War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi

ABSTRACT In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those who live within the margins of the city experience every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its progenitors in the margins of this city.