As part of the Emergency measures in the 1950s, the British colonial government in Kenya introduced regulations that imposed passbooks on the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru (KEM), who were seen as the wellspring of Mau Mau. Implemented in 1954, the passbook system, which bore resemblance to the formally abolished kipande, restricted the freedom of movement of a population seen as collectively suspect. Like the vipande, passbooks were aimed at controlling the movements of Africans outside their designated native reserves and regulating their ability to work. But the new system, which applied exclusively to those ethnic groups deemed a security threat, further securitized this bottleneck. Passbooks were part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy aimed at screening “unidentifiable” urban residents, sieving the “loyal” from the “disloyal,” restricting the mobility of inhabitants of Central Province, and isolating insurgents and their sympathizers from rights to the city. As I explain in this chapter, passbooks also became a vehicle for an ambitious, if short-lived, attempt at racialized social engineering—aimed at remaking Nairobi’s residents into a “respectable” urban working class based on notions of stable, companionate marriage.
WISER Seminar Papers
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon from 16:00 - 17:00 SA time during the teaching semester. Forthcoming seminars are available here, and past events are detailed in our archive.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants should please read the paper (below) prior to the seminar; it will typically be available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
In this semester, the Trust seminar will explore questions of credit and debt on the African continent. In contrast with the argument that trust and confidence are synonymous (most evident in the Edelman Trust Barometer and the reporting around it), some of the most convincing scholarship argues for the direct association of trust with credit. Other researchers, studying informal African institutions, have found credit everywhere on this continent, but little that can be associated with trust. Some state institutions (like SACCOs in Kenya) and simpler penalties, like efficient bankruptcy laws, seem also to be instrumental in shaping the politics of credit. One key driver of credit systems is a secondary market, which depends in part on institutions and information that derive from (and support) fiduciaries. These are especially important in the contemporary tensions between firm-based and individualised credit systems. The seminar series this semester will explore some of these dynamics, examining how they have shaped the cultures and politics of debt and credit from the precolonial to the contemporary period.
