Thinking through metabolism and digestion

Njeri's performances, of which the vignette above is a partial transcript, raise fundamental questions: how much toxin can bodies absorb and what does it mean to absorb processed foods manufactured by distant and unfamiliar others or corporations? She mostly waits till rush hour to set up her stage in public spaces such as bus stops or open squares to teach about the dangerous effects of chemicals that colonize the gut. During her one-hour performances, Njeri fills a plastic five-litre bottle representing the stomach with consumer goods that people use daily. She gradually builds up her story by patching together both urban gossip and substances that represent all the junk people put in their bodies. Towards the end of her performance, the contents of the artificial stomach become black. She has added the most common chemicals put in foods, such as artificial food colouring, sodium nitrite, artificial sweeteners and large amounts of potassium chloride (artificial salt). Promising her crowd that she will eventually make fire, she proves that kemikali ‘burn’ (-choma) their bodies. This, she argues, causes a loss of strength that is most noticeable in the diminishing sexual potency of both men and women. Her teachings are structured around the idea that kemikali burn stomachs, altering the productive transfer of ‘life force’ (moyo). The stomach and gut are introduced as membranes where inside and outside merge, mediating encounters between the body and the outside environment. It is also in the stomach where the absorption of the (toxic) outside takes place.

My ethnography follows Cousins’ (Reference Cousins2015) argument that the gut and stomach have a mediating capacity. Looking for ways to investigate ‘how the natural and the social are mutually absorbed in [the gut's] porous linings’ (ibid.: 3), Cousins examined ‘whether we can think of the gut, defined loosely as the whole apparatus from the mouth to the anus – including the stomach, intestines, colon, and enteric nervous system that envelops them – as a specific kind of anthropological object’ (ibid.). The gut, Cousins argues, acts as ‘a particular kind of mediator of social relations’. Building further on this, stomachs, as presented by herbalists in Nakuru, serve as infrastructure, a means through which urbanites not only experience social lifeFootnote ⁶ but also actively process everyday urban toxicity through their bodies. From this vantage point, herbalists demonstrate how stomachs can be ‘too open’ (tumbo imefunguka), allowing toxins to seep through the porous membrane and thereby altering a prosperous life flow, or ‘too closed’, clogged by dirt (chafu) and having an equally negative impact on proper flow.Footnote ⁷ Through the use of herbal concoctions, the porosity of the stomach can be altered, re-establishing proper bowel movements and consequent life flow (moyo).

Devisch's (Reference Devisch1993) observations among Yaka communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo reveal a similar analogy. He demonstrates how Yaka communities see the stomach as a place of transition. Food is absorbed in the belly and whatever cannot be transformed into blood is excreted. Devisch argues that ‘blood is thought to be either produced or corrupted specifically in the abdomen and especially in the heart and liver’ (ibid.: 138). Maintaining healthy bowel movements is considered very important among Yaka and enemas were occasionally also taken to get rid of any inflicted ill (ibid.).

Back in Nakuru, references to good bowel movements and good urinary output as proof of good health are interpreted in line with ideas about urban toxicity. Njogu's story demonstrates this well. During my stay at Njogu's place, I often noticed how he came home and shut himself in his bedroom. His wife cooked food without spices and with ingredients that came from Njogu's ancestral home, which served as a shamba (plot) on which they grew organic vegetables. When I asked him about the reasons for his peculiar way of living and moving through his own compound, he explained it in terms of navigating Nakuru's toxicity. In contrast to his wife, he confided that he was more often exposed to the ‘threats’ of the city and therefore needed what he called revitalization (-kumarisha) within the safe confines of his compound. Despite his efforts, Njogu's health was deteriorating and at some point he was even admitted to hospital because of severe diabetes causing kidney failure. Once back home, the feeling of weakness due to fatigue and an impaired urinary output worried him. More than anything else, he considered these symptoms signs of weakness and diminishing life flow (moyo) and therefore embarrassing.

Herbalists such as Njeri make a similar link between flow – whether urinary output or bowel movements – and general health and well-being. In the transcript, Njeri showed her audience how stomach content (mara) turns black, emitting heat and toxic gases due to chemicals in foods that clog desired flows from, in her words, ‘inlet’ to ‘outlet’. The herbal solutions she promoted included herbal enemas that provoke bowel movement. She explained that an excretion of the toxic build-up in the stomach and the restoration of a good bodily flow from ‘inlet’ to ‘outlet’ helps bring back vitality, health, well-being, strength and virility,Footnote ⁸ all encapsulated by the idiom moyo or life flow.

Of relevance for my analysis is that the medicinal practices of herbalists such as Njeri and the navigational efforts of Njogu frame urban toxicity manifested in processed foods as being internalized via the digestive system through the stomach's porous membrane all the way into the internal realms of urbanites’ very being, where prosperous transfers and transformations of moyo or life flow are disrupted (also see Myhre Reference Myhre2018 on the life force in Kilimanjaro). In what follows, I demonstrate how the urban health challenges herbalists in Nakuru seek to address are often interpreted as originating from the capital Nairobi, which serves as the portal through which foreign (toxic) influences and lifestyles reach the Kenyan hinterland. For now, it is important to point out that the stomach is where such confrontations between ‘insides’ and ‘toxic outsides’ or ‘autochthonous’ and ‘foreign’ take place and thereby serves as a gateway through which urbanites in Nakuru internalize the urban everyday, which is often imagined as increasingly getting ‘too hot’ or polluted (chafu).

Mediations of the absorptive capacities of the stomach lining and gut or the excretion of toxic build-ups by use of herbal interventions thus help process dangerous toxic exposures specific to urban life worlds. Regarding these mediations and interventions, Nakuru's ambivalent position between village and metropole and unique socio-political and economic context make the city a fertile ground in which to investigate discourses and practices related to toxicity that go beyond the hegemonic views of urban life in megacities. The particularities of urban experiences in secondary African cities such as Nakuru are often overlooked by researchers, although these urban centres increasingly play a pivotal role in debates and policy regarding the future of (more habitable) urban life worlds beyond the major metropoles (also see Ruszczyk et al. Reference Ruszczyk, Nugraha and de Villiers2020; De Boeck et al. Reference De Boeck, Cassiman and Van Wolputte2010).

Nakuru formerly generated most of the country's agricultural and industrial production (De Meulder Reference De Meulder, De Meulder, Loeckx, Shannon and Fleisch1998: 34; Esho Reference Esho2009: 210), but it lost most of its glory during the 1980s and 1990s under the weight of structural adjustment programmes and global economic competition. After reforms and the liberalization of the market, especially under former president Kibaki's rule, processed foods flooded the town as soon as supermarkets started to mushroom countrywide. Kenya's breadbasket now had to compete with these foreign influences and their often dangerous effects on urbanites’ health. Herbalists draw on the knowledge that 75 per cent of global foods sold are processed (Stuckler and Nestle Reference Stuckler and Nestle2012: 1) and that secondary cities such as Nakuru are bombarded with what they consider nutrient-free foodstuffs; the government acknowledges that some of these make people ill yet lacks the capacity to sufficiently regulate them. It is against this backdrop that the highland town became an important centre where herbalists argue for less porosity and come up with herbal interventions to deal with an increasingly toxic world.

Herbalists’ performances also call into question ‘how and to what extent the self and the world mix’ through absorptions between persons and substances (Solomon Reference Solomon2016: 5). The stomach, gut and cities are all ‘permeable interfaces of active traffic’ (ibid.) and ideas about maintaining a healthy ‘inside’ by managing what enters town or, metonymically, the stomach or gut should be read as a response to the intricacies of globalization, neoliberalism and capitalist markets that reach Nakuru; this will be unpacked further below. Inspired by the body as the most tangible frame of experience and source for metaphoric transpositions (Devisch Reference Devisch1993: 133), the stomach and gut, brought forth by herbalists as mediating membranes between lush insides and often toxic outsides, are thus as much a lived reality as the imagined borders that separate Nakuru from elsewhere, or the fence secluding the homestead from the city, as Njogu's story exemplified. They should therefore be considered as infrastructures through which toxicity is dealt with and metabolized.

My use of metabolism draws on Landecker's definition of new metabolism as ‘a model in which food enters the body and in a sense never leaves it, because food transforms the organism's being as much as the organism transforms it’ (Landecker Reference Landecker2011: 177). Also, Solomon's notion of ‘metabolic living’ (Solomon Reference Solomon2016) is relevant for my analysis of the link between urbanity and toxicity. Solomon researches the intricacies of the entanglements of food, bodies and fat in everyday life in Mumbai, India. He defines metabolic living as ‘an actively ongoing process people endure to survive the porosity that all life entails’ (ibid.: 9) and investigates the ‘connections between food and urban life to explain that absorption is taking hold as the grounds for experiencing and making sense of chronic illness’ (ibid.: 5). Solomon's notion of ‘metabolic living’ to investigate the link between food, the body and the city is insightful beyond the Indian context as it allows us to evoke a shift from food's link with intimacy and personhood towards the domain of metabolic science, urbanism and consumerism. His analysis of metabolism hinges on the concept of ‘absorption’, which he introduces as ‘the possibility for bodies, substances, and environments to mingle, draw attention to each other, and even shift definitional parameters in the process’ (ibid.: 5). By inquiring into metabolic illnesses such as diabetes, Solomon introduces metabolic living as a broader framework to ‘explore the ways that people complicate and even dissipate boundaries across the skin and thus show how bodies and environments are mutually porous’ (ibid.: 9).

Metabolism as a process operating across bodies and environments is what Njeri's performances exemplify, and thinking of the stomach as an ‘anthropological object’, as suggested by Cousins (Reference Cousins2015: 3), or as the toxic frontier where pollution and food adulterations are dealt with corporeally enables a careful unpacking of the different socio-political and economic layers of the toxic everyday in Nakuru. Moreover, this focus on metabolism and digestion and the stomach and gut as corporeal ‘contact zones’ (Pratt Reference Pratt1991) or spaces for understanding the links between bodies, food and asymmetrical relations of power allows for an analysis of toxicity as inherently part of life. This implies what Langwick (Reference Langwick2018: 435) refers to as ‘a condition to navigate’, which – as my data on Nakuru suggest – entails an enteric praxis.

Absorbing ‘toxic outsides’

My interlocutors often looked back nostalgically to the 1990s, when Nakuru was considered the cleanest town in Kenya and delegations, even from abroad, came to Nakuru to learn how to keep their cities clean. A population surge after the 2007 election violence and the opening up of the Kenyan economy to foreign influences made the highland town lose its reputation and fuelled debates about Nakuru being too absorbed by ‘toxic outsides’. Nakuru residents traced back the acceleration in dangerous chemicals invading Kenya to the era of former president Mwai Kibaki, who served from 2002 to 2013. After years of stagnation and economic mismanagement under the Moi presidency, Kibaki revived the Kenyan economy, leading to a period of rapid economic growth. Kibaki ruled the country with a ‘look East’ policy and a neoliberal approach, opening up the Kenyan market at an incredible rate to non-Western powers, with China and Japan being the biggest players boosting the country's economy (Mabera Reference Mabera2016: 378). His regime also oversaw the creation of Kenya's Vision 2030, a development blueprint to make Kenya a middle-income country by 2030, based heavily on foreign investments. These intensifying economic ties resulted in growing distrust in the government's ability to manage food safety regulations and fuelled panics over imported (Chinese) foods that were counterfeit or contained high levels of toxins. These health concerns and lack of trust in major infrastructural projectsFootnote ⁹ realized through Japanese or Chinese construction tenders underlie ideas about (toxic) outsides harming Kenyans’ bodies.

In the above transcript of Njeri's performance, her provocative use of ‘Kanya’ has two meanings. First, she explains that it is a reference to the biblical figure Cain (Kaini in Kiswahili), the brother of Abel and the first-born son of Adam and Eve. Cain murdered his brother Abel and some Bible interpretations consider Cain to be the originator of evil, violence or greed. Second, it refers to the growing fear that Kenya will be taken over by China and become ‘Kanya’. Njeri thus draws parallels between the figure of Cain, the Chinese presence in the country and Kenya's Vision 2030, confirming the omnipotent presence of ‘evil’ in the city. As proof of this, Njeri's phone is full of testimonies about food scams that haunt Kenyan markets. One video shows how chickens are injected with antiretroviral medicine to make them grow faster, while another demonstrates the toxicity of Chinese imported fish.

These videos inspire Njeri's performances and draw our attention to the collusion between the state and corporate or individual interests. These interests have a profound impact on urbanites’ bodies, as their diets are determined to a considerable extent by global food supply chains dominated by imports from China and – perhaps especially evident in the case of Kenya – a few affluent families who rule food businesses. In Nakuru, there are, among others, the British-Kenyan Delamere family, which was among the first colonial families in Kenya and is now a producer of dairy products, and the Indian-Kenyan Atul Shah family, known for founding the famous Nakumatt supermarket chain. These families are believed to be part of the oligarchic structures ruling food businesses in Kenya and are often the subject of rumours. My Pentecostal interlocutors argued that these families are linked to Freemasonry and devil-worshipping. Rastafarians who organize weekly worship sessions in the hills on the edge of Menengai volcano similarly claimed that these businesses put kemikali in foods to ‘steal’ ‘life’ (uhai) from people, reducing African wanainchi (common citizens) to guinea pigs on whom new ways of accumulating ‘fast’ (haram) money are being tested.

Rumours about food scams are raised against a backdrop of borders that are thought to be too open, making the lives of Kenyans more vulnerable to the afflictions of globalization. In this regard, Meiu's (Reference Meiu2020) recent work on plastic belonging among Samburu communities is insightful and complements my analysis of metabolic living in Nakuru. He argues that worries over plastics gained momentum in the 1990s as environmental concerns and then during the 2000s as ‘a war on plastics’ rhetoric, resulting in the banning of single-use plastic bags in 2017 (ibid.: 232). In Nakuru, these debates over a ban became apparent in discussions about Lake Nakuru being increasingly polluted by plastics from the city that end up in the lake during heavy rains and the harmful toxic smoke above Gioto dumpsite from the burning of plastic waste. Both cases are thorns in the side of the Nakuru municipality, which seeks to officially become a city partly thanks to its ability to process its waste. Meiu examines ‘plastic's association with the foreign and its afflictions’ (ibid.: 224) and unpacks the notion of ‘plastic boys’ or ‘men in their twenties through early forties who make a meager living selling antiques and plastic artifacts’ (ibid.). Samburu consider these ‘plastic boys’ non-Samburu and lacking ties of descent, similar to the way in which plastic objects are interpreted (ibid.). Plastic as a material is therefore closely linked to notions of ‘unbelonging’ and, Meiu further argues, ‘for locals, both plastics and “plastic boys” are devoid of life force, a property they can impart to others’ (ibid.: 226). Similar references to plastic and unbelonging circulate in Nakuru. Remember the description of Njeri showing her audience the membrane of an egg, which, she argued, was made of ‘plastic’. Njeri claimed that eggs from broiler chickens are unable to fertilize naturally and therefore need to be hatched in incubators. She wondered if this meant they lacked proper DNA and consequent lineage. References to plastiki are thus used to denote ‘fakeness’ and foreign cheap products coming from China (also see ibid.: 226), which urbanites believe harm Kenyan sovereignty and do not belong in Kenya.

Eggs without DNA, ‘plastic boys’ devoid of life force and processed foods as a substance lacking cultural meaning (also see Holtzman Reference Holtzman2007: 442 on ‘grey foods’) all remind us of Mbembe's notion of ‘necropolitics’ or the ‘subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Reference Mbembe2003: 39). I return here to Njeri's identification of food chemicals with older forms of oppression such as colonialism and her use of ‘Kanya’ to denote a world haunted by ‘evil’. Her statements bear a resemblance to Mbembe's description of colonized bodies that are ‘kept alive but in a state of injury’ (ibid.: 21), the Comaroffs’ references to ‘zombies’ (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2002) and Nixon's interpretation of environmental pollution as ‘slow violence’ (Reference Nixon2011). These ideas demonstrate how certain bodies are ‘designated expendable’ (Nixon Reference Nixon2011: 151) – Mbembe calls these ‘discounted bodies’ (Reference Mbembe2019: 10) – and are more exposed to the violence of neoliberal market forces, environmental decay and chemical exposure, often because of the negligence of regulating authorities (Davies et al. Reference Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi2017: 1281; Davies Reference Davies2018). Njeri's dystopic stance, encapsulated by her use of ‘Kanya’, hints at this realization that Kenyans are ‘subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003: 40).

Concluding the analysis here would be reductive, condemning Kenyans exposed to toxic outsides to passivity. Instead, the actions of herbalists to alter the stomach's and gut's porosity and re-establish proper bowel movements – and by extension life flow or moyo – in ways that reconfigure insides and outsides, autochthonous and foreign, are a way to actively respond to boundaries that are considered too porous. Through their enteric interventions, herbalists take the regulation of toxic intrusions by foreign markets into their own hands, a task my interlocutors argued the government cannot be trusted with. In what follows, I delve deeper into this notion of invasive outsides that ‘interfere’ with urbanites’ life flow and link these ‘attacks’ of kemikali to ideas about the occult.

‘Eating veins’: kemikali, heat and the occult

Herbalists’ narratives unfold against the backdrop of regional debates about occult economies and witchcraft. Geschiere's (Reference Geschiere1997) The Modernity of Witchcraft and the Comaroffs’ (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1993) Modernity and its Malcontents are seminal for any analysis of occult practices as reflections of modernity's ‘excesses’. Building on these works, James Smith's (Reference Smith2008) study of the Wataita community in Kenya examines the metaphoric and imaginative dimensions of both witchcraft and development to demonstrate how modernity, development and witchcraft follow similar logics and operate in tandem.

Although these debates are highly inspiring, my data on Nakuru do not fit well within such narratives about an abstract ‘critique on’ or ‘alternative interpretations of’ modernity, late capitalism and neoliberalist markets. I do not consider herbal practices in Nakuru to be examples of some kind of radical alterity or ‘alternative modernity’, nor mere discursive critiques or reflections on the nature and uses of power (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996; Gaonkar Reference Gaonkar2001; Piot Reference Piot1999; Hodgson Reference Hodgson2006). Instead, key for my analysis is the fact that witchcraft pivots on the distinction between insides and outsides, autochthonous and foreign (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1997; Reference Geschiere2013; Stroeken Reference Stroeken2010), and therefore serves as an important frame of reference to discuss toxicity's interference. Kemikali's effects are interpreted as the collapsing of insides and outsides due to the interference of foreign markets in Kenya and thus follow the logic of bewitchment.

Taking this analogy into account, Njeri's use of ‘eating veins’ to talk about the effects of chemicals in processed foodstuffs is not a coincidence. Quoting Solomon, kemikali eating veins questions ‘who and what become the eater and the eaten? What is nutrition and what is poison? Who and what set the boundaries of inside and outside, delineating organism and environment?’ (Reference Solomon2016: 5). Hunger and eating are well-known metaphors in sub-Saharan Africa to talk about witchcraft and more broadly about bribery, power, corruption and ideas of greed (Bayart Reference Bayart1996; D'Arcy and Cornell Reference D'Arcy and Cornell2016; Fabian Reference Fabian1990; Schatzberg Reference Schatzberg2001). Hornborg extends the idea of eating to the sphere of capitalism and states: ‘[I]f we follow Marx in understanding the commodities we consume (i.e. metaphorically eat) as embodiments of other people's life energy, not only is capitalism a transformation of slavery, as Graeber has argued, but of cannibalism’ (Reference Hornborg2014: 133).

Hornborg's assertion of commodities eating other people's life energy recalls what the Comaroffs called ‘occult economies’ or ‘the real or imagined deployment of magical means for material ends’ (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999: 279). Herbalists explained that chemicals indeed have consciousness and invade the stomach in a similar manner to spirits (shetani) who feed on their hosts. These occult ‘absorptions’ toxify the blood and eventually make you ‘weak’ (-potea nguvu).

Kemikali are easily disguisable in everyday products and interpreted as part of the quest for success and power undergirding global capitalism and occult economies. Chemicals are thus key substances used for the accumulation of wealth through what herbalists believe are witchcraft and sorcery (see also Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999). In a similar fashion, Katrien Pype argues that Pentecostalists in Kinshasa believe that ‘witches’ try to capture blood and ‘eat life’ (bakoliya bomoyi in Lingala). She states that Pentecostalists consider this eating idiom or vampiric act a spiritual attack and that consuming one's blood is a technique to steal one's soul (Pype Reference Pype2012: 48). Back in Nakuru, Njeri reminded her bystanders not only that kemikali ‘eat’ (-kula) people's veins and pollute blood, which results in a loss of moyo, but also that the people behind these food businesses do not share the same blood or lineage, making them difficult to trust. She discussed the sacrifices one makes by consuming processed foods, explaining to her audience how the ‘demonic’ chemicals ‘weaken your blood’ (-poteza nguvu ya damu), pollute urbanites’ lineage ties and make them ‘dry’ (wameparara). Her use of dryness refers to a state of bodily wasting as a consequence of the overheating effects of chemicals in the stomach.

Acts of witchcraft are often linked to foodstuffs, implying that, while eating, one's agency is implicated in the agency of others, as a meal almost always involves work – ‘enacted agency’ – conducted by others (farmers, supermarkets, food scientists). My data on kemikali in Nakuru confirm that stuff eaten can be dangerous and that adulterated and processed foods invert roles of eater and what is eaten. Kemikali eat, and life force is eaten. Through this inversion, chemicals affect relationality. Not only are veins ‘cut’ (-kata), but, using Strathern's (Reference Strathern1996) terminology, relationships are also ‘gathered’, ‘severed’ or ‘blocked’ through kemikali's eating of life. According to Njeri's statements, chemicals deplete virility in both men and women and, as moyo is transmitted through the union of paternal semen and maternal blood, kemikali's eating of life inevitably leads to a complete depletion of a lineage's vitality. Njeri's stance towards chemical toxicity thus reveals how, once absorbed at the level of the ‘intimacy of the house’ (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2013), chemical substances affect life and its reproductive and metabolic processes. Through ‘eating’ blood, kemikali consume things that operate through blood such as kin and the ability to reproduce kin relations,Footnote ¹⁰ which, coming back to Mbembe's notion of necropolitics (Reference Mbembe2003), forms the foundation of ‘dead worlds’, what Njeri encapsulated well with her use of ‘Kanya’.

Taking into account the aforementioned fears about intrusive toxic outsides under the guise of foreign markets threatening Kenya's sovereignty, this intimate relationality between kemikali and sociality draws attention to the idea of ‘proximity’ coined by Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2013) and the idea of ‘interference’ as developed by Pype (Reference Pype2018), both hinting at the undesired involvement of others in one's life. Njeri demonstrates that others interfere in the lives of urbanites through violent toxic entanglements that attack from within. Her performances demonstrate the effects of undesired social connectivity – proximity becoming (toxic) promiscuity (De Boeck Reference De Boeck2012) – with food cooperatives consisting of unfamiliar distant others that place market gain above urbanites' health.

These witchcraft narratives are also closely related to instances of ‘overheating’. If the occult character of kemikali implies a collapse of insides and outsides, hindering life flow, then overheating is the result. Nina Johnsen observed that Maasai communities talk of medicinal matters as ‘bodily processes, using concepts of “hot” and “cold”’ (Reference Johnsen1997: 79). Also, Sukuma communities in Tanzania interpret the loss of ‘coolness’ or control over oneself as a consequence of witchcraft attacks (Stroeken Reference Stroeken2000: 164). Heat (nsebu in Kisukuma) is what the witch feeds on and refers to ‘unpredictable emotion and lack of self-control as well as the transgression of taboos’ (ibid.). Stroeken's analysis of adultery among Sukuma helps us better understand the use of the idiom ‘heat’ by herbalists in Nakuru. He explores how both ‘dirt’ and ‘foreign semen’ are expressed with the same idiom – ‘mako’ in Kisukuma – and describes how children born out of wedlock are considered ‘hot’ (ibid.: 164). Heat is thus best described as a breach of ‘cool’ insides by ‘matter out of place’ – dirt or foreign semen in the case observed by Stroeken and kemikali or foreign markets in the case of the toxic everyday in Nakuru.

Heat's polysemy, referring to both physical and social processes of change, is crucial to understand the regulation of moyo in Njeri's medicinal practices. During all her performances, she used a second installation in addition to the bottle representing an artificial stomach. Every time she put chemical substances or foods into the bottle, she added smaller quantities of them to a mountain of salt, sugar, sweets and eggs resembling a volcano. This volcano, she argued, was a fair representation of the foods people consume on a daily basis, and, if all went well, it spontaneously erupted towards the end of her performance, proving the overheating and therefore ‘devilish’ effects of chemicals on the body.Footnote ¹¹

Urbanites in Nakuru look for ways to metabolize this overheating in order to restore productive transfers and transformations of life forceFootnote ¹² or the reproductive capacity of life. Processed foods containing chemicals are devoid of life force – similar to Samburu notions of plastic described by Meiu (Reference Meiu2020) – and, as they invert the role of eater and eaten, they feed on people's well-being. When my research participants talk about the use of kemikali to ‘steal moyo’ and take away life, they bring forth notions of disruption to the vital life flow on which the very idea of growth and ‘endless possibilities of being and becoming’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 256) is based. Manipulated foodstuffs stop the productive transfers and transformations (hence metabolism) of life – that is, from calories to life force – as kemikali disrupt the flow of blood and, through the semantic enmeshment of moyo, of health, well-being and eventually life. As breasts and the penis are the core ‘transmitters of force’ (Gutmann Reference Gutmann1926: 659), sexual potency and genitals are often the main topic of public scrutiny by healers and their clients with regard to toxicity and pollution. Following the logic of witchcraft, yet going beyond ‘mere’ critiques on the use of power, my ethnography shows that concerns about the occult character of food adulterations and consequent herbal practices in Nakuru exemplify the ways in which everyday urban experiences of pollution and toxicity, including their political, economic, spiritual and social causes and consequences, are inherently metabolic processes and accordingly also dealt with corporeally.

In what follows, I delve deeper into herbal interventions to restore a proper life flow and introduce ‘cooling technologies’ that alter undesired porosity to the toxicity of urban life and metabolize undesired heat into habitable coolness.

Remedying heat

Herbalists in Nakuru argue that, in lived experiences of toxic entanglements, using herbal concoctions is a means to negotiate the body's porosity to the toxicity of urban life and ‘cool down’ overheated stomachs. Across Bantu-speaking Africa, ideas of ‘cooling’ (-poesha) prevail in many metaphors (among Kikuyu, see Peterson Reference Peterson, Peterson and Walhof2002: 39; for Sukuma in Tanzania, see Stroeken Reference Stroeken2010). In colloquial Kenyan Kiswahili, as an answer to the informal greeting ‘Mambo?’ (Problem?), you answer ‘Poa!’ (Cool!). Similarly, a Luo friend called Okeyo explained how he likes his pockets to be ‘cool’, like it just rained inside them, a reference to having money. Remember also Njogu, who argued that one needs to revitalize from bar meetings in order to ‘feel cool’ (-sikia poa). With regard to this idea of ‘cooling’, Stroeken argues in reference to medicinal practices that ‘all the initiations, whether rite of passage or rite of healing, are called practices of kupoja, or “cooling”. The Bantu verb signifies the regulating of life, which is more than healing. It comprises both the remedying of “heat” and the acquisition of social status and fame’ (Stroeken Reference Stroeken2018: 37).

In order to cool down overheated stomachs, herbalists use all kinds of herbal shrubs; the leaves of a muleleshwa tree (Tarchonanthus camphoratus) were the most common ingredient. The shrub-like tree is endemic to the Nakuru region and used to treat a variety of gastrointestinal disorders. Njuguna, a Gikuyu herbalist operating from Menengai volcano just north of town, used the Gikuyu verb root ‘-gita’ in reference to the efficacy of muleleshwa: ‘-gita’ originally connoted both ‘to grow too thick to be seen through (as in a hedge)’ and ‘to flourish, prosper’ and linked domestic order to wealth (Peterson Reference Peterson, Peterson and Walhof2002: 39). The verb referred to the act of fencing the compound to domesticate the ‘hot’ (joto) and ‘untameable’ outside forest in order to create a ‘cool’ (poa) and ‘fertile’ inside homestead, assuring prosperity for the extended family. Along the same line of reasoning, the compound was – and, according to certain interlocutors, still is – swept with miti mihoro (Gikuyu for ‘cold’ or ‘sweet’ trees) such as muleleshwa; these are non-poisonous, without thorns, have soft leaves and often taste sweet (see Johnsen Reference Johnsen1997: 91 for similar notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ plants among Maasai communities; Leakey Reference Leakey2007 [1977]).

In her analysis of interference in Kinshasa, Pype (Reference Pype2018) argues that suspicions of risks in the city's streets (nzela in Lingala; barabara in Kiswahili) are the urban equivalent of fear of ‘the forest’ or everything outside the social sphere that lives among communities in Central Africa (ibid.: 248). Commodities that can be found on the street – or, according to my data, in supermarkets, local hotels and bars – are considered dangerous as their origins or networks are unknown; in this way, they are similar to the world of the forest inhabited by ‘heat’ in the form of wild animals, poisonous herbs and malevolent spirits (ibid.).

Njuguna's use of ‘-gita’ in reference to this new urban moral order of ‘risky’ and ‘safe’ or ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ space needs further unpacking. The semiotic potency of ‘-gita’, ‘cooling’ (-poesha) and ‘heat’ (moto), all references hinting at boundaries between toxic outsides and healthy, fertile insides, makes these idioms particularly useful in relation to urban experiences of toxicity and pollution in Nakuru. When urbanites consume herbal concoctions, herbalists such as Njeri and Njuguna explained that they ‘fence’ (-gita) their stomach and gut to re-establish ‘cool’ and ‘fertile’ insides by growing bodies ‘too thick to permeate through’. They thereby shield from potential interference by foreign markets and protect themselves against overheating, which could make them ‘dry’ or devoid of life force; this is similar to Njogu's practice of revitalization (-kumarisha) within the safe premises of his compound. The use of miti dawa or herbal concoctions to alter the porosity of the stomach lining and gut and the consequent cooling and soothing effects these provoke show how everyday pollution and toxicity are dealt with corporeally and how older notions of ‘fencing’ (-gita), ‘insides and outsides’, ‘heat’ and ‘coolness’ are reappropriated as ‘technologies’ – means to ‘cooler’ ends – to respond to the world's current condition in which bodies and environments bear increasing toxic loads.

By way of conclusion: ‘metabolizing’ everyday toxicity

I started off this article with the argument that ‘dirt’ as ‘matter out of place’ no longer suffices to capture lived experiences with bodies and environments believed to be increasingly toxic and polluted. ‘Dirt’ – imagined as kemikali in foods by herbalists in Nakuru – is all around us, invisible, has tangible effects, and has inevitably become part of everyday life, increasingly entangled with global food supply chains in the hands of distant and unfamiliar others. A more relevant question to ask, I argued, is how urbanites corporeally deal with bodies and environments exposed to increasing toxic loads. The performances of herbalists – embodying the role of contemporary, urban haruspices – reveal that ‘navigating’ these toxic environments implies an enteric praxis. The enteric system mediates what the nation's borders are unable to keep out: foreign interference that threatens Kenya's sovereignty. More specifically, my ethnography presents the lining of the stomach and gut as a porous boundary between the self and the outside world, and it is by actively altering its porosity using herbal concoctions that toxic interference is corporeally mediated, and hence metabolized.

Following the logic of bewitchment, if it is not dealt with, the interference caused by chemicals can enter the ‘intimacy of the house’, where it is considered an occult attack on people's life flow. Herbalists frame these collapses of ‘insides and outsides’ as an increased ‘heat’, stating that these attacks by kemikali overheat stomachs, leading to bodily wasting.

The ethnography on Nakuru presented here, from the vantage point of stomachs as anthropological objects (Cousins Reference Cousins2015), reveals new modes of habitation that are very specific to the urban context of smaller secondary cities beyond the hegemonic views on toxicity and pollution from the larger metropoles. Bodily mediations of healthy insides and toxic outsides thereby serve as a means to assert both agency over one's life trajectory and resistance to the toxicity of everyday urban life. This toxicity is often interpreted as originating from larger cities, which serve as portals through which foreign (toxic) influences and lifestyles reach the Kenyan hinterland. As national boundaries in Kenya are considered too porous with regard to the afflictions of global markets, urbanites in Nakuru look for their own ways to navigate everyday encounters with the toxicity and pollution specific to urban life worlds. Mediating bodily porosity through the use of herbal concoctions allows them to corporeally process lived experiences of worlds that are too entangled, bodies that are too absorptive, and too much ‘heat’. Quoting Danny Hoffman, ‘the present is toxic. But within it, impossible new bodies are born’ (Reference Hoffman2017: 9). Bodies that – in the case of Nakuru – serve as infrastructure through which ‘hot’ and ‘toxic’ outsides, both materially and metaphorically, are given sense and are consequently metabolized.