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

Introduction

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 geography that clearly delineated between spaces of ‘war’ (Somalia) and ‘peace’ (Kenya), despite a grounded reality that defies clean binaries. ¹ Implicit in this imagination is the positioning of the Somali-dominated neighborhood of Eastleigh (popularly referred to as ‘Little Mogadishu’) as part of Somalia rather than Kenya. ² For Nairobi’s more privileged residents, the film’s clumsy conflation of Kenya’s capital with the war-ravaged landscape of Eastleigh (a.k.a. Somalia) was therefore an insult to their aesthetic ideal of Nairobi as a ‘world-class’ city. ³

Working at the intersection of blackness and Islam, this article is a reflection on the multiple, overlapping processes of racialization that inform the ongoing war against the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab in East Africa. On the one hand, I emphasize the structuring role of race in the context of global policy narratives about security in Africa, as information economies about ‘unstable’ Africa intersect with those focused on ‘violent’ Islam. At the same time, I illustrate that the war on terror has resurfaced colonial-era mappings of alterity about populations racialized as Arabs and Somalis, necessitating critical analysis of race and racialization beyond the black/white binary. ⁴ To this end, I employ a relational framework to the study of race, conceptualizing racial formation as a mutually constitutive process wherein ‘racial meanings and hierarchies are co-produced through dynamic processes that change across time and place’ (Molina and Ho Sang, 2019: 8). ⁵ Attention to relationality and multiplicity allows us to explore the racialization of subordinate groups in relation to one another and to broaden our understandings of race beyond Eurocentric teleologies. ⁶

Theories of race and racialization as they relate to Islam and the war on terror have focused primarily on Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims, rendering African Muslims largely invisible. Moreover, the focus of these works has primarily been on Muslim populations living in the United States and Europe, meaning that our understandings of race in relation to Islam remain limited to Eurocentric fears and anxieties. In East Africa, colonial-era categorizations are at the heart of racialized constructions of threat, with black ‘native’ Islam juxtaposed against Arab and Somali ‘foreign’ Islam. While so-called foreign Muslims constitute a racial minority and are deemed to be the most threatening, these are nevertheless populations that actively benefited from the colonial racial order. The legacy of colonial distinctions has been paradoxical in the Kenyan context: those who identified as Arabs or Somali embraced their ‘non-native’ but nonetheless urban rights-bearing status, calculating that it would protect their privileges vis-a-vis ‘native’ subjects. Thus, as Jemima Pierre (2018: 20) reminds us, the ‘Africa’ we know today ‘does not exist outside the legacies of slavery and imperialism, Arab and European white supremacy, racialization, and most importantly, Blackness’.

During my extended period of research, I found that Kenyan middle-class publics are both consumers and producers of racialized imaginative geographies that have come to be associated with violence and instability. Whether in relation to Somalia as a whole, or areas of Kenya populated by residents associated with violence and terror, I was often warned or discouraged from spending time in particular places and with particular people. Interlocutors in Nairobi spoke disparagingly about the coastal city of Mombasa, while those in Mombasa counselled against travel to areas along the border with Somalia, where the majority of Kenyan Somalis reside. Meanwhile, the war against Al-Shabaab has provided a stage for the production of new fantasies and subjectivities about Kenya’s place in the world. Through carefully choreographed public events that celebrate Kenya’s commitment to liberal norms of peace and security, Kenya emerges as exceptional, standing apart from its purportedly uncivilized neighbors (Al-Bulushi, 2019). ⁷ For Kenyans, therefore, the war on terror is as much a cultural field of meaning and representation as it is a violent endeavor. How might ethnographic research direct our attention to African modes of self-making and identity formation that are in dialogue with racialized discourses about state failure and (in)security? What modes of geopolitical refashioning are taking place in tandem with imperial discourses about people and places deemed to be violent or threatening? And in what ways do colonial racial distinctions inform contemporary imaginative geographies of ‘terror’?

Researcher positionality and methodological considerations

This section foregrounds the positionality of the researcher, noting that discussions about fieldwork and methods on the topic of security states generally refer to an undifferentiated ‘we’ as researchers. ⁸ The default assumption is that the researcher is white and male, thereby unencumbered by considerations of gender or race – not to mention visa regimes. ⁹ Because whiteness continues to be the assumed position from which research is conducted, scholarly notions of expertise on this topic conceive of authoritative knowledge as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate. Meanwhile, scholars of color focused on security, particularly as it relates to the war on terror, face a double bind: we may be viewed with suspicion by our own governments, as well as by the governments in the places where we conduct our research.

Between 2013 and 2016, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study in the Kenyan cities of Nairobi and Mombasa focused on Kenya’s relationship to the so-called war on terror. I was especially interested in how Kenya’s Muslim minority population was affected by the rapidly expanding practices of surveillance and policing by Kenyan security bodies that have received funds, training, and equipment from the USA, the UK, and various supranational entities. Coordinated forms of police power have had deadly consequences: communications surveillance is conducted without legislative oversight, and intercepted contents are shared and abused to spy on, profile, and track potential terror suspects, often leading to their arrest, torture, and disappearance (Privacy International, 2017). Between 2012 and 2016 alone, over 80 people from the coast were either killed or disappeared by agents operating within specialized counter-terror bodies like the Anti-Terror Police Unit (HAKI Africa, 2016).

Preliminary research trips to Kenya made clear to me that my intended topic of study, and the individuals I would be interacting with, would inevitably garner scrutiny from the very security assemblages I sought to examine. I also knew that my name and physical appearance would incline Kenyan officials to place me in the racialized category of Arab/Muslim, thereby marking me as suspicious. With this in mind, I scheduled a meeting with an official at Yale University, where I was pursuing my PhD, in order to learn in advance what measures the university had in place should I be arrested or detained. I saw this as an opportunity to inform the university about my research so that it would be prepared for any unexpected encounters I might have with police or security agencies. The exchange I had with the university official, whose actual duties I have come to associate with those of a foreign minister, was illuminating, and I was immediately reminded of Yale’s entanglement in US empire. The US ambassador to Kenya, I was told, was a graduate of Yale. If anything were to happen, the official assured me, he would simply pick up the phone and call him. Leaving aside the unspoken understanding that the US ambassador wields enough power to override the decisionmaking authority of the country to which he or she is posted, the fact that the US government was of equal – if not greater – concern to me as an entity that might surveil or detain me never entered the university official’s mind. ¹⁰

Upon my arrival in Nairobi for my extended period of research, I confronted bureaucratic hurdles in the effort to obtain a research permit. It eventually became clear that the director of the office in charge of approving these permits was curious about my background and intentions, as well as one of my proposed research sites, Mombasa – a coastal city that Nairobi residents often refer to disparagingly as full of ‘radicals’. Over the course of numerous exchanges with a mid-level bureaucrat, I realized that he had been tasked with assessing my political leanings. Rather than ask me direct questions, he made casual observations on different topics (ranging from Al-Shabaab, to Israel–Palestine, to the International Criminal Court). Throughout these exchanges, I could not help but take note of the sole item hanging in his office: a newspaper clipping of the ‘White Widow’, a British convert to Islam popularly believed to have coordinated the 2013 Westgate mall attack in Nairobi. When I eventually gathered the courage to ask about the image, he proclaimed, ‘You see, she could pose as a researcher and come here looking for a permit!’

In Kenya, the gendered figure of the female terrorist – particularly in the case of the ‘White Widow’ (Samantha Lewthwaite) – has emerged as exceptional, feeding into sensationalized reporting and conspiracy theories (Auer et al., 2019). The newspaper clipping clearly served to remind this bureaucrat that Muslim women, too, were cunning masters of disguise. That Samantha Lewthwaite is white is noteworthy, as the association between whiteness and civilizational modernity continues to structure Kenyan social and political life in such a way that Kenyan officials might fail to suspect a white woman of involvement with ‘terrorism’. Indeed, it was arguably her marriage to a Muslim man from Mombasa that made it possible to conceive of Lewthwaite as threatening.

Days later, I was summoned to meet with the director general. After a careful examination of my US passport, he apologized for the extended vetting process and half-jokingly proclaimed to his colleagues that ‘she looks innocent, but she could be a terrorist!’ For several months after these exchanges, I received phone calls from the mid-level official, who inquired about the progress of my research and about what life was like in Mombasa. He had never visited, he told me, because it was ‘dangerous’.

These interactions contributed to my paranoia about surveillance. I regularly made strategic decisions about who not to interact with, and where not to travel, on the basis of my embodied awareness that I was likely being watched. At the same time, I was compelled to critically assess the potential consequences of my research for my interlocutors, who themselves were on the receiving end of far more insidious forms of surveillance and policing. As others before me have noted, this requires careful consideration of the ultimate objectives of our research – who are we writing for, and to what end? The reality is that research on the question of ‘security’ in East Africa risks contributing to the surveillance of already heavily surveilled populations. What some have referred to as an ‘ethics of obfuscation’ (Abboud et al., 2018: 282) may entail the need to make decisions not to write about particular topics or to consciously omit certain details.

Race, space, and ‘terror’

‘Africa’ as idea and geopolitical space has long been racialized as the quintessential other in the global order of nation-states (Clarke, 2011; Grovogui, 2001; Mudimbe, 1988; Pierre, 2013). ‘The very production of “Africa”’, writes Jemima Pierre (2013: 5), ‘occurs through ideas of race’. With this in mind, we cannot contend with policy narratives about governance and security ‘without recognizing the ways they are refracted through processes of racialization’ (Pierre, 2013: 5). The concept of the ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ state, on the one hand, and the need for ‘good governance’, on the other, constitute two strands of a conceptual vocabulary that international policymakers regularly employ in relation to Africa, particularly to warn about the threat of terrorism (Gruffydd Jones, 2015: 62–63).

The so-called war on terror in Africa is as much a racial project as it is a geopolitical one, unfolding at the intersection of Islamophobia and anti-blackness. While the mainstream media fixated primarily on the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11, US officials concerned about potential threats to global oil supplies increasingly framed the continent as a ‘threat environment’, reinforcing longstanding racialized ideas about the ‘dark continent’. ¹¹ In November 2001, for example, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Susan Rice (2001) characterized Africa as the world’s ‘soft underbelly for global terrorism’. Terrorist networks, she argued, were exploiting the continent’s porous borders and ‘weak law enforcement and security services’.

Since then, Euro-American policymakers and military strategists have regularly invoked narratives about state failure to legitimate external intervention. While on the surface these narratives appear to be free of racial tropes, scholars increasingly recognize the ways in which they are both informed by and produce racialized ideas about place and space (Grovogui, 2001; Gruffydd Jones, 2015; Wai, 2012). As Siba Grovogui (2001) observes, the history of colonialism requires that we consider the racialization of international knowledge, wherein the so-called international community is generally portrayed as white, male, Christian, and guided by morality and neutrality. Indeed, as others have elaborated, the discursive production or ‘cultural coding’ (Springer, 2011) of certain peoples and places is imbricated in racialized notions of governance, rationality, and civilization. ¹² In what Junaid Rana refers to as ‘racialized regionalisms’, policymakers and their ‘expert’ counterparts in the global North academy imagine different countries as a single geopolitical mass, producing arguments about regional exceptionalism that are then used to justify foreign intervention. ¹³

Somalia was of particular concern for the United States after 9/11. In her testimony to the House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa in November 2001, Susan Rice (2001) declared that ‘Somalia has become the continent’s proverbial black hole: an ungoverned, lawless, radicalized, heavily armed country with one of the longest undefended coastlines in the region. It is terrorist heaven.’ Meanwhile, Kenyan officials issued statements of their own, arguing that the risk of terrorism in the region emanated from Somalia. In the words of former permanent secretary Dave Mwangi in the Ministry of Interior, ‘Our most serious vulnerability is that we are neighboring the Somali Republic, a land with no government’ (cited in Butler, 2003). The (re)scripting of Somalia as lawless and ungoverned contributed to a call to action. ¹⁴ While the Bush administration was the most vocal about Somalia as a problem, it had no intention of placing US troops on the ground in the region. By invoking the language of partnership, it sought to garner support from allies who would be ready to deploy their own troops to the frontlines.

Kenya is an important example of a ‘partner’ state that has now become entangled in the ongoing war against Al-Shabaab. The Kenyan military invaded Somalia in 2011 and has now been engaged in military combat abroad for nearly a decade. In response, Al-Shabaab launched a growing number of attacks inside Kenya. Large-scale attacks such as those at the Westgate mall (2013), in Mandera (2014), and at Garissa University College (2015) have raised questions and concerns about ‘blowback’, and about the recruitment of Kenyan Muslims onto the ‘wrong’ side of this war.

As mass-mediated ideas about the Al-Shabaab militants gained hold in the Kenyan public sphere, they have been entwined in imaginative political geographies that are both new and old. The racialization of Islam, whereby the notion of a ‘local’ ‘African’ Islam is juxtaposed with a ‘foreign’ ‘Arab/Somali’ Islam has involved the production and reproduction of difference over time, implicating colonial officials, local intelligentsia, anthropologists, and policymakers (Besteman, 1999; Glassman, 2011; Westerlund and Rosander, 1997). Scholars have outlined how colonial officials assigned African subjects distinct ethnic and racial identities, linking these identities to territory (Mamdani, 1996; Pierre, 2013; Weitzberg, 2017). Because the British colonial system classified Arabs and Somalis as non-native citizens alongside Europeans, it effectively blurred the boundaries between the colonizer and a minority among the colonized (Mamdani, 2001).

Since independence, however, these populations have been marked by purportedly competing loyalties because they continued to invest in kinship, religious, and trade networks that extended beyond the nation-state – whether eastwards across the Indian Ocean or north to Somalia (Kresse, 2009; Ndzovu, 2014; Prestholdt, 2014; Weitzberg, 2017). Contemporary policymakers have built upon colonial-era distinctions, juxtaposing African ‘native’ Islam against Arab and Somali ‘foreign’ Islam. ¹⁵ A 2007 report by the Combatting Terrorism Center’s Harmony Project (2007: 51) at West Point, for example, located prospects for radicalism within the ‘small but significant Arab, Arab-Swahili and Somali minorities concentrated in coastal Kenya, Nairobi and several other urban centers’. It further pointed to Indian Ocean histories of trade, study, and intermarriage as indicative of the coastal population’s non-native roots. Yet, even as we grapple with the significance of these discursive distinctions, racial identities and meanings have always been fluid in practice, shifting according to context. Indeed, there are multiple protagonists relevant to the racialization of Arab and Somalis in East Africa, including those who identify as Arabs and Somalis themselves (Brennan, 2012; Glassman, 2011; McIntosh, 2009; Weitzberg, 2017). ¹⁶

In this sense, ‘Arab’ and ‘Somali’ are mobile signifiers whose meaning is both historically situated and continuously redefined. Rather than simply a reference to phenotype, a combination of racial, religious, and geographical bases for differentiation are entangled in what Mahmood Mamdani (2004) would refer to as ‘culture talk’. ¹⁷ Frantz Fanon’s (1963) analysis of the dividing lines that characterized French colonial spatial organization of Algiers is helpful here as we contend with the ways in which entire neighborhoods become racialized as threatening. ¹⁸ The spatial dimensions of racialization assume renewed meaning and significance in the context of security-related ‘events’. Because the 1998 Al-Qaeda embassy bombings in Nairobi came on the heels of mass protests led by the Islamic Party of Kenya in Mombasa, Kenyans clung to rumors that the perpetrators were not only Muslim, but also ‘Arabs’ from the coast (Prestholdt, 2011). On the eve of the Kenyan military’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011, Assistant Minister for Internal Security Orwa Ojode compared Al-Shabaab to a snake ‘with its tail in Somalia and its head in Eastleigh’ (Quist-Arcton, 2011). And in the aftermath of the Al-Shabaab attack on Garissa University College in April 2015, state officials and media outlets quickly seized on the revelation that one of the gunmen was a Kenyan Somali law graduate of the University of Nairobi, fueling anxieties about a Somali ‘invasion’. ¹⁹ Kenyan police quickly launched a new wave of neighborhood sweeps and mass arrests in Eastleigh, triggering memories of Operation Sanitize Eastleigh the year prior, in which thousands were arrested and detained. In Mombasa, where I was living at the time, the Kenyan military erected checkpoints in the dead of night, stopping families returning home from their weekend outings.

Each of these actions and declarations works to reinscribe colonial-era mappings of alterity along race and space. Kenyan reactions to Eye in the Sky were inevitably informed by these histories, as well as by situated understandings of the continent’s ongoing relationship to global racialized hierarchies, wherein the language of insecurity is a proxy for blackness. Ethnographic research that attends to day-to-day politics on the ground brings to life the ways in which multiple racial formations (Islam, blackness, Africa) are linked and mutually reinforcing. Even as populations within Kenya are differently positioned in relation to each other, and to wider structures of power, a relational framework allows us to simultaneously grapple with these distinctions and to shed light on the shared logics that undergird broader power formations. Rather than a recourse to area studies or a privileging of the ‘local’, this is a call to think across divergent temporalities and spatialities, asking what relational geo-histories open up for theorizations of race and critical security studies.