Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large‐Scale Infrastructures of East Africa

Abstract

In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large‐scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.

‘Under construction’: everyday anxieties and the proliferating social meanings of China in Kenya

“…Interestingly, these notions appear in direct opposition to how ‘the Chinese’ are perceived in Africa, as seen from the list of associations above. While the stereotypes of Africans in this online discourse include ‘poor’, ‘lazy’, ‘sexist’ and ‘threatening’, affirming a longue durée pathologization of Africans (Shen 2009; Kimari and Ernstson 2020), the increasing social meanings of China and ‘the Chinese’ mentioned above, for the most part, link them relationally to processes enacted towards ‘progress’, ‘modernity’ and ‘development’, 13 however contested this may be. Shen (2009: 442) adds that ‘Africans have become convenient straw men through whom Chinese users can project their wished-for Chinese identities’.…”

“…In this regard, while the synonymity of China and ‘the Chinese’ to infrastructure is also seen in other countries on the continent, such as Angola (Croese 2012), most of these references are situated in the particular socio-political and economic dynamics of Kenya–China relations. Beyond the connections to railways, expressways and debt that have been discussed earlier, links to, for example, racism stem from other events, such as when a Chinese restaurant in the city refused to accept African patrons for evening meals in 2015, the uneven labour relations within SGR operations (see Kimari and Ernstson 2020), and even the video of a young Chinese worker who was caught on camera calling the president a monkey 11 . Other surprising societal links to ‘the Chinese’, such as late-night spas, prostitution and ‘Thika Road babies’, 12 make evident that analyses of the practices and experiences of China in Africa can no longer be relegated solely to the formal political and economic domain, but must now also dwell on and in our intimate fabrics.…”

“…This statement could be one of the ‘myths about Africa and China’ (Sheridan 2018: 145) that circulates as a consequence of greater bilateral proximity, or a reproduction of the long-established trope that juxtaposes the continent's fates and futures after independence with those of Asia, and in particular Singapore 6 . Whatever the case, implicit in this comparison is Asia's rapid development and Africa's ‘lagging behind’, and the construction of recent mega-infrastructures in Kenya, such as the SGR, are seen to be motivated by this bid to enable a ‘new chapter in Kenya's history’ (Okoth 2017; Kimari and Ernstson 2020) – one filled with the ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ that Sino-Kenyan alliances are said to pursue.…”

“…It is worth restating that the undertone of some of these associations reveals racialized relations of being whose tenor is smoothed over by government references to ‘misunderstanding[s] and unresolved cultural differences’ (Kimari and Ernstson 2020). What's more, though not broached sufficiently on the continent, local and travelling versions of ‘yellow peril’ (Plummer 2019; Park 2013) are provincialized in local terms such as ‘Chinku’ and ‘Ching-Chong’, references to how the Chinese ‘eat everything’, or even a derogatory mimicking of supposed Chinese speaking practices.…”

The Making and Unmaking of a Megaproject: Contesting Temporalities along the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya

“…This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on infrastructural megaprojects by exploring how communities across Northern Kenya engage in stabilising or unsettling a megaproject and its spatio‐temporal imaginaries. The question, “what makes a megaproject?”, has been investigated from a plurality of positions: megaprojects have been discussed in connection to risk (Flyvbjerg et al 2003; see also World Bank 2019); future‐making (Müller‐Mahn 2020); capitalist expansionism (Kanai 2016; Zhang 2017); colonial legacies (Aalders 2020; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020); peace‐ and state‐building (Bachmann and Schouten 2018; Stepputat and Hagmann 2019; Uribe 2019); and reconfiguration of state spaces (Demissie 2017; Mayer and Zhang 2020; Ong 2003), to name but a few. In addition, critical scholarship has pointed to the constellations of capital and state interests that drive the current rush of large infrastructure projects across the global South, and have in addition exposed the severe forms of exclusion and dispossession that they produce (Li 2018; Tsing 2003; Uribe 2017).…”