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Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity IntroductionInfrastructures played a key role in the imperial logics of colonialism. Ships that carried enslaved humans were central in constituting systematic racialism as the dark underbelly of modern capitalism (Linebaugh and Rediker 2012). The expansion of resource‐hungry European empires and the subsequent colonisation of the “new” worlds were made possible by railways and roads that, built on the backs of subjugated racialised populations, commenced flows of resources and knowledge that sustained colonial projects of empire (Ranganathan 2020). In the colonised spaces that had cosmologies of their own but were blatantly deemed to be “without history” (Wolf 1982), infrastructures of settler colonialism created hierarchical worlds, in which European settlers lived separated from natives who were systematically subjected to violence, hardship, and premature death (Fanon 2001:5). Naval routes, railways, or urban road networks, therefore, functioned as mediums of expression of racial capitalism—a global system of exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation that, based on imperialism, slavery, and genocide, is deeply grounded in a systematic exaggeration of “regional, subcultural, and dialectic differences into ‘racial’ others” (Robinson 2000:16).Although European imperialism formally ended in the late 1960s, the power structures set in motion through the expansion of empire continue to shape today's world. Acknowledging this enduring continuity of colonialism, Quijano (2007) was the first to foreground the “coloniality of power” and how it insidiously reverberates into the present, reconstituting the sociopolitical construct of “race”1 as a fundamental criterion of social, economic, political, and cultural relations, as well as classification of peoples. The coloniality of power and the racialisation of life that it inscribes forcefully intersect with other vectors of power such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or body ability. This, according to Quijano (2000), enables the expansion and intensification of racial capitalism, as well as sustains unjust and fundamentally unequal global division of labour that subordinates racialised peoples to exploitation, heightened precarity, and premature death (also see Mbembe 2019; Mignolo 2011).In the article, I depart from these conditions of racial capitalism to trace how the coloniality of power is reiterated through the current “global infrastructure turn” (Dodson 2017) that has brought forth mega‐infrastructures as the latest trope of “progress” and “development”2 in global racialised geographies of capital. I examine how infrastructure's power—specifically, its semiotic properties to shape practices and experiences of subjectivation (Lesutis 2022a, 2023)—unfolds through ethnicity‐based regimes of sociopolitical differentiation and self‐identification. As I discuss in detail below, during the colonial period, constructs of ethnicity, functioning as sub‐genres of being human (Wynter 2003), were invented by the colonial power to emphasise the lack of humanity of racialised populations, as well as their supposed irrationality and the inability for the self‐reflexive reason.3 I explore how in the postcolony these constructs of ethnicity‐as‐identity are currently reworked through infrastructures and how they continue to function as primary social frames of belonging. This reiteration of ethnicity as a determining vector of identity, I argue, entrenches inherently colonial grammars of self—what people experience themselves to be and how they vernacularly place themselves within the state's body politic4—embedded within broader global mechanisms of the racialisation of peoples who historically have been deemed surplus, abject, constitutively other to Whiteness. As a result, these racialised groups continue to appear “in the space of the asterisked human as the insurance for, as that which underwrites, white circulation as the human”, as Sharpe (2016:110) put it.Although these intrinsically colonial grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity are central to biopolitical practices of power and control, to date, geographical scholarship in its analysis of the coloniality of infrastructure has primarily focused on a question of “race”.5 An increasing number of scholars (see e.g. Chua et al. 2018; Cowen 2020; Davies 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Khalili 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021), for instance, highlight how infrastructure systems and networks, designed to secure and intensify global circulation of surplus value, are deeply rooted in racialised histories of empire. According to this body of work, spatial visions, territorialities, and techno‐politics of now ostensibly gone empires are reworked as “imperial durabilities” (Stoler 2016) into new infrastructure systems that materialise interests of global capital (Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Lesutis 2021). As a result, “the grammar of coloniality”, as Distretti (2021:1437) notes, endures, for it is forcefully reiterated through landscape‐changing infrastructure systems. In a similar vein, Kimari and Ernstson (2020:827) observe that today's mega‐infrastructures, built on preceding racialised histories of empire, “engage and extend already existing dynamics of pathological racialisation of Africa and Africans even amidst claims to horizontal ‘South–South’ cooperation and ‘win–win’ promises”. Echoing this epistemological position, Bernards (2022) highlights how the undeniable continuity of imperial genealogies of power is made visible by the normalised workings of racial financial capitalism. This is forcefully expressed through financial infrastructures that, setting conditions of (im)possibility, mediate profoundly uneven landscapes of liveability across the Global South, ostensibly post‐colonial now (Cowen 2020; Davies 2021).Even so, despite the apparent historical durabilities of infrastructure systems that provide a connective tissue between the colonial past and the present subsumed to the coloniality of power, no teleological assumptions about the entanglements between infrastructure, race, and coloniality ought to be made. How infrastructure and matrixes of coloniality come together is indelibly contingent and thus cannot be foretold. As Aalders (2021:997) notes, “the ruins of empire—both material and metaphorical—are durable but do not determine the present”. Lesutis (2021), for instance, shows that, despite shared historical dynamics of the infrastructure‐based constitution of state power in Kenya, current national megaprojects articulate ontologically different, diffused modalities of power, primarily because the postcolonial state relies on external actors for its practices of infrastructure development, which simultaneously weakens its sovereignty. Historically sustained colonial materialities and symbolic economies of infrastructure, therefore, are not mechanistically replicated across time and space (Bernards 2022), even if the coloniality of power reverberates through infrastructure from the past into the present.In this epistemological aperture opened by exponentially growing geographical scholarship on the coloniality of power that is actively sustained through infrastructure systems, in the article, I further explore opportunities for understanding everyday experiences of coloniality mediated through mega‐infrastructures. Focusing on ethnicity, I specifically disentangle more hidden layers of colonial power advanced through the current “global infrastructural turn” (Dodson 2017) than the analytic of “race” reveals. Whilst infrastructure is indeed central to both explicit and overt forms of racialisation in countries recipient of mega‐infrastructure investments (e.g. Bernards 2022; Davies 2021; Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021), I demonstrate how the coloniality of power is differentiated within biopolitics, as well as lived experiences, of racialism. Foregrounding inherently colonial grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity, I outline further arbitrary hierarchisation of racialised peoples historically deemed surplus and constitutively other to Whiteness.This discussion of enduring colonial grammars of self mediated through infrastructure is empirically grounded within Kenya's political economy and its current turn to megaprojects as primary state‐led modes of “development” (Lesutis 2021) discussed in more detail below. In Kenya, the sociopolitical construct of “ethnicity”, although inherited from the colonial past, continues to function as a central embodied grammar of self, as well as a key mediator of social, economic, and political relations (Jenkins 2012; Lynch 2018). Rather than negated after Kenya's independence, ethnic consciousness, highly politicised ethnic group allegiance, and hardening of ethnic group boundaries have intensified since the second half of the 20th century. People look for meaning, security, and stability as they experience uneven patterns of urbanisation, socioeconomic inequalities, or scarcity of resources, as well as political changes such as democratisation or decentralisation (Lynch 2006; Nnoli 1998; Osaghae 2003; Oucho 2002). In this context, mega‐infrastructures play a significant biopolitical function: as I argued elsewhere, they shape “the subject's life at a material level, as well as provide a semiotic framework for the subject to make sense of her personal experience and social position within the techno‐political setting of the state co‐constituted by infrastructure” (Lesutis 2022a:303–304). Herein, I specifically highlight how infrastructures order Kenya's everyday politics of difference, inequality, and struggle that are made sense of, and narrated, through vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity.I explore these intersections of coloniality, infrastructure, and ethnicity in the context of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transportation (LAPSSET) Corridor in Lamu County discussed in more detail below. Between January 2019 and January 2020, I carried out ten weeks of research on the socio‐political effects of this megaproject across the county. Focusing on the livelihoods of people displaced by the construction of Lamu Port (e.g. Lesutis 2022c), this research included open‐ended interviews, informal conversations, and participant observations. My reading of people's reflections on the everyday, Lamu Port, and “development”, in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, highlights how ethnicity‐as‐identity is reiterated through infrastructure development, as well as how it functions as a mode of coloniality in the present, ostensibly post‐colonial conjuncture.The article is structured as follows. First, it discusses the enduring centrality of ethnicity‐qua‐identity in Kenya's body politic and its inherently colonial underpinnings. Second, it outlines how, in global racialised geographies of contemporary capitalism shaped by an increasing role of large‐scale investment projects in capital accumulation strategies, mega‐infrastructures function as the latest iteration of “progress” within a long list of symbolic frameworks that are evoked to justify, sustain, and advance coloniality disguised as “development”. Third, the article demonstrates how these symbolic and material economies of mega‐infrastructures reiterate already existing colonial modalities of power that are expressed through the vernaculars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity as enduring colonial grammars of self.Ethnicity in Kenya: Belonging as ColonialityEthnicity functions as a sociopolitically mediated construct and a vernacular framework of belonging (Lonsdale 1994): it is centred around an idea of shared peoplehood primarily based on perceived cultural similarities and common descent (Berman 1998). Expressing these logics, within Kenya's body politic, ethnicity overshadows other forms, expressions, and meanings of identity. From the early post‐colonial period, ethnicity‐based patronage networks became a primary means to mediate social, political, and economic interactions (Branch and Cheeseman 2006; Mutua 2008). Central to these relations is access to, and ownership of, land—what Atieno‐Odhiambo (2002:225) called “the tyranny of property”—that enforced and solidified ethnic allegiances across Kenya (Manji 2020). Following independence, ethnicity was mobilised by different groups to make claims for land redistribution. This, intersecting with class politics,6 laid foundations for social animosities and ethnopolitical conflicts to emerge in the future (Kanyinga 2009). Owing to these dynamics, autochthonously perceived expressions of ethnicity‐as‐identity function as a necessary and highly effective strategy for survival as people face multiple socioeconomic insecurities (Lynch 2011). These conditions of uncertainty that intensified competition over limited resources were particularly unleashed by Structural Adjustment. Implemented in the late 1980s, it unsustainably integrated Kenya's national economy into transnational financial flows, anchoring its political elites in global circuits of capital. This further solidified political patronage and clientelist networks across Kenya (Harrison 2005; Lehman 1990; Rono 2002). In this context, Kenya's body politic is structured by, and differentiated through, “indigenous”–“newcomer”, “host”–“guest” binaries that pit ostensibly distinct ethnic groups against each other (Jenkins 2012; Kanyinga 2009).In spite of ethnicity's centrality in shaping class politics and social, civic, and political engagement, ethnicity‐qua‐identity, however, does not reflect autochthonous, in some way primordial identities and social practices of different peoples. Instead, the construction of ostensibly clear ethnic boundaries is an effect of biopolitical practices of control that directly reflect, sustain, and reproduce the power of coloniality—specifically, active legacies of European colonialism that shape sociopolitical orders and forms of knowledge in the postcolony. Ethnic identity is one instance of these dynamics. As Parashar and Schulz (2021:869) argue, such boundary‐setting frameworks of intersubjective meaning‐making as ethnicity are “informed by the fundamental, structural, enduring and normative transformations impelled by the colonial era practices, which continue to shape the ideas of ‘self’, ‘modernity’, ‘rationality’, and even ‘indigeneity’ and ‘tradition’ within formerly colonised societies”. Differently put, the frameworks of ethnicity‐qua‐identity are direct effects of colonial relations that, through the control of the economy, land, and natural resources (see Quijano 2000), continue to shape vernacular grammars of self, sociality, and belonging.During the colonial period, across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the notion of “tribe” functioned as central in biopolitical practices of control that relied upon this construct to symbolically enforce the ostensibly primitive nature of Africans who, as colonialists argued, would be given salvation through their exposure to the European civilisation (Ehret 2002). In this sense, “tribal Africa” was a European imaginary that defined the lack of humanity of racialised populations. It was used to effectively control colonised territories with limited resources and questionable political authority of fragile colonial states (Berman 1990, 1998). Illiffe (1979), for instance, highlighted how, as European colonial powers classified social life into different categories—including “race”, “tribe”, or the systematisation of local languages—in some instances, these processes of categorisation resulted in fictitious inventions of entirely new ethnic groups. In these contexts, the construct of “ethnicity”, therefore, functioned as an instrument of colonial biopolitics, or what Wynter (2003) called a sub‐genre of being human.The biopolitics of ethnicity also took a material form through land expropriation for the development of the settler colony in Kenya. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915, for instance, introduced a dual system of land administration that bifurcated land into “native reserves” and “white highlands” for European settlement. Each of these “reserves” was allocated for the use of a specific ethnic group. This, in effect, materialised the construct of ethnicity, emplacing it within the colony's landscape. For the colonial practices of control, this ethnicisation of Kenya's society was particularly productive for it obstructed interactions and potential political mobilisation between groups that were deemed ethnically different (Kanyinga 2009; Manji 2020).However, as Ranger (1993) observes, these colonial modalities of biopolitics expressed through discursive and material practices of ethnicisation could not and did not give exact content to the new categories and expressions of sociality. Instead, these frameworks of meaning‐making were much more complex and contested modalities of power, identity, and belonging than the colonial state could control; and they only took full form and emerged out of multiple power struggles within African societies themselves. Therefore, even if ethnic group‐based identities and social alliances ossified during the late colonial period, ethnicity‐qua‐identity did not become rigidly bound but, instead, functioned as much more fluid and mutable, transforming with social, political, and material circumstances (Lentz 2006). In this sense, vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity provided opportunities to reinterpret and rework social and political alliances, and with it to continually renegotiate one's social and political belonging (Cohen 1978; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lynch 2011).It is not my aim here, however, to qualify whether contemporary boundaries of ethnicity were indeed fictitiously invented during Africa's colonisation (e.g. Iliffe 1979), or whether European colonisation was only one disruptive period within a much longer history of changing ethnic group formations and mutable political alliances (e.g. Kesse 2016; Spear 2003). These historical and anthropological questions on the dialectical interplay of ethnicity as lived and imposed, contingently constructed and forcefully invented, are more comprehensively explored elsewhere (e.g. Lynch 2018). Instead, I want to highlight what these debates leave implicit—namely, that the very concept of “ethnicity” as a delineable boundary of identity that constitutes a supposedly ontological line of separation between oneself and the other is undeniably a biopolitical product and effect of the colonial hierarchisation of life against the framing of Whiteness as “progress” and “modernity”; or as Wynter (2003) put it, Whiteness as the main genre of being human. It was European colonialism grounded in the imagined superiority of Whiteness, and the supposed irrationality of its racialised nonhuman other that it iterated, that brought the very idea of “ethnicity” as a distinct form of identity into the world. Many people still live with this construct today, even if they have reiterated and embodied “ethnicity” in multiple ways that colonial powers could not control and predict from the outset.The acknowledgement of this inherently colonial grammar of “ethnicity” is theoretically and politically significant. As Weheliye (2014:32) observes, particularities of specific cultural groupings, including diasporic cultures or ethnicities, however meaningful they might appear to individuals who choose to narrate and structure their lives through these identity categories, “are in danger of entering the discursive record as transcendental truths rather than as structures and institutions that have served repeatedly to relegate black subjects to the status of western modernity's nonhuman other”. This is exactly what colonial biopolitics of ethnicity aimed to achieve. In Wynter's (2003) words, European modernity based on the imagined superiority of Whiteness invented different sub‐genres of being human such as “race”. I argue that, in line with this epistemology, the construct of “tribe” / “ethnicity” also ought to be perceived as one of these sub‐genres of humanity that entrenched the power of Whiteness (as well as imaginaries of “progress”, “civilisation”, and “modernity” intertwined with it), which subjugated colonised populations to racialisation and ostensibly ontologically stable “ethnic” differences.Owing to this, ethnicity—as further differentiation of Blackness, as another embodied variation of constitutive otherness to Whiteness—functions as an integral structuring assemblage of the modern human. In other words, ethnicity is a fictitious invention within systems and practices of racial hierarchisation that Fanon (2008:204), for instance, detailed in his work. Importantly, because in the present moment racialised peoples rework and adapt (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lentz 2006; Lynch 2011) these ethnicity‐based hierarchies of valuing their own lives, as well as those of others, they inevitably reproduce the coloniality of power. As Coulthard (2014:66), building on Fanon's work,7 argues, “dominant groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating an image of inferiority in the subjugated”. In this sense, the colonised subject is not the subject who is exposed to colonial violence. Instead, it is the subject who internalises this violence as one's ontological truth, in this way accepting its own inferiority and subordinate attitude to the colonial master. Autochthonous expressions of ethnicity‐as‐identity—once constructed to justify the native's inferiority—are a vivid example of these dynamics. Acknowledging this tension, Mbembe (2021) refuses to embrace any framework of the “indigenous” as necessary for transformative politics. Instead, a more politically productive strategy is acknowledging the “becoming black of the world”—extending the Black condition to all subordinate humanity that capital no longer needs, thus giving it over to necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). The theory and praxis implied in this reasoning underline the need to go beyond and abandon identity categories articulated through colonial biopolitics, which is particularly salient in formulating strategies of decolonisation and what it means to be human in today's world in ruins.Acknowledging the non‐facticity of ethnicity implicated in Euro‐centric biopolitics of Whiteness as the main genre of being human is one way to highlight how vernacular grammars of self that continue to be tethered to ethnicity‐as‐identity are active, enduring matrixes of coloniality. Differently put, in the postcolony, invoking “ethnicity” alongside “indigeneity”, “tradition”, and “being local” is a differential reiteration of the biopolitical logics of colonial control once used to legitimise European colonialism as I discussed in this section. In the remainder of the article, I outline how these vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity are reworked through contemporary mega‐infrastructures. This will foreground how the coloniality of power is expressed through further biopolitical differentiation of life within the ongoing colonial logics of racialisation that large‐scale infrastructures have been attributed to (e.g. Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021).“People Without Infrastructure”We went from the sixteenth‐century characterization of “people without writing” to the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century characterization of “people without history”, to the twentieth‐century characterization of “people without development” and more recently, to the early twenty‐first‐century of “people without democracy”. (Grosfoguel 2011)If Grosfoguel was writing in the present moment, he would perhaps add “people without infrastructure” to the list of symbolic frameworks that are continually evoked to justify, sustain, and advance changing forms of colonialism and racialisation disguised as “development”. In the last decade, global financial investment in infrastructure has reached a new geopolitical significance. This is evidenced through a range of high‐profile infrastructure programmes that range from China's Belt and Road Initiative to the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa initiated by the New Partnership for Africa's Development. In this geopolitical context, the expansion of megaprojects for spatial planning initiatives (Kanai and Schindler 2019) is promoted by development banks and country governments alike as key in reinvigorating national development strategies (Schindler and Kanai 2021). Deconstructing these narratives in the context of Kenya, critical geographical scholarship highlighted how through this “global infrastructure turn” (Dodson 2017) mega‐infrastructures rework “symbolic geopolitical architectures of development” (Kimari and Lesutis 2022). They unfold as the latest trope of “progress” or “modernity” (Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Lesutis 2022b, 2022c) in the long history of the evolving global matrixes of coloniality that subjugate the majority world to racialised domination. Kimari and Ernstson (2020:828), for instance, note that today's megaprojects operate as “rhetoric, discourse, and practice”—they create unequal possibilities of liveability, which is grounded in the racialisation of African populations that, yet again, are deemed to be lacking “knowledge” and “development”.Displaying these dynamics, LAPSSET—often cited as the most ambitious megaproject in East Africa (see Lesutis 2020)—is meant to address the lack of “progress” for “people without development” (Grosfoguel 2011:7). As a transport and infrastructure corridor, LAPSSET is intended to connect East Africa through grandiose infrastructures: a deepwater port in Lamu, a highway and railway network from Lamu to main economic hubs in Kenya and on borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan, and a pipeline to transport refined petroleum products from South Sudan crude oil fields, or oil drill sites in Lokichar, Turkana, to Lamu Port, and then East Asian commodity markets. The wider project also includes resort cities, new airports, and agricultural commodity processing and export hubs that are expected to generate economic growth across the region (see LAPSSET 2016). LAPSSET is envisioned to eventually form a part of an equatorial land bridge from East to West Africa that will connect Lamu Port at the Indian Ocean in Kenya through Juba in South Sudan, Bangui in the Central Africa Republic, finally reaching the Atlantic Ocean in Yaoundé and Doula in Cameron (Kenya Engineer 2019).8Expressing these logics of regional integration, LAPSSET is central to Kenya's national development strategy “Vision 2030” aimed at transforming Kenya into an industrialised country, overcoming its aid dependencies, and achieving a “middle‐income status” in less than two decades (Enns 2019). Therefore, LAPSSET, like other national megaprojects (Lesutis 2022a), is supposed to create material conditions for a “better life”. On 2 March 2012, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, at the inauguration ceremony of LAPSSET in Lamu, for instance, stated, “I have no doubt that this day will go down in history as one of the defining moments when we made a major stride to connect our people to the many socio‐economic opportunities that lie ahead” (BBC News Africa 2012). Symbolically tethered to state‐led visions of a prosperous future—i.e. the opportunities that lie ahead—LAPSSET, besides its structural function in regional and global regimes of extractivism (Lesutis 2020), plays a specific normative function in advancing visions and practices of what constitutes desirable forms of “development” (Lesutis 2022b, 2022c).As the title of LAPSSET indicates, Lamu is the focal point of Kenya's current development strategies. Until recently, however, this has not been the case and the region had signified the lack of “development”. Historically, the coastal areas of Kenya today known as Lamu County were defined by constantly shifting constellations of power. Once controlled by the Omani Protectorate and the Zanzibar Sultan, with the onslaught of European imperialism, coastal Kenya fell under the influence of Germany and, shortly after, the British Empire (Romero 1986, 1997). Before the violent expansion of European powers formalised in the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, Lamu was a religious centre and a prosperous city sustained through economic wealth derived from the Indian Ocean trade and plantation agriculture based on slave labour. However, with the colonisation of East Africa—specifically, the construction of the Uganda Railway that connected Mombasa Port with Lake Victoria (Clemm 2018; Lesutis 2021)—Kenya's highlands became the epicentre of the British colonial project. This subsequently led to decreasing importance and marginalisation of Kenya's coast. As a result, in the first decade of the 20th century, Lamu was relegated to a minor role as a small local harbour in the colony (Siravo and Pulver 1986; Ylvisaker 1976).The historical marginalisation of coastal Kenya started to change in the early post‐colonial period. In 1972, Lamu's coastline was identified as the most suitable site on Kenya's coast for a second national port (Enns and Bersaglio 2020). Therefore, rather than being a 21st century phenomenon, Kenya's current modernisation strategy outlined in “Vision 2030” which is centred on megaprojects (Enns 2019; Lesutis 2021, 2022a) prevailed immediately after national independence. The inner circle of the first post‐independence prime minister, and then later president, Jomo Kenyatta, included modernising elites who favoured extractive forms of capital accumulation based on export promotion and urban development (Fourie 2014:541). However, such large‐scale projects as the second national port in Lamu were not explored due to the lack of financial resources. Instead, in the early 1970s, the Kenyan state, in its attempts to stabilise the coastal region to render it profitable, sought to implement large‐scale commercial agriculture schemes for cotton and seed marketing. However, due to the central government's incapacity to successfully realise these programs, they were soon abandoned (Chome 2020).Today, state‐led development programmes are again being inscribed into the material and affective landscapes of Lamu. Integral to “Vision 2030”, LAPSSET is supposed to bring “development” to Lamu County and beyond. The planned modern port of 32 berths in Lamu is a focal point of the LAPSSET corridor. Other regional development plans include a Special Economic Zone, an oil refinery, and a new state‐of‐the‐art metropolitan city that are conceptualised with explicit references to global symbols of contemporary capitalism, such as Silicon Valley or Dubai. With this aesthetic of “high modernism” (Scott 1998) that is to come to the region (Mosley and Watson 2016:456–457), LAPSSET and associated initiatives—as other infrastructure projects in Kenya (e.g. Kimari and Lesutis 2022) or across the globe (e.g. Ghertner 2015)—constitute powerful imaginaries of “prosperity”, “development”, and “opportunity”. One civil servant, for instance, explained that:You cannot see it yet, but the master plan [of the Special Economic Zone] is full of spectacular investments that the Kenyan Government wants to bring—casinos, hotels, laboratories, [and] even an opera house; it is going to be like the Middle East. (Nairobi, November 2019)In this sense, the temporalities of LAPSSET are bent towards the future. Even if LAPSSET infrastructures remain “unbuilt and unfinished” (Carse and Kneas 2019), the promise that they iterate sustains the symbolic power of “development” whose temporalities, in a similar measure, are always expressed in a future tense (Lewis 2009). Importantly, however, in Lamu, these imaginaries of “development” not only function as the Kenyan state's fantasies of fetishised capitalist modernity but also are sustained by local populations themselves. In other parts of Kenya, LAPSSET and other national megaprojects have been shown to trigger economies (Elliot 2016; Kochore 2016) and subjective dispositions (Lesutis 2022a) of anticipation that are based on (imagined) possibilities of a more prosperous life. Echoing these dynamics, in Lamu County, LAPSSET generates imaginaries of a desired future, with residents themselves expecting positive changes. One local businessman in Lamu Town, for instance, remarked:In the future, all the business will be there in the port. All the future [sic] is going to be there. Here [in Lamu] we will only have a sleepy town for tourists to visit. (Lamu, December 2019)However, to date, the anticipated benefits of LAPSSET only operate symbolically. The actual material effects of this megaproject that would realise the state‐promised modernity are yet to be seen and experienced. Meanwhile, disruptive effects of infrastructure development, including dispossession, land conflict, and marginalisation of historically disadvantaged ethnic minority groups, are already tangible (Lesutis 2022c). Across Kenya, national megaprojects have been shown to limit access to land and other natural resources for marginalised populations, which triggers contestations over the meanings of “development” (Enns 2019; Kochore 2016; Lesutis 2022b). In Lamu, with the port construction already underway, the development of LAPSSET has similarly escalated competition over land, simultaneously igniting conflicts over sociopolitical meanings of identity, belonging, and “development” (Chome 2020). In this way, LAPSSET is further entrenching the power of coloniality, expressed vividly through vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity as I discuss in the next session.Infrastructure and EthnicityAs I discussed above, Kenya's body politic is structured through vernacular frameworks of ethnicity that, intersecting with class politics, mediate (im)possibilities of liveability. Reflecting this, in Lamu, local grammars of identity and belonging are tethered to ethnicity‐based narratives of “autochthony”, “home”, and being “local”. Historically, people who understand themselves as “indigenous” to the coastal area of Kenya, today known as Lamu, have been marginalised by the central state. This started in the early post‐colonial period. Following the failure to implement large‐scale commercial agriculture schemes for cotton and seed marketing in Lamu County discussed in the preceding section, the central state, in its strategies of land redistribution, focused on land settlement schemes for people themselves to undertake commercial agriculture (Kanyinga 2009). Between 1973 and 1975, the government in Nairobi—under the leadership of President Jomo Kenyatta, himself a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group—accommodated the arrival of landless Kikuyu families from Kenya's central highlands to Lamu.9 To this day, they continue to occupy the most fertile and best‐serviced lands in Lamu County (Chome 2020:314–315). Meanwhile, populations that consider themselves “local” to the region—including the Swahili, Bajuni, Boni, Sanye, and others10—not granted official rights to own land in Kenya's coastal areas, were systematically neglected by the central state.It was this moment of exclusionary biopolitics of the newly independent Kenyan state that, explicitly privileging the Kikuyu people through state assistance to resettle and commence farming activities, inscribed a sense of ethnic group‐based social, political, and economic marginalisation of the populations already living in Lamu. As one Swahili resident narrated this historical event, “President Kenyatta suffocated us and tried to chase us away from the coastal area, giving our land to his people, Kikuyus” (Lamu, November 2019). This juxtaposition between Kikuyus as the president‐supported “newcomers” to Lamu, on the one hand, and the “indigenous” populations of Lamu deliberately neglected by the Kikuyu‐dominated government, on the other, continues to be a primary way of making sense of, and narrating, everyday hardships in Lamu. As one Bajuni community leader in Lamu, recounting the historical event of the Kikuyu arrival, observed:Before Kenya became independent, Lamu was a good place, because it was a part of the [Omani] protectorate. [Historically], the princes of Oman took good care of Lamu. But now Lamu [has] declined. All of this is due to Kenya's independence, and the influence of Kikuyus everywhere. [Kikuyus] are dominating our culture and our lives. Their government [has] always tried to erase us and ignore all the injustice done to us, the people of Lamu. (Lamu, January 2020)This sense of marginalisation has considerable political valence. As Horowitz (1985) highlighted, a strong emotive force of ethnicity that, in times of social and political crises, might solidify into political power is closely intertwined with memories of collective historical experiences of wrong‐doing and victimisation. In the current period of megaprojects, Lamu's marginalisation, locally understood and narrated through the juxtaposition between the “indigenous” populations and “outsiders”, is further entrenched through the regional mega‐infrastructure development. Specifically, it is the anticipated changes to be triggered by LAPSSET that are reactivating historical experiences of neglect and marginalisation. Kenya's national authorities ambitiously project that LAPSSET and related projects will attract more than one million newcomers to Lamu County; with all planned urban developments, this is expected to generate and sustain economic growth and prosperity across the region (see LAPSSET 2016). However, some residents of Lamu who are aware of these developments perceive them as a direct existential threat. They fear their further marginalisation within the national body politic that already renders them highly superfluous, deprived of opportunities for inclusion into ethnicity‐dominated vertical patronage networks that underpin Kenya's political settlement. One local activist (identifying himself as Bajuni) perceived the prospects of “development” to be brought by LAPSSET as follows:Lamu Port will be good for Kenya, but not for the people of Lamu. All jobs will go to Kikuyus, everybody working in the port come from somewhere else but Lamu. It has always been like this. All the jobs at [Kenyan Port Lesutisity] are taken by [the] Kikuyu people, and only a couple of places are given to the local people, if at all. (Lamu, December 2019)In this sense, in the historical context of marginalisation—resulting from one's ethnic group lineage, closely tied to geographical location and class‐based ownership of land—the development of LAPSSET is further bolstering already existing anxieties about one's place in Kenya. On the one hand, in Lamu, these developments and resulting land conflicts are understood as further marginalising the Bajuni people (see Chome 2020). On the other hand, these affective dispositions are also noticeable in narratives about regional mega‐developments and the cultural heritage of Lamu, in which Lamu Port and associated initiatives are depicted as “a tsunami that will wipe out Lamu Town and the Swahili people”, as “a monster that will engulf Lamu”, or as an “outside force that will destroy the culture of Lamu” (Lamu, December 2019). These observations were anxiously articulated in several community meetings in Lamu Town Hall organised to discuss challenges and opportunities to be brought by the anticipated infrastructure developments in the region, as well as the future of Lamu's cultural and material heritage in the rapidly changing context of urban and regional developments.11In several of these meetings, local community representatives depicted LAPSSET as a direct, impending threat to the Swahili identity, already “under attack” (Lamu, December 2019) since the early post‐independence period. Community elders, as well as spokespersons of several local civil society groups, highlighted that the cultural and material Swahili heritage would be destroyed by the planned infrastructure developments and the projected number of one million newcomers to the region. One Swahili elder, for instance, noted:We, the people of Lamu, are only 120,000 people in [the 54] million people [of Kenya]. We will not be able to defend our culture and values when all those newcomers arrive. It's one tribe against another tribe—that's how politics are done in Kenya. We will be outnumbered by Kikuyus. We will [become] guests in our land—strangers in our own home. (Lamu, November 2019)Here, I do not intend to extensively examine how these claims are substantially grounded in Kenya's political economy (see Kanyinga 2009; Manji 2020). Instead, I am interested in the symbolic function of the “host–guest” binary in the enduring vernacular grammars of self that are intimately intertwined with ethnicity‐as‐identity. As I discussed above, the “guest” reference that signals a fundamentally unstable position of the other within sociopolitical hierarchies of power in the topographies perceived as “home” reflects broader national dynamics of body politic and meaning‐making that are based on ethnic group affiliation (e.g. Lonsdale 1994). In Kenya, one's rights to belong and, by extension, one's ability to access and control land and other resources are constructed and justified through a constantly negotiated social binary that oscillates between a “host” and a “guest” (Jenkins 2012). As highlighted in other contexts, these binaries of one's place in the world intertwine social belonging with ideas of “indigeneity”—having one's ancestorial roots, culture, and a sense of self traceable (or at least imagined to be so) to a specific geographic locality and a common descent (see Radcliffe 2018). In this sense, as Igoe (2006) argues, territorialised social life—specifically, land ownership and control—are situated at the very centre of communal ethnic identity as it unfolds at the intersection of class politics and livelihood, cultural, social, and religious practices.One's sense of self and belonging—understood and narrated through the “host–guest” or “indigenous–newcomer” binaries—is further shaped by tumultuous relations with the state. Across Kenya, people in historically marginalised regions like Lamu have been subjected to different forms of violence during both colonial and post‐colonial periods. This was a direct result of biopolitics that aimed to control populations to either appropriate their labour power or remove them from the areas of high value and potential profit (Mosley and Watson 2016). As a result, as Enns and Bersaglio (2020:119) note, in many cases, historically marginalised groups perceive the central state as “a powerful and even foreign entity that exists to control and punish rather than to sustain and include”. These dynamics of exclusionary biopolitics are vividly articulated in Lamu where the central state is seen as an enduring reiteration of violence projected onto peoples who perceive themselves as “indigenous” to this part of coastal Kenya. As one fisherman in Lamu noted, discussing the projected future developments of LAPSSET:We are not expecting anything from the [central] state for us, the Bajuni people. We inherited this situation of injustice from our parents, they were telling us the same stories of land injustice, evictions, rape, [and] denied access to health [and] education facilities. They were mistreated by [the] Kenyan Government. And now we see the same injustice happening again. Nothing has changed—future generations will see the same injustice again. (Lamu, January 2020)In this sense, the ongoing mega‐infrastructure developments rework multiple historical layers of state neglect, marginalisation, and social effacement. These different manifestations of injustice are interpreted through the inherently colonial biopolitical constructs of sociopolitical differentiation such as “ethnicity” or “tribe”. Through these frames that now function as dominant vernacular grammars of identity and belonging, the people of Lamu ascribe meaning to their lives, as well as make sense of state‐led changes in their living environments, thus aiming to sustain a place in the world of not their own making.This discussion highlights how, narrated through the colonial constructs and lived experiences of “ethnicity” (or “tribalism” that is more prominent in the vernaculars of Kenya), the coloniality of infrastructure is expressed and unfolds beyond the question of “race” that has been centred in the analyses of infrastructure‐based and ‐sustained racialism and biopolitical modes of differentiation between Whiteness and its multiple constitutive others (e.g. Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Sherman 2022; Zeiderman 2021). Certainly, the racialisation of Africans advanced through mega‐infrastructure development ought not to be overlooked. However, it is important to also highlight how this racial differentiation—as a form of being rendered less human (Wynter 2003), as being bound to exist as a constitutive other of Whiteness (Sharpe 2016)—is embodied and further advanced by other sociopolitical hierarchies of sub‐humanity such as “ethnicity”. As I highlight, mega‐infrastructures sustain colonial matrixes of power: they rework ethnicity‐based social differentiations, as well as forms of self‐identification that racialised peoples embody. The present thus is also undeniably the colonial past, and this past is the present. Time in the postcolony, therefore, is not linear but multidirectional. Mbembe (2001:14) conceptualised these temporalities as entanglement—“as an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another”.In these multiple entanglements of the postcolony, the sub‐humanity of the racialised other deemed incommensurable with Whiteness is further pixelated into boundary‐setting modalities of ethnicity‐as‐identity. Set in motion as a biopolitical means of colonial control, these grammars of belonging continue to hold sway in the present. Infrastructure that dispossesses and threatens one's way of life (Lesutis 2022c) further entrenches this pixelated sense of self. This prevents people from recognising their coextensive, porous humanity and their shared struggles for liveability beyond identity categories given through mechanisms of racialisation. In this sense, within Kenya's political economy, coloniality—specifically, the arbitrary, inherently racialised hierarchisation of life that continues to shape topographies of everyday life—endures and sustains itself through infrastructure. For, as megaprojects unfold in socially contested landscapes, one is Swahili, the other is Kikuyu, one is a “host”, another is always a “guest” before one is Kenyan, or, in the most violent cases (e.g. Jenkins 2012), even human.Concluding ThoughtsThe examination of coloniality advanced through mega‐infrastructures, as Kimari and Ernstson (2020:841) observe, provides “a real possibility to more explicitly account for how the everyday and global‐imperial scale intersect”, as well as highlighting moments of transformative politics that such intersections might enunciate, however fleetingly. Contributing to this growing body of scholarship on the coloniality of infrastructures that span across national territories, geopolitical regions, or the globe (see e.g. Bernards 2022; Cowen 2020; Distretti 2021; Zeiderman 2021), in the article, I foregrounded one node of biopolitics tethered to infrastructure in which colonial power is forcefully expressed and intimately embodied. Reflecting on material and affective intersections between mega‐infrastructures as mediums of imperial violence, on the one hand, and vernacular textures of ethnicity‐qua‐identity, on the other, I demonstrated how infrastructures sustain matrixes of coloniality. Namely, how enduring everyday grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity—inseparable from colonial modalities of biopolitical control and sociopolitical differentiation of racialised peoples into sub‐genres of being human—are reworked as afterlives of empire. In this sense, infrastructure development entrenches already existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups that, through inherently colonial grammars of belonging, ascribe meaning to their lives, as well as make sense of state‐led changes in their environments, in this way aiming to sustain a place in the world of not their own making.In the article, I outlined how vernacular grammars of “ethnicity”, “autochthony”, or “home” tethered to notions of being “local” in Lamu are further sustained by the development of LAPSSET. This intersects with class politics and very real fears of dispossession that the people of Lamu historically have experienced. As material dispossession is once again looming or is already made real within contested landscapes of LAPSSET development (Lesutis 2022c), groups that understand themselves as “local” to Lamu perceive this project as deliberately marginalising them as “indigenous” populations of coastal Kenya, and thus as only beneficial to the central government in Nairobi and the Kikuyu people historically favoured by the central state. In this sense, mega‐infrastructures further entrench ethnicity‐based colonial grammars of self that are available to racialised populations. Differently put, one's ethnic identity, particularly of those who historically have been marginalised by the state, is rearticulated to make sense of one's highly precarious position in the unfolding of new infrastructural worlds. This centrality of ethnicity‐qua‐identity—the colonial sub‐genre of humanity set in motion to inscribe constitutive otherness to Whiteness—highlights how the colonial past is not, in fact, past but entangles the present with insidious colonial matrixes of power. Developing this argument, I foregrounded how afterlives of empire and logics of racialism built within large‐scale infrastructure systems (e.g. Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021) are further differentiated through inherently colonial biopolitics of ethnicity‐as‐identity.Besides the analytical frame, as well as everyday experiences, of vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity, my main argument also gestures at the foreclosure of the political that mega‐infrastructures as modes of techno‐politics inscribe in space (e.g. Lesutis 2021). Unlike Enns and Bersaglio (2020), Kimari and Ernstson (2020), or Zeiderman (2021), who allude to the possibility that infrastructure systems might harbour potentialities of new worlds, in this article, I foregrounded how transformative politics of mega‐infrastructures are extinguished by inherently colonial grammars of self that are reworked through these very infrastructures. The continual reiteration of ethnicity‐as‐identity pixelates the social: it prevents people from recognising their shared struggle for a more liveable world beyond identity categories inscribed through biopolitical mechanisms of racialisation. In effect, their porous, coextensive humanity is fractioned by colonial matrixes of power that, intersecting with class politics, divide and separate people perceived as ethnically different from one another, placing them within social bounds of incommensurability. In this way, the coloniality of power reverberates through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday. The future of the postcolony, therefore, remains burdened by the enduring injuries of the past.AcknowledgementsMany thanks to Maria Kaika, Nanke Verloo, three anonymous reviewers, and the editor Laura Barraclough for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I am also grateful to the residents of Lamu for engaging in my research. This research is funded by Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (Project ID: 101023118).Data Availability StatementThe data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.Endnotes1Following Black feminist tradition, in the text I introduce “race” in inverted comas to explicitly foreground that race is “not as a biological or cultural classification” but is “a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization, which are projected onto the putatively biological human body” (Weheliye 2014:5).2In the article, I refer to “progress” and “development” in quotation marks to underline their discursive biopolitical function (e.g. Ferguson 1990).3Wynter demonstrated that racialisation of colonised peoples—and their humanity, or the lack thereof—emerged alongside a European domination that overrepresented a white man as Man, placing specific experience of European men into the sphere of Universal Humanity. As a result, Whiteness has been perceived as the main genre of being human—“as if it were the human itself” (Wynter 2003:260). Subsequently, nonwhite, queer, and feminine modes of humanity were defined as lacking humanity—as sub‐genres of being human.4 In contemporary social theory, “body politic” refers to a group of persons, or a population, who belong to a country, state, or society, often represented as a coherent sovereign body (e.g. Schlosser 2007). As Foucault (1978) highlighted, this “body politic” is subjected to biopolitics of the state—interventions designed to control and capacitate national populations to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of power.5See Note 1.6For instance, in the early post‐colonial period, the central government marketised a means for accessing land by buying land from private owners to sell it to new African farmers. This primarily benefited individuals who, in possession of sizeable capital, secured large land holdings in former “white highlands” (Harbeson 1973).7Fanon (2001), for instance, suggested that intellectuals who intend to represent colonised peoples reproduce the logics of coloniality when they try to prove the existence of a common African or “Negro” culture. For him, such endeavour is futile because it was originally articulated by European colonists who racialised all peoples in Africa as “Negro”. Therefore, according to Fanon (2001), movements like Négritude that propose a continental identity based on the colonial category of the “Negro” are limiting in their imaginaries of transformative politics and the future.8These imperatives of enhanced regional connectivity and economic development reproduce colonial logics of planning that were undertaken by former empires in East Africa as Enns and Bersaglio (2020), for instance, show in their analysis of LAPSSET in Northern Kenya. More broadly, the imaginary of the equatorial land bridge from East to West Africa echoes the history of the Cape to Cairo Railway—an unfinished British colonial infrastructure project that was intended to create a railway line crossing Africa from south to north (see Merrington 2004).9This, following national independence, was the central government's strategy to contain unrest amongst land‐hungry Kikuyu peasantry that, alongside ex‐Mau Mau freedom fighters, threatened to execute forcible seizures of settler farms (Kanyinga 2009:329).10In the text, I focus on the Swahili and Bajuni. 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Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

Lesutis, Gediminas
Antipode , Volume 55 (6) – Nov 1, 2023
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Abstract

IntroductionInfrastructures played a key role in the imperial logics of colonialism. Ships that carried enslaved humans were central in constituting systematic racialism as the dark underbelly of modern capitalism (Linebaugh and Rediker 2012). The expansion of resource‐hungry European empires and the subsequent colonisation of the “new” worlds were made possible by railways and roads that, built on the backs of subjugated racialised populations, commenced flows of resources and knowledge that sustained colonial projects of empire (Ranganathan 2020). In the colonised spaces that had cosmologies of their own but were blatantly deemed to be “without history” (Wolf 1982), infrastructures of settler colonialism created hierarchical worlds, in which European settlers lived separated from natives who were systematically subjected to violence, hardship, and premature death (Fanon 2001:5). Naval routes, railways, or urban road networks, therefore, functioned as mediums of expression of racial capitalism—a global system of exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation that, based on imperialism, slavery, and genocide, is deeply grounded in a systematic exaggeration of “regional, subcultural, and dialectic differences into ‘racial’ others” (Robinson 2000:16).Although European imperialism formally ended in the late 1960s, the power structures set in motion through the expansion of empire continue to shape today's world. Acknowledging this enduring continuity of colonialism, Quijano (2007) was the first to foreground the “coloniality of power” and how it insidiously reverberates into the present, reconstituting the sociopolitical construct of “race”1 as a fundamental criterion of social, economic, political, and cultural relations, as well as classification of peoples. The coloniality of power and the racialisation of life that it inscribes forcefully intersect with other vectors of power such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or body ability. This, according to Quijano (2000), enables the expansion and intensification of racial capitalism, as well as sustains unjust and fundamentally unequal global division of labour that subordinates racialised peoples to exploitation, heightened precarity, and premature death (also see Mbembe 2019; Mignolo 2011).In the article, I depart from these conditions of racial capitalism to trace how the coloniality of power is reiterated through the current “global infrastructure turn” (Dodson 2017) that has brought forth mega‐infrastructures as the latest trope of “progress” and “development”2 in global racialised geographies of capital. I examine how infrastructure's power—specifically, its semiotic properties to shape practices and experiences of subjectivation (Lesutis 2022a, 2023)—unfolds through ethnicity‐based regimes of sociopolitical differentiation and self‐identification. As I discuss in detail below, during the colonial period, constructs of ethnicity, functioning as sub‐genres of being human (Wynter 2003), were invented by the colonial power to emphasise the lack of humanity of racialised populations, as well as their supposed irrationality and the inability for the self‐reflexive reason.3 I explore how in the postcolony these constructs of ethnicity‐as‐identity are currently reworked through infrastructures and how they continue to function as primary social frames of belonging. This reiteration of ethnicity as a determining vector of identity, I argue, entrenches inherently colonial grammars of self—what people experience themselves to be and how they vernacularly place themselves within the state's body politic4—embedded within broader global mechanisms of the racialisation of peoples who historically have been deemed surplus, abject, constitutively other to Whiteness. As a result, these racialised groups continue to appear “in the space of the asterisked human as the insurance for, as that which underwrites, white circulation as the human”, as Sharpe (2016:110) put it.Although these intrinsically colonial grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity are central to biopolitical practices of power and control, to date, geographical scholarship in its analysis of the coloniality of infrastructure has primarily focused on a question of “race”.5 An increasing number of scholars (see e.g. Chua et al. 2018; Cowen 2020; Davies 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Khalili 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021), for instance, highlight how infrastructure systems and networks, designed to secure and intensify global circulation of surplus value, are deeply rooted in racialised histories of empire. According to this body of work, spatial visions, territorialities, and techno‐politics of now ostensibly gone empires are reworked as “imperial durabilities” (Stoler 2016) into new infrastructure systems that materialise interests of global capital (Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Lesutis 2021). As a result, “the grammar of coloniality”, as Distretti (2021:1437) notes, endures, for it is forcefully reiterated through landscape‐changing infrastructure systems. In a similar vein, Kimari and Ernstson (2020:827) observe that today's mega‐infrastructures, built on preceding racialised histories of empire, “engage and extend already existing dynamics of pathological racialisation of Africa and Africans even amidst claims to horizontal ‘South–South’ cooperation and ‘win–win’ promises”. Echoing this epistemological position, Bernards (2022) highlights how the undeniable continuity of imperial genealogies of power is made visible by the normalised workings of racial financial capitalism. This is forcefully expressed through financial infrastructures that, setting conditions of (im)possibility, mediate profoundly uneven landscapes of liveability across the Global South, ostensibly post‐colonial now (Cowen 2020; Davies 2021).Even so, despite the apparent historical durabilities of infrastructure systems that provide a connective tissue between the colonial past and the present subsumed to the coloniality of power, no teleological assumptions about the entanglements between infrastructure, race, and coloniality ought to be made. How infrastructure and matrixes of coloniality come together is indelibly contingent and thus cannot be foretold. As Aalders (2021:997) notes, “the ruins of empire—both material and metaphorical—are durable but do not determine the present”. Lesutis (2021), for instance, shows that, despite shared historical dynamics of the infrastructure‐based constitution of state power in Kenya, current national megaprojects articulate ontologically different, diffused modalities of power, primarily because the postcolonial state relies on external actors for its practices of infrastructure development, which simultaneously weakens its sovereignty. Historically sustained colonial materialities and symbolic economies of infrastructure, therefore, are not mechanistically replicated across time and space (Bernards 2022), even if the coloniality of power reverberates through infrastructure from the past into the present.In this epistemological aperture opened by exponentially growing geographical scholarship on the coloniality of power that is actively sustained through infrastructure systems, in the article, I further explore opportunities for understanding everyday experiences of coloniality mediated through mega‐infrastructures. Focusing on ethnicity, I specifically disentangle more hidden layers of colonial power advanced through the current “global infrastructural turn” (Dodson 2017) than the analytic of “race” reveals. Whilst infrastructure is indeed central to both explicit and overt forms of racialisation in countries recipient of mega‐infrastructure investments (e.g. Bernards 2022; Davies 2021; Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021), I demonstrate how the coloniality of power is differentiated within biopolitics, as well as lived experiences, of racialism. Foregrounding inherently colonial grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity, I outline further arbitrary hierarchisation of racialised peoples historically deemed surplus and constitutively other to Whiteness.This discussion of enduring colonial grammars of self mediated through infrastructure is empirically grounded within Kenya's political economy and its current turn to megaprojects as primary state‐led modes of “development” (Lesutis 2021) discussed in more detail below. In Kenya, the sociopolitical construct of “ethnicity”, although inherited from the colonial past, continues to function as a central embodied grammar of self, as well as a key mediator of social, economic, and political relations (Jenkins 2012; Lynch 2018). Rather than negated after Kenya's independence, ethnic consciousness, highly politicised ethnic group allegiance, and hardening of ethnic group boundaries have intensified since the second half of the 20th century. People look for meaning, security, and stability as they experience uneven patterns of urbanisation, socioeconomic inequalities, or scarcity of resources, as well as political changes such as democratisation or decentralisation (Lynch 2006; Nnoli 1998; Osaghae 2003; Oucho 2002). In this context, mega‐infrastructures play a significant biopolitical function: as I argued elsewhere, they shape “the subject's life at a material level, as well as provide a semiotic framework for the subject to make sense of her personal experience and social position within the techno‐political setting of the state co‐constituted by infrastructure” (Lesutis 2022a:303–304). Herein, I specifically highlight how infrastructures order Kenya's everyday politics of difference, inequality, and struggle that are made sense of, and narrated, through vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity.I explore these intersections of coloniality, infrastructure, and ethnicity in the context of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transportation (LAPSSET) Corridor in Lamu County discussed in more detail below. Between January 2019 and January 2020, I carried out ten weeks of research on the socio‐political effects of this megaproject across the county. Focusing on the livelihoods of people displaced by the construction of Lamu Port (e.g. Lesutis 2022c), this research included open‐ended interviews, informal conversations, and participant observations. My reading of people's reflections on the everyday, Lamu Port, and “development”, in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, highlights how ethnicity‐as‐identity is reiterated through infrastructure development, as well as how it functions as a mode of coloniality in the present, ostensibly post‐colonial conjuncture.The article is structured as follows. First, it discusses the enduring centrality of ethnicity‐qua‐identity in Kenya's body politic and its inherently colonial underpinnings. Second, it outlines how, in global racialised geographies of contemporary capitalism shaped by an increasing role of large‐scale investment projects in capital accumulation strategies, mega‐infrastructures function as the latest iteration of “progress” within a long list of symbolic frameworks that are evoked to justify, sustain, and advance coloniality disguised as “development”. Third, the article demonstrates how these symbolic and material economies of mega‐infrastructures reiterate already existing colonial modalities of power that are expressed through the vernaculars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity as enduring colonial grammars of self.Ethnicity in Kenya: Belonging as ColonialityEthnicity functions as a sociopolitically mediated construct and a vernacular framework of belonging (Lonsdale 1994): it is centred around an idea of shared peoplehood primarily based on perceived cultural similarities and common descent (Berman 1998). Expressing these logics, within Kenya's body politic, ethnicity overshadows other forms, expressions, and meanings of identity. From the early post‐colonial period, ethnicity‐based patronage networks became a primary means to mediate social, political, and economic interactions (Branch and Cheeseman 2006; Mutua 2008). Central to these relations is access to, and ownership of, land—what Atieno‐Odhiambo (2002:225) called “the tyranny of property”—that enforced and solidified ethnic allegiances across Kenya (Manji 2020). Following independence, ethnicity was mobilised by different groups to make claims for land redistribution. This, intersecting with class politics,6 laid foundations for social animosities and ethnopolitical conflicts to emerge in the future (Kanyinga 2009). Owing to these dynamics, autochthonously perceived expressions of ethnicity‐as‐identity function as a necessary and highly effective strategy for survival as people face multiple socioeconomic insecurities (Lynch 2011). These conditions of uncertainty that intensified competition over limited resources were particularly unleashed by Structural Adjustment. Implemented in the late 1980s, it unsustainably integrated Kenya's national economy into transnational financial flows, anchoring its political elites in global circuits of capital. This further solidified political patronage and clientelist networks across Kenya (Harrison 2005; Lehman 1990; Rono 2002). In this context, Kenya's body politic is structured by, and differentiated through, “indigenous”–“newcomer”, “host”–“guest” binaries that pit ostensibly distinct ethnic groups against each other (Jenkins 2012; Kanyinga 2009).In spite of ethnicity's centrality in shaping class politics and social, civic, and political engagement, ethnicity‐qua‐identity, however, does not reflect autochthonous, in some way primordial identities and social practices of different peoples. Instead, the construction of ostensibly clear ethnic boundaries is an effect of biopolitical practices of control that directly reflect, sustain, and reproduce the power of coloniality—specifically, active legacies of European colonialism that shape sociopolitical orders and forms of knowledge in the postcolony. Ethnic identity is one instance of these dynamics. As Parashar and Schulz (2021:869) argue, such boundary‐setting frameworks of intersubjective meaning‐making as ethnicity are “informed by the fundamental, structural, enduring and normative transformations impelled by the colonial era practices, which continue to shape the ideas of ‘self’, ‘modernity’, ‘rationality’, and even ‘indigeneity’ and ‘tradition’ within formerly colonised societies”. Differently put, the frameworks of ethnicity‐qua‐identity are direct effects of colonial relations that, through the control of the economy, land, and natural resources (see Quijano 2000), continue to shape vernacular grammars of self, sociality, and belonging.During the colonial period, across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the notion of “tribe” functioned as central in biopolitical practices of control that relied upon this construct to symbolically enforce the ostensibly primitive nature of Africans who, as colonialists argued, would be given salvation through their exposure to the European civilisation (Ehret 2002). In this sense, “tribal Africa” was a European imaginary that defined the lack of humanity of racialised populations. It was used to effectively control colonised territories with limited resources and questionable political authority of fragile colonial states (Berman 1990, 1998). Illiffe (1979), for instance, highlighted how, as European colonial powers classified social life into different categories—including “race”, “tribe”, or the systematisation of local languages—in some instances, these processes of categorisation resulted in fictitious inventions of entirely new ethnic groups. In these contexts, the construct of “ethnicity”, therefore, functioned as an instrument of colonial biopolitics, or what Wynter (2003) called a sub‐genre of being human.The biopolitics of ethnicity also took a material form through land expropriation for the development of the settler colony in Kenya. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915, for instance, introduced a dual system of land administration that bifurcated land into “native reserves” and “white highlands” for European settlement. Each of these “reserves” was allocated for the use of a specific ethnic group. This, in effect, materialised the construct of ethnicity, emplacing it within the colony's landscape. For the colonial practices of control, this ethnicisation of Kenya's society was particularly productive for it obstructed interactions and potential political mobilisation between groups that were deemed ethnically different (Kanyinga 2009; Manji 2020).However, as Ranger (1993) observes, these colonial modalities of biopolitics expressed through discursive and material practices of ethnicisation could not and did not give exact content to the new categories and expressions of sociality. Instead, these frameworks of meaning‐making were much more complex and contested modalities of power, identity, and belonging than the colonial state could control; and they only took full form and emerged out of multiple power struggles within African societies themselves. Therefore, even if ethnic group‐based identities and social alliances ossified during the late colonial period, ethnicity‐qua‐identity did not become rigidly bound but, instead, functioned as much more fluid and mutable, transforming with social, political, and material circumstances (Lentz 2006). In this sense, vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐qua‐identity provided opportunities to reinterpret and rework social and political alliances, and with it to continually renegotiate one's social and political belonging (Cohen 1978; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lynch 2011).It is not my aim here, however, to qualify whether contemporary boundaries of ethnicity were indeed fictitiously invented during Africa's colonisation (e.g. Iliffe 1979), or whether European colonisation was only one disruptive period within a much longer history of changing ethnic group formations and mutable political alliances (e.g. Kesse 2016; Spear 2003). These historical and anthropological questions on the dialectical interplay of ethnicity as lived and imposed, contingently constructed and forcefully invented, are more comprehensively explored elsewhere (e.g. Lynch 2018). Instead, I want to highlight what these debates leave implicit—namely, that the very concept of “ethnicity” as a delineable boundary of identity that constitutes a supposedly ontological line of separation between oneself and the other is undeniably a biopolitical product and effect of the colonial hierarchisation of life against the framing of Whiteness as “progress” and “modernity”; or as Wynter (2003) put it, Whiteness as the main genre of being human. It was European colonialism grounded in the imagined superiority of Whiteness, and the supposed irrationality of its racialised nonhuman other that it iterated, that brought the very idea of “ethnicity” as a distinct form of identity into the world. Many people still live with this construct today, even if they have reiterated and embodied “ethnicity” in multiple ways that colonial powers could not control and predict from the outset.The acknowledgement of this inherently colonial grammar of “ethnicity” is theoretically and politically significant. As Weheliye (2014:32) observes, particularities of specific cultural groupings, including diasporic cultures or ethnicities, however meaningful they might appear to individuals who choose to narrate and structure their lives through these identity categories, “are in danger of entering the discursive record as transcendental truths rather than as structures and institutions that have served repeatedly to relegate black subjects to the status of western modernity's nonhuman other”. This is exactly what colonial biopolitics of ethnicity aimed to achieve. In Wynter's (2003) words, European modernity based on the imagined superiority of Whiteness invented different sub‐genres of being human such as “race”. I argue that, in line with this epistemology, the construct of “tribe” / “ethnicity” also ought to be perceived as one of these sub‐genres of humanity that entrenched the power of Whiteness (as well as imaginaries of “progress”, “civilisation”, and “modernity” intertwined with it), which subjugated colonised populations to racialisation and ostensibly ontologically stable “ethnic” differences.Owing to this, ethnicity—as further differentiation of Blackness, as another embodied variation of constitutive otherness to Whiteness—functions as an integral structuring assemblage of the modern human. In other words, ethnicity is a fictitious invention within systems and practices of racial hierarchisation that Fanon (2008:204), for instance, detailed in his work. Importantly, because in the present moment racialised peoples rework and adapt (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lentz 2006; Lynch 2011) these ethnicity‐based hierarchies of valuing their own lives, as well as those of others, they inevitably reproduce the coloniality of power. As Coulthard (2014:66), building on Fanon's work,7 argues, “dominant groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating an image of inferiority in the subjugated”. In this sense, the colonised subject is not the subject who is exposed to colonial violence. Instead, it is the subject who internalises this violence as one's ontological truth, in this way accepting its own inferiority and subordinate attitude to the colonial master. Autochthonous expressions of ethnicity‐as‐identity—once constructed to justify the native's inferiority—are a vivid example of these dynamics. Acknowledging this tension, Mbembe (2021) refuses to embrace any framework of the “indigenous” as necessary for transformative politics. Instead, a more politically productive strategy is acknowledging the “becoming black of the world”—extending the Black condition to all subordinate humanity that capital no longer needs, thus giving it over to necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). The theory and praxis implied in this reasoning underline the need to go beyond and abandon identity categories articulated through colonial biopolitics, which is particularly salient in formulating strategies of decolonisation and what it means to be human in today's world in ruins.Acknowledging the non‐facticity of ethnicity implicated in Euro‐centric biopolitics of Whiteness as the main genre of being human is one way to highlight how vernacular grammars of self that continue to be tethered to ethnicity‐as‐identity are active, enduring matrixes of coloniality. Differently put, in the postcolony, invoking “ethnicity” alongside “indigeneity”, “tradition”, and “being local” is a differential reiteration of the biopolitical logics of colonial control once used to legitimise European colonialism as I discussed in this section. In the remainder of the article, I outline how these vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity are reworked through contemporary mega‐infrastructures. This will foreground how the coloniality of power is expressed through further biopolitical differentiation of life within the ongoing colonial logics of racialisation that large‐scale infrastructures have been attributed to (e.g. Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021).“People Without Infrastructure”We went from the sixteenth‐century characterization of “people without writing” to the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century characterization of “people without history”, to the twentieth‐century characterization of “people without development” and more recently, to the early twenty‐first‐century of “people without democracy”. (Grosfoguel 2011)If Grosfoguel was writing in the present moment, he would perhaps add “people without infrastructure” to the list of symbolic frameworks that are continually evoked to justify, sustain, and advance changing forms of colonialism and racialisation disguised as “development”. In the last decade, global financial investment in infrastructure has reached a new geopolitical significance. This is evidenced through a range of high‐profile infrastructure programmes that range from China's Belt and Road Initiative to the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa initiated by the New Partnership for Africa's Development. In this geopolitical context, the expansion of megaprojects for spatial planning initiatives (Kanai and Schindler 2019) is promoted by development banks and country governments alike as key in reinvigorating national development strategies (Schindler and Kanai 2021). Deconstructing these narratives in the context of Kenya, critical geographical scholarship highlighted how through this “global infrastructure turn” (Dodson 2017) mega‐infrastructures rework “symbolic geopolitical architectures of development” (Kimari and Lesutis 2022). They unfold as the latest trope of “progress” or “modernity” (Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Lesutis 2022b, 2022c) in the long history of the evolving global matrixes of coloniality that subjugate the majority world to racialised domination. Kimari and Ernstson (2020:828), for instance, note that today's megaprojects operate as “rhetoric, discourse, and practice”—they create unequal possibilities of liveability, which is grounded in the racialisation of African populations that, yet again, are deemed to be lacking “knowledge” and “development”.Displaying these dynamics, LAPSSET—often cited as the most ambitious megaproject in East Africa (see Lesutis 2020)—is meant to address the lack of “progress” for “people without development” (Grosfoguel 2011:7). As a transport and infrastructure corridor, LAPSSET is intended to connect East Africa through grandiose infrastructures: a deepwater port in Lamu, a highway and railway network from Lamu to main economic hubs in Kenya and on borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan, and a pipeline to transport refined petroleum products from South Sudan crude oil fields, or oil drill sites in Lokichar, Turkana, to Lamu Port, and then East Asian commodity markets. The wider project also includes resort cities, new airports, and agricultural commodity processing and export hubs that are expected to generate economic growth across the region (see LAPSSET 2016). LAPSSET is envisioned to eventually form a part of an equatorial land bridge from East to West Africa that will connect Lamu Port at the Indian Ocean in Kenya through Juba in South Sudan, Bangui in the Central Africa Republic, finally reaching the Atlantic Ocean in Yaoundé and Doula in Cameron (Kenya Engineer 2019).8Expressing these logics of regional integration, LAPSSET is central to Kenya's national development strategy “Vision 2030” aimed at transforming Kenya into an industrialised country, overcoming its aid dependencies, and achieving a “middle‐income status” in less than two decades (Enns 2019). Therefore, LAPSSET, like other national megaprojects (Lesutis 2022a), is supposed to create material conditions for a “better life”. On 2 March 2012, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, at the inauguration ceremony of LAPSSET in Lamu, for instance, stated, “I have no doubt that this day will go down in history as one of the defining moments when we made a major stride to connect our people to the many socio‐economic opportunities that lie ahead” (BBC News Africa 2012). Symbolically tethered to state‐led visions of a prosperous future—i.e. the opportunities that lie ahead—LAPSSET, besides its structural function in regional and global regimes of extractivism (Lesutis 2020), plays a specific normative function in advancing visions and practices of what constitutes desirable forms of “development” (Lesutis 2022b, 2022c).As the title of LAPSSET indicates, Lamu is the focal point of Kenya's current development strategies. Until recently, however, this has not been the case and the region had signified the lack of “development”. Historically, the coastal areas of Kenya today known as Lamu County were defined by constantly shifting constellations of power. Once controlled by the Omani Protectorate and the Zanzibar Sultan, with the onslaught of European imperialism, coastal Kenya fell under the influence of Germany and, shortly after, the British Empire (Romero 1986, 1997). Before the violent expansion of European powers formalised in the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, Lamu was a religious centre and a prosperous city sustained through economic wealth derived from the Indian Ocean trade and plantation agriculture based on slave labour. However, with the colonisation of East Africa—specifically, the construction of the Uganda Railway that connected Mombasa Port with Lake Victoria (Clemm 2018; Lesutis 2021)—Kenya's highlands became the epicentre of the British colonial project. This subsequently led to decreasing importance and marginalisation of Kenya's coast. As a result, in the first decade of the 20th century, Lamu was relegated to a minor role as a small local harbour in the colony (Siravo and Pulver 1986; Ylvisaker 1976).The historical marginalisation of coastal Kenya started to change in the early post‐colonial period. In 1972, Lamu's coastline was identified as the most suitable site on Kenya's coast for a second national port (Enns and Bersaglio 2020). Therefore, rather than being a 21st century phenomenon, Kenya's current modernisation strategy outlined in “Vision 2030” which is centred on megaprojects (Enns 2019; Lesutis 2021, 2022a) prevailed immediately after national independence. The inner circle of the first post‐independence prime minister, and then later president, Jomo Kenyatta, included modernising elites who favoured extractive forms of capital accumulation based on export promotion and urban development (Fourie 2014:541). However, such large‐scale projects as the second national port in Lamu were not explored due to the lack of financial resources. Instead, in the early 1970s, the Kenyan state, in its attempts to stabilise the coastal region to render it profitable, sought to implement large‐scale commercial agriculture schemes for cotton and seed marketing. However, due to the central government's incapacity to successfully realise these programs, they were soon abandoned (Chome 2020).Today, state‐led development programmes are again being inscribed into the material and affective landscapes of Lamu. Integral to “Vision 2030”, LAPSSET is supposed to bring “development” to Lamu County and beyond. The planned modern port of 32 berths in Lamu is a focal point of the LAPSSET corridor. Other regional development plans include a Special Economic Zone, an oil refinery, and a new state‐of‐the‐art metropolitan city that are conceptualised with explicit references to global symbols of contemporary capitalism, such as Silicon Valley or Dubai. With this aesthetic of “high modernism” (Scott 1998) that is to come to the region (Mosley and Watson 2016:456–457), LAPSSET and associated initiatives—as other infrastructure projects in Kenya (e.g. Kimari and Lesutis 2022) or across the globe (e.g. Ghertner 2015)—constitute powerful imaginaries of “prosperity”, “development”, and “opportunity”. One civil servant, for instance, explained that:You cannot see it yet, but the master plan [of the Special Economic Zone] is full of spectacular investments that the Kenyan Government wants to bring—casinos, hotels, laboratories, [and] even an opera house; it is going to be like the Middle East. (Nairobi, November 2019)In this sense, the temporalities of LAPSSET are bent towards the future. Even if LAPSSET infrastructures remain “unbuilt and unfinished” (Carse and Kneas 2019), the promise that they iterate sustains the symbolic power of “development” whose temporalities, in a similar measure, are always expressed in a future tense (Lewis 2009). Importantly, however, in Lamu, these imaginaries of “development” not only function as the Kenyan state's fantasies of fetishised capitalist modernity but also are sustained by local populations themselves. In other parts of Kenya, LAPSSET and other national megaprojects have been shown to trigger economies (Elliot 2016; Kochore 2016) and subjective dispositions (Lesutis 2022a) of anticipation that are based on (imagined) possibilities of a more prosperous life. Echoing these dynamics, in Lamu County, LAPSSET generates imaginaries of a desired future, with residents themselves expecting positive changes. One local businessman in Lamu Town, for instance, remarked:In the future, all the business will be there in the port. All the future [sic] is going to be there. Here [in Lamu] we will only have a sleepy town for tourists to visit. (Lamu, December 2019)However, to date, the anticipated benefits of LAPSSET only operate symbolically. The actual material effects of this megaproject that would realise the state‐promised modernity are yet to be seen and experienced. Meanwhile, disruptive effects of infrastructure development, including dispossession, land conflict, and marginalisation of historically disadvantaged ethnic minority groups, are already tangible (Lesutis 2022c). Across Kenya, national megaprojects have been shown to limit access to land and other natural resources for marginalised populations, which triggers contestations over the meanings of “development” (Enns 2019; Kochore 2016; Lesutis 2022b). In Lamu, with the port construction already underway, the development of LAPSSET has similarly escalated competition over land, simultaneously igniting conflicts over sociopolitical meanings of identity, belonging, and “development” (Chome 2020). In this way, LAPSSET is further entrenching the power of coloniality, expressed vividly through vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity as I discuss in the next session.Infrastructure and EthnicityAs I discussed above, Kenya's body politic is structured through vernacular frameworks of ethnicity that, intersecting with class politics, mediate (im)possibilities of liveability. Reflecting this, in Lamu, local grammars of identity and belonging are tethered to ethnicity‐based narratives of “autochthony”, “home”, and being “local”. Historically, people who understand themselves as “indigenous” to the coastal area of Kenya, today known as Lamu, have been marginalised by the central state. This started in the early post‐colonial period. Following the failure to implement large‐scale commercial agriculture schemes for cotton and seed marketing in Lamu County discussed in the preceding section, the central state, in its strategies of land redistribution, focused on land settlement schemes for people themselves to undertake commercial agriculture (Kanyinga 2009). Between 1973 and 1975, the government in Nairobi—under the leadership of President Jomo Kenyatta, himself a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group—accommodated the arrival of landless Kikuyu families from Kenya's central highlands to Lamu.9 To this day, they continue to occupy the most fertile and best‐serviced lands in Lamu County (Chome 2020:314–315). Meanwhile, populations that consider themselves “local” to the region—including the Swahili, Bajuni, Boni, Sanye, and others10—not granted official rights to own land in Kenya's coastal areas, were systematically neglected by the central state.It was this moment of exclusionary biopolitics of the newly independent Kenyan state that, explicitly privileging the Kikuyu people through state assistance to resettle and commence farming activities, inscribed a sense of ethnic group‐based social, political, and economic marginalisation of the populations already living in Lamu. As one Swahili resident narrated this historical event, “President Kenyatta suffocated us and tried to chase us away from the coastal area, giving our land to his people, Kikuyus” (Lamu, November 2019). This juxtaposition between Kikuyus as the president‐supported “newcomers” to Lamu, on the one hand, and the “indigenous” populations of Lamu deliberately neglected by the Kikuyu‐dominated government, on the other, continues to be a primary way of making sense of, and narrating, everyday hardships in Lamu. As one Bajuni community leader in Lamu, recounting the historical event of the Kikuyu arrival, observed:Before Kenya became independent, Lamu was a good place, because it was a part of the [Omani] protectorate. [Historically], the princes of Oman took good care of Lamu. But now Lamu [has] declined. All of this is due to Kenya's independence, and the influence of Kikuyus everywhere. [Kikuyus] are dominating our culture and our lives. Their government [has] always tried to erase us and ignore all the injustice done to us, the people of Lamu. (Lamu, January 2020)This sense of marginalisation has considerable political valence. As Horowitz (1985) highlighted, a strong emotive force of ethnicity that, in times of social and political crises, might solidify into political power is closely intertwined with memories of collective historical experiences of wrong‐doing and victimisation. In the current period of megaprojects, Lamu's marginalisation, locally understood and narrated through the juxtaposition between the “indigenous” populations and “outsiders”, is further entrenched through the regional mega‐infrastructure development. Specifically, it is the anticipated changes to be triggered by LAPSSET that are reactivating historical experiences of neglect and marginalisation. Kenya's national authorities ambitiously project that LAPSSET and related projects will attract more than one million newcomers to Lamu County; with all planned urban developments, this is expected to generate and sustain economic growth and prosperity across the region (see LAPSSET 2016). However, some residents of Lamu who are aware of these developments perceive them as a direct existential threat. They fear their further marginalisation within the national body politic that already renders them highly superfluous, deprived of opportunities for inclusion into ethnicity‐dominated vertical patronage networks that underpin Kenya's political settlement. One local activist (identifying himself as Bajuni) perceived the prospects of “development” to be brought by LAPSSET as follows:Lamu Port will be good for Kenya, but not for the people of Lamu. All jobs will go to Kikuyus, everybody working in the port come from somewhere else but Lamu. It has always been like this. All the jobs at [Kenyan Port Lesutisity] are taken by [the] Kikuyu people, and only a couple of places are given to the local people, if at all. (Lamu, December 2019)In this sense, in the historical context of marginalisation—resulting from one's ethnic group lineage, closely tied to geographical location and class‐based ownership of land—the development of LAPSSET is further bolstering already existing anxieties about one's place in Kenya. On the one hand, in Lamu, these developments and resulting land conflicts are understood as further marginalising the Bajuni people (see Chome 2020). On the other hand, these affective dispositions are also noticeable in narratives about regional mega‐developments and the cultural heritage of Lamu, in which Lamu Port and associated initiatives are depicted as “a tsunami that will wipe out Lamu Town and the Swahili people”, as “a monster that will engulf Lamu”, or as an “outside force that will destroy the culture of Lamu” (Lamu, December 2019). These observations were anxiously articulated in several community meetings in Lamu Town Hall organised to discuss challenges and opportunities to be brought by the anticipated infrastructure developments in the region, as well as the future of Lamu's cultural and material heritage in the rapidly changing context of urban and regional developments.11In several of these meetings, local community representatives depicted LAPSSET as a direct, impending threat to the Swahili identity, already “under attack” (Lamu, December 2019) since the early post‐independence period. Community elders, as well as spokespersons of several local civil society groups, highlighted that the cultural and material Swahili heritage would be destroyed by the planned infrastructure developments and the projected number of one million newcomers to the region. One Swahili elder, for instance, noted:We, the people of Lamu, are only 120,000 people in [the 54] million people [of Kenya]. We will not be able to defend our culture and values when all those newcomers arrive. It's one tribe against another tribe—that's how politics are done in Kenya. We will be outnumbered by Kikuyus. We will [become] guests in our land—strangers in our own home. (Lamu, November 2019)Here, I do not intend to extensively examine how these claims are substantially grounded in Kenya's political economy (see Kanyinga 2009; Manji 2020). Instead, I am interested in the symbolic function of the “host–guest” binary in the enduring vernacular grammars of self that are intimately intertwined with ethnicity‐as‐identity. As I discussed above, the “guest” reference that signals a fundamentally unstable position of the other within sociopolitical hierarchies of power in the topographies perceived as “home” reflects broader national dynamics of body politic and meaning‐making that are based on ethnic group affiliation (e.g. Lonsdale 1994). In Kenya, one's rights to belong and, by extension, one's ability to access and control land and other resources are constructed and justified through a constantly negotiated social binary that oscillates between a “host” and a “guest” (Jenkins 2012). As highlighted in other contexts, these binaries of one's place in the world intertwine social belonging with ideas of “indigeneity”—having one's ancestorial roots, culture, and a sense of self traceable (or at least imagined to be so) to a specific geographic locality and a common descent (see Radcliffe 2018). In this sense, as Igoe (2006) argues, territorialised social life—specifically, land ownership and control—are situated at the very centre of communal ethnic identity as it unfolds at the intersection of class politics and livelihood, cultural, social, and religious practices.One's sense of self and belonging—understood and narrated through the “host–guest” or “indigenous–newcomer” binaries—is further shaped by tumultuous relations with the state. Across Kenya, people in historically marginalised regions like Lamu have been subjected to different forms of violence during both colonial and post‐colonial periods. This was a direct result of biopolitics that aimed to control populations to either appropriate their labour power or remove them from the areas of high value and potential profit (Mosley and Watson 2016). As a result, as Enns and Bersaglio (2020:119) note, in many cases, historically marginalised groups perceive the central state as “a powerful and even foreign entity that exists to control and punish rather than to sustain and include”. These dynamics of exclusionary biopolitics are vividly articulated in Lamu where the central state is seen as an enduring reiteration of violence projected onto peoples who perceive themselves as “indigenous” to this part of coastal Kenya. As one fisherman in Lamu noted, discussing the projected future developments of LAPSSET:We are not expecting anything from the [central] state for us, the Bajuni people. We inherited this situation of injustice from our parents, they were telling us the same stories of land injustice, evictions, rape, [and] denied access to health [and] education facilities. They were mistreated by [the] Kenyan Government. And now we see the same injustice happening again. Nothing has changed—future generations will see the same injustice again. (Lamu, January 2020)In this sense, the ongoing mega‐infrastructure developments rework multiple historical layers of state neglect, marginalisation, and social effacement. These different manifestations of injustice are interpreted through the inherently colonial biopolitical constructs of sociopolitical differentiation such as “ethnicity” or “tribe”. Through these frames that now function as dominant vernacular grammars of identity and belonging, the people of Lamu ascribe meaning to their lives, as well as make sense of state‐led changes in their living environments, thus aiming to sustain a place in the world of not their own making.This discussion highlights how, narrated through the colonial constructs and lived experiences of “ethnicity” (or “tribalism” that is more prominent in the vernaculars of Kenya), the coloniality of infrastructure is expressed and unfolds beyond the question of “race” that has been centred in the analyses of infrastructure‐based and ‐sustained racialism and biopolitical modes of differentiation between Whiteness and its multiple constitutive others (e.g. Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Sherman 2022; Zeiderman 2021). Certainly, the racialisation of Africans advanced through mega‐infrastructure development ought not to be overlooked. However, it is important to also highlight how this racial differentiation—as a form of being rendered less human (Wynter 2003), as being bound to exist as a constitutive other of Whiteness (Sharpe 2016)—is embodied and further advanced by other sociopolitical hierarchies of sub‐humanity such as “ethnicity”. As I highlight, mega‐infrastructures sustain colonial matrixes of power: they rework ethnicity‐based social differentiations, as well as forms of self‐identification that racialised peoples embody. The present thus is also undeniably the colonial past, and this past is the present. Time in the postcolony, therefore, is not linear but multidirectional. Mbembe (2001:14) conceptualised these temporalities as entanglement—“as an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another”.In these multiple entanglements of the postcolony, the sub‐humanity of the racialised other deemed incommensurable with Whiteness is further pixelated into boundary‐setting modalities of ethnicity‐as‐identity. Set in motion as a biopolitical means of colonial control, these grammars of belonging continue to hold sway in the present. Infrastructure that dispossesses and threatens one's way of life (Lesutis 2022c) further entrenches this pixelated sense of self. This prevents people from recognising their coextensive, porous humanity and their shared struggles for liveability beyond identity categories given through mechanisms of racialisation. In this sense, within Kenya's political economy, coloniality—specifically, the arbitrary, inherently racialised hierarchisation of life that continues to shape topographies of everyday life—endures and sustains itself through infrastructure. For, as megaprojects unfold in socially contested landscapes, one is Swahili, the other is Kikuyu, one is a “host”, another is always a “guest” before one is Kenyan, or, in the most violent cases (e.g. Jenkins 2012), even human.Concluding ThoughtsThe examination of coloniality advanced through mega‐infrastructures, as Kimari and Ernstson (2020:841) observe, provides “a real possibility to more explicitly account for how the everyday and global‐imperial scale intersect”, as well as highlighting moments of transformative politics that such intersections might enunciate, however fleetingly. Contributing to this growing body of scholarship on the coloniality of infrastructures that span across national territories, geopolitical regions, or the globe (see e.g. Bernards 2022; Cowen 2020; Distretti 2021; Zeiderman 2021), in the article, I foregrounded one node of biopolitics tethered to infrastructure in which colonial power is forcefully expressed and intimately embodied. Reflecting on material and affective intersections between mega‐infrastructures as mediums of imperial violence, on the one hand, and vernacular textures of ethnicity‐qua‐identity, on the other, I demonstrated how infrastructures sustain matrixes of coloniality. Namely, how enduring everyday grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity—inseparable from colonial modalities of biopolitical control and sociopolitical differentiation of racialised peoples into sub‐genres of being human—are reworked as afterlives of empire. In this sense, infrastructure development entrenches already existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups that, through inherently colonial grammars of belonging, ascribe meaning to their lives, as well as make sense of state‐led changes in their environments, in this way aiming to sustain a place in the world of not their own making.In the article, I outlined how vernacular grammars of “ethnicity”, “autochthony”, or “home” tethered to notions of being “local” in Lamu are further sustained by the development of LAPSSET. This intersects with class politics and very real fears of dispossession that the people of Lamu historically have experienced. As material dispossession is once again looming or is already made real within contested landscapes of LAPSSET development (Lesutis 2022c), groups that understand themselves as “local” to Lamu perceive this project as deliberately marginalising them as “indigenous” populations of coastal Kenya, and thus as only beneficial to the central government in Nairobi and the Kikuyu people historically favoured by the central state. In this sense, mega‐infrastructures further entrench ethnicity‐based colonial grammars of self that are available to racialised populations. Differently put, one's ethnic identity, particularly of those who historically have been marginalised by the state, is rearticulated to make sense of one's highly precarious position in the unfolding of new infrastructural worlds. This centrality of ethnicity‐qua‐identity—the colonial sub‐genre of humanity set in motion to inscribe constitutive otherness to Whiteness—highlights how the colonial past is not, in fact, past but entangles the present with insidious colonial matrixes of power. Developing this argument, I foregrounded how afterlives of empire and logics of racialism built within large‐scale infrastructure systems (e.g. Distretti 2021; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Zeiderman 2021) are further differentiated through inherently colonial biopolitics of ethnicity‐as‐identity.Besides the analytical frame, as well as everyday experiences, of vernacular grammars of ethnicity‐as‐identity, my main argument also gestures at the foreclosure of the political that mega‐infrastructures as modes of techno‐politics inscribe in space (e.g. Lesutis 2021). Unlike Enns and Bersaglio (2020), Kimari and Ernstson (2020), or Zeiderman (2021), who allude to the possibility that infrastructure systems might harbour potentialities of new worlds, in this article, I foregrounded how transformative politics of mega‐infrastructures are extinguished by inherently colonial grammars of self that are reworked through these very infrastructures. The continual reiteration of ethnicity‐as‐identity pixelates the social: it prevents people from recognising their shared struggle for a more liveable world beyond identity categories inscribed through biopolitical mechanisms of racialisation. In effect, their porous, coextensive humanity is fractioned by colonial matrixes of power that, intersecting with class politics, divide and separate people perceived as ethnically different from one another, placing them within social bounds of incommensurability. In this way, the coloniality of power reverberates through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday. The future of the postcolony, therefore, remains burdened by the enduring injuries of the past.AcknowledgementsMany thanks to Maria Kaika, Nanke Verloo, three anonymous reviewers, and the editor Laura Barraclough for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I am also grateful to the residents of Lamu for engaging in my research. This research is funded by Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (Project ID: 101023118).Data Availability StatementThe data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.Endnotes1Following Black feminist tradition, in the text I introduce “race” in inverted comas to explicitly foreground that race is “not as a biological or cultural classification” but is “a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization, which are projected onto the putatively biological human body” (Weheliye 2014:5).2In the article, I refer to “progress” and “development” in quotation marks to underline their discursive biopolitical function (e.g. Ferguson 1990).3Wynter demonstrated that racialisation of colonised peoples—and their humanity, or the lack thereof—emerged alongside a European domination that overrepresented a white man as Man, placing specific experience of European men into the sphere of Universal Humanity. As a result, Whiteness has been perceived as the main genre of being human—“as if it were the human itself” (Wynter 2003:260). Subsequently, nonwhite, queer, and feminine modes of humanity were defined as lacking humanity—as sub‐genres of being human.4 In contemporary social theory, “body politic” refers to a group of persons, or a population, who belong to a country, state, or society, often represented as a coherent sovereign body (e.g. Schlosser 2007). As Foucault (1978) highlighted, this “body politic” is subjected to biopolitics of the state—interventions designed to control and capacitate national populations to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of power.5See Note 1.6For instance, in the early post‐colonial period, the central government marketised a means for accessing land by buying land from private owners to sell it to new African farmers. This primarily benefited individuals who, in possession of sizeable capital, secured large land holdings in former “white highlands” (Harbeson 1973).7Fanon (2001), for instance, suggested that intellectuals who intend to represent colonised peoples reproduce the logics of coloniality when they try to prove the existence of a common African or “Negro” culture. For him, such endeavour is futile because it was originally articulated by European colonists who racialised all peoples in Africa as “Negro”. Therefore, according to Fanon (2001), movements like Négritude that propose a continental identity based on the colonial category of the “Negro” are limiting in their imaginaries of transformative politics and the future.8These imperatives of enhanced regional connectivity and economic development reproduce colonial logics of planning that were undertaken by former empires in East Africa as Enns and Bersaglio (2020), for instance, show in their analysis of LAPSSET in Northern Kenya. More broadly, the imaginary of the equatorial land bridge from East to West Africa echoes the history of the Cape to Cairo Railway—an unfinished British colonial infrastructure project that was intended to create a railway line crossing Africa from south to north (see Merrington 2004).9This, following national independence, was the central government's strategy to contain unrest amongst land‐hungry Kikuyu peasantry that, alongside ex‐Mau Mau freedom fighters, threatened to execute forcible seizures of settler farms (Kanyinga 2009:329).10In the text, I focus on the Swahili and Bajuni. However, intrinsic ethnic differentiation between these groups merits an extensive analysis in its own right and thus is beyond the scope of this study.11For instance, one of these meetings included a joint World Heritage Centre/ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites)/ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) Reactive Monitoring mission that visited Lamu Town in November 2019 to evaluate the current state of its material and cultural heritage. This was a part of an ongoing institutional assessment whether Lamu Town should be removed from the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.ReferencesAalders J T (2021) Building on the ruins of empire: The Uganda Railway and the LAPSSET corridor in Kenya. Third World Quarterly 42(5):996–1013Atieno‐Odhiambo E S (2002) Hegemonic enterprises and instrumentalities of survival: Ethnicity and democracy in Kenya. 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Journal

Antipode – Wiley

Published: Nov 1, 2023

Keywords: coloniality; infrastructure; ethnicity; grammars of self; Kenya; LAPSSET

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