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Experiences of Slow Violence in Poor Kenyan Communities: Micro Disasters, Formalized Aid Responses, and Community Support through Social Networks

01 Jan 2015-
About: The article was published on 2015-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 10 citations till now.
Citations
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Journal Article
TL;DR: The story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya is explored in this article, where Elkins examines the imprisonment of thousands of Kenyans, overwhelmingly Kikuyu and men, in camps scattered across Kenya.
Abstract: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. By Caroline Elkins. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005. Pp. xvi, 475. $27.50. For decades now, Nairobi lore has told of the city's dark skies in the days just before the British made the country independent. Lore has it right. Those dark skies were not a natural act, but caused by the continuous fires used by the British to burn records. Caroline Elkins mentions these "massive bonfires" (p. xii) as an attempt by the British to suppress knowledge of their detention system in Kenya. This erasure of history was but one of the reasons for her near-decade toil to reassemble an evidentiary foundation from which to write this book. Elkins has been successful, indeed triumphant. She has written a harddriving historical narrative about the system of detention erected by the British during 1952-1960 in Kenya to stem the Mau Mau rebellion. She has examined in the greatest depth the imprisonment of thousands of Kenyans, overwhelmingly Kikuyu and men, in camps scattered across Kenya. Her main achievement is pulling back the veil that stood between us and this system so we can now see what took place in the camps. It is a gruesome sight. After telling the rise of the colonial state and later, of nationalism and Mau Mau, in Chapters 1-2, Elkins picks up the pace with chapters on the screening of detainees and on the concept of detainee rehabilitation. Chapter 5, "The Birth of Britain's Gulag," is the epicenter of the book. Here, Elkins shows how in 1954, the detention system was transformed. In that year, at the end of Operation Anvil, a "Gestapolike" (p. 121) sweep of Nairobi, the "detainee population had risen to over fifty-two thousand-an increase of 2,500 percent" (p. 131). It would continue to rise, until its daily average running total was over 70,000-according to Elkins, making the total detained more than previously admitted by colonials. With Elkins's new timeline and demography, we are well-placed to see the camps' infrastructures in creation: the system of interrogation heavily assisted by torture; the indoctrination against Mau Mau, to produce a procolonial new citizen; forced labor; the deeds of specific British commandants and their loyalist allies; the detainees' self-governing committees and resistance, particularly their ingenious communication in oral "newspapers"; camp tactics to break "The Hard Core" (in impressive Chapter 7); the treatment of women in camps; the success at dividing detainees; and the everyday hardships, such as cooling water for drinking. With the spotlight on the camps, "Domestic Terror," Chapter 8, might get overlooked, because it deals with terror in the countryside, but it is a classic, informing us of oppressions visited randomly on rural folk: raids, confessional barazas, physical tortures, sexual assaults against women. …

145 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Caroline Elkins as mentioned in this paper investigated the real history of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya and the systematic brutality with which the British colonial bureaucracy put it down, finding obvious gaps in the usually meticulous records, some missing and others "still classified as confidential some fifty years after the Mau- Mau war" (Elkins 2005: x).
Abstract: Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. London: Jonathan Cape. 2005. pp. xiv, 475. Caroline Elkins, now Assistant Professor at Harvard University, spent ten years researching the real history of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya and the systematic brutality with which the British colonial bureaucracy put it down. Had her work been less thorough, had she been content with the surface of the story which initially emerged from the highly censored records, her report might have been quite different . Elkins tells us: "When I presented my dissertation proposal to my department in the winter of 1997, I was intending to write a history of the success of Britian's civilizing mission in the detention camps of Kenya" What drew her into the lower depths of the true history of the Mau Mau rebellion was the absence of records about it. The author found obvious gaps in the usually meticulous records, some missing and others "still classified as confidential some fifty years after the Mau Mau war" (Elkins 2005: x) The Kikuyu people in Kenya found their land being confiscated and their labor coerced by British "development" projects such as the building a railroad, the growing of cash crops to repay British taxpayers for this expensive scheme, and ultimately the influx of white settlers to exploit land use and native labor. Some thirty thousand "coolies" from India were imported to build the railroad, many of whom were killed or maimed in the back-breaking work. Completed in 1901, the Uganda Railway consisted of hundreds of miles of track stretching from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and beyond. British military strategists believed this rail line gave them quick access to Uganda where they feared some rival, possibly Germany, might gain control of the headwaters of the Nile. Because the native way of life centered on family-cooperative subsistence farming, they were resistant to incorporation into cash-crop plantation agriculture. The colony therefore resorted to importing white settlers from England and South Africa in hopes of producing the money needed to pay off the enormous cost of this military-industrial feat. Resistance among the Kikuyu people took the form of a loose affiliation of organizations which came to be known as Mau Mau. Loyalty to the people's struggle against loss of land and their traditional way of life caused them to bond together through a time-honored practice of oath-taking, a practice which came to involve almost the entire population of Kikuyu communities and smaller numbers of people from neighboring tribes. So effective was this organization that the colonial bureaucracy sought to break it at any cost. The alleged barbarism of the Mau Mau became legendary, though in fact, as Elkins shows, far fewer people, white and/or black, died at the hands of the Mau Mau than the thousands of Kikuyu killed by the Colonial bureaucracy and their Kikuyu loyalist collaborators. As Elkins describes it, the British occupation of Kenya provides a good example of Maxime Rodinson's contention that settler colonialism is intrinsically genocidal. Though the Kikuyu retreated further into the interior to escape their depradations, the British military launched a series of punitive raids designed to force the natives to submit. "There is only one way of improving the Wakikuyu," Francis Hall wrote to his father, "[and] that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies." Of course Hall, an officer in the Imperial British East Africa Company, was unaware that he was echoing precisely the sentiments of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest Prospero reminded his daughter that they could not eliminate Caliban completely because they needed him to cut wood for their fire and haul water for their cooking. In campaigns of extermination reminiscent of those carried out a century earlier against the Native American indigenous peoples, British army officers like Captain Richard Meinertzhagen "launched several attacks that included wiping out an entire village of men, women, and elderly (the children were spared) uising bayonets, rifles, machine guns, and fire (Elkins 2005: 3). …

140 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Abouharb and Cingranelli as discussed by the authors, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, by M. Rodwan Abouhartb and D. David Conitzer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 276 pp.
Abstract: Book under review in this essay: Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, by M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 276 pp. Paperback. The structural a...

87 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of social capital is introduced and illustrated, its forms are described, the social structural conditions under which it arises are examined, and it is used in an analys...
Abstract: In this paper, the concept of social capital is introduced and illustrated, its forms are described, the social structural conditions under which it arises are examined, and it is used in an analys...

31,693 citations


"Experiences of Slow Violence in Poo..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Coleman (1988) proposed a definition of social capital that focused upon the collective resources in social networks from which individuals are able to draw resources....

    [...]

Book
01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: Putnam as mentioned in this paper showed that changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors are isolating Americans from each other in a trend whose reflection can clearly be seen in British society.
Abstract: BOWLING ALONE warns Americans that their stock of "social capital", the very fabric of their connections with each other, has been accelerating down. Putnam describes the resulting impoverishment of their lives and communities. Drawing on evidence that includes nearly half a million interviews conducted over a quarter of a century in America, Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors are isolating Americans from each other in a trend whose reflection can clearly be seen in British society. We sign 30 percent fewer petitions than we did ten years ago. Membership in organisations- from the Boy Scouts to political parties and the Church is falling. Ties with friends and relatives are fraying: we're 35 percent less likely to visit our neighbours or have dinner with our families than we were thirty years ago. We watch sport alone instead of with our friends. A century ago, American citizens' means of connecting were at a low point after decades of urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration uprooted them from families and friends. That generation demonstrated a capacity for renewal by creating the organisations that pulled Americans together. Putnam shows how we can learn from them and reinvent common enterprises that will make us secure, productive, happy and hopeful.

24,532 citations

01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: The notion of capital is a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world as mentioned in this paper, which is what makes the games of society, not least the economic game, something other than simple simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle.
Abstract: The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

21,046 citations


"Experiences of Slow Violence in Poo..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Social capital was first defined by Bourdieu (1986) as one of many collective properties within social networks that could be converted into economic capital, with others being cultural capital and symbolic capital....

    [...]

Book
01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: In this paper, Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know.
Abstract: In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know. Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking "What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?" and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

19,080 citations

Book ChapterDOI
14 Jan 2008
TL;DR: In this article, the authors define cultural capital as accumulated labor that, when appropriated on a private, that is, exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.
Abstract: Capital is accumulated labor that, when appropriated on a private, that is, exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. Most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that, in its fundamental state, it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. Cultural capital, in the objectified state, has a number of properties that are defined only in the relationship with cultural capital in its embodied form. By conferring institutional recognition on the cultural capital possessed by any given agent, the academic qualification also makes it possible to compare qualification holders and even to exchange them. Furthermore, it makes it possible to establish conversion rates between cultural capital and economic capital by guaranteeing the monetary value of a given academic capital.

13,768 citations