns that bog this “post-colonial” construction. Coups constitute a part of those events that have come to define the search for the soul of the independent African state. Phrased differently, if independence concerned itself with uplifting the formerly colonised—in all spheres of human development such as education, health, income, access to food and water, access to capital, civil liberties and dignity of Africans—these dreams have been defined and continue to undergo different political processes in different moments in the life of the postcolonial state.

What is historically accurate is that the soul and promise of independence is above any form of government (democratic, authoritative, cultural-hereditary); rather, it is constitutive of different political events. Therefore, these coup-vs-democracy analyses are not only ahistorical and theoretically handicapped, they also ought to be seen as absolute neo-colonialist distortions. They blur the histories and political economies, regimes of power and pillage in which major global political shifts continue to shape the African continent, especially in the context of what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has called coloniality, or “postcolonial neo-colonised Africa”, as Gayatri Spivak terms it.

Coups constitute a part of those events that have come to define the search for the soul of the independent African state.

What is normally confusing to observers is that coups display a deeply contradictory form of agency on the part of the African actors—the military coup leaders—who tend to be viewed as selfish power grabbers. That is half the analysis. In fact, it is the smaller analysis. In truth, while actors appear to be responding to or may claim actually visible local grievances (specifically, the emptiness of independence), they are at the same time, sadly, responding to, and are inspired and riding on shifts in political regimes in Europe and North America (from where, also, coup execution resources come). The shifts in European-North American politics which influence local events on the continent often relate to the ways in which African resources continue to be pillaged. This essay is an effort to make visible these historical, local-international shifts, and their interactions with the soul of the African.

Africa since independence

One can actually draw a periodised graph reflecting shifts in African politics and the ways in which leaderships have changed since independence in the 1950s and 1960s to the present.  These shifts in local African politics were responses to seismic shifts, to superior forces in neo-colonial politics. Oftentimes, these shifts have little to do with the men who emerge as new leaders in Africa, except through a little positioning and sheer luck. It could be anybody. This is not to say that African actors are deprived of all agency. Not at all.  African actors, especially ordinary folks, have continued to exercise agency in seeking to find meaning in their independent nation states. But often, they are crushed or exploited by superior international players who are quick to influence and conscript publics through both violent and technocratized means. The table below captures the different phases in both global and African politics, and the ways in which they respond to each other.

Note: Of course, there are, and will always be overlaps. But the table captures the most prominent political orders of every decade. Congolese politician Denis Sassou Nguesso is the living embodiment of these overlaps, having participated in most of these different phases (led coups, liberation wars, and currently wins elections).

***

Independence saw anti-colonial leaders naturally emerge as presidents and prime ministers: Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana; Patrice Lumumba in Congo-Kinshasa; Milton Obote in Uganda; Julius Nyerere in Tanzania; Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya; Aden Adde in Somalia; Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia; Agostinho Neto in Angola; etc. Discussing the myth of the postcolonial world, Puerto Rican sociologist, Ramon Grosfoguel has noted, “The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical-political decolonization of the periphery.” Indeed, with African independence, colonialists had only strategically withdrawn, but were too impatient to return. As Africa’s leaders sought to consolidate the promise of independence, the “former” colonisers jostled for ways of continued access to resources in the so-called formerly colonised places: coups came to define the African continent.

In addition to assassinations, such as, more prominently, that of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 (in which Americans and Belgians supported Mobutu Sese Seko), coups were the more prominent feature of the new wave of colonial tinkering starting in the early 1960s and running through the 1980s. Nkrumah is overthrown in 1966.  Mali’s Modibo Keita in 1968.  Uganda’s Milton Obote in 1971.  Fulbert Youlou of Congo-Brazzaville in 1963, and his successor, Alphonse Massamba-Débat, five years later. In Somalia, Siad Barre’s coup takes place in 1969. Nigeria’s Tafawa Balewa is couped in 1966 by Yakubu Gowon.  In Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana overthrows Gregory Kayibanda in 1973.  Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie is overthrown by the Derg in 1974, while Muamar Gaddafi’s coup happens in 1969.

With African independence, colonialists had only strategically withdrawn, but were too impatient to return.

Throughout this period, many promising leaders that had emerged from the colonial struggle would be either assassinated, blackmailed or simply couped out of office. It is important to note that while these coups were the product of local grievances, they were largely masterminded by former colonisers jostling for access to resources. (In West Africa, to this day, France has sustained its grip on 14 countries using its central bank, its currency, and its military.) With the culture of coups introduced, one coup led to another, and more leaders sought to portray themselves as the most compliant with the demands of their former colonisers.

Then came the Cold War, as superpowers wrestled each other, again over our resources. Proxy guerrilla wars gave us the next crop of leaders (1980-90s). Africa became the battleground for “liberation wars”, with contending groups, aligned to a superpower, seeking to overthrow the dictator that had come to power through a coup. Foreign-supported Ugandans fought against nationalist leader Idi Amin, and later Obote II, ushering in Yoweri Museveni. President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) fought Juvenal Habyarimana. In Somalia, several groups emerged to fight against Mohammed Siad Barre during the Somali civil war between 1980 and 1991. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laurent Désiré Kabila fought and overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko. One major driving thread was that rebel-liberators had to have the support of a superpower, or a subsidiary, which often gave them access to weapons, cash, and other resources including public relations for the purposes of legitimacy.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, we entered an era of democratic elections alongside structural adjustment programmes. Former guerrilla leaders quickly started chanting multiparty politics, and surviving coup-presidents quickly mutated into capitalist-democrats. They promulgated constitutions, and also periodically held elections.  But their actual hold on power was not through elections; rather, it was bedrocked on giving former colonisers unlimited access to resources.  (These were technocratized, expert-driven pillage schemes executed through regimes of banking, tax avoidance by multinational corporations, and monopolies—all of them superintended by the new colonial administrators, the World Bank and the IMF.) These leaders include Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Joseph Kabila of DRC, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, etc.

Throughout the 1990s and 2010s, former rebels and earlier coup leaders—now democrats and incumbents—organised and won one election after another. In truth, the ways in which an election unfolded did not matter; what mattered was the holding of an election itself, which translated into legitimacy for loans and grants. During this time, with one single power dominating the world, and already granted access to resources across Africa, there was a phase of relative political stability, with leaders enjoying long spells in office.  It did not matter who was in charge of the country or which policies they implemented, as long as they implemented free market economics, which in effect allow Europe and North America unrestricted access to resources.

It is important to note that while these coups were a product of local grievances, they were largely masterminded by former colonisers jostling for access to resources.

Then came the era of human rights movements and discourses—especially within the context of 9/11, the birth of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect doctrines. Emboldened by one of the doctrines of R2P, which is protection against human rights and other violations (with potential for intervention), street protests as a legitimate means of political negotiation were born.  Indeed, it is the 2010-2020 decade that gave us, among other things, the Arab Spring. Ironically, the uprisings in Arab Africa and the Middle East continue to be read as “struggles for democracy” or are viewed as “manifestations of democracy”. (There are tons of papers and media commentary with keywords “Arab Spring” and “democracy” in their headlines.) They were not agitations for democracy. With the exception of one country, Libya, the others—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria—have continuously held elections, a major defining marker of a democratic dispensation (and on the basis of which the WB and the IMF view a government as legitimate and thus deserving of loans and grants). But as the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda Movement in Tunisia demonstrated, these were historical struggles for independence, with formerly colonised peoples still dreaming of being governed on their own local-cultural terms, and ironically seeking to escape the oppressive and exploitative character of the democratic order preached by the world’s “new intellectuals of empire’” in academia and mass media.

Presently, human rights discourses have not necessarily become obsolete, but they have lost their salience and their urgency. They have been overtaken by events. There is dullness around them, especially in black Africa, where current governments freely give foreign banks and Western monopoly capital all the access they need.  But at the same time, our democracy-practicing former rebels have found smarter ways of preventing protests from taking place while some communities simply lack the intellectual and material resources to pull off successful protests.

There is a new phase in international European colonial positioning: On the one hand, there is United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) established in 2007 and launched in 2008. Coming on the heels of 9/11, Africom was pitched as a tool to coordinate military relations with African countries.  But in reality—as all US bases actually do—Africom pursues and protects American political and economic interests. In an enriching conversation with Democracy Now, political anthropologist Samar Al-Bulushi noted that Africom,

. . . now has approximately 29 known military facilities in 15 states across the continent. And many of the countries . . . that have experienced coups or coup attempts are key allies of the U.S. in the war on terror, and many of the leaders of these coups have received training from the U.S. military.

To fully appreciate the new phase emerging on the continent that favours coups, one has to consider the other side of this conversation—the other seemingly competing powers.  China, Russia and Turkey have continued to rise in power and stature and are viewed as destabilising long established (American-European) patterns of resource exploitation on the African continent. Indeed, the ongoing rivalry between China and the United States has been well documented. With the ideological orientation of the soldiers trained by Africom, and the security-related grants they are privileged to receive (easier than anything else, be it education or health, as Al-Bulushi noted in the same interview), it is arguable that more than a decade later, these officers are seeking to take over power, securitizing entire countries, confident to emerge as the legitimate buffer between their ideological and military benefactors and the Chinese and Russian competition. Worth noting is that over and above the push-and-pull between these new superpowers, long-staying leaders have become an embarrassment to their benefactors in Europe and North America—particularly with regard to their human rights records—while at the same time they are easily winning elections and constitutionally amending constitutions. Once they are deposed, Europe and America are hard-pressed to condemn the coups. It is no wonder then that coups are receiving general acceptance in our so-called international community.

The problem with democracy discourses

I started this article with the assertion that coups have nothing to do with democracy, and nor does democracy have anything to do with coups. But coups point to the revolving life-cycle of foreign and local interests, and the quest for meaning in Africa. Democratic or un-democratic (whatever those terms mean), African countries remain the same: exploited, their economies dominated by Western bankers (and African banks are the most profitable across the world), exporters of raw materials (and not because they are unable to add value), with heavily impoverished populations and a youth problem, etc. From Nigeria to South Africa, Zambia to Ghana, Kenya or Uganda, with regular elections and chants of democracy, these countries remain the same with regards to most growth indices. Strangely, a so-called non-democratic autocracy, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was classed as most advanced on the UN Human Development Index, above South Africa.

In their BBC opinion piece of 8 February 2022, Cheeseman and Mbulle-Nziege express worry but are also confident in the resilience of democracy. Thus, they are quick to pour water on the cheers that welcomed coups in some of the places where they took place. They are armed with figures and surveys that they endlessly regurgitate, discussing inexistent things such as economic growth and human rights. While running their surveys, they never include the work of anthropologists to appreciate the quality of civil publics in Africa, and nor do they include the work of historians and political economists dealing with broader theoretical questions relating to notions such as “problem spaces” and local-international connections.

The ways in which an election unfolded did not matter, but what mattered was the holding of an election itself.

The NYT analysis on the other hand, points to the excitement around coups, but notes that the grievances run deep, springing mostly from the economy and continued colonial control.  Focused on understanding why coups are back, the NYT underlines, “insecurity, bad governance, and frustrated youth”. Reporting on pro-coup voices in downtown Ouagadougou, the NYT notes that they were “inspired by the way the junta in neighboring Mali had stood up to France, the increasingly unpopular former colonial power”. Quoting an ordinary person—a customer at a cellphone market in Ouagadougou called Anatole Compaore, who had welcomed the coup, the NYT reported him as saying, “Whoever takes power now, he needs to follow the example of Mali—reject France, and start to take our own decisions,” echoing the anti-colonial sentiments that run deep in most West African states still under direct French control, which also include Togo, Senegal, Niger and Côte d’Ivoire.

Quick to dismiss any grounds upon which coups could be welcomed, Cheeseman and Mbulle-Nziege simplistically and directly connect coups to authoritarianism, arguing that authoritarian regimes do not deliver economic growth. They write, that “despite growing frustration with the way that multiparty politics is performing [link in original], on average democracies generate higher economic growth and do a better job of providing public services, according to a study at the US’s Cornell University.” Without problematizing the ways in which democracies generate higher economic growth (than non-electoral regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya under Gaddafi, or the United Arab Emirates), it is curious scholarship that directly connects non-electoral leaderships to autocracies incapable of delivering civil liberties and freedoms. Perhaps noticing this anomaly, Cheeseman and Mbulle-Nziege add, “The poor performance of authoritarian forms of government on African soil . . . helps to explain why the support for democracy is high,” perhaps to create the dichotomy that authoritarian governments elsewhere have performed better. But how does one generate firm understanding through such ahistorical and untheoretical analyses?

It becomes clear that democracy discourses in the present “problem space” of African politics ought to be understood as not necessarily obsolete but overtaken by events ironically emanating from Europe and North America, and their contestations. Africans remain colonised. New problem spaces require that we ask questions that are specific to the discursive context. Clearly, coups are back because of the nature of the new phase we are in in the life of the neo-colonised postcolonial state.

On 15 November, Minoo Kyaa, a community activist from Mukuru kwa Njenga, South Nairobi, tweeted,

We keep asking each other “we unaenda wapi?” [Where are you going?] and even tho it isn’t funny we laugh about it and stare at each other in disbelief.

At the time, Minoo was living in a tent on the site of her former home, along with some 40,000 other forcibly evicted Mukuru residents. Their dwellings had been demolished to make way for a link road connecting the city’s industrial zone to a contentious new expressway, plunging them into a humanitarian crisis. A pet project of incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta – intended to be another symbol of his “legacy” – the seventeen-mile toll-road, dubbed a “Road for the Rich” by critics, aims to facilitate speedier movement between Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport and the Central Business District.

Last November, the authors of this article convened a meeting with activists and community representatives from across Nairobi to understand the causes and consequences of displacement in urban contexts. We wanted to get a clearer sense of the circumstances under which poor urban residents are regularly compelled to leave their homes. Four of those who attended, roughly a third of our participants, were and remain directly affected by events in Mukuru, which they recounted in disturbing detail, providing troubling insights into the conditions of extreme precarity under which Nairobi’s poorest residents are repeatedly forced to rebuild lives and livelihoods following forced evictions.

The first wave of displacement in Mukuru, they told us, began abruptly on October 10th, just two days after a public announcement that they should move to make way for the road. Some say they received notice only moments before the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) and the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) bulldozers appeared. Others were caught unawares: “We only saw bulldozers, the General Service Unit [the paramilitary force known as ‘GSU’] and men in blue [regular police officers],” said Rukia, a Mukuru resident also living at the time on the site of her demolished home. She continued: “[It was] like they were marching at Nyayo Stadium,” in reference to the military parades these forces perform before dignitaries at the National Stadium during state functions –  with forceful intent and an exactness in implementing an agenda.

Within a short time, heavy machinery razed to the ground residences, businesses, places of worship and schools under the watch of the police and the GSU. According to local residents and reports in the media, at least one person was killed by a police bullet during the protests that followed. There are reports of others being buried under the rubble as they sought to salvage their belongings, or dying of heartbreak.

“We only saw bulldozers, the General Service Unit and men in blue.”

Evicted households were offered neither compensation, nor alternative housing arrangements. Consequently, with nowhere to go and in a bid to protect from land grabbing “cartels” and thieves the spaces they had known as home for decades, many found themselves encamped on the rubble of their former homes. Their temerity and resistance in the face of the evictions and the looming private developers continues to inspire.

Who are these “cartels”, as locals refer to them? They are well-connected citizens with interests in property development that can, because of their likely links to the government, prompt land grabs in areas considered informal. Their association with the state, though difficult to prove, is evidenced in the continued role of the police during Mukuru evictions where they respond to demonstrators with teargas, water cannons, and live ammunition. During the most recent unrest, which was sparked by attempts to clear the area of residents and demarcate the space with beacons on 27 December 2021, two residents were shot dead and scores of others were injured. Today, months after the first eviction in early October, many of the displaced remain homeless and are unable to re-establish livelihoods in Mukuru in the face of a formidable alliance of enemies: property developers backed by the police and the government.

Informal evictions: Nairobi’s incendiary displacements

None of this is unique. Of the fifteen activists and community representatives from across the city who participated in our November focus group – from Mathare to Mukuru, to Baba Dogo and Kayole – two thirds had faced the reality or the threat of development-induced displacement. Each case involved populations in informal housing settlements having to make way for concrete structures – roads such as the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport-Westlands expressway, or residential high-rise buildings.

And yet these “formal” evictions – in which official involvement is often signalled by the presence of bulldozers flanked by various police forces – are just part of the story. We also learned of fires that residents believe are intentionally started to clear slums. It is virtually impossible to prove that these conflagrations are started with the deliberate intention to grab land. However, there are good grounds for the perception that these fires serve as “informal evictions”. Crucially, they have occurred in locations where the poor reside on desirable land; where land-title arrangements are contested, and/or where proximity to the city attracts the construction of more lucrative housing than the shacks that once stood upon these sites. As one activist commented, “In almost all places where there is a fire, a high-rise building will come up.”

Their temerity and resistance in the face of the evictions and the looming private developers continues to inspire.

Participants at our November meeting counted 14 episodes of displacement since the beginning of 2020, either through the construction of infrastructure or by the setting of fires. These took place in Shauri Moyo, Deep Sea, Kariobangi, Korogocho Market, Nyayo Village and Kisumu Ndogo, Baba Dogo, Njiru, Ruai, Gikomba, Viwandani, Mathare, Kibera and Kangemi. In total, these violent episodes involving either arson or demolition by bulldozers have deterritorialized, either permanently or temporarily, thousands of Nairobi residents over the last two years.

The social consequences of urban displacement 

Despite their diverse causes and contexts, urban displacements share a common set of consequences. Above all, they greatly diminish the living conditions for already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty. While they do not take place across borders, those who are affected live and suffer in ways that are comparable to the plight of refugees. Evictions typically involve the demolition of property, arrests and fines, and often feature brutal violence of the kind described earlier – the expulsion of entire communities from their homes, a disruption of livelihoods, and loss and damage of personal effects, such as belongings and identity documents.

And, certainly, this impact is gendered. Women, habitual caregivers, have had to take care of children in situations of greater precarity than usual in Mukuru. In the absence of housing structures and a community that can protect each other, the threat of sexual and gender-based violence looms larger than before, as but one example of the gendered impacts of forced evictions.

The hardship experienced by those displaced in urban contexts is persistent, with many being forced to move on more than one occasion. In several of the aforementioned sites, evictions have occurred more than once within relatively short spans of time. For example, Dagoretti Centre was demolished several times by the City Council between 1971 to 1978. During that same period, Soko ya Mawe (1975), Mafik (1979) and the villages of Light Industries (1980) also faced evictions. Indeed, the history of displacement in Nairobi is as old as the city.

Urban displacement: past, present, future

As early as 1902, four years into the emergence of Nairobi as a railway town, the “Indian Bazaar” was demolished for being “unhygienic” – a result of racialized projections that would lead these evictions to recur twice by 1907. Africans, whose very presence in the city was conditional upon their registration as workers, had to contend with the regular demolition of their dwellings, legalized by the 1922 Vagrancy Act.

During the emergency period, between 1952 and 1960, whole settlements in the Eastlands area, such as Mathare and Kariobangi, were flattened as they were perceived to harbour anti-colonial agitators and undesirable city dwellers. Fifty years since the colonial evictions, post-colonial urban governance continues to borrow from a similar toolbox: from Mji wa Huruma, to Muoroto to Kibagare settlements, thousands of Nairobi residents have been forced to make way to concrete: usually roads, buildings or housing for more prosperous citizens.

Today, over 60 per cent of Nairobi’s population lives in its informal settlements, which make up just 5 per cent of the city’s residential area. Many homes in these “slums” are built with corrugated iron sheets, and residents lack access to adequate sewage, electricity, or water systems, denied to those without the titles that would confer on them tenure rights to their dwellings. Over the years, justification for the violent displacement of the “informal” (we would say informalized) sector workers and residents has included concerns over tax evasion, trespassing, traffic congestion and food safety. Yet the highway that displaced Mukuru residents was equally informal: it did not feature in the 2014 Masterplan for Nairobi and nor was a strategic environmental assessment of its costs undertaken. It, however, continues to be defended by the government, including the National Environmental Management Agency (NEMA), as a viable means to “decongest” the city.” Evidently, concerns with order, modern aesthetics and “hygiene” have always prevailed over the principles of equity and inclusion in the governance of Nairobi, and it is probably for these reasons that the Evictions and Resettlement Procedures Bill – introduced to Parliament in 2012 – has not been passed.

In the absence of housing structures and a community that can protect each other, the threat of sexual and gender-based violence looms larger than before.

Despite a legislative framework from which to draw upon, such as Article 40 of the 2010 Constitution that upholds the protection of property, the majority of our elected representatives do not prioritize the formulation of policies that protect those at risk from the inhumane consequences of urban displacements. Evictions have been widespread over decades, and, as we have noted above, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest they may be taking increasingly sinister forms, with fires being deployed to expel and intimidate those living in areas considered “informal”.

If documents such as Kenya Vision 2030 are anything to go, the present scenario, in which the poorest elements of urban society are being repeatedly displaced in violent, unjust and often illegal evictions, is likely to worsen. This development plan, which is used to justify an ever greater proliferation of concrete infrastructure, is frequently referred to by technocratic proponents of large-scale hypermodern architecture. And as the infrastructure it portends is materialized in order to realize Vision 2030 or presidential legacies, more communities will likely be forced to move.  All of which underlines the need for an urgent response from civil society, which must scrutinize the role of the state, county governments, and private interests in inflicting incessant housing insecurity, and psychological and physical trauma on already marginalized communities.

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This article is the first in a series on migration and displacement in and from Africa, co-produced by the Elephant and the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s African Migration Hub, which is housed at its new Horn of Africa Office in Nairobi.