Waste Worlds

Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability

Jacob Doherty

• Editorial: University of California Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520380967
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Cultural & Social Anthropology

Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion.

PART I The Authority of Garbage

1 Accumulations of Authority

Thus says the Lord God, “On the day that I cleanse you from all your sins I will also cause the cities to be inhabited, and the ruins will be rebuilt. The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. Then they will say, ‘This land that was deserted and desolate has become like the Garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate, and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ Then the nations that are left round about you shall know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places, and replanted that which was desolate; I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will do it.”

—Ezekiel 36:33–36

In a 2014 interview reviewing her accomplishments as executive director of the KCCA, Jennifer Musisi cites Ezekiel 36:33–36 as a source of purpose and inspiration as she takes on the task of transforming Kampala into a clean, orderly, and functioning city.¹ Ezekiel relates an apocalyptic prophecy of divine judgment, devastation, and redemption, prophesying God’s wrath: “Wherever you dwell your cities shall be waste and your high places ruined.”² It tells that the people of Israel will be scattered into exile, punishment for the sins of idol worship, violating taboos, ritual transgressions, and spiritual uncleanliness that profane God’s name. Establishing the Lord’s sovereignty over a host of foreign nations, Ezekiel relays God’s proclamation that He will “make the land desolation and a waste.”³ After suffering God’s wrath, the people of Israel will receive His beneficence; Ezekiel prophesies a gathering of the scattered people on the lands of their ancestors where God will deliver them from uncleanliness, give them a new heart and a new spirit, and transform waste to wealth, turning the defiled desolation into a fertile land for a fertile, righteous, and resurrected people.

While it may seem exaggerated to compare this biblical narrative of the judgment and redemption through which God’s sovereignty is proved and a people is reborn to the story of municipal transformation in contemporary Kampala, Musisi’s reference to this passage attests to some of the moral narratives through which urban politics in Uganda are understood. The KCCA, controversially established in 2010 to restructure urban governance, is not just a technical project but an agent of moral transformation intent on turning a wasteland into a prosperous and Edenic city. Musisi observed that, prior to the KCCA, “Government and all Ugandans were constantly embarrassed about the state of the city.”⁴ So, as the first head of the KCCA, she set out to repair the image of the city and transform the nation’s feelings about its capital.

The following chapters show that garbage served as a material, practical, and symbolic foundation for the KCCA’s authority, signaling its mandate and its ambitions as well as the infrastructural terrain upon which its legitimacy would be established. This is surprising because waste management provides few occasions for the kinds of elaborate white-elephant projects through which a new government might seek to make its mark on a city. Nonetheless, of all the issues facing the city—potholed roads and traffic congestion, wetland encroachment, flooding, housing shortages, health care, air quality, food security, and the overriding concern for the urban population and unemployment—in its first year of operation, the KCCA made solid waste management its first priority. Routine maintenance emerged as the critical field in which the KCCA’s highly contested governmental restructuring was legitimized and a new municipal government authorized. What does the fact that a newly established municipal government sought to found its authority on garbage reveal about the landscape of government and the constitution of political authority in Kampala? How does routine maintenance constitute, consolidate, and reproduce municipal power and urban space? Garbage is a messy foundation for political authority, one that opens a lively terrain of popular contestation. Waste management, one of the most unspectacular and mundane aspects of urban governance, offers a privileged view into the establishment of the KCCA, how it legitimized its authority in the face of protest, and how it has pursued its project of antipolitical urban renewal. Waste thus emerges as central to world making. As an object of governance, it becomes a generative substance through which social and political relations are made and remade.

This chapter situates the contemporary politics of cleanliness in relation to changing forms of political authority since the early twentieth century. A chronic crisis of rule, authority, infrastructural disorder, and uncontrolled development (the condition sometimes labeled with the Luganda term kavuyo) in Kampala were the historically situated problems that the KCCA was established to resolve. Putting this crisis of rule into a longer historical view illustrates the ways contemporary political struggles continue a pattern in which waste infrastructures and the moral economies of cleanliness operate as both a source of legitimacy and a terrain of political contestation. It reveals how routine maintenance work like waste management is simultaneously shaped by and productive of the ongoing multiplication of political authority in Kampala. Infrastructural maintenance, I argue, is also the maintenance of the forms of power and political authority that infrastructure sustains.

To call Kampala the seat of government in Uganda would be a radical understatement. The history of the city is a history of the accumulation and sedimentation of multiple forms of authority. Kampala’s topography of rolling hills interspersed with swampy lowlands suggests an alternative to theories of sovereign power inspired by the singular peak of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Rather than a lone Hobbesian sovereign authorized by the mutual covenant of a terrorized people, political authority in the city is multiple and heterogeneous. While most of the ethnographic research that informs this book is concentrated on the city’s wetlands, drains, and dumps, this chapter heads for the hilltops to describe the proliferation of authorities that shape the political terrain upon and against which visions of a clean city take shape.

In the century prior to the establishment of British over-rule with the 1900 Buganda Agreement, the hills that make up contemporary Kampala were the political center of the Buganda Kingdom. Each new kabaka (king) founded a new capital on a hilltop, establishing a palace, administrative center, and court. Upon the king’s death, his palace became a royal tomb, a site of spiritual authority tended by mediums, while the successor established a new capital.⁵ Recognizing the capital’s strategic location, and perceiving some commensurability between the Buganda Kingdom and Victorian Britain—their hierarchical centralized political structure and culture, the value placed on progress, and an emphasis on domestic virtues like cleanliness—British officials saw the Buganda Kingdom as an attractive partner in the project of indirect colonial rule.⁶ The British, in turn, consolidated the kabaka’s authority at a time when the kingdom was wracked by a territorial war with the neighboring Bunyoro Kingdom and an internal religious conflict pitting adherents of the Catholic and Anglican churches against each other.⁷ Missionization preceded colonization and, by virtue of the conflicts it generated, played a role in fragmenting and destabilizing the kingdom, which facilitated the establishment of colonial rule.⁸ Under the British, the Buganda capital ceased moving and was consolidated at Mengo, the Lukiiko (the Buganda Parliament comprised of chiefs appointed by the kabaka) was established nearby on Rubaga Hill, and the tomb of Kabaka Mutesa I at Kasubi became designated as the Buganda Royal Tombs.⁹ Although kingdoms were abolished in 1966 under President Milton Obote, who saw the kabaka as a threat to his own authority, in 1993 they were reinstated as purely “cultural institutions” by President Museveni in a bid to consolidate his own authority and popularity in Buganda.¹⁰

In the 1890s, prior to the consolidation of British rule, Frederick Lugard established a fort on a hilltop neighboring the palace of Kabaka Mwanga II at Mengo, under the authority of the Imperial British East Africa Company. This fort—Camp Impala, named after the antelope that made the area a rich hunting ground—became the nucleus of the colonial city of Kampala that extended from what is now known as Old Kampala to Nakasero and Kololo Hills and stood apart from the Kibuga, the native town centered around Mengo that remained under the authority of the kabaka.¹¹ Kampala was a segregated city, inhabited by British merchants and colonial officers as well as Indian traders and laborers. The neighboring native town was home to a large African migrant population from around East Africa, while the majority of Baganda who worked in Kampala commuted from nearby villages where they resided.¹² The 1903 Township Ordinance established a planning framework based on a system of cantonments imported from colonial India. Planning schemes were drawn up based on the recommendations of staunch segregationist Professor W. J. Simpson in 1912, and again in 1919, to establish cordons sanitaires between European and Asian areas but did not incorporate any African settlements.¹³ Not until 1947, when avant-garde German architect Ernst May was hired to create an ultimately unimplemented plan for the rapidly expanding post–World War II city were African workers incorporated into municipal planning. May proposed a garden city model including discrete African quarters with the ambitious modernist goal of carefully evolving Africans through holistic special, social, and cultural planning.¹⁴ In the early 1950s the final British plan for Kampala was proposed, and it responded to growing demand for African housing and urban rights by incorporating the Nakawa-Naguru area as a planned African residential area. For African workers, inclusion still involved segregation. As Ann Stoler has argued, however, it is important not to overstate the fact of segregation and portray an entirely divided society, ignoring the imperial intimacies and circulations across boundaries constitutive of colonial racial orders.¹⁵ On one hand, colonial rule created elaborate campaigns to intervene in and remake African intimacies, including efforts to abolish nonmonogamy, promote fertility, and control disease.¹⁶ On the other hand, British colonists’ domesticities relied upon African labor in the most intimate spaces of European homes, as the cleanliness of white spaces required the circulation of African workers across the urban borders that racially demarcated space.¹⁷

In Kampala, as throughout the British Empire, waste and cleanliness were central to the construction and maintenance of racial difference, both between colonizer and colonized and between differentially racialized members of the colonized population.¹⁸ In his study of the Buganda capital late in the colonial period, anthropologist Peter Gutkind observes that early explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators in fact offer contradictory, but consistently racializing, accounts of sanitary conditions and the importance placed on cleanliness by the kabaka. These range from statements that label Baganda as a rare “Negro race . . . who attempt anything like sanitary measures to keep their surrounding areas from filth” by Special Commissioner Sir Harry Johnston and missionary ethnographer John Roscoe’s report that the kabaka “made the neglect of certain sanitary conditions in the capital an offense punishable by death” to medical officer Dr. Ansorge’s depiction of the “abominable filth in the native capital” with “filth and stench everywhere.”¹⁹ Responding to this filth, cleanliness, hygiene, and sanitation became a struggle as the Kampala Municipal Council sought to extend sanitary authority over the Kibuga, meeting both cooperation and resistance from the kabaka and his prime minister.

Sanitary measures in the 1920s and ’30s included using forced labor to clear drains, burning huts, and hunting rats, primarily with the goal of combating plague and malaria.²⁰ Although the outcome of these efforts was often appreciated, following the orders of colonial medical officers was seen as compromising the king’s sovereignty over the Kibuga. Carrying out these orders also made Baganda authorities unpopular among their followers, upon whose labor they relied and who were being evicted from unsanitary huts.²¹ In his 1930 masterplan, A. E. Mirams, a town planner and fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute with prior experience in colonial Bombay, proposed constructing a refuse incinerator outside Kampala in an area that appeared blank on his maps but was an inhabited part of the Kibuga. Mirams noted simply that the “site is on native land but can be acquired.”²² The disposal facility would be “screened from the public gaze, and so sited as to create as little annoyance to the public as possible.”²³ The white public would thus be spared the annoyance of encountering its own waste and the infrastructures of disposability by expelling them from Kampala into the African city.

Racialized dualism marked both the development of Kampala and the ways in which the city’s social problems were understood. Diagnoses of urban ills disavowed relationality between colonial and African settlements and, as Achille Mbembe writes, “circumscribe[d] the phenomenon of poverty within racially associated enclaves.”²⁴ Writing in 1961 at the eve of Uganda’s independence, for instance, political scientist David Apter observed that Kampala is “prepossessing” and “exudes prosperity. . . . It has no ‘African Quarter’ ” although “there are slums outside, such as Kisenyi and Mulago, sometimes quite fearful ones, but by and large African immigrants live there.”²⁵ This distinction between Kampala and its outside, the Kibuga, was a sustaining effect of a political and infrastructural dualism that gave rise to a clean Kampala on the one hand and “squalid slums in a royal realm” on the other.²⁶ As in other East African cities, cleanliness was thus established as a critical terrain of political contestation in colonial Kampala.²⁷ It marked the contours of urban belonging, materialized racialized theories of who counted as a proper urban citizen, and legitimized or delegitimized particular forms of rule.

When the kabaka was exiled and the kingdom abolished by President Obote in 1966, Kampala and the Kibuga were integrated under the authority of the Kampala City Council. A new integrated plan for the city was prepared in 1972 but, amid the chaos of the Amin Regime (1971–1979), was never implemented.²⁸ Kampala decayed during these years and over the course of the ensuing Obote II regime (1979–1986), marked by civil war and authoritarian violence directed at the population. The Asian expulsion and economic war of 1972 led to the collapse of Uganda’s industrial and manufacturing sectors. With the loss of jobs, stable incomes, high tariffs on imports, and state control of primary exports, a black-market economy—dubbed the “magendo economy”—flourished in these years, and informal means of securing an income were normalized across the class spectrum.²⁹

Since Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Army (now the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement, NRM) took power in 1986, established peace in southern Uganda, rebuilt the national state, and restructured the national economy through IMF-authored structural adjustment policies, the city has experienced a boom in population, commerce, and international nongovernmental activity.³⁰ In 1993, prior to establishment of the nation’s new constitution, a ten-year urban plan was commissioned by the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development.³¹ By far the most comprehensive...