Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest

By Pius Adebola Adesanmi and Allan Rutherford Blair

Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest provides a sampling of some of these insightful articles from the first five issues of Nokoko, bringing together some of the pieces that for the editorial board of the journal are particularly perspicacious in their analysis and resonant in their crafting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daraja Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988832326

Pius Adebola Adesanmi

Pius Adesanmi was Professor of francophone and anglophone African and Black Diasporic literatures, politics and cultures and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University until his passing in the tragic Ethiopian Airline flight ET302 crash of March 10, 2019. His research fields also spanned Postcolonial writing and social media; Popular Culture, Street Culture in Africa; Postcolonial and cultural theory, and Third World feminist discourses. Adesanmi believed in public intellection and held high hopes for a Pan-African future. His first book, The Wayfarer and Other Poems, published in 2001, won the Association of Nigerian Authors prize for poetry. His 2010 book, You're Not a Country Africa, won the Penguin Prize for African Literature. The remarkable collection of essays tried to unravel what Africa meant to him as an African and pull apart the enigma that is the continent. A subsequent celebrated book of essays on Nigerian politics and culture, Naija No Dey Carry Last: Thoughts on a Nation in Progress, was named to Channels Televis

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Introduction: On the matter of African matters

Introduction

Blair Rutherford and Pius Adesanmi

In the opening shots of the 2019 documentary Système K, the camera follows a middle-aged dreadlocked man meandering through the crowded and often decrepit streets of Kinshasa. At one point, he bends down, digs around the debris on the ground and pulls out a discarded bullet case, which he keeps. Shortly afterwards the camera shows him entering through a metal gate into a courtyard full of arresting sculptures of two or so metres high male and female bodies lined up against a wall, constructed out of old bullet cases and rusty cutlery. We soon find out that this bricoleur is Freddy Tsimba, one of the few Kinshasa artists profiled in this film who has made it, in terms of finding an actual market for some of his work beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo.[1] But in the film his sculptures join that of other innovative creators, including performance artists whose bodies become the jarring work – bedecked in astronaut outfits made from scraps (a Congolese man in space, Kinshasa space), rolling in the filth and puddles of the roads, hotwax dripping down on one or blood on another which he pours over himself as he stands unsteadily in an old bathtub fastened with wheels being dragged over the potholed roads by a small group of men, and so on – in the streets of a quartier of Kinshasa, trying to disturb the numbness of many riding in the fula fula (quick quick, commuter-taxi minibuses and trucks), commercial trucks, private autos or weaving through crowds of pedestrians. In Kinshasa—an urbanscape whose constant energy and movement, entangled in a series of invisible cities which resist objectification, colonization … and constantly out of focus (de Boek and Plissart 2004: 8)—the boundary between art and quotidian life, one of the artist adds, is quite porous for simply trying to survive in this city of more than ten million with limited public investments is like creating art itself.

While recognizing that many of us involved in this book are like Renaud Barret, the Kinshasa-based French film director of Système K, and are in relatively privileged positions in our various communities around the world, we nonetheless all have striven in varied ways and forms to both show how wider projects, forces, and processes affecting and shaping African geographies, livelihoods, and imaginaries are understood, embodied and reworked from these street-level lives. And, equally important, to critically find ways to unsettle, to call out, and condemn the range of inequalities, terrors, and miseries historically and contemporaneously woven into the soils, political economies, and human and nonhuman beings of Africa and its diasporas thanks to particular configurations of colonial and postcolonial, localized, national and transnational power dynamics and social relationships.

Through their analyses, the contributors to this book in their own way are examining different forms of agency Africans on the continent and in its diasporas deploy against, through, or are even complicit with, the inequalities and injustice pervading our world, as a way to critically reflect on what could or should be. In so doing, their analyses show something new, novel, if not surprising and interesting; expressions associated with the Ga word, nokoko, which is the name of the open-access journal in which they were originally published.

Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest brings together insightful articles from the first five issues of Nokoko, the journal of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Since its establishment in 2009, the only stand-alone academic department with a sole focus on African Studies in Canada has helped to galvanize a greater focus on Africa. Refashioning an open-access journal gifted to the new Institute by one of its founding members, Professor Daniel Osabu-kle, the Journal of Pan-African Wisdom then became Nokoko, with a renewed commitment to bring a range of views and voices in and on Africa, some of who are just emerging, all of whose insights are fresh and challenging.

This sampling of articles from Nokoko brings together some of the pieces that for the editorial board of the journal are particularly perspicacious in their analysis and resonant in their crafting. Grouping them in this book permits a new dialogue to emerge around the key themes of cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest. Their intersection here provides a sharp spotlight on some of the seams, knots, and contestations of varied matters of import for many Africans in the twenty-first century.

As a verb (Africa matters to…), the authors contribute to teasing out the varied ways Africa is increasingly important in economies, politics, and daily lives for many outside of the continent of Africa even if, perversely, there is a deeper sense for more and more in different parts of Africa of abjection, of rejection by their governments and corporations and a generalized indifference by those in the Global North and international institutions (Ferguson 2006). As African Studies scholars, if not pan-Africanists, the contributors all are committed to demonstrating why Africa matters in light of the ongoing historicized marginalization of the states, peoples, and sociocultural dynamics from many discussions of so-called global processes and trends: showing, for instance, that not only did much of the wealth that drove the industrial revolution in western Europe come through the exploitative and deadly Atlantic slave trade and the colonial economies in the Americas fuelled by the unfree labour but also the wealth continues to flow out of Africa to Europe, North America, and Asia to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually through unequal transfer pricing agreements with offshore firms, tax avoidance, and other schemes (Africa Progress Panel 2013). Africa matters also in international football and cosmopolitan music and fashion trends, migration patterns and debates, literatures, climate change scenarios and consequences, conservation practices and movements, and securitization infrastructures and panics, among other transnational configurations, apparati and desires enabling new and continued political economies, sociocultural networks, and hegemonies. In other words, we are pointing out that despite apparent indifference and neglect by institutions and opinion leaders that take the world as their remit, this continent has been vitally important to a plethora of world-wide processes and imaginaries.

And yet we are adamant that our demonstration of the importance of Africa on a planetary scale does not blind us to the growing economic misery and despair in many parts of Africa. While donor reports declare that the absolute poverty rate in Africa has declined over the last few decades, even these typically sanguine declarations of the importance of the neoliberal policy these organizations promote still show that the number of Africans living in poverty, illiteracy rates remain unchanged and incidences of violence across the continent are on the rise (World Bank 2016). Moreover, even their claims about declining absolute poverty are disputable, in part due to questionable statistical methodologies and analyses deployed to neglect the growing economic inequalities in Africa and beyond (Hickel 2016, 2018). The African Union has created a commendable vision in its Agenda 2063 documents (African Union 2015), but from South Africa to Algeria, Zimbabwe to Eritrea, Lesotho to Nigeria, Burundi to Guinea Bissau, jobs are scarce, government bodies and other institutional nodes of authority are more apt to close down channels of expression and debate, sometimes violently, than enhancing or enabling them and many African populations that are increasingly tapped into social media worlds and connected to family and friends living abroad thanks to the ubiquity of cellphones are feeling left behind.

And it is here in its nounal form (some African matters include…), that the chapters in Africa Matters trace some of the forms, objects, and lives of differently constituted groups, polities and communities within African and its diasporas. The Africa matters here range from fashion to literature, entrepreneurs to monetary policy, regional administrative bodies to feminist movements, cellphones to cinema, xenophobic violence to political activism. Through incisive analyses of some of these sociocultural lives, objects, ideas and ideals helping to constitute socialities, polities, economies, and imaginaries within and of the continent and its diasporas, the authors of this book provide more enriched understandings of them.

And it is through examining the intersection of these two senses of matters—how explicitly and implicitly Africa matters in international, transnational and national domains of policy, activism, and popular culture that in turn help to provide new or different valuations on different matter that become, in part or whole, African—that the contributions to this book bring to the foreground. By examining different palimpsests in these intersections—be it the traces of the discursive and nondiscursive that revalue certain ideas, objects, geographies as matters that seem to stand on their own or how different material and nonmaterial items animate the political and intellectual analyses, cultural productions, and economic flows—that these chapters highlight different indexical and iconic moves and socio-political stakes at various scales that are not always apparent.

Let us touch on three such palimpsests one finds threaded through this volume before we briefly examine each chapter.

African migrants have screamed across screens, national and subnational legislative houses, and coffeehouses and living rooms throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East, indexing the million asylum seekers entering into these countries since 2010 (also sweeping up the many other Africans who have migrated through other channels, or who are undocumented, or are there on student or work permits, etc.). Both the raced physical corporeality and the idea, if not meme, of African migrants have wrought angst, outrage, and suffering and many state and non-state actions ranging from policing, deportations, electioneering, rescuing, xenophobic attacks, protests, and labour practices, especially in states hugging the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Israel, Turkey to Spain (e.g., Flahaux and De Haas 2014, Kalir 2015). It also has led to strenuous efforts by the European Union to enrol northern African governments, including dictatorial regimes, to control and limit the flows north of the Mediterranean (Jakob and Schlindwein 2019).

Yet, this intense, disparate and contested focus, particularly since 2015, distracts attention away both from older forms of mobility within and from Africa and a different set of passions, desires, and hostilities. One of the oldest, if not foundational, forms of (forced) mobilities in which a raced sense of Africa was deployed was the Atlantic slave trade, generating a range of changing and different forms of African diasporas in the Americas (and elsewhere) and a range of transnational political economies and cultural forms predicated on particular imaginings of these communities with varying consequences in different parts of Africa (Akyeampong 2000). Such types of cultural politics brims both in W.R. Nadège Compaoré’s incisive analysis of the global human hair industry, U.S. cultural industries, and hegemonic visions of black female beauty as well as Suvi Lensu’s disquisition on the mediation of the attachments to Africa by a small group of diasporic filmmakers.

Another migration route that has grown over the last two decades is between different African cities and regions and cities in China, with a growing number of African individuals and groups heading to China for educational and particularly, economic opportunities (Bodomo 2012) as well as a vast expansion of Chinese governmental, business (including state-owned), and individual visits and migration across the continent (Park 2009). Wendy Thompson Taiwo’s photo-essay provides a perspicacious and evocative insight into an element of these human mobility connections.

The mass-mediated version of African migrants in Europe also neglects the fact that most African refugees are within other African countries, where they face varying degrees of acceptance or hostilities, particular configurations of state and humanitarian practices from governmental, international, civil society and community bodies, and different sets of grammars of raced, gendered, linguistic and ethnic belonging (Milner 2009, Bakewell and Laundau 2018). For instance, particularly since the political and economic implosions in their country since 2000 (Rutherford 2017), Zimbabweans have become marked as the largest migrant community in South Africa and thus a key representative of "the makwerekwere, the Afrophobic term in South Africa to mark African migrants who don’t belong," as Wallace Chuma’s sharp analysis makes clear.

The second palimpsest is African women, one that goes back to at least early European missionary efforts in West Africa, southern Africa and elsewhere with a focus on moulding gender relations and gendered comportment according to their own patriarchal imaginaries (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). Along with bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—which in many ways continue the work of missionaries, not only faith-based NGOs but also secular ones (Manji and O’Coill 2002)—have played a crucial role in constituting African women as an object of humanitarian and development concern. At the same time, African ruling political parties and African women’s and feminist groups have also galvanized varying legislative, state, and non-state actions directed towards particular socioeconomic, political, and pedagogical projects concerning African women, which can support, contest, or redirect other development initiatives (e.g., Urdang 1989, Nnaemeka 2004). From FGM (female genital mutilation) to economic empowerment, the growth of oppositional feminist African fiction to those challenging the application of Western gender/sexuality classification schemes to precolonial African polities, African women have been iconic figures in many interventions and analyses at multiple and intersecting scales (e.g., Amadiume 1987, Adesanmi 2004, Abusharaf 2007, Tamale 2011). It is also a theme threaded through many of the contributions to this book.

Whereas Compaoré examines the racialized gendering of the transnational human hair industry, Stephanie Urdang reflects on her own feminist awakening as a South African living in the United States in the late 1960s when she learned more about the important African women’s anti-apartheid march in Pretoria in 1956. Both Nduka Otiono and Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin critically analyse gendered struggles and inequalities in different domains of Nigeria. Otiono draws a vivid portrait of the Nigerian intellectual, activist and leader, Catherine Acholonu, and the gendered struggles she faced in the literary field. In turn, Adeniyi-Ogunyankin insightfully draws on postcolonial and different feminist lenses to show how discourses on culture and religion are deployed to marginalize women in Nigerian politics. Sinmi Akin-Aina also examines women and politics, with a careful analysis of Kenya’s  oldest  and  largest women’s  organization in light of the tensions inherent  in  African  feminisms.

The chapters by Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Akin-Aina also squarely tease out the overlays of the last palimpsest we will note here: African politics. Politics has become a key index of African matters within and beyond the continent. From corruption to repression, electoral fixing to narrowed classed, ethnic, prebendalist definitions of publics that the government serves, Africa is often overdetermined by particular connotations of its particular form of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003). Like those by Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Akin-Aina, several chapters complicate such portrayals. Whereas they examine how politics or feminism becomes a particular icon that configures uneven and unequal pathways for individual women in specific historical and socio-geographical contexts, other chapters explore both institutionalized political economies and eruptions against such uneven fields of privilege. Jessica Evans smartly examines global political economies, particularly the push for structural adjustment policies by international financial institutions and bilateral donors, that have had ramifications in undermining previous forms of economic livelihoods and leading to a range of transnational pursuits for means of survival in southern Africa and, in response, more stringent border controls against African foreigners in South Africa (also discussed in Chuma’s chapter), contrary to the promises of regionalism of the Southern African Development Community. Elizabeth Cobbett also expertly draws on political economy analyses to innovatively show how the South African Reserve Bank uses monetary stories as discursive interventions in national political debates as a way to firm up the African National Congress government’s neoliberal policy positions. Two other chapters look at creative attempts to provide platforms for those multitudes on the margins of the formal political systems. Wangui Kimari and Jacob Rasmussen carefully examine the possibilities and challenges of a rather ad hoc social movement in Nairobi called The People’s Parliament in Nairobi, while one of the key activists in this movement, Gacheke Gachihi, briefly reflects on the promises of Pan-Africanism for new social activists on the continent.

It is here, the to-ing and fro-ing between critical examinations of how Africa imbues and energizes particular imaginaries and actions (while marginalizing others) within and beyond continental spaces and simultaneously  highlight some particular objects, people, ideas while being tripped up by many other configurations of such material and non-material entities, that the chapters show the doubling of African matters. Although to varying degrees each chapter engages with, if not draws on, issues of cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest, we are somewhat arbitrarily assigning four chapters to each of these categories as a template of organization for the purposes of this Introduction.

The matter of cultural politics

All matters of struggle, hegemony, protest, and oppression are infused with cultural terms, symbolic sentiments, and signifying distinctions that help motivate, rationalize, dissemble, and constitute the debates, identifications and socialities on all scales of action: from the murmurings and rumours careening down the proverbial radio trottoir to the boardrooms of banks, from state prisons to international development donor workshops (Adesanmi 2011). While all the authors in this book are directly examining and engaging in different forms of cultural politics concerning Africa and its diasporas, the four chapters included under this heading are each explicitly examining and or deploying registers of culture, including some of the aesthetics techniques or discursive genres of persuasion and power.

In her poignant photo essay, Two Cities: Guangzhou / Lagos, Wendy Thompson Taiwo takes the reader into the lives of Yoruba traders who ply the complicated stream of commerce between Guangzhou, China and Lagos, Nigeria. Drawn into these worlds through reading about a protest by Nigerian traders in Guangzhou over their maltreatment by authorities, Thompson Taiwo examines some of the desires and contestations of the mundane and quotidian in the transnational lives of some of these traders through her words and photos. Making up the largest proportion of the approximately 20,000 Africans living in the coastal Chinese province of Guangzhou in 2009, these Nigerians negotiate a range of boundaries and tensions as they ply their trading endeavours. Reflexively positioning herself—and her camera—in some of the flows of life, Thompson Taiwo vividly captures some of the terms marking the possibilities and borders of business and socialities for these Yoruba men in China and Nigeria.

A very different insight into Nigeria is provided in Nduka Otiono’s chapter, Catherine Acholonu (1951- 2014): The Female Writer as a Goddess, where he offers an elegant unpacking of the gendered struggles of the great Nigerian writer, scholar, and political activist, Catherine Obianuju Olumba-Acholonu. His biographical elucidation of this prominent Nigerian intellectual, writer and public figure not only covers some of her audacious and substantive inquiries into Nigerian history, gender politics, and international politics but also her enchanting mediations on gender, religion and history in her poetry. As insightful as his own analysis is, Otiono’s chapter also wonderfully allows the late Nigerian public intellectual herself to note some of the motivations, challenges, and terms of inspiration and opposition that marked her writings and her life in his October 2005 interview with her in Abuja, when she was the Senior Special Adviser on Arts and Culture to President Olusegun Obasanjo.

In Filming Home, Plurality of Identity, Belonging and Homing in Transnational African Cinema: A Case Study of the Films Restless Wandering, The Place in Between, and That’s My Face, Suvi Lensu gives a resonant mediation on the tropes of belonging in a deeply unequal and raced world in three transnational African films. Their filmmakers—Tunisian Nouri Bouzid, African-American Thomas Allen Harris, and French (of Burkinabé heritage), Sarah Bouyain—explore in the films she studies registers and challenges of belonging inside and outside of Africa and along the boundaries of many cultures. This exquisite, theoretically rich, essay speaks to larger issues on digital community formations, an increasingly important medium for generating and informing understandings of continental, raced, gendered and other identifications and affects.

Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin’s chapter, ‘Spare Tires,’ ‘Second Fiddle,’ and ‘Prostitutes’?: Interrogating Discourses about Women and Politics in Nigeria, brings the reader back to Nigeria through providing a critical African feminist interrogation of discourses about women and politics in Nigeria. As was clearly on display in the run-up to the February 2019 elections, the grounds of politics in Nigeria, like so many countries in Africa, are treacherous for women candidates. In her incisive analysis, Adeniyi-Ogunyankin lays out the range of barriers against women, as colonial ideologies inflected in postcolonial Nigeria claim culture and religion relegate women to family matters. Through empirical research in Ibadan, she uncovers some of the key terms marking the moral boundaries deployed to police women’s participation in politics.

The weight of political economies

Political economy analysis in academia is shorthand for a variety of conceptual approaches that examine international and national dimensions of states and markets as key institutional sources of inequalities, hegemonies, and tyrannies. Informed through different configurations of Marxist, feminist, critical race theories, and postcolonialism, those deploying such an analytical approach seek to reveal varied dimensions of economic, political and social power, creating advantages for a few and disadvantages if not misery for many. The four chapters placed under this heading marshal some of these conceptual lenses to examine some of the contours and landscapes of power within and beyond Africa.

In The South African Reserve Bank and the telling of monetary stories, Elizabeth Cobbett provides a fecund and original analysis of some of the tropes and narratives deployed by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to reinforce its (and by extension, the African National Congress government’s) neoliberal policies and to undercut criticisms proposed by sympathetic but powerful critics like the main national trade union congress, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions). Situating such monetary storytelling within the political economy of international finance and the particular state formation of post-apartheid South Africa, she illustrates how reserve banks (along with credit rating agencies) have become key arbiters of power in the global governance of finance and some of the discursive techniques and strategies of the SARB to wield this weight on the national scale.

Jessica Evans continues this political economy examination of South Africa with her chapter, The neoliberal turn in the SADC: Regional integration and disintegration. In it, she shows how the regional development and partnership imaginary of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) when it was created during the transition to post-apartheid South Africa becomes undercut by the pressures for neoliberalism by the global political economy. Anchoring her analysis around the drastic heavy-handed responses of the South African government against the informal cross-border traders of the region who seek to enter it to buy (and occasionally sell) their wares (a growing livelihood in the region thanks to the devastating consequences of neoliberal policies adopted in southern Africa, like elsewhere), Evans spells out the strict border policing as a stark contrast to the open-border promises of the regional body.

Wallace Chuma’s sharp chapter, The Role of Radio and Mobile Phones in Conflict Situations: The Case of the 2008 Zimbabwe Elections and Xenophobic Attacks in Cape Town, also touches on this theme. Yet, his chapter does so through a rich analysis of some of the responses of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants to the most severe outbreak of Afrophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008 as well as some of the strategies by Zimbabweans to cope and reveal the intense political violence in Zimbabwe unleashed by its government and allies after the first round of the presidential elections there in March that year. In particular, he examines how new information communication technologies become deployed by Zimbabwean citizens as well as radio stations in both countries in everyday negotiations of violence, be it coming from state or non-state actors. Drawing on substantial empirical research in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Chuma offers a well-rounded perspective on how new and old media can be deployed in times of conflict.

Through her chapter Indian Hair, the After-Temple-Life: Class, Gender and Race Representations of the African American Woman in the Human Hair Industry, W. R. Nadège Compaoré traces the political economy of the transnational human hair industry and its part in reinforcing raced and gendered images that play out in diasporic and national circuits. Built around the production of Virgin Indian Remy hair in India and its marketing to African American women in the United States, she establishes the ways in which a gendered construction of blackness is constituted for African Americans and, given the summital position of U.S. cultural industries in Africa, beauty ideals for different black African women in Africa itself, pointing to the inequalities and power dynamics that are part and parcel of intimate bodily aesthetic decisions.

Grammars of protest

While the chapters found in the previous two headings show Africans on the continent or in the diaspora generating cultural forms for various audiences on the scale of the person or the globe, engaging in debates, carrying out entrepreneurship, performing bureaucratic manoeuvrings, avoiding terror, and the like, the chapters in this final one address specific politic actions. Attending to the specific grammars of protest in particular historical moments shows how different Africans have been generating specific confrontations with power as well as some of the imaginaries driving different commitments to social change. The chapters here attend to weighty matters of organized attempts at social change as well as personal reflections of such change, showing some of the specific grammars of how the personal becomes the political.

The lead-off chapter under this heading beautifully articulates this phrase, the personal is the political. The renowned South African feminist writer, Stephanie Urdang, critically reflects on her coming-to-awareness in the apartheid state, a reflexivity prompted by her return to her country of birth after fleeing there to the United States (and also conducting research in Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, among elsewhere). In The Story of Cape Town’s Two Marches: Personal Reflections on Going Home, she eloquently inquires into the complicated resonances of home (echoing some of the themes in Lensu’s chapter) and political struggles for her as well as for so many other South Africans. The semantics of home is uneasy for many Africans in the diaspora, even if they do not necessarily recognize themselves as belonging to such a (contested) community, but for Urdang its meanings are laden with struggles for change tied to those multitudes who fought against apartheid South Africa; struggles, she realizes, that continue, albeit in at times different forms, today in the post-apartheid country.

In Beyond an Epistemology of Bread, Butter, Culture and Power: Mapping the African Feminist Movement, Sinmi Akin-Aina carefully delves into the enduring Maendeleo  Ya  Wanawake  (MYW), Kenya’s oldest and largest women’s organization as a way to assess them as an agent of social change and to critical reflect on wider social movements that could be called feminist. She unpacks the specific cultural logics of advocacy and service of MYW from the colonial period until the twilight of the one party rule in Kenya in the 1990s, showing the tender cross-class (and initially raced) alliances, the necessary but uneasy relationship with the then ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) party and the tensions with dominant understandings of feminism in Kenya that led to what could be called a very feminist organization distancing itself from such a label. This careful analysis of both MYW and African feminisms smartly demonstrates the palimpsest through which social actions occur.

Wangui Kimari and Jacob Rasmussen continue the focus on Kenya with their searing chapter, ‘Setting the agenda for our leaders from under a tree’: The People’s Parliament in Nairobi. Unlike MYW, this is a more rhizomatic initiative, the establishment of Bunge la Mwananchi, people’s parliament in KiSwahili, in a central park where there have been daily gatherings of Kenyans to discuss and debate the matters of the day. Calling itself a pro-poor social movement, Kimari and Rasmussen carefully examine how it is political, contesting the spatial and semantic parameters of what generally is constituted as political in this East African country. Through a provocative and compelling use of theoretical works and an ethnographic analysis of Bunge la Mwananchi, they show the spatial politics that led to its emergence in the 1990s and innovations of this movement in the 2000s as they trace how it performs a grassroots alternative to political participation.

A short