Activists, care work, and the ‘cry of the ghetto’ in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for ‘justice’ but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask ‘whatever happened to empathy?’, but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists are then tasked with incorporating intentional emotional and care labors in their everyday material and discursive practices in order to restore empathy in and for their neighborhoods. This article is informed by over a decade of fieldwork in Mathare ‘slum,’ as well as interviews and participant observation with activists from a cross section of poor urban settlements in the city of Nairobi.