Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled. The paper includes archival and authored photographs:

Contesting Civilization: Louis Riel’s Defence of Culture at the Collège de Montréal

A newly discovered manuscript of a debate between two college students sheds new light on Louis Riel’s experience in Montreal. By the time the young Métis left Montreal, he was an accomplished public speaker with a sophisticated understanding of Canadian society and culture. This article argues that Riel’s education was not isolating and frustrating but, rather, encouraged him to engage with public issues and moral reform. It demonstrates that Riel, in responding to the debate sparked by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, could engage meaningfully with Western theories of civilization. This debate is examined in the light of mid-nineteenth-century elite Catholic education, missionary and colonial thought, the nature of the civilizing mission, and Riel’s theories of political sovereignty. Tracing Riel’s unique intellectual genealogy provides insight into the diverse and dynamic ways Indigenous people experienced colonialism. Finally, it offers a critique of the “colonial archive,” particularly when it comes to Indigenous identities. Ultimately, Riel was a successful student who could act as an exemplar of “Western civilization” while confidently maintaining his own identity as an Indigenous person.

THE BEARERS OF NEWS: PRINT AND POWER IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA

Historians have drawn on newspapers to illuminate the origins of modern nationalism and cultures of literacy. The case of Kiongozi (The Guide or The Leader) relates this scholarship to Tanzania's colonial past. Published between 1904 and 1916 by the government of what was then German East Africa, the paper played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, by promoting the shift from Swahili written in Arabic script (ajami) to Latinized Swahili, it became the mouthpiece of an African elite trained in government schools. By reading and writing for Kiongozi, these waletaji wa habari (bearers of news) spread Swahili inland and transformed coastal culture. On the other hand, the paper served the power of the colonial state by mediating between German colonizers and their indigenous subordinates. Beyond cooptation, Kiongozi highlights the warped nature of African voices in the colonial archive, questioning claims about print's impact on nationalism and new forms of selfhood.

Imperial Intimacies—Further Thoughts

Reflecting on arguments and insights in the discussion essays by Eddie Chambers, Marisa Fuentes, and Marc Matera on the author’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, this response essay focuses on the dilemma of black feminist critique, practice, methodology, and pedagogy in a constant struggle with and against the colonial archive. It poses questions about the possibilities and limits of developing alternative ways for narrating racialized lives into being.

Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.