Joyriding: Making Place in Nairobi’s Matatu Sector

Ference, Meghan E.

doi:10.1111/ciso.12226

Cited by 24 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 28 publications

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“…6 Documentaries, plays, sketch performances and network television shows that feature matatu operators are just some of the genres and mediums that have fictionalized matatu workers' lives. A Netflix original series called Sense 8 also featured the story of a matatu driver in Nairobi as a main character for two seasons (see Ference 2019). which is followed by public debates and regulatory policy initiatives (Lamont 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘You will build me’: fiscal disobedience, reciprocity and the dangerous negotiations of redistribution on Nairobi'smatatu

Ference¹

2021

Africa

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Those who populate the productive frontiers of capitalism are often targets of violence by groups and institutions aiming to poach, control and regulate their economic practices. This article draws on years of ethnographic research conducted with informal transport operators in Nairobi who drive, conduct and own the minibus taxis called matatu. In order to navigate the city, this workforce engages in a coordinated but tense economic dance along the dangerous and shifting lines between illegality, work and reciprocity. The article aims to situate the more dangerous and morally ambiguous aspects of the ‘hustle economy’ ethnographically, within the generative and ultimately mobile location of urban transportation infrastructures of the matatu sector. Building on the conceptualizations of social infrastructure of AbdouMaliq Simone and Janet Roitman's study of fiscal disobedience, whereby the legitimacy of regulatory authority is questioned and undermined, matatu workers as infrastructure challenge multiple levels of state and non-state regulation through a variety of practices that blend danger, violence and control with solidarity, reciprocity and redistribution. This article evaluates and analyses distinctive features of ‘hustling’ in Nairobi through the ethnographic lens of matatu transportation operators as they navigate dangerous negotiations with the state, the police and vigilante gangs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘You will build me’: fiscal disobedience, reciprocity and the dangerous negotiations of redistribution on Nairobi'smatatu

Ference¹

2021

Africa

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From “para-transit” to transit? Power, politics and popular transport

Klopp

2021

Advances in Transport Policy and Planning

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‘Compliments from the Housewives’: Contesting White Public Space in Late-Colonial Nairobi

Ference

2023

J. Afr. Hist.

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This article examines the racial politics of decolonization in late-colonial Nairobi in the decade before independence through the unique space of the colonial bus using archival letters from a group of European women who called themselves ‘The Housewives’. In letters to Nairobi's mayor and the Kenya Bus Service (KBS), the Housewives argued against a newly proposed transportation policy that would make all seating on the colonial buses the same price, doing away with the first-class section. The letters reveal that African bus riders, particularly Muslim women riders, were centrally important in this crucial time in Kenya's urban history. With Nairobi still under a ‘State of Emergency’ as military operations against the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) were coming to an end, these letters show colonial buses as battlegrounds during the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya with extremely porous social borders and transportation vehicles serving as rich sites of urban life.

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Joyriding: Making Place in Nairobi’s Matatu Sector

Cited by 24 publications

References 28 publications

‘You will build me’: fiscal disobedience, reciprocity and the dangerous negotiations of redistribution on Nairobi'smatatu

‘You will build me’: fiscal disobedience, reciprocity and the dangerous negotiations of redistribution on Nairobi'smatatu

From “para-transit” to transit? Power, politics and popular transport

‘Compliments from the Housewives’: Contesting White Public Space in Late-Colonial Nairobi

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