Remittances were key to Kenya take-off as a nation

A customer carries out a cash transaction at a Western Union outlet in Nairobi. Diaspora experiences can inform our expectations of remittances beyond the purely monetary. Photo/File 

By Keguro Macharia

 

In Summary

• A judicious analysis of the resources afforded by remittance economies holds much potential for reconfiguring Kenyan practices of belonging.

The term remittance is understood as monies sent from those living abroad to those in Kenya.

This narrow frame prevents us from understanding how broadly conceived remittance economies can help reconfigure notions of belonging, attachment, citizenship, and nationhood.

Remittance economies were central to Kenya’s emergence as a nation during the colonial period, anti-colonial struggles, and struggles against government repression in the post-independence period.

These economies were material and affective, providing intellectual, cultural, and emotional resources for creating and contesting modes of practising Kenyan identity.

The story of contemporary remittance in Kenya begins in the early 20th century with the growth of urban centres.

The centres such as Nairobi provided young women and men with opportunities to create new networks away from, and sometimes in concert with, the demands of ethnic communities and kinship obligations.

As Luise White and Janet Bujra have documented, African women were at the forefront of creating commercial ventures in Nairobi. As property owners and capital accumulators, these women sent money to their rural-based kin, helping to build and sustain networks of obligation across space.

Indeed, these women and the young men who followed their example established urban-rural remittances as a key feature of Kenyan urbanisation.


Urban-rural remittances produced gendered possibilities in colonial-era Kenya.

Although women played key roles in rural-based economies as traders and farmers and caregivers, and while some women had greater control over their domestic economies, the patriarchal structure of most Kenyan communities dictated the disbursement of property and, ultimately, favoured men as guardians of household and community goods.

Women in urban-based communities transformed their relations to accumulation, and, in the process, reconceived gendered relations of dependency.

In urban centres, young men deferred to women, who taught them how to navigate urban spaces and practices of sociality and provided relations of care as economic transactions. Remittance economies helped to transform Kenya’s gendered relations and economies in progressive ways.

Urban-rural remittances helped to create a sense of Kenyan identity based on mutual obligation.

The products remitted, ranging from money to consumables, were as much material as they were affective: material products communicated an ethics of care and attachment, helping to sustain community ties across vast distances.

At the same time, remitted goods forged new power relationships as those previously understood to be dependent—young women and men—acquired economic goods and helped to support their rural-based networks.

In the early decades of the 20th century, then, remittance economies unsettled structures of dependence and sociality, helping to forge new material and affective economies, and producing Kenyan identity as a structure of material and affective circulation across spatial distance.