UC Riverside

In Kenya, if you cannot pay your hospital bill you don’t go home. You are detained within the hospital until your bill, which can be inherited and accrues interest for each day you are there, is paid. This practice is called body detention and is the central healthcare phenomenon this research investigates. This dissertation constellates how antiblackness, mothering, and the Kenyan Healthcare System in Mathare Constituency, Nairobi, Kenya is a foundational state project in modern-day Kenya. Drawing on black diasporic approaches to geography and ongoing conceptualizations of antiblackness, it argues that the historical production of antiblackness through Indian Ocean and Transatlantic Ocean chattel trades, and integrated corporate development plans from 1909 to present, built the political formation called the Republic of Kenya by operationalizing techniques of capture and an ecology of terror as death-dealing force. This mode of crafting State, and the World, as political forms of Order, must simultaneously wage war. The relations of this war maintain a predatory relationship to Black women, children, and the Earth. This dissertation ethnographically examines these conditions as Critical Participatory Action Research from 2019-2023 through two guiding questions: (1) What are the spatial, social, structural, and spiritual elements producing conditions of capture in Mathare within Black children’s healthcare journeys? (2) What strategies have Black women and children in Mathare used and needed to embody bodily integrity? Methodologically, I combine ethnographic and archival methods. The findings come from a disparate, study-created people’s archive which gathers open access maps of health facilities and Mathare, (auto)ethnographic entries, notes on walking routes though hospital wards and wards of Mathare Constituency, shared reflections on group conversations, oral histories, urban ethnographies, and Black women’s reports on body detention, gender-based violence, and ecological justice initiatives in Nairobi, and local reports conditions of capture and terror in Mathare. Collectively, this study shows how the production of a hierarchy of antiblack valuation has direct implications for the health and life of black communities, globalized systems of exchange, and the utility of human rights and reproductive justice frameworks.