Feigning jump - jump as a clear gesture, one jumps only to end up wishing for it. Taking off but aborting the jump immediately after take-off so that the process is incomplete. Whatever comes out is the intended result. A movement poetry forms straight away and develops by adding imaginary movement phrases to itself.
Imagine yourself standing at a point in a square, trying to reach all the four corners of it with all your limbs: extending your extremities: feet, knees, hips, legs etc. One question in this affair would be, how do you start? Do you start from plié or by elevating yourself? Where and how do you shift your body weight?
Do you initiate movement from your hands and allow your body to follow? How else would your movement be affected in the sense that you are searching for purity in movement? Is such a movement true and pure? But is purity even possible in an African context? Since colonialism (but even before then), Africa has always been hybrid.
We socialize spaces we walk in through the way in which we carry our bodies in those spaces, mincing steps, strolling, staggering, swaggering etc. We communicate our emotions, our sense of belonging, cultural history, ethnic identity in how we walk in the space. How we walk through spaces also reveal our subtle fears of unknowns, strangers etc
The Outer Ring Road
The Outer Ring road in Nairobi traverses the eastern edge of the city. It begins from Thika Super Highway at the General Service Unit Camp (a paramilitary police force that is used for crowd control), then runs towards Embakasi GSU Camp, cutting off the informal settlement areas of Korogocho, Kariobangi, Baba Dogo from the Central Business District and core areas that were regarded as nucleus of the colonial rule. Korogocho, these informal settlement areas were considered peri-urban and were neglected by the colonial government and remained so until the mid 1980s, when a World Bank-Kenya government low-cost housing project was designed for affordable housing. Areas such as Dandora, Kayole, Umoja and Donholm were settler sisal plantations. Major roads and highways entering and leaving the city have army barracks and police stations located at strategic points alongside them. Juja Road served the purpose of controlling movement into and out of the city through the Pangani police station and Moi Air Force Base. Thika Road has Muthaiga police station, the GSU camp and Kahawa Military Barracks.
Urban edges of the city are what Abdoumaliq Simone calls the periphery spaces of exclusion, insufficiency and zones of fragmentations. The Outer Ring Road and Juja Road enforced the colonial enterprises of keeping the natives from accessing areas which were regarded as socio-political and economic enterprises of imperial colonial rule. And to further control urban influx, the colonial government introduced the “Pass” or “Kipande”, a form of identification which still exists to date in the different iteration of Identity Card. Every native had to carry this pass or kipande to show that he is in employment and where he is employed, without which he faced deportation back to the village. This is precisely the reason that led to the creation of Mathare and Kariobangi slums which served as the hiding places for those who did not have the pass and official employment to be able to access the city.
In general, Nairobi roads remained a single carriageway that impacts mass movements to get stuck in traffic for hours. Adi Ophir defines the sovereign state as an apparatus of closure. Functioning alongside these apparatuses of closure is the deliberate motive to control movement, and the state controls these modes of confinement to freedom and violence. Enclosure, hindrance, modes of slowing things down, and boundaries of various types do not only hinder circulation, flow and above all liberty, but rather precondition freedom.
In the colonial British empire, street names played a significant role in promoting the British colonial identity in Kenya. Amutabi asserts that streets were more effective than buildings in promoting that hegemony.
Buildings aside, it is the naming of streets which had an unmistakable colonial tag about them. The streets were mainly named after something in Britain or relevant to Europe. The royal family was especially celebrated in the street names. Owning goes by naming and this, the British relish ( Amutabi, M. Buildings as Symbols and Metaphors of Colonial Hegemony: Interrogating Colonial Buildings and Architecture in Kenya’s Urban Spaces. In Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories; Damissie, F., Ed.; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2012. [Google Scholar])
Nairobi’s colonial history of controlling urban movements through spatialized mechanisms, including urban planning, emergency measures, and segregated infrastructural allocation, has left its mark on Nairobi, creating residues that continue to modulate the texture and character of the city.
Notes on violence
The meaning of sovereignty and citizenship in Kenya can best be understood through the perennial cycles of violence that take place after every general election. These violences occur along ethnic lines and are usually politically instigated and backed by the state. Those who normally bear the brunt of this violence have been the Luo people, and other ethnic groups that have been continuously and systematically marginalized and neglected in the distribution of public resources. What role does politics play in the redistribution of public resources? What are the links between road infrastructures and the movement of people to structural conditioning that render certain people vulnerable to various forms of exploitations, state sponsored violence, adverse weather conditions, climate change, and floodings?
What are the implications of these forms of violenceon the natural resources that subject the marginalised communities to cycles of slow violence and destructions in times of floodings in Nairobi? Food risk, and the as- sociated uncertainties it provokes is just one example of how colonial legacies endure deeply and problematically into the present. Nairobi’s city planning was designed to provide services to a smaller European population.2 The natives were not considered city residents at that time though after independence and over decades, Nairobi’s population has increased exponentially on a daily basis due to rural-urban migration and effects of climate change that has decreased agricultural food productions in the village thus forcing many to move to the cities. Since independence, Kenya’s governments have done so little to improve the city planning and sewerage system that was built during the colonial period. Its approach has always been that of command and compliance where in times of crisis, victims are expected to comply with the government’s directives which in most cases are ill informed, politically instigated, devoid of facts, and opinions from victims and experts. This exposes the majority of Kenyans to all kinds of suffering, diseases and instances of premature death.
The humility of the land to hold things
to nourish plants and witness life happen.
To nurture seeds and watch them sprout & grow.
Land is also where violence is met and justice sacrificed.
Luos are shot and killed for protesting - the land grieves but accepts their bodies.
When they die, the land receives their bodies with a rare humility
for the soil never rejects; it only opens up for death to die so that life may spring up.
Loo Ja Juok 1
1 The phrase comes from Luo community, closest translation may mean - the land is evil.
The burden of the term Jua Kali is that it systematically and forcibly places people in a confined world regardless of whether they have always retained the characteristics that have made them human beyond subjection and produced ways of thinking that are truly their own. Even if they have invented their livelihood and modes of survival, and ways of celebrating their ingenuity, found their institutions and political organizations different from the official sphere, the term Jua Kali still wants to confine them. To a large extent, Jua Kali becomes a sign of confinement, and dehumanization. Different points of references get attached to it which point to a series of images, words, enunciations, and stigmas, all meant to define the supposed attributes of local populations, their poverty, desperation, and above all, their forms of life whose length is uncertain, since hunger, diseases, death, and ugliness always lay close by.
That morning gloom and grey hung heavy in the air
like a reminder of a dread that had just happened or was about to happen.
I kept my eyes from the dirty Nairobi river underneath for fear of spotting a floating body as
perpetual panic of the unexpected lingered around.
Traces of blood on the Ngomongo-Dandora wooden bridge
blood stains on the Ngomongo- Kariobangi rough road
that previous night Mungiki hacked innocent Luos in cold blood backed by state police.
Like in Naivasha, in Korogocho they were dismembering bodies and stuffing them in gunias before dumping into a nearby sewer running towards Njiru. Life is only defendable when you have a fully functioning body, and this body can be so many things. We were too decimated to make a body.
Kelele takatifu
The middle.
The grey. The not-so-not.
The not to be trusted. A bridge. A snitch.
A bit of both. A bitch of both worlds. A hybrid.
The middle ground.
The grey part. The not-so-not.
The bridge. The not to be trusted.
A refusal to take sides. Rejecting both because anyway, no side is interesting.
A compromise.
When it's impossible to negotiate both, one is forced
into the middle grey
compromised zone.
In the making of this city, certain colonial designs were used to structure memory in the public spaces. Today, these act as vehicles for commemorating colonial legacies and accentuating the desired vision of how that legacy is to be lived through and through. Nairobi is a product of colonial planning that materialized into an array of interrelated notions, where meanings are manufactured, distributed, and exchanged. But that colonial legacy is trauma and pain.
For all we've got to say
we need some particulars to write them down for the future.
To right the lie that framed our lives for decades
and how abstract?
The lie that
what you haven't said, remains unsaid.
That once you say something, you can't unsay it
and that anything you can't say well is unsayable.
Since we've got things to say, we need to write them down for the future.
Only then will things meant to be said get into history
without the excuse that time came
and found us too inefficient, and language too insufficient
to fully express ourselves.
Crossing hills
to see love sleeping
down Lambwe valley.
How nice the feeling
of barefoot on thorns and dry leaves
to see love in her stunning beauty soothed
in a pitch-black starless night.
We leaving Lagos behind
Past Victoria island over the 21 km bridge to main land
The 11am morning water is calm and the sun casts a shiny viscous over it
On both sides the water extends to imaginable distances
On the left it extends to the floating shacks and vegetations
On the right water extends infinitly till it meets with the skyline
We pass the floating village, brown chocolate roofs patched together
Beneath the shacks are the disposed deluge of the plastic soup
The air outside is warm and humid
The landscape is adorned with grey concrete buildings half finished some old.
They look west African city, or mombasa city or Zanzibar city perhaps
Because of the islamic influences and the agbada, filas
Catching and throwing
in the end you only have memories
as some kind of repertoire.
Catching and throwing near and far.
You first need to find that something
Catch it with either part of your body,
Improvise with shaking and stepping
step to allowing movement to flow,
stepping and not brushing.
Step before you move the body
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