Goats, materials and uncertainty in Nairobi

Abstract

Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi’s becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko’s goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and blockages, and processes of containment and transformation, that entangle lives and livelihoods in Kiamaiko with those of the city as a whole. These flows and processes are marked by uncertainties and contingencies that can be both full of potentiality for (re)forging regimes of order, social relations, subjectivities, mobility and livelihood aspirations, and entrench inequalities, social hierarchies and exclusions, as well as undermine the safe containment of material forms essential for liveable lives. Since the mid-2000s, city authorities have repeatedly failed to impose planning and public health-related regulations and relocation on Kiamaiko’s goat industry. These efforts and their repeated failure reflect the emergent but productive excessivities of the material, corporeal and bodily flows that constitute cities, which both demand and yet often defy formal mechanisms of regulation, containment and order.

Introduction: the stuff of African cities

“…Cities are places in flux, incomplete, and always in a process of becoming (Guma 2020;Fontein et al 2023). To draw attention to process in this way also means drawing attention to time: to the ways that cities unfold across time, but not in a linear fashion.…”

“…There are some strong examples of such attempts within African urban studies, notably De Boeck and Baloji's (2017;2016) visual collaborations on Kinshasa. More recently, we have been part of a five-year collaboration with a range of creative producers, writers and artists in the research project 'Nairobi Becoming', which produced a series of exhibitions, events, films and a forthcoming book (Fontein et al 2023). Meaningful collaborations can open up other ways of knowing that shift the emphasis from deductive, completionist narratives to more open-ended and subjunctive possibility.…”

Ironies of accomplishment: negative aspiration, economic resentment and the myth of the middle class on Nairobi’s new urban outskirts

“…3 The topic broached by Kenyan TV station K24 evokes the gap between surface-level performances of wealth and the deeper reality. The 'brokeness' concealed by middle-class 'fakeness' finds comment in work such as artist Onyis Martin's 'A table for two', where he contrasts the luxury of Nairobi restaurants with the reality for many city-dwellers of eating at cheap bandas (kiosks), a meditation on the pressure for Nairobians to project their achievements in spite of their material circumstances (Fontein et al 2023). The majority of Kenyans continue to derive their wages from the informal economy (KNBS 2022), and when economic success is read through external markers, genuine precarity is easily concealed.…”