Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:07:04.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SPEED GOVERNORS: ROAD SAFETY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL OVERLOAD IN POST-COLONIAL KENYA, c. 1963–2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2013

Mark Lamont
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since independence in 1963 as a way of illustrating the analytic value of speed for the anthropology of the state. Road safety, a highly visible public concern in Kenya since the 1960s, offers us a way to rethink the temporal dangers and uncertainties of automotive travel under global capitalism, but also to go further in seeking out historical continuities in Kenya's post-colonial aspirations for safer and more efficient roads. This focus on road safety takes us from Africanization, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the regulatory reforms of the 1990s and 2000s in the guise of neo-liberalism. From the vociferous complaints and debates of Kenyan politicians about imported Peugeots being dangerous to drive on Kenya's rough and sparsely tarmacked roads in 1964, to the much publicized traffic crackdown of 2003, the so-called ‘Michuki Rules’, road safety is a field of study ideally suited to the analysis of infrastructural power and its transformations and continuities over a four-decade period. What is of analytic interest here is the new value of speed in an East African region that has aggressively embraced automobility as a vehicle for enhancing state sovereignty in a globalized economy.

Résumé

Dans cet article, l'auteur s'intéresse à la place de la sécurité routière dans l'histoire législative du Kenya depuis l'indépendance du pays en 1963 pour illustrer la valeur analytique de la vitesse pour l'anthropologie de l’État. Enjeu public de premier plan au Kenya depuis les années 1960, la sécurité routière offre un moyen de repenser les incertitudes et les dangers temporels des déplacements automobiles en période de capitalisme mondial, mais également d'aller plus loin dans l'identification de continuités historiques dans les aspirations postcoloniales à des routes plus sûres et plus efficaces au Kenya. À travers le prisme de la sécurité routière, l'article nous transporte de l'africanisation des années 1960 et 1970 aux réformes réglementaires des années 1990 et 2000 sous les traits du néolibéralisme. De la virulence des plaintes et des débats des politiciens kenyans à propos de la mauvaise tenue de route des véhicules importés Peugeot sur les routes cahoteuses et peu goudronnées du Kenya en 1964, à la très médiatisée répression sur les infractions de la circulation de 2003 (appelée « Michuki Rules »), la sécurité routière est un champ d’étude qui se prête parfaitement à l'analyse du pouvoir infrastructurel et de ses transformations et continuités sur quatre décennies. D'un point de vue analytique, il est intéressant de voir ici la nouvelle valeur de la vitesse dans une région d'Afrique orientale qui a ardemment adopté l'automobilité comme véhicule de renforcement de la souveraineté d’État dans une économie globalisée.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 367 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Beuving, J. (2004) ‘Cotonou's Klondike: African traders and second-hand car markets in Benin’, Journal of Modern African Studies 42 (4): 1–27.Google Scholar
Chalfin, B. (2010) Neoliberal Frontiers: an ethnography of sovereignty in West Africa. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Connolly, W. (2008) Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed. Minneapolis MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Dalakoglou, D. (2010) ‘The road: an ethnography of the Albanian-Greek cross-border motorway’, American Ethnologist 37 (1): 132–49.Google Scholar
Das, V. and Poole, D. (2004) Anthropology in the Margins of the State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harvey, P. (2005) ‘The materiality of state effects: an ethnography of a road in the Peruvian Andes’ in Krohn-Hansen, C. and Nustad, K. (eds), State Formation: anthropological explorations. Cambridge: Pluto.Google Scholar
Jackson, M. (2011) Life within Limits: well-being in a world of want. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power: a history of power from the beginning to AD 1760 (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Masquelier, A. (2002) ‘Road mythographies: space, mobility, and the historical imagination in postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist 29 (4): 829–56.Google Scholar
Miller, D. (2001) Car Cultures. Oxford and New York NY: Berg.Google Scholar
Moody, E. (2006) ‘Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash: the value of death in “free market” El Salvador’, American Ethnologist 32 (1): 63–80.Google Scholar
Morris, R. (2010) ‘Accidental histories, post-historical practice? Re-reading Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance in the actuarial age’, Anthropological Quarterly 83 (3): 581–624.Google Scholar
Mwanzia, M. and Nzia, D. (2009) ‘Agony of Kibaki crash families’, Standard Ditigal, <http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=1144016179&story_title=Agony-of-Kibaki-crash-families>, accessed 7 May 2013.,+accessed+7+May+2013.>Google Scholar
Sanders, T. (2008) ‘Buses in Bongoland: seductive analytics and the occult’, Anthropological Theory 8 (2): 107–32.Google Scholar
Smith, J. (2008) Bewitching Development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Virilio, P. 2006. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Weber, M. (1946/1958). ‘Essays in Sociology’ in Weber, M., Gerth, H. and Mills, C. W. (eds), From Max Weber. New York NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar