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‘Sleep Occupies No Space’: The Use of Public Space by Street Gangs in Kinshasa
Abstract
This article deals with issues of territoriality, public space, the microphysics of power and street gang life in the current urban context of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this city, a growing number of street children invade the public places. They team up in gangs and scour the streets in search of a location to settle (for a while). Along with their appropriation of public space, these gangs encounter several actors such as the city authorities, shop owners, tenants or rival street gangs. Before any settlement, deals have to be closed since every inch of the city is negotiable. All participants get involved in these negotiations, for no one is considered marginal, certainly not the street youth who are inextricably bound up with Congolese society. This contribution considers this dynamic field of negotiations through a focus on space and analyses it from a Foucauldian angle. It explores how gang members develop particular ways to control their territories and exercise power in them. Additionally, it examines how street youths manage to construct a home in the streets and make sense of their urban environment in the process.
... Vasudevan (2015) has called this a "radical politics of infrastructure" that sometimes "materializes the social order which it seeks to enact" (318), while at other times it asserts "the persistence of the body" materializing against the powerful (Butler in Vasuduvan 2015:323). In the context of Kinshasa, Geenen (2009) has shown how shegues (street children) have sought to "colonize" spaces within the city, asserting their presence and perhaps a "right to the city" (Lefebvre 1996(Lefebvre [1967) in the face of extreme official violence. ...
... This can be seen in the rituals that cluster around the key infrastructures of the city, such as the airport and its connecting road, briefly discussed in Likala's case above. Airplanes and airports are key locations in Kinshasa's ritual nexus, and successful players on the city stage-politicians, sportsmen, and musicians-return from success abroad to be greeted by a plebeian throng rented for this purpose (Geenen 2009). In the more important instances, it is not only the airport but also the length of the Boulevard Lumumba connecting the airport with the city that are surrounded by crowds. ...
... Another aspect of the article generally accepted by the responses is the focus on space and the "politics of presence." In her comment, Geenen summarizes this aspect of the paper accurately and generously, though I must confess I am slightly disappointed that she does not relate this back to her own wonderful analysis of the use of space by the urban poor in Kinshasa (Geenen 2009), a particular favorite of mine and, as I hope I indicate in the paper, a key inspiration for the article. ...
On the basis of fieldwork in Kinshasa, this essay makes a link between riots, the recent anthropology of "surplus populations," and distributive politics in low-income countries, especially Africa. Tracing the history of a political demonstration turned riot, it shows how distribution structures the interactions between rich and poor in the city. Situating the riot in a context in which subjects are dependent on the market for goods but are not able to sell their labor, the essay shows the riot to be a rational intervention in a place where elites do not see popular support as especially important and where occupying space and controlling circulation and distribution are the primary political-economic imperatives.
... often refer to these children as a ticking time bomb, because they are perceived as making the city unsafe with rude and criminal behavior. Although not all social scientists agree with this perception (as for example Geenen, 2009), we document in this contribution that it's very likely that the increasing numbers of street children in the capital of the DRC is leading to an aggravated problem of pick-pocketing and theft, but to look at them essentially as criminals is a highly overstated perception. ...
... Not only do they participate in these informal economic activities, they have also become an important player on this market, performing an essential role for the everyday functioning of the city. For example, Geenen (2009) reports that when a raid is held by the Congolese National Police (PNC) it often becomes difficult for other actors on the marketplace to properly pursue their activities and "vendors deplore the lack of dishwashers, sweepers, wrap-up boys, and carriers". ...
... Almost exclusively, girls start working as prostitutes around the age of eleven for the simple reason that this is the most profitable. Geenen (2009) argues that it is not so much the money they gain from the client, but the possessions they gather during their work that makes prostitution lucrative. These "darker" sides of shege life can explain the bad reputation street boys and girls have among the Kinois. ...
... often refer to these children as a ticking time bomb, because they are perceived as making the city unsafe with rude and criminal behavior. Although not all social scientists agree with this perception (as for example Geenen, 2009), we document in this contribution that it's very likely that the increasing numbers of street children in the capital of the DRC is leading to an aggravated problem of pick-pocketing and theft, but to look at them essentially as criminals is a highly overstated perception. ...
... Not only do they participate in these informal economic activities, they have also become an important player on this market, performing an essential role for the everyday functioning of the city. For example, Geenen (2009) reports that when a raid is held by the Congolese National Police (PNC) it often becomes difficult for other actors on the marketplace to properly pursue their activities and "vendors deplore the lack of dishwashers, sweepers, wrap-up boys, and carriers". ...
... Almost exclusively, girls start working as prostitutes around the age of eleven for the simple reason that this is the most profitable. Geenen (2009) argues that it is not so much the money they gain from the client, but the possessions they gather during their work that makes prostitution lucrative. These "darker" sides of shege life can explain the bad reputation street boys and girls have among the Kinois. ...
In this article, we will explore the phenomenon of the so-called “bashege”, or street children, in Kinshasa, the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), from a criminological/ethnographical perspective. Four months of participant observation and ethnographical interviewing with the Congolese NGO ORPER (Oeuvre de Reclassement et deProtection des Enfants de la Rue) in Kinshasa have enabled us to develop a rich understanding of everyday life among the bashege and the ambiguities and complexities they encounter in this dazzling city.
... By dividing the street populations into "drifters" (lower-class background) and "droppers" (middle-class background), it became evident that the former attempted to make a home on the streets, whereas the latter complied with the domiciled definition of homelessness and simply sought to survive while desiring a shift back to domiciled life. Studies among youth in the UK (Kidd and Evans 2011), Brazil (Ursin 2011), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Geenen 2009) suggest that as many young people eventually grow weary of street life, feelings of being "at home" may alter to those of "homelessness" (see also May 2000). ...
... Their more matured peers prefer sleeping in hidden locations away from the public gaze because they risk being harassed or arrested by the police. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some older street boys seek privacy and security in rental shacks (Geenen 2009). Since the public realm is understood as a male domain in most societies, the sleep geographies of young people on the street are also highly gendered. ...
... To be able to establish a regular sleeping place depends on a continuous negotiation of trust with local residents, care organizations, night guards, gatekeepers, and other employees of businesses and public facilities (Rensen 2003;Ursin 2012). As observed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, street gangs must avoid criminality and keep troublemakers away to gain acceptance in a neighborhood (Geenen 2009), while street youth in the capital of Tanzania pay night guards to sleep on the doorsteps of buildings (Moyer 2004). Establishing trust relations with the police is more ambivalent, since police officers are source of both security and persecution (Kovats-Bernat 2006). ...
This chapter explores the temporal and socio-spatial aspects of sleep geographies of a young male street population in urban Brazil. It sets out by providing an overview of relevant academic debates on young people living on the street across the globe, related to issues of marginality, mobility, and belonging. It then narrows the focus to the less explored field of sleep geographies of young street populations, before it presents four different sleep patterns detected among boys and young men on streets of Salvador da Bahia. These patterns are closely linked to four collective identities available for young people in the street environment – menino de rua (street child), pivete (street thug), maloqueiro (vagrant), and favelado (resident of shantytown). The empirical material reveals that a range of individual and structural factors – such as drug use, crime involvement, physical maturity, and mainstream attitudes – influence the choices on where, when, and with whom to sleep. Sleep is thus shown to be socially constructed and spatially defined, and a life course perspective that embraces the dynamic character of street life is proposed.
... Developing nations are particularly impacted, where a strong public infrastructure is lacking and high levels of unemployment, poverty, and disorder govern daily life (Katz, Maguire, & Choate, 2011). Greater levels of residential instability contribute to a lack of turf stability among gangs, producing conditions where territorial claims are constantly under dispute (Geenen, 2009;Heinonen, 2011;Winton, 2014). The flexibility of mobile territorial behavior benefits these gangs and facilitates their survival. ...
... The flexibility of mobile territorial behavior benefits these gangs and facilitates their survival. Many gang members know where their natural families reside but put greater value in being autonomous from parents, living on the street in makeshift accommodations that frequently change on nightly basis (Atkinson-Sheppard, 2016;Geenen, 2009;Smith, 2016). Where gang members loiter also varies, with no particular boundary or claim to a specific set space. ...
This chapter explores the ways in which space shapes the territoriality of urban street gang members as well as the ways in which a gang exploits the local landscape. It begins by providing a brief overview of the classic works on the emergence of gangs, paying particular attention both to the literature on human terrain/territoriality and to the ecological studies of place, especially the Chicago school. It then looks at the criminal enterprises of gangs as they relate to space. Next, it investigates how residency, technology, and territoriality may be influencing the relationship modern street gangs have with space. It concludes with a look at the use of geographically targeted policing to curtail gang activity, especially intergang violence.
... By dividing the street populations 247 into "drifters" (lower-class background) and "droppers" (middle-class back-248 ground), it became evident that the former attempted to make a home on the streets, 249 whereas the latter complied with the domiciled definition of homelessness and 250 simply sought to survive while desiring a shift back to domiciled life. Studies 251 among youth in the UK (Kidd and Evans 2011), Brazil , and the 252 Democratic Republic of the Congo (Geenen 2009) suggest that as many young 253 people eventually grow weary of street life, feelings of being "at home" may alter to 254 those of "homelessness" (see also May 2000 To sleep in public spaces -on sidewalks, in parks, in vehicles, or other places not 269 intended for human habitation -is emphasized in research about young people on 270 the street in the Global South. The act of sleeping in the public realm separates 271 certain young people from their equally poor peers, who also commonly play, work, 272 and hang out in city centers. ...
... Their more 304 matured peers prefer sleeping in hidden locations away from the public gaze 305 because they risk being harassed or arrested by the police. In the Democratic 306 Republic of the Congo, some older street boys seek privacy and security in rental 307 shacks (Geenen 2009). Since the public realm is understood as a male domain in 308 most societies, the sleep geographies of young people on the street are also highly 309 gendered. ...
This chapter explores the temporal and socio-spatial aspects of sleep geographies of a young male street population in urban Brazil. It sets out by providing an overview of relevant academic debates on young people living on the street across the globe, related to issues of marginality, mobility, and belonging. It then narrows the focus to the less explored field of sleep geographies of young street populations, before it presents four different sleep patterns detected among boys and young men on streets of Salvador da Bahia. These patterns are closely linked to four collective identities available for young people in the street environment – menino de rua (street child), pivete (street thug), maloqueiro (vagrant), and favelado (resident of shantytown). The empirical material reveals that a range of individual and structural factors – such as drug use, crime involvement, physical maturity, and mainstream attitudes – influence the choices on where, when, and with whom to sleep. Sleep is thus shown to be socially constructed and spatially defined, and a life course perspective that embraces the dynamic character of street life is proposed.
... It is through shared relations to a home area that you sort out your accommodation, and get a start in the business of, selling secondhand shoes. Geenen documents homeless youth in Kinshasa imagining housing for themselves in the underpasses and railway tracks where they seek shelter (Geenen, 2009). Sowatey et al's (2018) study from Accra shows gender ties binding traders together in family-like networks, with women making strategic alliances supporting each other as 'sisters' and 'mothers'. ...
Street vendors are some of the most put-upon actors in urban Africa and elsewhere, vulnerable to harassment by government, commercial businesses, and residents. We look at a group of vendors occupying a sidewalk next to the offices of the Kumasi Metropolitan Authority (KMA) in Ghana’s second city. We demonstrate how the sidewalk functions as a family-like space for the coconut sellers. They not only work there, but also use the sidewalk as a space to sleep and bathe. The coconut sellers are migrants from the central region of Ghana and spoke of their relationship to one another, as they lived and worked on the sidewalk, as that of a ‘family’. We build on recent scholarship that focuses on sidewalks as places where economic activities are shaped by social relationships. We also show how the location of the sidewalk – near local government offices, next to an urban park – made the coconut sellers less vulnerable to harassment and being moved along.
... At this moment, Isookanga embodies the paradox that is the transition 46 Strikingly, some scholars have pointed to how the moniker, shégue, may in fact be derived from the name of Che Guevara, yet another icon in the pantheon of global Marxism. See Geenen 2009. Mujila's Tram 83 also captures these new flows of globalization albeit in a desultory, stream-of-consciousness style. ...
This article asks how China has figured as a trope in Congolese literature from the Cold War and to the present. To do so, I analyze three texts: V.Y. Mudimbe’s Entre les eaux ( Between Tides ) (1973), In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc . (2014), and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2014). I also examine how Mobutu interpolated Maoism into his dictatorship. I argue that whereas the Cold War produces figures such as the Maoist guerrilla, the radical intellectual, and the authoritarian leader, Chinese investment in the DRC facilitates the rise of new figures such as the mondialiste and the economic tourist. As a result, Third Worldism is ironically recast through the lens of a mutual “win-win” for development. This lens masks a new era of extractivism that produces its own social dislocations, which lends Pierre Mulélé’s Maoist-inspired rebellion a paradoxical relevance to DRC - PRC relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
... During the Kabila years, the 'revolution of modernity' program, epitomized by the Cité du Fleuve, went hand in hand with a large-scale politics of destruction and erasure of 'illegal' public and private spaces and infrastructures: houses, bars, 'informal' agricultural spaces and fields along boulevards and avenues, sidewalk activities (for example, ambulant restaurants, better known as malewa), informal cemeteries, and often also the very bodies of those the government sees as illegal occupants of the city, such as the women who run the sidewalk malewa's, street children and members of kuluna street gangs (cf. Geenen, 2009;Intudi and Liwerant, 2017). ...
Global Urbanism is an experimental examination of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the 'global' and the 'urban'. What does it mean to say that we live in a global-urban moment, and what are its implications? Refusing all-encompassing answers, the book grounds this question, exploring the plurality of understandings, definitions, and ways of researching global urbanism through the lenses of varied contributors from different parts of the world. The contributors explore what global urbanism means to them, in their context, from the ground and the struggles upon which they are working and living. The book argues for an incremental, fragile and in-the-making emancipatory urban thinking. The contributions provide the resources to help make sense of what global urbanism is in its varieties, what's at stake in it, how to research it, and what needs to change for more progressive urban futures. It provides a heterodox set of approaches and theorisations to probe and provoke rather than aiming to draw a line under a complex, changing and profoundly contested set of global-urban processes. Global Urbanism is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students in geography, sociology, planning, anthropology and the field of urban studies, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines and practices which converge in the study of urbanism.
... In these sites, men congregate to seek out and engage in informal work, to socialize, and to sleep. Similar to other kinds of youth-appropriated spaces that have been described in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa (Geenen 2009;Masquelier 2013;Weiss 2009), maskani are geared toward masculine forms of labor, leisure, and performance, and embedded with economic, social, and affective possibilities oriented toward the immediate and more distant future (Kerr 2015(Kerr , 2018Moyer 2005Moyer , 2006. They are places of intense self-fashioning, meaning making, and imagination, which can be found in the city's center and its sprawling, densely populated outlying areas (uswahilini). ...
We examine how young men who have spent years living on the streets of downtown Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have used urban spaces, as well as particular kinds of spatial “flights” and “fixes,” to navigate the process of growing into adulthood. We argue that places called maskani have provided them with a powerful sense of forward momentum, engendering more immediate and future-oriented forms of becoming. As time has passed, however, life at these places has also generated a sense of stagnation and engendered forms of coming undone, which have necessitated particular kinds of spatial flights and fixes. Some men have left maskani and the city altogether, despite limited prospects elsewhere.
... Gangs and their associated challenges are a global phenomenon. As Hagedorn (2005: 153) pointed out, ' [G]angs are a significant worldwide phenomenon with millions of members and a voice of those marginalized by processes of globalization.' Gangs are found in various degrees in various regional contexts, whether they be developed countries such as the USA (see, for example, Curry and Decker, 1998;Howell, 2012;Klein and Maxson, 2006;Vigil, 2002), Canada (see Rollwagen and Beland, 2012) and the UK (see Bartie, 2010), or developing countries such as those of the Northern Triangle of Central America (see Savenije and Van der Borgh, 2014), the Democratic Republic of Congo (see Geenen, 2009) or Indonesia (see Kadir, 2012). ...
Gang violence has been extensively highlighted as an issue of national concern in South Africa. Gangs also pose concerns about the social contexts of the communities in which they are found. The Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces have had the most prolific occurrences of gangsterism. Here gangs have demonstrated unique characteristics that set them apart from gangs in other areas. This article examines the context of gangsterism in the selected provinces by means of a comparative analysis. The purpose is to provide some strategies for effective intervention. The discussion also interrogates how or why intervention efforts may have failed and what could be improved in order to strengthen the chances of success of future interventions in affected communities.
... As one commented: "Here it is impossible to come and kill, do you understand? This is a place with security, police everywhere, security guards who like us" (see also Geenen 2009 for a similar practice in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Others choose to sleep near police stations; one young man explained that one of the main reasons for him to settle in this specific neighborhood was that he could sleep "unconcerned" in the vicinity of the police. ...
This article draws on six periods of fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, stretching over a decade. Sleep ethnographies are explored through 24-hour participant observation among a specific street population and narrative interviews with 12 young men. The empirical material shows how sleeping on the street means making conscious choices and continuous risk negotiations, seeking to reduce risk of attacks, abductions, and homicides while being most vulnerable. The safety strategies employed demonstrate the ambiguities of sleeping in public, revealing how co-sleeping is both a way of seeking safety and a source of risk, how sleeping in the public gaze is perceived as comforting by some and detested by others, and why darkness and silence are desired by most, but sunrise and movement are preferred by some. The street dwellers' relationships with peers, passersby, and police are in constant flux, and the places they appropriate for sleep are shaped by time and social relationships. The article concludes that the sleep patterns are responses to as well as reinforce the ambiguities of the wider social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of street life.
... As one commented: "Here it is impossible to come and kill, do you understand? This is a place with security, police everywhere, security guards who like us" (see also Geenen 2009 for a similar practice in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Others choose to sleep near police stations; one young man explained that one of the main reasons for him to settle in this specific neighborhood was that he could sleep "unconcerned" in the vicinity of the police. ...
This article draws on six periods of fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, stretching over a decade. Sleep ethnographies are explored through 24-hour participant observation among a specific street population and narrative interviews with 12 young men. The empirical material shows how sleeping on the street means making conscious choices and continuous risk negotiations, seeking to reduce risk of attacks, abductions, and homicides while being most vulnerable. The safety strategies employed demonstrate the ambiguities of sleeping in public, revealing how co-sleeping is both a way of seeking safety and a source of risk, how sleeping in the public gaze is perceived as comforting by some and detested by others, and why darkness and silence are desired by most, but sunrise and movement are preferred by some. The street dwellers’ relationships with peers, passersby, and police are in constant flux, and the places they appropriate for sleep are shaped by time and social relationships. The article concludes that the sleep patterns are responses to as well as reinforce the ambiguities of the wider social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of street life.
... People do not like such children, who are known to be violent, to steal and to commit other crimes. They can be equated with 'social dirt' or 'matter out of place' (see De Boeck and Honwana 2005:9, Geenen 2009). In addition , in recent years the shègue have become the state's 'other'. ...
On June 30 2010, in Kinshasa, a “drama” unfolded as the military march was abruptly interrupted by street children intermingling and enacting ndombolo-inspired dances in front of the president. Police and soldiers started beating up people; the state radio and television channels aborted the live broadcasts; and people were urged to return home. The order and discipline that the military march had expressed, had in a few seconds given way to chaos.
I take this “drama” as a case to study political sensibilities in contemporary Kinshasa. The main premise is that performances are not merely ‘representations’, but are also crucial events within the circulation of feelings and affects. Therefore, both political aesthetics and affects involved in this ‘drama of Independence Day’ will be studied. I first juxtapose the various aesthetics at play in the independence festivities, both performed in the défilé (military-inspired aesthetics) and afterwards (the ‘popular’, sexually explicit dances); and then analyse the ways in which these performances and reactions express different senses of ‘nationhood’ and different relations to the state.
... Among those who first fell victim to the state's effort to " sanitize " and recolonize the city, rewrite the city's public spaces, and redefine who has a right to the street and to the city, were Kinshasa's street children and youth gangs, commonly referred to as bashege, pomba, and kuluna. 4 In an attempt to stamp a new material and moral scale onto the city's surface, the urban authorities started to organize operations such as Kanga Vagabonds ( " Grab the Vagabonds, " an operation reported by Geenen 2009), to expulse street children from the city's public eye. 5 But this urban policy went much further than purifying the streets of unruly kids or prostitutes. ...
This article addresses the tensions that exist between the lives of city dwellers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those official attempts currently being launched by the Congolese government to create a new, albeit exclusionist, urban environment. During the campaign leading up to the 2006 presidential elections, President Kabila launched his “Cinq Chantiers” program, arguably the most ambitious project since the end of colonization in 1960 to overhaul the country and respond to its most pressing and urgent needs—or at least that of its elites—with regard to its urbanization. The article first situates the main phases of Kinshasa's expansion from the colonial era to the present day. It then turns to an analysis of the impact of the “Cinq Chantiers” program by examining two concrete cases: the expansion of fields in the Malebo Pool (looking at current modes of “informal” expansion of the urban space) and the development of a new urban project, the Cité du Fleuve (whose progressive uplift leaves out a large swath of the population). Are these examples of an African futurity, and for whom do they envision a new kind of urban life?
Public space is a possible site for grounding a social psychology of citizenship. Locational citizenship speaks to the right to have a place in public space. Certain groups are however often excluded. Drawing on individual interviews and focus group discussions with street children in Gambella Town, Ethiopia, this study explores how street children talk about their lives on the street. The results demonstrate the children's lack of inclusion in locational citizenship, and how public space becomes contested space when different groups use these places in ways that clash. The children also speak to processes of inclusion, both among groups of street children, and kindness from individual adults in their environment. These children's their stories of both exclusion and inclusion are crucial to the developing social psychology of citizenship. The study emphasizes exclusion and inclusion as processes, and the children's active handling of their street life. We also problematizes the division between private and public space when the former is often no longer an available space for these children.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been widely derided as a failed state, unable to meet the basic needs of its citizens. But while state infrastructure continues to decay, many essential services continue to be provided at the local level, often through grassroots initiatives. So while, for example, state funding for education is almost non-existent, average school enrolment remains well above average for Sub-Saharan Africa.
This book addresses this paradox, bringing together key scholars working on public services in the DRC to elucidate the evolving nature of governance in developing countries. Its contributions encompass a wide range of public services, including education, justice, transport, and health. Taking stock of what functions and why, it contributes to the debate on public services in the context of ‘real’ or ‘hybrid’ governance beyond the state: does the state still have a function, or is it no longer useful and relevant? Crucially, how does international aid help or complicate this picture?
Rich in empirical detail, the contributors provide a valuable work for students and scholars interested in the role played by non-state actors in organizing statehood - a role too often neglected in debates on post-conflict reconstruction.
My dissertation explores the state in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through a case study of the Congolese police and their reform. In short, it is about the police and their everyday work, about the effects of police reform and the nature of the state. While scholarship on the police in the post-colony and in Africa in particular has been growing over the past decade, this is the first comprehensive academic account of the police in Congo. Moreover, despite the crucial role of the police in state-society relations, in Congo and the wider region they remain underexplored in the study of these relations as well as of the state in general. My thesis, then, aims to contribute not only to scholarship on the
police in Congo, but to broader questions of the state and its nature in Central Africa. It addresses the following question: How do the police perform the state in Congo? Or, more specifically, in what ways do police practices and encounters with the public reproduce, sustain or collapse Congo’s state?
The shortest answer to this question lies in what I refer to as the Craft of the Congo Cop. Based on a year of immersive fieldwork consisting of interviews, focus groups and participant observation, my dissertation traces this performative way of doing the police in a context marked by acute contingency, scarcity and plurality. Following police officers
from the classroom via the station to the street, I argue that officers make policework possible through their everyday performativity (Butler 1994, 2010) that draws on, combines as well as subverts rationalities, technologies and techniques of prevailing—and entangled—governmentalities. While some of these police performatives project an effect of the state that instils them with its authority, not all do. In fact, everyday police performatives subvert as much as sustain the ‘state effect’ (Mitchell 1991). The Craft of the Congo Cop lies in the ability to reconcile colliding governmentalities and to project the state as a temporary, yet convincing effect of authority as and when it is required. This effect may barely last through one interaction only to crumble in the next and call for its transformation in the one thereafter. Therefore, rather than implying weakness, failure or chaos from this inherently contingent performative process, I propose that the state in Congo is best understood as a composite of temporary and fast-changing effects summoned by police performatives to gain an edge in a given social encounter. This composite nature explains why the state in Congo seems to be everywhere and nowhere, tangible and illusive, enduring and fleeting all at once.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article explores how a group of young men construct their sense of belonging to a public space, namely, a market in the capital city of Mozambique, Maputo. The young men’s occupancy of the market was a clever opportunistic move. While life in and around the market provided opportunities and resources that allowed them to “get by,” the way space was lived and experienced in everyday life by these young men made them particularly exposed to punitive systems of social control. Their experience of belonging to the street was ambiguous, as the freedom they searched for became conditional and they recurrently put themselves in a situation in which they became easy targets for police harassment and incarceration in state prisons. The article shows how these young men position themselves and negotiate their masculinities in an urban environment where they are identified as a threat to the social order.
Duress results from the internalization of violence. Through the narratives of two Central African Republic student refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this article presents the multiple layers of violence they experience. After introducing violence, the article turns to its different layers by making use of the palimpsest metaphor. Three layers of violence interrelate and overlap: the first relates to chronic crisis in the Central African Republic; the second layer deals with the context of the urban jungle (Kinshasa); and the third layer is linked to the humanitarian agencies that fail to provide for urban refugees. The experience of these three layers adds up to duress. Duress colors the students’ agency and the decisions they make along their life paths.
This paper draws on the explanatory power of assemblage thinking to consider the lives and urban experiences of young people growing up on the streets of sub-Saharan African cities. Urban assemblage is used to articulate a ‘thick description’ of the practices of coping with extreme poverty and marginalisation and to identify the effects of these actions on the construction of both young lives and the city. Focusing on a central idea of urban assemblage as a process of formation/transformation, the paper examines the strategies and performances adopted by street youth to meet their basic needs and navigate complex power and social relationships. Highlighting constrained agency, assemblage thinking is employed to demonstrate how multiple small actions of coping shape the urban experiences of street youth and their transition into adulthood.
This exploratory study was inspired by the author’s voluntary work with street-connected children and youth in Kenya. It develops an understanding of the experiences of young people leaving the street in two provincial Kenyan towns. Although there has been extensive research concerned with street-connectedness, there has been a limited focus on young people’s transitions away from the street.
Participants were identified with the help of three organisations: fifty-three young people, aged 12 -28, participated in semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and visual methods, during two field research visits to Kenya, in 2012 and 2013. The study found that their experiences of leaving the street were influenced by their day-to-day interactions with family, friends and other members of the communities into which they transitioned. These interactions influenced how accepted the young people felt and the extent to which they believed they were supported economically, physically and psychosocially, especially with regards to their relationships with family members. The participants’ interactions with school-based peers and teachers were particularly important in schools and training centres, where they struggled to develop a sense of belonging.
Being street-connected is an integral part of the identities constructed by young people after they leave the street and establish places for themselves in their families, schools, local communities, and wider society. Such street-connectedness can be a strength: the resilience and skills developed on the street are useful attributes in adapting to new situations, potentially providing income-generating opportunities later on. However, the stigmatisation and resulting marginalisation they experienced on the street can have lasting effects. Barriers to inclusion experienced on the street influence a young person’s ability to develop a sense of belonging to their new situation after leaving the street.
This study makes a conceptual contribution. Street-connectedness begins when a young person first arrives on the street, and continues until what could be years after they leave it. This street-connectedness can be characterised by three liminalities. The first is associated with living in the physical space defined as being on the street: a physical embodiment of liminality. The second, describes the process of being in transition as a young person newly arrived on the street, or having recently left the street: each being a liminal phase. The third liminality is described by an identity-forming social space, associated with being, and having been, street-connected: a liminal identity. This liminal identity, associated with being street-connected, impacts upon young people (re-)entering home communities and, in particular, education, and highlights a need to consider and address the effects of these impacts.
Since the arrival in Tanzania of American hip hop recordings in the 1980s, a varied, local, rapped music scene has developed. Due to high import duties, hip hop recordings were available only to wealthier Tanzanians, who consequently formed many of the early rap groups. Following liberalization of the media, however, local music incorporating rapping has become widely popular and the practice of rapping more widespread. Tanzanian rapped music has moved from a largely elite pastime to a ubiquitous form of Swahili language popular culture; from the margins to the mainstream.
As rapped music has become increasingly popular it has engendered both local musical stars and maandagraundi or ‘underground’ rappers. Underground rappers define themselves through their marginalization and exclusion from the circuits of commercial musical production, distribution and dissemination in Dar es Salaam. Unplanned settlements, commonly referred to by the term uswahilini, are fundamental to the practice of underground rapping, providing spaces for underground rapping practice and performance. This article will explore the ways in which underground rappers use the marginal and liminal space of uswahilini to engage in productive, creative practices, arguing that rapping acts as a means through which young men contest their marginality and assert their personhood. Rapping is a space in which young men contest not only their marginality but that of uswahilini – sonically asserting their presence in the city.
The inhabitants of Kinshasa (Kinois) in general and the street children (bashege) in particular, exist in a kind of half-dead (or half-living) state. The social, political, economic and cultural circumstances that characterise the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) manifest themselves in daily life in the form of permanent and structural exclusion, discrimination, humiliationand poverty. All this is not to say that the Kinois and the bashege remain entirely passive in this regard, or that they make no attempt to assert control over their lives. In this article, we will argue that they transform themselves into active agents who exercise agency – that is, exert deliberate control over their lives. We therefore opt for the term human agency instead of coping or coping strategies in this text.
In recent years the South African government has found itself increasingly challenged by the continuing violence and instability in certain communities that have been caused by street gangs and so-called vigilantism or popular justice. Street gangs have been a particular problem in predominantly coloured communities in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The phenomenon of popular justice has become characteristically associated with black African townships, and instances of popular justice have flared up in various townships. At face value, the extreme violence which is endemic to both the street gang and vigilantism would appear to be meaningless and senseless. However, these phenomena do pose a serious underlying challenge to the state. This article seeks to reflect on the street gang and vigilantism as examples of symbols of resistance to the state. Through an analysis of the socio-cultural contexts of both, the author shows how the street gang and vigilantism are symbols of the challenge to state authority.
Hip hop is part of a global economy of music, images and signs. Since the 1990s, hip hop has become an increasingly mainstream part of the African musical landscape. In Tanzania, as hip hop has become progressively more popular, the practice of rapping has also become more widespread.
In recent years, Dar es Salaam has seen a growth in andagraundi or ‘underground’ rappers. It is, in part, through the consumption of transnational styles and signs that underground rappers are able to fashion themselves. Through popular cultural practice, rappers embody the transnational
persona of a rapper. These transnational ideas and symbols are, however, imbued with meanings embedded in local discourses. The distinction frequently made between the local and the global is collapsed by the rappers as they come to embody the local in the global and vice versa.
“Taking the Street” : Urban Trajectories of Kinshasa’s Shégués
This article looks at urban trajectories of the Shégués, the so called “street children” of Kinshasa. “Taking the street” means for these children combining their wish to enhance their self-assertion with different ways of socializing with their peers through a collective learning of specific behaviors (such as theft technics, use of drugs and violence). Between the promotion of values linked to this “different” lifestyle, the yearning to social recognition and the dreams of individual success, the Shégués build themselves within a society in which they continuously try to “becoming someone” and to simply “exist”.
The declining salience of the nation state has led to an interest in whether other socially constructed forms, such as the city, have replaced it as a source of accumulation, belief and identity. This article seeks to explore whether this is true in the case of the capital of one of Africa's least successful states, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A survey explored the views towards the city of Kinshasa on the past of a variety of middle-class professional people as potential leaders in different occupations resident in different quarters of the city with roots in different parts of the DRC. Despite their somewhat abject material condition and despite extensive contacts internationally, the old dream of the nation state remains relatively strong among them while feelings towards the city largely reflect its situation in that dream rather than any new kind of loyalty. Members this class have extensive national networks of professional contact that help define their identity. New kinds of urban identity with cultural or political meaning beyond this could not be discerned contrary to the perspective held out initially.
This review presents a critique of the academic and welfare literature on street children in developing countries, with supporting evidence from studies of homelessness in industrialized nations. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sea change of perspective in studies concerning street youth. This review examines five stark criticisms of the category "street child" and of research that focuses on the identifying characteristics of a street lifestyle rather than on the children themselves and the depth or diversity of their actual experiences. Second, it relates the change of approach to a powerful human rights discourse - the legal and conceptual framework provided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - which emphasizes children's rights as citizens and recognizes their capabilities to enact change in their own lives. Finally, this article examines literature focusing specifically on the risks to health associated with street or homeless lifestyles. Risk assessment that assigns street children to a category "at risk" should not overshadow helpful analytical approaches focusing on children's resiliency and long-term career life prospects. This review thus highlights some of the challenging academic and practical questions that have been raised regarding current understandings of street children.
Temporality in contemporary Kinshasa is of a very specific eschatological kind and takes its point of departure in the Bible, and more particularly in the Book of Revelation, which has become an omnipresent point of reference in Kinshasa's collective imagination. The lived-in time of everyday life in Kinshasa is projected against the canvas of the completion of everything, a completion which will be brought about by God. As such, the Book of Revelation is not only about doom and destruction, it is essentially also a book of hope. Yet the popular understanding of the Apocalypse very much centers on the omnipotent presence of evil. This article focuses on the impact of millennialism on the Congolese experience, in which daily reality is constantly translated into mythical and prophetic terms as apocalyptic interlude.
In post-socialist Tanzania people rarely articulate economic disparity in terms of class. Instead idioms of space and place are employed to designate differences between the haves and have-nots. The material presented in this paper was gathered during 1999-2000 research among a group of poor urban youth struggling to make a living in the streets of the downtown business district of Dares Salaam. This location allows for an exploration of various themes related to labor, power, and the politics of development. This article attempts to unravel some of the complex relationships between contemporary processes of globalization and young peoples' efforts to make meaningful lives for themselves (street youth, Dar es Salaam, globalization, informal labor, NGOs).
In Zaire reality is in contradiction with the state.
Today in Zaire , real life takes place out of the State and its institutions. This grassroot social regulation has made possible the development of new positions of power out of State’ control or substitution of monopoly. These positions of power which correspond to the actual needs of the population are mushrooming in the streets of the country’s main towns. It is the case of the open currency markets and the new communities of prayers.
This book brings together a range of anthropological writings that are inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault and examine Foucault's contribution to current theories of modernity. Treats modernity as an ethnographic object by focusing on its concrete manifestations. Tackles issues of broad interest: from colonialism and globalization to war, genetics, and AIDS. Draws on work from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Contributors include James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Aihwa Ong, Paul Rabinow, and Rayna Rapp.
The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline, and security. Scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of the art and rationality of governance, or governmentality, have explored how urban social orders are increasingly based on the governance of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offenses. The new urban social order is characterized by privatized security systems and consumer-policed spaces such as malls. Gender violence interventions represent another deployment of spatial forms of governmentality. Over the last two decades, punishment of batterers has been augmented by disciplinary systems that teach batterers new forms of masculinity and by security systems for women based on spatial separation. In the postmodern city, spatial governmentality is integrally connected with punishment and discipline. These new forms of governance circulate globally along with neoliberal ideas of the diminished state.
This paper deals with fashion (la Sape) and its use among Congolese youth as a vehicle to borrow new identities. La Sape is an ambiguous adventure, a sort of Baudelairian voyage, that leads Congolese youth (Sapeurs), not only from a third world city to Paris and Brussels, but also from social dereliction to psychological redemption. It authenticates and validates their quest for a new social identity which the African city has failed to provide its overwhelming population of youth. It is, above all, a study of the interactions between clothing and social (and cultural) identities and the transfer of meaning from one to the other, and vice versa. La Sape allows the Sapeur to define the boundaries that separate him from the Other, but also serves as a defined social territory which distinguishes the Sapeurs from the rest of society. Ultimately, la Sape is redolent with political meanings. It is a political statement which, I argue in this paper, is directed toward the West, the former colonizer, as well as toward the authoritative structures of the African state. I also demonstrate that this political discourse is inseparable from the egotistical and hedonistic dimensions of la Sape.
This study examines ways that political leaders influence the development of the unofficial economy in Congo. Using aggregate data as well as data from observation and two surveys conducted in 1991–1992, it demonstrates that the unofficial economy develops not only as a reaction against an over-regulated state, but also because of a market segmentation along gender lines, state policy in defining property rights, and networks of relationships that partly shape the behavior of bureaucrats who act to satisfy their own preferences. Although the unofficial economy creates institutions that can challenge state hegemony, it neither allocates resources equally among the participants nor provides an equal access to high-profit activities to all. The findings suggest that women are more likely to be involved in low-value profit sectors of the unofficial economy than men. Because the unofficial economy reinforces mutual trust and reciprocity, it tends to create a new idea of social order and interactions.
Anthropological literature on children and violence has been constrained by similar considerations that have limited an anthropology of childhood more generally, and by difficulties in conceptualizing children both as victims of violence and as violent themselves. A review of the anthropological literature on violence directed toward children reveals a litany of violence to which children may be subjected that includes child abuse and neglect, bullying, violent cultural rites, warfare, and structural violence stemming from poverty and inequality. Aggression in childhood has been the subject of a robust and long-standing literature that has examined socialization for or against aggressive behavior in children. An emerging literature considers children's own violent behavior from the perspective of child agency. Children's own voices and perspectives have been largely absent from the anthropological literature on childhood and violence. This review highlights several issues at the intersection of childhood and violence that demand a synthesis and reformulation in anthropology.
“There is a growing consciousness of children at risk … there is also a growing sense of children themselves as the risk …”
( Stephens 1995 , p. 13)
How places are made is at the core of human geography. Overwhelmingly the discipline has emphasized the economic and material forces at work. Neglected is the explicit recognition of the crucial role of language, even though without speech humans cannot even begin to formulate ideas, discuss them, and translate them into action that culminates in a built place. Moreover, words alone, used in an appropriate situation, can have the power to render objects, formerly invisible because unattended, visible, and impart to them a certain character: thus a mere rise on a flat surface becomes something far more—a place that promises to open up to other places—when it is named “Mount Prospect.’The different ways by which language contributes toward the making of place may be shown by exploring a wide range of situations and cultural contexts. Included in this paper are the contexts of hunter-gatherers, explorers and pioneers, intimate friendship, literary London, Europe in relation to Asia, and Chinese gardening and landscape art. There is a moral dimension to speech as there is to physical action. Thus warm conversation between friends can make the place itself seem warm; by contrast, malicious speech has the power to destroy a place's reputation and thereby its visibility. In the narrative-descriptive approach, the question of how and why language is effective is implied or informally woven into the presentation, but not explicitly formulated or developed. Ways of making place in different situations—from the naming of objects by pioneers, to informal conversation in any home, to the impact of written texts—are highlighted and constitute the paper's principal purpose, rather than causal explanations, which must vary with each type of linguistic behavior and each situation.
The article provides insight into the current violent practices of urban youngsters in Kinshasa. At nightfall youth gangs transform the streets of Kinshasa's townships into arenas of the fight. Frequent regular clashes between these gangs create young violent leaders, who not only sow terror but also provide security for the inhabitants (young and old) of their territories. Although many of these boys and young men are trained in foreign fighting styles such as judo, jujitsu and karate, in the public clashes between the fighting groups, these boys and young men perform mukumbusu. This fighting style, inspired and based on the gorilla, was invented during the last decade of colonialism, and is an original mixture of a traditional Mongo wrestling practice, libanda, and Asian and Western fighting practices. In the article, I scrutinize the practices of these young fighters through the diverse images of masculinity (kimobali) upon which they draw, such as the fighter and the soldier; and the models of masculinity that they contest, the sapeur and the staffeur.
In this article, I contribute to recent efforts to correct aid organizations' ethnocentric representations of so-called street children. These organizations tend to impose a modern Western notion of childhood that portrays young people from around the world as passive objects of adult subjectivity. Using ethnographic data collected among two bandas (gangs) of so-called street children in Mexico City, I argue that the alternative is not necessarily to portray them in the image of the modern Western adult – as subjects or agents capable of authoring their own actions – but instead to recognize the specificity of the relationship among personhood, action, and sociality in a particular cultural context. Marilyn Strathern's writings on the gift economy help conceptualize this relationship among those of the bandas, who, rather than authoring their own actions, are caused to act by others.
This article is about space and social relationships. More precisely, it is about the space of and in social relationships. It is also about the efficacy of social relationships in segregating their own contexts of meaning and value. The article also addresses the question of how agency comes about. This ‘coming about’ of agency, its swelling and appearance in a structure of meaning, is what I call ‘capacity’. Social relationships have ‘capacity’. That is, they have both spaciousness and potency. They accomplish things, and accomplish things ‘somewhere’. In this respect, space (or the capacity of social relationships) is something very different from idioms that we have come to think of as forms of space, like landscape or place. This article is also, therefore, a critique of the way in which some anthropologists have recently theorized landscape and place. My argument is based on an ethnographic account of the dimensions through which people construct urban space in the Chilean city of Antofagasta.
This essay draws on long-term ethnographic data to analyze the shifting relations between street gangs and their broader commu-nity. The essay focuses on one particular moment in the evolution of a ghetto-based street gang, namely its attempt to "corporatize" by accumulating revenues in underground economies, in order to demonstrate that neither the structure nor the practices of the street gang can be understood apart from the social organizational context of the larger community it inhabits.
The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline, and security. Scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of the art and rationality of governance, or govemmentality, have explored how urban social orders are increasingly based on the governance of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offenses. The new urban social order is characterized by privatized security systems and consumer-policed spaces such as malls. Gender violence interventions represent another deployment of spatial forms of govemmentality. Over the last two decades, punishment of batterers has been augmented by disciplinary systems that teach batterers new forms of masculinity and by security systems for women based on spatial separation. In the postmodern city, spatial govemmentality is integrally connected with punishment and discipline. These new forms of governance circulate globally along with neoliberal ideas of the diminished state, [gender violence, govemmentality, urban society, globalization, law]
In this article I explore how an integrated approach to the anthropological study of urban space would work ethnographically. I discuss four areas of spatial/cultural analysis—historical emergence, sociopolitical and economic structuring, patterns of social use, and experiential meanings—as a means of working out of the methodological implications of broader social construction theoretical perspectives. Two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, furnish ethnographic illustrations of the social mediating processes of spatial practices, symbolic meaning, and social control that provide insight into the conflicts that arise as different groups and sociopolitical forces struggle to claim and define these culturally significant public spaces. [urban space, ethnographic methods, plazas, Costa Rica, social production, social construction]
Public Culture 12.3 (2000) 627-651
Cities like Bombay -- now Mumbai -- have no clear place in the stories told so far that link late capitalism, globalization, post-Fordism, and the growing dematerialization of capital. Their history is uneven -- in the sense made commonsensical by a certain critical tradition in Marxism. It is also characterized by disjunct, yet adjacent, histories and temporalities. In such cities, Fordist manufacture, craft and artisanal production, service economies involving law, leisure, finance, and banking, and virtual economies involving global finance capital and local stock markets live in an uneasy mix. Certainly, these cities are the loci of the practices of predatory global capital -- here Mumbai belongs with Bangkok, Hong Kong, Saõ Paulo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, and Singapore. But these cities also produce the social black holes of the effort to embrace and seduce global capital in their own particular ways, which are tied to varied histories (colonial and otherwise), varied political cultures of citizenship and rule, and varied ecologies of production and finance. Such particularities appear as images of globalization that are cracked and refracted. They are also instances of the elusiveness of global flows at the beginning of the new millennium.
Typically, these cities are large (10-15 million people) and are currently shifting from economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism, and finance. They usually attract more poor people than they can handle and more capital than they can absorb. They offer the magic of wealth, celebrity, glamour, and power through their mass media. But they often contain shadow economies that are difficult to measure in traditional terms.
Such cities, too, are the site of various uncertainties about citizenship. People come to them in large numbers from impoverished rural areas. Work is often difficult to obtain and retain. The rich in these cities seek to gate as much of their lives as possible, travelling from guarded homes to darkened cars to air-conditioned offices, moving always in an envelope of privilege through the heat of public poverty and the dust of dispossession. Frequently, these are cities where crime is an integral part of municipal order and where fear of the poor is steadily increasing. And these are cities where the circulation of wealth in the form of cash is ostentatious and immense, but the sources of cash are always restricted, mysterious, or unpredictable. Put another way, even for those who have secure salaries or wages, the search for cash in order to make ends meet is endless. Thus everyday life is shot through with socially mediated chains of debt -- between friends, neighbors, and coworkers -- stretched across the continuum between multinational banks and other organized lenders, on the one hand, and loan sharks and thugs, on the other.
Bombay is one such city. It has an interesting history as a set of fishing villages, many named after local goddesses, linked by bridges and causeways and turned into a seat of colonial government in western India. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it blossomed as a site of commercially oriented bourgeois nationalism, and, until the 1950s, it retained the ethos of a well-managed, Fordist city, dominated by commerce, trade, and manufacture, especially in the realm of textiles. Well into the 1970s, in spite of phenomenal growth in its population and increasing strain on its infrastructure, Bombay remained a civic model for India. Most people with jobs had housing; most basic services (such as gas, electricity, water, and milk) reliably reached the salaried middle classes. The laboring classes had reasonably secure occupational niches. The truly destitute were always there, but even they fit into a complex subeconomy of pavement dwelling, rag picking, petty crime, and charity.
Until about 1960, the trains bringing in white- and blue-collar workers from the outer suburbs to the commercial and political core of the city (the Fort area in South Bombay) seemed to be able to move people around with some dignity and reliability and at relatively low cost. The same was true of the city's buses, bicycles, and trams...
The inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the
popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa’s most urbanized
settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins—of ruined urbanization, the ruining of
Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be
happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but
also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is
capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of
economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means.
This essay is framed around the notion of people as infrastructure, which
emphasizes economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from
and immiserated by urban life. Infrastructure is commonly understood in physical
terms, as reticulated systems of highways, pipes, wires, or cables. These modes of
provisioning and articulation are viewed as making the city productive, reproducing
it, and positioning its residents, territories, and resources in specific
ensembles where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and
accounted for.
”De slaap neemt geen plaats in.” Een etnografische analyse van het gebruik van de publieke ruimte door straatbendes in Kinshasa
- K Geenen
Le transport urbain á Kinshasa: un noeud gordien
- Wa Mwanza