Nairobi Becoming: security, uncertainty, contingency is a sandbox of multidisciplinary experimentation, subtly demarcated from the conventional scholarship of an edited volume, curating the daily realities of an urban ethnography and the experiences of Nairobians in the context of a post-independent Kenya. It is indeed a treasure trove of Nairobi city fates and Nairobians’ future visions. Fontein, Diphoorn, Lockwood and Smith assembled twenty-eight astute scholars, daring artists and photojournalists to untangle the tensions between ‘coherence’ and ‘fragmentation’ in a city characterized by fear, ontological insecurity, uncertainties and police brutality. The work illuminates the hopes and aspirations for a brighter future under the guise of Vision 2030 and institutional bricolage. However, these aspirations are overshadowed by structural exclusion in a world of what the multidisciplinary editors describe as the ‘fragmented city’ of Nairobi, as urban communities respond to the rapid transformations of modernity.
The editors and authors alike claim to position the debate between two rivers of scholarship – ‘African agency’ and the ‘materialistic-inclined’ – by seeking to give voices to the multiple and diverse experiences of an African urban setting. With a combination of academic orthodoxy and artistic tactics, the main challenge for the editors was the harmonization of various scholarly traditions into a cogent and coherently integrated piece of work with a clear line of argument. It seems to me that Nairobi Becoming is an experiment in how to develop a collaborative and multi-authorship knowledge production system that vividly captures diverse voices, styles and experiences from below. In this regard, Fontein et al. make a strong and convincing case for the importance of ‘creative improvisation’ as a style of writing scholarly work by harnessing intellectual diversity and inclusivity. To this end, the editors of this volume manage to weave a ‘cocktail’ of scholars and artists into an intellectually captivating piece with vestiges of a multidisciplinary knowledge system.
But it remains unclear whether Nairobi Becoming was indeed a multidisciplinary project of historiographic utopianism. The use of interlude – commonly known as ‘writing back’ – adds to this methodological uncertainty. Although interlude offers an alternative approach to the rather reductive methodological frame commonly used in conventional scholarship, there are several instances where the editors were unsuccessful. It does not matter how poetic the construction of the interlude or how effectively it rouses readers’ ire; the lack of a distinctive methodology in curating materials renders the book less admissible within the family of multidisciplinary knowledge systems. The text is full of scientific jargon – ‘biosystems’, ‘metabolism’, ‘bacteriology’, ‘cadaver’ and so on – but the use of such terminology does not rationalize a scientific approach. Therefore, for the editors to ‘similize’ biological concepts such as ‘metabolism’ for the functioning of an urban system or ‘metaphorize’ ‘bodies’ for cities is not only unscientific but invalidates the verifiability of knowledge generated through such pseudo-scientific approaches.
The metaphorization approach is used to paint a picture of a fragmented city. However, Fontein et al.’s parallelism between science and artivism is the main problem with the book. For instance, several sections make reference to one of the authors with an artistic background (James Muriuki) having taken water samples from the Nairobi River to establish the level of water pollution. The text does not provide any scientific protocols for this activity. Surely, one would not expect an artist without a scientific background to conduct a water quality investigation? The reader is left wondering what ‘steampunk science’, fully ordered, might look like as an artistic project.
The reason for my criticism is not the book’s content but rather its flawed methodology. It is undeniably reasonable for authors to claim that the Nairobi River’s pollution constitutes a form of insecurity in the landscape of the city. It is an accurate indication of other forms of risk and uncertainty that perhaps constitute part of what the antithesis of the book would have been: Nairobi (Un)becoming. However, this does not justify the multi-disciplinarity of the text. Still, Nairobi Becoming not only is useful for students of political science studying urban sociology from below but also will perhaps attune students and researchers alike to reconceptualize the notion of the ‘formality–informality’ spectrum of institutions through the veins of the politico-utopian titans of urban institutionalism.
This work is a stark reminder of the ‘Nairobi city yet to come’ and its potentialities, located far away from the ‘hustlers’. The ‘curated’ (as opposed to edited) approach is a strength as much as it is a weakness. As is often the case in edited volumes – particularly when the extra layer of curating a mix of both traditional scholarship and intellectual ‘artivists’ is added – disjointedness and inconsistency are inevitable. Indeed, Fontein et al. never achieve an overarching ‘analytical operator’ – some sort of unifying school of thought that should have run through the text to give it coherence. But despite its incoherence, the book is admirably informative and interesting to read.
In sum, this book identifies and deploys a novel approach – ‘creative improvisation’ – in what should have ordinarily been a historiographical debate on urban political sociology. Both the approach and the debate in this book invoke a curiosity to reconsider ‘cocktail’ scholarship through a decolonizing lens. This may unravel some insights into a rapidly changing Nairobi City in a country with a huge youthful population (popularly known as Gen Z) with opportunities and uncertainties that transcend social sciences.
