Making a Home together: Class Entanglements and Dependency on Cheap Labour in the Afromodern City

Abstract

This ethnographic article focuses on a Kenyan upper-middle-class neighbourhood to draw conclusions about the practices of social boundaries. The city of Kisumu appears geographically segregated along several class divides. In the upper-middle-class quarter this study examines, I describe the neighbourhood committee’s emphasis on class distinction and separating this upper-middle-class neighbourhood from an adjacent lower-class one. While the separation of social classes is maintained rhetorically, in practice boundaries are fluid and easily transgressed and the neighbourhoods are interdependent. The lower class is instrumentally involved in maintaining a middle-class ‘safe and clean’ image but depends on the informal economy to remove its own traces. Moreover, the upper middle class borrows elements of self-organized planning, using its political and economic power to shape the city. Social entanglements incorporate colonial, postcolonial, modernist, neoliberal and globalization paradigms, making Kisumu an example of an Afromodern city. Urban change is analysed in the article through the lens of space instead of time.