China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) exploits increased permeability of all kinds of boundaries even as old rhetorics of sovereign space are reanimated. This paper examines a very local example of impacts in Kibwezi, Kenya. Regarding more than a century of local land disputes, BRI's “dreamscape” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) can be repurposed especially given
persistence of sacred geographies of wood and water access. These
By 2018, countries and organizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa representing 40 % of global GDP had signed trade and infrastructure deals with China as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI's flagship project in East Africa is the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) effort to replace colonial-era infrastructure with several new transportation corridors extending across Kenya to Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia. Implementation of this enormous undertaking relies on discourse meant to unite many different sociocultural, political, economic, and environmental contexts (Flyvbjerg, 2005). But how successful are such “dreamscapes” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015)? Likewise, must they be opposed only by equally grandiose alternative narratives, or do more localized imaginaries have a chance? While such discourses project visions of future developments are alternatives referencing the past comparatively inadequate? Answering these questions in the context of more than a century of local land disputes in Kibwezi, Kenya, reimagined pasts can be shown to animate cultural resistance to dreamscapes, megaproject narratives repurposed by those whom nominally they target.
Investigating the consequences of imposing dreamscapes on particular African contexts joins wider discussions advancing affective, nonrepresentational theory (Thrift, 2007; Pile, 2009) in geographic analysis. Before and beyond the situating of a locality within a discursive context, there are sentimental, nonrepresentational interactions of “taking-place” (Anderson and Harrison, 2010). The grand abstractions of BRI's dreamscape presume the ontological independence of something assigned a distinction we are all supposed to accept, while the nonrepresentational amounts simultaneously to what its originator intends and also to what others encountering it interpret it as. This deliberately unstable sense of a place as being in an endless process of becoming brings us into the orbit of affective theory since nonrepresentational approaches to the enactment of place “valorise those processes that operate before … conscious, reflective thought” (McCormack, 2005:122).
Focus on the affective challenges dreamscapes as significantly technological exercises in future-making. Enthusiasm for state-of-the-art technologies such as SGR's high-speed trains is persistently confronted by the “shock of the old” (Edgerton, 2006), prompting attention to which specific technologies societies actually use as opposed to only those promoted. Moreover, what “technology” is understood to encompass when speaking about “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) needs to be critiqued. While those in Kibwezi discontented with SGR's arrival utilize such ubiquitous 21st-century technologies as digital television, cellphones, mobile banking, and (ironically) even Chinese motorcycles, many of their reactions are couched in terms of “indigenous knowledge”. While for a long time such ways of negotiating the world were characterized as parochial, science and technology studies (STS) and the study of indigenous knowledge more recently have experienced a convergence of assumptions, recognizing all knowledges as specific to particular cultural contexts. Even the claim to a universal scientific perspective is itself value-laden; only seemingly value-free, Western knowledge is no more rational than non-Western alternatives (Watson-Verran and Turnbull, 1995; Turnbull, 2000). As adjuncts to promotion of dreamscapes, science and technology are forms of social action, as are indigenous knowledges being deployed in Kibwezi.
But dreamscapes are not simply about technological innovation; effort is also needed to challenge them as “fabrications of power” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) from particular geopolitical centers. So, who gets to imagine the future, and how much latitude do others have to participate in particular designed futures as they see fit? Jasanoff and Kim (2009:123) associate sociotechnical imaginaries in the USA and South Korea “with active exercises of state power, such as the selection of development priorities, the allocation of funds, the investment in material infrastructures, and the acceptance or suppression of political dissent.” Schiølin (2010) goes further, emphasizing that globalist sociotechnical imaginaries in Denmark promote a “future essentialism” to depoliticize dreamscapes by foreclosing democratic debate about their appropriateness. Smallman (2019) finds the instrumentality of government in the UK fortifying policymaking that implements dreamscapes against public opinion as characterized by having “Nothing to do with the science”. But crucially for consideration of local responses to SGR's dreamscape, sociotechnical imaginaries have no necessary connection to state actors only. For instance, remote sensing technologies deployed by anti-war NGOs and other non-state analysts promoted a powerful imaginary in the early 2000s that Iran's Natanz nuclear facility was being constructed as part of a clandestine weapons program (Lawrence, 2020).
Heeding Bhabha's call for an “ex-centric” approach (Bhabha, 1994:6) means not only questioning China's optimism for its BRI projects in Africa but also avoiding assumptions there is anything like an equally generic “African” alternative to future-making. A world system conditioned by “global coloniality” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014) may limit such efforts to being defined in terms of Eurocentric versions of what development means. But examples from Kibwezi demonstrate a “local” sense of place often borrowing elements originating elsewhere to reframe the terms under which ideas and physical conditions of spatial reordering are debated. In Kibwezi, much of this involves particular trees and springs in the Ki-Kamba language called
Answering the three questions posed at the outset requires (1) laying out SGR's prehistory in Kibwezi and then (2) describing how the dreamscape represents itself materially. Since SGR is just one example of a “travelling model” of development promoted as transposable to any number of other geographical scenarios (Behrends et al., 2014), it is also necessary (3) to situate the project within Kibwezi's particular physical circumstances before finally (4) confronting it with the affective, hybrid geographies calling into question its “fictional expectations” (Beckert, 2016). An important caveat is to make clear the observations presented here are not based on research directly targeting investigation of the impacts of BRI's dreamscape on Kibwezi. Instead, they arise from 2 decades of ethnographic research about changing patterns of human interaction with the physical environment, especially mapping
Construction to replace the defunct railway line between Mombasa and Nairobi began in 2016 after China's state-run Exim Bank loaned Kenya 90 % of the USD 3.6 billion cost. Although Kenyan taxpayers took on the debt, a Chinese company was awarded SGR's construction contract. African labor was included, but China sent thousands of workers and has kept a firm grip on both construction and operation of the new railway. Although unfinished, SGR nonetheless officially opened in 2017 when the first Belt and Road Forum was held in Beijing to celebrate BRI achievements worldwide. In 2019, a second forum recalibrated expectations about delayed projects, with Kenya failing to obtain fresh loans to extend SGR all the way to the Ugandan border.
SGR first closely follows Mackinnon-Sclater Road, an early colonial effort to modernize older caravan routes, stretching 300 km from Mombasa to Kibwezi. Most of this initial interior region of Kenya is today referred to as Ukambani, designated homeland of the Akamba people. In the 1890s, imported South Asian labor built the meter-gauge Uganda Railway along roughly the same track, dubbed the “Lunatic Line” given exorbitant costs in personnel losses to disease, hostile indigenous populations, and predatory wildlife. Already woefully antiquated by Kenya's independence in 1963, when the railway was shut down officially in 2017 the 488 km journey between Mombasa and Nairobi could easily last 24 h. Today, SGR's trains make the trip in just 5 h.
Despite proximity to the railway, the highway that replaced Mackinnon Road, and the Kenya Pipeline Company oil distribution artery, Kibwezi Division for many decades remained a backwater. In 1999 running water and electricity existed only in a handful of government facilities, the sole bank informally renting public use of its one landline telephone (personal observation). With about 3000 people in Kibwezi town and nearby villages, most non-pedestrian traffic moved on one-speed bicycles, with only an exterior ring road partly paved. Only 6 % of the entire division's population (80 000) was considered “urbanized”. Today, Makueni County (including Kibwezi as 1 of 15 divisions) remains more rural than Kenya overall (88 % vs. 68 %) and with a higher poverty rate (64 % vs. 46 %) (KNBS, 2020). Only 10% of the population has secure title to land, which is experiencing rapid environmental degradation in a semi-arid region with a 75 % rainfall failure rate. Deep poverty induces people to migrate to Nairobi, Mombasa, and neighboring countries in search of waged work, with social fragmentation including higher-than-national HIV/AIDS rates. Population clusters in Mbuinzau Hill Sublocation northwest of Kibwezi and the Masongaleni Resettlement Area to the southeast (both now crossed by SGR) connect Kenya's dependence on safari tourism with a complicated history since the 1930s of multiple evictions of tens of thousands of people from the Chyulu Hills to the southwest, now part of the vast Tsavo National Park.
Kibwezi's outward appearance has changed over time (personal observation).
Twenty years ago, Kibwezi town had only single-story buildings; today, four- and five-story buildings dominate the center and large, multistory private
homes are scattered throughout the outskirts. Electricity and running water
are commonplace. There are four banks, and cellphones typically connected to
Kenya's M-Pesa mobile money network are ubiquitous. Roads into the interior have increased truck traffic through town, not just past it, and a highway bus stop has improved long-distance transit. In 2008 the import duty on Chinese-made motorcycles was eliminated, prompting a 24-fold increase in numbers nationally within just 5 years. In Kibwezi, even children within walking distance of school pay for a
Likewise, more than a century of land disputes with a 22 475-acre (9095 ha), British-owned sisal plantation called the Dwa Estate on Kibwezi town's eastern edge have become more aggravated, both because the estate hopes to repurpose the fiber crop as biofuel and now by SGR's environmentally disastrous arrival. Kibwezi now has two railway stations, but only the old one scheduled for closure is actually in town, opposite the government's gigantic grain stores, the police station, and main market, while the sparkling new station is a 40 min walk to the west (see Fig. 1). What little train traffic used to stop at Kibwezi now rushes past as part of statistics celebrating supposedly improved service.
General study area, showing the locations of Kibwezi and Mbuinzau towns, Mbuinzau Hill, the Dwa Estate, and other relevant features.
Since a dreamscape's viability depends on sociotechnical imaginaries to implement hoped-for visions of the future (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), Roselle urges attention is paid to “what means and methods of persuasion and influence are likely to work under what conditions” when such “strategic narratives” simultaneously “explain the world and set constraints on the imaginable and actionable, and shape perceived interests” (Roselle et al., 2014:71 and 74). Foreclosing the possibility of alternative narratives involves deployment of evaluative metaphors drawing on shared cultural knowledge (Charteris-Black, 2003). Thus, the first Belt and Road Forum in 2017 opened with a rhetoric of “inclusive globalization” (Liu and Dunford, 2016) during a “lovely season … when every living thing is full of energy” (Xi, 2017), emphasizing “a bridge for peace and East–West cooperation” and “not a solo but a symphony.” Tacit assumptions were made that “East” and “West”, “bridge”, “peace”, and even “symphony” were understood by everybody in the same, unproblematic way. Similarly, the phrase “Connecting nations, prospering people” appears on the side of SGR's express engines, but before you can question which nations are being connected, how and why they are being connected, or what exactly is meant by “prospering” (or even the difference between “nations” and “people”), the train has rushed past.
The same is the case with the design of SGR's nine passenger stations. Nairobi Terminus supposedly resembles two sleek, modern engines facing one another representing Kenya and China, an additional structure laid atop them meant to be a bridge. When the line heading southeast reaches Emali, the meeting point of Maasai and Akamba cultural geographies is depicted by a station resembling two closed fists as a sign of unity. Confusion about why open hands or hands holding one another had not seemed more appropriate illuminates the fact that Chinese contractors, not local peoples, controlled design processes.
SGR public relations rhetoric claims Kibwezi's new station design with large triangular extensions resembles “African architecture” and “trees that shield passengers from the sun” (Mwende, 2019), though traditional Kamba houses are round and Ukambani is dominated not by broadleaf trees but by thorny acacia scrub vegetation and massive baobabs towering over the landscape with typically narrow canopies and small leaves. Further on, the sloping roof of Mtito Andei Station supposedly represents Mount Kilimanjaro and the Chyulu Hills even though the name Mtito Andei meaning “place of the vultures” refers to when the corpses of workers who died building the Lunatic Line were gathered there before being returned home to British India.
Where Kamba cultural geography yields to Taita territory, Miasenyi Station in the Taru Desert has prominent white and brown stripes, supposedly inspired by the patterns of zebras. Though it is unlikely the subtext intentionally references China's underdeveloped Kenyan partner, only immature animals have brown stripes. Coastal Mariakani Station's loggia looks more realistically like regional coconut trees, but land-grabbing for tourism and real estate development associated with SGR's construction has increased deforestation. SGR's arrival in Kibwezi has similarly reactivated strong feelings about sacred
This celebratory dreamscape often fails to translate well. Large blue and white banners I have seen outside SGR supply and equipment yards, excavation
zones, cement factories, electrical stations, and work camps broadcasting
messages in Chinese and English are rarely grammatically correct – including
“In equal cooperation, work together for good money
It is helpful here to recall the tension existing between what Bakhtin (1981, originally published 1934) called the “epic”, striving for a hegemonic discourse assimilated by its audience, and the “novel” endlessly disturbed by so-called “hybrid utterances” with information always referencing indefinite chains of sources. Narratives may be selectively assimilated and/or contested among many different constituencies simultaneously, and because much of what counts as knowledge is non-verbal, what we normally consider to be narrative is unrepresentative of the whole range of possible expression (Bloch, 1998). Bakhtin refers to this as heteroglossia, with Kristeva emphasizing “the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into history” (Kristeva, 1980:68). China tries to elide such contending imaginations of future development via broadcast of a single message reinforcing BRI's dreamscape. In 2011, a subsidiary of the Chinese pay-TV operator StarTimes was awarded one of only two licenses for digital TV broadcasting in Kenya (the other given to the state-run Kenya Broadcasting Corporation). Competition from a consortium of private Kenyan companies broadcasting almost 90 % of the country's analog signal was not allowed until a 2014 Supreme Court decision mandating competition. StarTimes' sociotechnical imaginaries predictably whitewash news about China in Africa, reporting nothing to Kenyan subscribers about SGR's many problems. Now StarTimes is the most widespread digital provider in Kenya, but its Faustian tradeoff provides remote populations with access to the globe but only in a top-down, consumerist model of information exposure, heavily influencing subjectivities (Clausen, 2004; Lefkowitz, 2017).
But material circumstances can get their revenge for efforts to foreclose
alternative geographic imaginaries. In 2015, Kenyans working on SGR in Kibwezi reported language problems with Chinese supervisors with inadequate
command of English (personal communication). Kenyan foremen who took over
decision-making were reprimanded when things subsequently went wrong. Worse,
Kibwezi sits in an ancient lava field composed of small
SGR's most visible impact locally has been substantial damage to Kibwezi Forest (see Fig. 2). Housing a Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI)
station, it has been a semi-legal source of household fuelwood and habitat for
resident wildlife and includes
Detailed view of the relationship of SGR with Kibwezi Forest, the Dwa cut lines, and the evicted villages of Syetali and Kakangani.
Bad feelings rose quickly, and at least once a group of Chinese required an armed police escort to go shopping in Kibwezi given residents' fury at the damage SGR was doing to the area. Chinese workers staying overnight in Kibwezi insisted on booking all the rooms of a hotel to avoid contact with local populations, and when they stayed outside town, they remained in gated encampments. As much figurative as topographic, claims to place are as much about “sentimental sovereignty” as they are about formal adjudication (Greyser, 2017).
Moreover, because “vernacular landscapes” of lived experience are only
ever seen “out of the corner of one's eye” (Jackson, 1984), the subjects of alternative narratives of change are not necessarily populations articulating them but material aspects of local landscapes through which people rework their collective past (Walley, 2004; Shetler, 2007). What matters less than people accurately remembering a place's history is how the conditions of “accuracy” are defined and redefined as the contexts in which memory is deployed change. For example, the name “Kibwezi” means “to stand akimbo”, a reference to Kamba farmers disturbed by the noise of the Lunatic Line walking away from shambas to stand by the railway hands on hips frowning in disapproval. This history has reemerged almost as a kind of “right” to stand askance in regard to SGR's disruptions locally, as though to say grievance was already “authorized” by the advent of the first railway. The town's name thereby developed by usage of a meaning not directly deducible by the strict meaning of the word
Such a particularly local expression of place identity allows something
seemingly small-scale to generate more diffuse denotations across time and
space. Consider the long history of grievances about the Dwa Estate. Starting in 1909, Dwa exploited the colonial British authority's alienation of indigenous people to evict populations of at least 13 so-called “lost” villages. Even though only a third of the immense estate is actually
planted with sisal today, several entrances are gated and staffed by armed
guards (
The landscape still bears evidence of these so-called “Dwa lines” (see Fig. 2). When the return of multiparty democracy in 2003 prompted talk of constitutional reform defining ownership of land in terms of “productive” use, Dwa bulldozed the remaining area of the lost village of Syetali to plant fresh sisal. On 200 acres (81 ha) south of the estate's present western gate between the old railroad and the highway, Syetali's landscape was modified again when SGR received government permission to bulldoze Dwa's sisal there in 2015. Local people outraged that the estate was compensated for this clearance tried in 2016 to blockade the Syetali construction site. Armed with traditional bows and poisoned arrows, villagers insisted that if changing land use was an option, the government should have recognized still-remembered histories of indigenous settlement. The modern railway has been used to resurrect memories of the Lunatic Line's impacts on Kibwezi to argue Dwa's 947-year lease of land is invalid because it was negotiated with the British and not with the Kenyan government, which should not consider itself obligated to compensate the estate for lost sisal before adjudicating village claims that would vacate the plantation's expectation of being taken seriously by the Chinese.
Nonhuman landscape elements gain active agency at this point, with affect encompassing more than emotion when sensation becomes as fundamental as signification (Massumi, 2002). Townspeople's complaints are not only about quantified volumes of water now missing in the Kibwezi River or about particular fig trees cut down to make room for another multistory building erected by “strangers” but also about changing relationships with forests and fish that have much to do with defining the community's identity. Those squatting along the Dwa lines can rarely point to specific landscape markers of former villages bulldozed long ago, but that hardly makes their sense of those places less substantial, especially now that SGR intersects the landscapes of expropriation and violence on the estate's southern periphery.
At stake is not just a precursive feeling about place but the intensity of that emotional connection, understanding “place” as a field of intensities constantly changing relations with one another. Representational forces such as maps, texts, and photographs try to render the world as intelligible but reduce lived experience to a second-order phenomenon, while affective geographies reassert intimacy with landscape stretching across time and distance. The photographer Tayiana Chao documented dozens of stations along the Lunatic Line in a project called Save The Railway (Chao, 2017). Making sure her pictures were not left to speak for themselves, an exhibition includes public review; field interviews with local people near each station; accounts of Chao's own experiences traveling across the country before SGR demolished her targets; and social media commentary posted by a community throughout Kenya and across the globe with personal memories of taking the old railway to school, to work, and on holidays or a honeymoon. Polyvalent production of meaning intensifies feeling to achieve reflective engagement with both the place of memory and the place of futures not circumscribed by SGR's dreamscape. Such comments as “Just see how all the railway stations have the same look and feel” connect a generalized emotional reaction to Chao's photographs to a more particular intensity about diminished pasts – “Its sad to see a railway tower that once had workers watching through the windows for trains coming or going” – and to reflections about the future – “As a country, we should be careful that SGR doesn't end up the same way”.
Affect has both the seeming insubstantiality and unavoidable presence of an “inventory of shimmers”, but Seigworth and Gregg insist it is not “always already sutured into a progressive or liberatory politics” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010:10). Stubbornly neutral, this is not simple indifference to existing conditions, with affect “elud[ing] easy polarities and contradictions”. Not an event in time, a location in space, or a body positioned at a particular juncture of the two, affect is an interval composed of intensities of interaction “that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise)” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010:1). As Swyngedouw (2004:18) puts it, “Every body and every thing … is a mediator, part social, part natural, lacking discrete boundaries and internalizing the multiple contradictory relations that redefine and rework them”.
So how does appreciation for the dynamic presence of affective geographies help us make sense of sociotechnical imaginaries and reactions to them? Jasanoff (2007) suggests a need for methods or “technologies of humility” to accommodate the partiality of knowledge about the future in order to “reflect on … sources of ambiguity, indeterminacy and complexity”. From a comparison of British and Brazilian examples, Macnaghten and Guivant (2011) likewise call for critical consideration of significant cultural variability in public engagement with sociotechnical imaginaries. An emphasis on partiality and particularity implies taking ethnographic approaches to investigation. As already noted in reference to the language used in the Belt and Road forums in 2017 and 2019, as well as in Chao's multiform archive about the Lunatic Line, discourse analysis of spoken and written words in formal and informal contexts is important, as is that of representational images. As already shown, this involves paying attention to speeches, policy documents, blogs, promotional slogans at construction sites and those emblazoned on locomotives, and even the architecture of SGR's stations. Inasmuch as success of a dreamscape's spatial reorderings depends on how well it is received at a visceral level in advance of description or declaration, SGR's streamlined development model is also confronted by affective, hybrid geographies in Kibwezi that are significantly nonrepresentational. The task remaining here is to engage with some of those geographies.
The Kamba universe is saturated with energy never entirely containable by a
single body, human or nonhuman, with core concepts of
While
Whether such tales are true is beside the point. “Modern” housing is now
common throughout Kibwezi; the current fashion is to build sprawling “Nigeria
houses” in the style of mansions seen on West African soap operas (often
broadcast by China's StarTimes). At issue is not change per se but a “right” sort of relationship to place in the process, that is, appropriately affective change. Mr. Mathu soon rebuilt his house in nontraditional materials again but only after appeasing supposedly aggravated
The most intense affective geographies are those associated with
A women's group called a
Whatmore calls for “an upheaval in the binary terms in which the question
of Nature has been posed and a recognition of the intimate, sensible, and
Colors vitalize microspatializations in Kibwezi. Red, black, and white
cloths traditionally hang in trees marking
At the heart of local affective geographies, the trees of Kibwezi Forest are not merely trees (Rocheleau and Ross, 1995). They simultaneously mark vestiges of displaced people's ancestral villages, Dwa Estate's expectation of compensation for bulldozed resources, the temporal edge of sisal soon to transform from a fiber crop into biofuel, and in the KEFRI arboretum parts of a revitalized scientific discourse about species richness now lost to the railway. Just as familiar landscapes have been rendered unfamiliar in disfigurement, trees still standing and trees pushed down are no longer recognizable as what they once were presumed to be. None of these versions of Kibwezi's trees is superior, although different interests vie for their version to have the greatest affective impact on anybody paying attention.
Otherwise contending forces can combine and recombine. Reflecting historical
changes in Ukambani's wider cultural ecology,
But perhaps the most revealing example involves the reinvention of Kilundo
Meli. At the turn of the 20th century, the Presbyterian Church of East
Africa (PCEA) laid claim to 64 km
Some in Kibwezi have now reinvented Kilundo as a chief around whose memory
they hope to rally resistance to government collaboration with the Chinese
negatively impacting their lives. But precolonial Akamba did not have chiefs;
communities traditionally organized along clan lines by gender and age grades – even today,
Precisely because of how hated the act was and for how long it was hated, it is fascinating that Kilundo is now often referred to as a chief given such authority was promulgated decades after his death in 1901 by the government now being blamed for allowing SGR to destroy local landscapes. His reinvention is also meant to suggest that the PCEA swindled the chief, misleading him about how the deal he made permitted expropriation of his land and that of his neighbors. Yet this assumes today's definitions of property ownership and market exchange can be applied to the situation that existed more than a century ago when, in fact, Kilundo was in no position to have negotiated with the PCEA as it claims he did.
Finally, there is Kilundo's
Xin and Matheson (2018:4262) ask, “What happens to the power to produce certain images when their mediated reception is hyperconscious …? Are such narratives … diminished when the hearer is listening for the strategic moves?” Certainly, by the time of the Second BRI Forum in 2019, China had “adopted a more nuanced tone, talking about the environment, sustainability, better oversight and anti-corruption measures rather than focusing on the sheer scale of BRI projects” (Balakrishnan, 2019). While BRI was still situated within a “lovely season” (Xi, 2017), a more subdued rhetoric recognized that the commitment required both is more strenuous than expected and needs to be more reflective, with talk about friends getting together “to climb up mountains and write poems” (Pham, 2019). Earlier talk of easy cooperation gave way to a need “to be guided by the principle of extensive consultation [and] joint contribution”. Likewise, some of the international community's complaints about violations of intellectual property protection were acknowledged, as was the need for China to “promote sustainable development”. But Pham reported the second forum to be a “chaotic” affair “lacking a clear schedule and sufficient content” to adequately promote its new emphasis on transparency and accountability, and television coverage of a roundtable discussion only included comments by China's leadership and not those of any attending BRI partner countries.
Clifford noted that “the currency of culture and identity as performative acts can be traced to their articulation of homelands, safe spaces where the traffic across borders can be controlled … Cultural action … takes place in the contact zones, along … policed and transgressive … frontiers. Stasis and purity are asserted – creatively and violently – against historical forces of movement and contamination” (Clifford, 1997:7). At the outset, I asked, how successful are dreamscapes (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015)? The answer is that success depends on the degree to which they are adopted and in which forms, with reactions in Kibwezi to SGR's futurism revealing the “purity” of “safe spaces” is never limited to specific sites but to intensities of interactions between variable imaginaries. The other questions initially posed are now also answered. Dreamscapes may be opposed not only by equally grandiose alternative narratives but also by more localized imaginaries, and while dreamscapes are future-oriented, alternatives referencing the past can compete well.
Affective geographies are energized by precisely the condition of changing
local conditions paradoxically exploited to reaffirm a sense of place (Kottak, 1980), so “postequilibrial” approaches to understanding development can helpfully evaluate SGR's impacts. “New ecology” (Scoones, 1999) emphasizing adaptive disturbance and dynamic social–environmental relations reconceptualizes the supposed boundedness of one geography relative to others both human and nonhuman (Gillson et al., 2003). As with indigeneity
(Ellen, 2007), we should wonder when and why equilibrium is emphasized in
particular contexts. Instead of wondering what happens when material reality
has its revenge and the whole SGR scheme collapses, it is more important to
wonder how deeply its dreamscape can take root in Kenya and why (Ferguson,
1990; Escobar, 1995). A “forest fundamentalism” (Buttel, 1992:19) about
Kibwezi's copses, springs, and other
Likewise, there is a powerful need to recognize that facts on the ground do not support a clear distinction of sacred and profane landscapes (Sheridan, 2008).
From a postequilibrial perspective, it should be noted that many supposedly “traditional” and local
So, needing to examine practices of coordination, decision-making, and investment in globalizing dreamscapes, we should also recognize opportunities for vigorously negotiating alternatives to the geographies
they promote. Kibwezi's
Of course, it is worth investigating whether and how cultural ecologies other than those explored here may also be shaping responses and alternatives to BRI's dreamscapes, regarding sites not only outside Kibwezi but also within it. While Akamba populations dominate the region, colonial and postcolonial histories have involved other identities there too. Before independence, Dwa Estate hired significant numbers of Luos from Kenya's Lake Victoria region. A much earlier history of Swahili contact established Kibwezi town's original version and continues to have a presence in one neighborhood there. A nearby Sikh community is home to descendants of South Asian laborers who built the Lunatic Line; Gikuyus related to the country's political and economic elite have speculated in land development in the area, and a handful of Europeans have established long-term personal connections to Kibwezi as well. For that matter, histories of repeated population displacement and resettlement are also tangled up with stories of other large infrastructure projects, including many like SGR brought in by foreign actors. Careful examination of differences in local responses to different categories of such projects (for example, comparing and contrasting SGR-like development efforts with more explicitly humanitarian interventions) is similarly clearly warranted.
In 2013 China defended its willingness to avoid imposing conditions on African regimes known for corruption, human rights abuses, and environmental neglect by suggesting “Only the wearer knows whether the shoes fit or not” (Xinhuanet, 2013). But how far is Africa willing to walk the same path with China, and for how long, and will the two feel the same way about it for as long as the journey lasts?
No data sets were used in this article.
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Thanks to Eddie Mwanzia, Monika Lawrence, and Sarah Anderson (for help with mapping).
This paper was edited by Simon Runkel and reviewed by two anonymous referees.