Race, space, and ‘terror’: Notes from East Africa

Abstract

In early 2016, I received an exasperated text message from a friend in Nairobi. Referencing the newly released political thriller Eye in the Sky, she contested the film’s portrayal of Kenya as a place of violence and terror. Having returned the previous year from Kenya, where I conducted extended ethnographic research on questions related to militarism and security, I reflected on the film and her reaction to it. In Eye in the Sky, British and American military officials rely on satellite imagery to track the movements of suspected Al-Shabaab militants in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. As the story unfolds, the officials close in on a home in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, where the home’s inhabitants are in the midst of assembling vests armed with explosives. Debate quickly ensues in London and Washington about whether to launch a drone strike on this home with the goal of preventing a future – seemingly imminent – act of violence. Because the film is almost exclusively focused on the decisionmaking process leading up to a drone strike, commentators have generally foregrounded the question of ‘ethical’ warfare as seen from the perspective of those who occupy imperial war rooms. In their accounts, the historical specificity of Kenya as a country that has become entangled in the war against Al-Shabaab is entirely obscured by images of a generic, lawless Africa inhabited by killers and their potential victims. Both the film and its critics in the Global north overlook the day-to-day politics on the ground that have shaped Kenya’s relationship to the racialized geopolitics of the so-called war on terror. I quickly discovered that Kenyans on social media shared my friend’s frustrations and challenged the film’s portrayal of Nairobi as a war zone overrun by Al-Shabaab militia. ‘Wow great movie this #eyeinthesky but got so many wrong things about our great nation #Kenya.’ ‘Clearly the guys who made #EyeInTheSky have never been to Nairobi. Nice film but inaccurate imagination that Nairobi is like Mogadishu.’ ‘Shocking how #EyeInTheSky depicts a real country #Kenya & city #Nairobi are under control of militants. Ridiculous!’ These impassioned interventions rejected the notion that Kenya is in any way connected to the racialized ‘ungoverned spaces’ typically associated with ‘terrorism’. They reflected an affective geopolitics about ‘us’ and ‘them’ that structures many of my middle-class interlocutors’ sense of self. Many people I encountered in the course of my research were invested in an imaginative