Police, Native and Location in Nairobi, 1844-1906
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The Bleaching Carceral: Police, Native and Location in Nairobi, 1844-1906 Yannick Marshall Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Yannick Marshall All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Bleaching Carceral: Police, Native and Location in Nairobi, 1844-1906 Yannick Marshall This dissertation provides a history of the white supremacist police-state in Nairobi beginning with the excursions of European-led caravans and ending with the institutionalizing of the municipal entity known as the township of Nairobi. It argues that the town was not an entity in which white supremacist and colonial violence occurred but that it was itself an effect white supremacy. It presents the invasion of whiteness into the Nairobi region as an invasion of a new type of power: white supremacist police power. Police power is reflected in the flogging of indigenous peoples by explorers, settlers and administrators and the emergence of new institutions including the constabulary, the caravan, the “native location” and the punitive expedition. It traces the transformation of the figure of the indigenous other as “hostile native,” “raw native,” “native,” “criminal-African” and finally “African.” The presence of whiteness, the things of whiteness, and bodies racialized as white in this settler-colonial society were corrosive and destructive elements to indigenous life and were foundational to the construction of the first open-air prison in the East African Hinterland. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction......................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Encounter………………………………………………........8 Chapter 2: Kiboko Colony …………………………………………….…...52 Chapter 3: Pacification: The Expansion of Punishment …………………..117 Chapter 4: Figurations of Order: Preconditions for the Town……………..167 Chapter 5: The Town: The Bleaching Carceral…………………………….213 Concluding Remarks…………………………………………………….....295 Bibliography………………………………………………………………..298 i Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been written without the love and support of my parents and my brilliant sister Yolanda. It would not have been possible without the life-sustaining love of Asha Khamis who not only encouraged me and kept me to task, but soothed policemen and immigration officers enough to make them laugh at the heated frustration in my eyes. I thank my supervisor Joseph Massad whose appetite for risk led him to bet on me despite the odds. He shows me, never through words but through the example of his life and career that the intellect can and must be fearless. The possibility of a Joseph Massad, and his thriving in a world hostile to the colonized and the radical, has been a lamp and my road map. I thank Mahmood Mamdani whose impatience with ignorance almost shocked me out of mine, and Partha Chatterjee who proved that genius is cool and uninterested in the noise of celebrity. I thank Kevin Fellezs for being there and Neville Hoad for saving the day. Natacha Nsabimana’s critique of both my chapters and my politics were indispensable. My singular partner in crime, I thank her for helping me to pry open a space of Pan-African life into the campus and the greater New York City. Sudipta Kaviraj has been the clearest picture of pure philosophy I have had the pleasure to witness. Jessica Rechtschaffer not only saved me every semester of my PhD but without her constant expression of interest in my work and ideas and protection my survival in the program would not have been possible. If it was not for the late Manning Marable and Farah Jasmine Griffin who first took an interest in me and drew me from Toronto telesales to the bright lights of New York I would have been lost. Sharon Harris’ desk at the Institute for Research in African American Studies was a much needed rest-stop in the white-hot desolation of campus life. The quality of this work would have been irreparably compromised if the staff at Zanzibar National ii Archives did not keep the lights on for me a minute overtime each visit, or the security guards and librarians at Kenya National Archives did not look on me with sympathy enough to bend the rules. Abdul Nanji’s patience with my stuttered Swahili and his insistence about making language learning political allowed me not only to conduct the necessary research for this dissertation but helped me to attain a life-goal I did not know I had. Baltasar Fra-Molinero and Sue Houchins not only provided me my first opportunity to teach and learn through teaching #BlackLivesMatter but their kindness, understanding and insight made the last grueling days of writing a joy. I would like to thank, finally, all of those under the thumb of anti-black police violence and still surviving with style. Here’s to clapping back. iii for Asha for black(ened) people Dans cette ville inerte, cette étrange foule qui ne s’entasse pas, ne se mêle pas: habile à découvrir le point de désencastration, de fuite, d’esquive. Cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule… - Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal iv Introduction Whiteness for white people, but especially for non-white people, is a violent, confining institution. In several spaces the presence of the white body invites sensations of anxiety, of conspicuity or invisibility, discomfort, humiliation, a sense of disorientation, futility and punishment. The white body is not simply a body among others. As signifier and weapon its presence in white supremacist society convicts others of their inferiority. It inspires self- immolation through toothpaste and skin-lightening cream, and the surgeon’s scalpel. It encourages a mother’s assault on the body of her child. It leads her to the diurnal rituals of pressing the nose bridge of her baby together in the crib, the foam of chemicals or the heat of curling irons searing a toddler’s scalp. The rickshaw driver flogged with the umbrella of the white gloved lady and flogged again for impertinence on the magistrate court’s steps knows first- hand that the space of whiteness is violent, corrosive and confining. He would laugh at Foucault’s warning about the expanding carceral society. After a day of nursing the slices on his back inflicted by the kiboko,1 the strain in his neck from averting his gaze, hanging up his kipande,2 praying for the quiet after the raid or hut-tax collector’s visit he might think of asylums and prisons as a respite. The whites, their bodies, the intrusion of their material, the itch of their language, the world they make is hot, poisonous, corrosive, and containing all the chloric properties of their perverse invention, bleach, a liquid state of white supremacy. After the deluge of settlers and the open-air prison left in its wake, the open-air sjambok strikes that forced 1 Hippopotamus-hide whip. 2 Pass card. 1 prostrations, the sus laws, the man under the weight of a rickshaw would not be threatened by a police-state. The proceeding is a brief history of that man3 put under the rickshaw; the history of the burning. From the first flickers of the approaching caravan and the gallant attempts to meet it with a flurry of arrows, to the quiet resignation, for some, in the midst of the conflagration, sat in the township of ink and raiding. The Bleaching Carceral is the white supremacist police-state, peopled by white-bodied settlers, explorers and administrators ruling over and manipulating the bodies, lives, and environment of the indigenous inhabitants in the space historically referred to as Nairobi. It is white supremacist and not European because European ethnic and national distinctions collapsed4 in the region. The discursive construction of power and authority in the region was raced white. Nairobi and the wider region of what would become the East Africa Protectorate had a uniquely explicit white supremacist identity due to the conceptualizing of the space as the “White Man’s Country.” As will be shown, the logic of law, the conceptualization of the good society as presented in newspaper articles, the liberal and illiberal prescriptions for progress offered by administrative officials all reflected the presumption that whites would decide, white bodies and interests where to be especially protected, and the telos of progress was “white” civilization.” 3 Although not an explicit aim, the dissertation might be also read as a study of racialized masculinity and the conflict between oppositional masculinities in a colonial setting. 4 With the possible, notable exception of the Jew. The Jew in Europe, however, has always had a strained relationships with white nationalism. During the first third of the 19th century in Germany for example, (the period immediately preceding the period studied in this study), a time or racialism and nationalism, the Jew was beginning to be positioned as a “race” outside of the Volk. See Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), 64-95. 2 This white-supremacist order was also, in effect, a police-state. In late fifteenth-century Europe, during the collapse of feudalism, the term “police” was ubiquitous. Throughout Continental Europe there was a growing concern about how to manage the “masterless” men who escaped their feudal lords and were causing disorder near the guilds and emerging urban centers of capitalist production. The term police was synonymous with the term policy and both denoted the “legislative and administrative regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order…and the regimenting of social life.” Mark Neocleous continues, defining the concept of polizeistaat operative in this dissertation: “The institutions and activities considered necessary for the maintenance of good order were known as Policey Ordnung, or Polizeiordnungen – police ordinances – and referred to the management and direction of the population by the state.