Changing Cities: Climate, Youth, and Land Markets in Urban Areas
on the legal tools, capacity, and will of the local state and the identities that form to leverage and capitalize on the fractures and disjunctures arising out of fragmented urban governance. For example, when the validity of temporary occupation passes instituted under military authority were rejected under the civil administration as having been granted outside the legal mandate, the administration found that the “African Settlement (Kibera Settlement Area) Rules of 1949,” which were intended to grant the authority to evict, had no teeth for enforcement (Parsons 1997, 116). And further attempts to evict nonSudanese dwellers were in vain because the Sudanese adopted or claimed to hire their tenants as domestic workers in order to protect their renters’ rights to live in Kibera (Parsons 1997). With looming independence, the Sudanese pressured the regime to extend formal rights to Kibera. However, the British had lost interest in the plight of the settlers, partly due to broader concern with the pending loss of the colonial stronghold and partly due to the shared consensus that the Sudanese were a tribe of questionable character and integrity (de Smedt 2009a). Although the postcolonial government failed to have equal sympathy for the rights granted under the colonial state, it also had little success in removing people from Kibera and, after failed attempts to convince structure owners in Kibera to be compensated for tearing down their shacks, the government finally agreed to tolerate the settlement. A new form of temporary occupancy license was granted in Kibera, however; and these licenses were again handed out as political patronage to those associated with the ruling party (Amis 1984). The unique urban importance of the tribe, as both a colonial and African construct for social grouping and identification, became increasingly pertinent throughout the development of Kibera (de Smedt 2011). Despite their allegiance to the British, the Sudanese (in post-independence to be classified as the “Nubian tribe,” in an effort to be seen as rightfully Kenyan) are often seen as the first and most legitimate claimants to Kibera. Although the Kikuyus are often seen as the second generation of Kibera settlers, their own legacy dates back to the 1920s, when they first entered Kibera as renters—–only to be chased out during the Mau Mau Uprising in the late 1950s (de Smedt 2009b; Dafe 2009). However, from the time of independence, the Kikuyu population aggressively sought licenses and actively constructed large structures for rental, shifting the historically Nubian-dominated demographic composition of Kibera. Additional groups | 128 |