Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home AfricaBib Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Speed governors: road safety and infrastructural overload in post-colonial Kenya, c. 1963-2013
Author:Lamont, MarkISNI
Year:2013
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (ISSN 0001-9720)
Volume:83
Issue:3
Pages:367-384
Language:English
Geographic term:Kenya
Subjects:infrastructure
automobiles
roads
traffic accidents
politics
legislation
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_the_journal_of_the_international_african_institute/v083/83.3.lamont.pdf
Abstract:This article focuses on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since independence in 1963 as a way of illustrating the analytic value of speed for the anthropology of the State. Road safety, a highly visible public concern in Kenya since the 1960s, offers a way to rethink the temporal dangers and uncertainties of automotive travel under global capitalism, but also to go further in seeking out historical continuities in Kenya's post-colonial aspirations for safer and more efficient roads. From Africanization, in the 1960s and 1970s, with its vociferous complaints and debates of Kenyan politicians about imported Peugeots being dangerous to drive on Kenya's rough and sparsely tarmacked roads, to the regulatory reforms of the 1990s and 2000s in the guise of neo-liberalism, with the much publicized traffic crackdown of 2003 (the so-called 'Michuki Rules'), road safety is a field of study ideally suited to the analysis of infrastructural power and its transformations and continuities over a five-decade period. What is of analytic interest here is the new value of speed in an East African region that has aggressively embraced automobility as a vehicle for enhancing State sovereignty in a globalized economy. Bibliogr., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
Views
Cover