Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One PRESENT PASTS, UNCERTAIN FUTURES
- Part Two MAKING NEW HORIZONS
- 4 Land, Home and Funerals
- 5 Constructing Security Claims
- 6 Making the Future in the Shadow of Vision 2030
- Conclusion: Belonging to the Future
- Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
5 - Constructing Security Claims
from Part Two - MAKING NEW HORIZONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One PRESENT PASTS, UNCERTAIN FUTURES
- Part Two MAKING NEW HORIZONS
- 4 Land, Home and Funerals
- 5 Constructing Security Claims
- 6 Making the Future in the Shadow of Vision 2030
- Conclusion: Belonging to the Future
- Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
CCTV footage made public showed KDF [Kenya Defence Force] officers entering the Nakumatt store and later walking out each carrying paper bags. More footage showed KDF officers ransacking safes in jewellery stores at the mall but [Chief of Defence Forces] General Karangi said they were undertaking a procedure he termed as ‘sanitization to ensure their safety.’ [Other footage showed] soldiers taking boxes of mobile phones from a shop where a body lies on the ground.
L. Wanambisi, report on looting after the Westgate Mall attack Capital News, 22 October 2013I made my way slowly along a muddy path between bungalows hidden by high corrugated iron fences. Shouts and screams started up behind me, people began to rush by. There's a shooting! The police are there, they yelled. Reaching the house, Arina unbolted her heavy front door and welcomed me inside. Neighbours dropped by, we learned more: ‘thugs’ fleeing a robbery nearby had sought refuge in a little café in the estate. The police were alerted, a shootout had ensued. Arina lamented what a place Kaloleni had become, full of gangs and crime. ‘They are just terrorists,’ she sighed. ‘These days we don't have security’.
Fieldnotes, 28 August 2014Making a life in Nairobi has long been about managing insecurity. This has taken many guises. From colonial refusals to allow permanent dwelling in the city to fears of violent crime and now the chronic uncertainty of Vision 2030, the felted landscape of Nairobi has been shaped by the upheaval and rupture of various insecurities. The globalised insecurity of terrorism has also made itself all too present, with the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy and then, in 2013, the Westgate Mall attack shockingly exposing new urban vulnerabilities. Security has become a lens through which life in the city is frequently understood and experienced, whether discursively, in debates about failures of urban policing, or materially, in the proliferation of gated communities. It influences architectural design, the vocabulary of politics, the topics of discussion on Twitter. It is difficult then to discuss the making of Nairobi without considering the ways in which (in)security permeates the atmosphere as well as the substance of the city, from small-scale construction activities to conversations about Kenya's place in the world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nairobi in the MakingLandscapes of Time and Urban Belonging, pp. 139 - 158Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019