Politics of Informality and Anti-Urban Discourse

Abstract

This article examines how Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road portrays informality as a political mechanism in which postcolonial elites in Nairobi reasserted colonial logics to control urban citizenship, produce systematic economic precarity, regulate urban belonging, and sustain exclusion and marginalisation. For many Africans, the city was envisioned as an emblem of opportunity and modernity. It was within these urban discourses that grievances against colonial rule were articulated. However, the emergent postcolonial African city has proven difficult to distinguish from its colonial counterpart. Elites who came to power after colonisation continued to imagine urban spaces through colonial logics and frameworks. Employing Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics”, this paper argues that the postcolonial state regulates urban informality not simply as a response to socioeconomic pressures but as a strategic means of controlling urban citizenship by determining who has the right to live, work, and exist in the city. By criminalising informal labour, housing, and migration, postcolonial authorities perpetuate what Mbembe regards as the politics of life and death, whereby some groups are granted full access to urban life. In contrast, others are left to fend for themselves. In this regard, Mwangi depicts the lived experiences of marginalised urbanites in Nairobi from a ‘necropolitical’ perspective, framing their lived urban experience as “a form of death-in-life”, particularly when they forge alternative means of survival that deviate from the state’s prescribed formalities. Centring on postcolonial insights, this paper employs qualitative methods, particularly close reading alongside textual and contextual analysis, to examine how Mwangi challenges the continuities between colonial and postcolonial regimes of control, hence underscoring the agency of the marginalised to capture the sense of inclusion. Generally, this article argues that the novel portrays informality as a political machinery of controlling urban citizenship, allowing accessibility while systematically reproducing exclusion and marginalisation in which inequality is controlled rather than resolved.