Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of Home in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya

Abstract

At the heart of this dissertation sits a question: why have access to infrastructures and services emerged as key metrics by which people evaluate and debate the meaning of social and political belonging in contemporary Kenya? Part of the answer, I argue, lies in the long and entangled history of marketization and state-formation in this corner of Eastern Africa. The tensions between the public and the private, the state and the corporation, were the basis of early infrastructural projects undertaken by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA) under the dual mandate of “commerce and civilisation.” This marriage, I argue, formed the durable foundations of the austere state. Indeed, the tension between private capital and the commonweal did not end with the formalization of colonial rule, but critically shaped the infrastructural landscape of both the Kenya colony and later the postcolonial state. In understanding these dynamics, this dissertation addresses three infrastructures ‘in the making’—roads in the interwar period, radio broadcasting in the postwar period, and services offered by Safaricom, Kenya’s wildly successful communications company, in the present.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, I explore how the state and Kenya’s various communities have negotiated the technopolitics of infrastructures enacted under durable conditions of austerity. As I argue, public austerity over the longer term has repeatedly undermined infrastructures’ purported status as public goods to which all should have access. Specifically, conditions of austerity not only guided the distribution of infrastructures and services, but critically shaped the conditions of infrastructural work.

Considering infrastructures as multiply authored cultural and material objects, this dissertation pursues two lines of inquiry. First, I explore the ways in which designers and administrators imagined how infrastructures could materialize new economic, political, and social orders. Second, I trace the unforeseen ways that Kenya’s multiple publics, including ordinary and extraordinary experts, reshaped infrastructural networks in staking out the domain of the political.