Paper short abstract:

Wedding processions staged by the Nubian inhabitants of Kibera, Kenya's biggest slum, are crystallization points of the Nubians' historical struggles and present-day claims to the urban space they call their 'ancestral home' and are analyzed as practices of (insurgent) citizenship in this paper.

Paper long abstract:

Based on the thick ethnographic description of Nubian wedding processions, the paper shows how a particular urban space ('ancestral home') is produced, negotiated and contested and how these festive events can be conceptualized as practices of (insurgent) citizenship.

Descendants of 'Sudanese' soldiers in the colonial army have lived in Kibera, Kenya's biggest informal settlement, for generations, their history being intimately tied to its development from army-barracks to multi-ethnic slum. These Nubians, as they call themselves nowadays, claim parts of Kibera as their 'ancestral home', evoking powerful imageries of ethnic homelands which mirror Kenyan discourses of citizenship and belonging. Behind their claim lies a historical struggle for the formalization of Nubians' land rights in Kibera (from colonial times on) and for their recognition as Kenyan citizens (from independence till recently).

At weddings, relatives, guests and musicians accompany the couple from their homes to the mosque, the celebratory venue, and back to their common residence in several processions meandering through Kibera, disrupting everyday life, demonstrating the Nubians' intimate tie to Kibera vis-à-vis slum dwellers of other ethnic origins. Through the lens of 'insurgent citizenship', these processions shall be re-read as performative practices of spatial belonging and hence, as enactments of the Nubians claim to Kenyan citizenship. I analyze the processions as crystallization points in which the historical struggles and present day claims to this particular urban space converge and become visible as they are being negotiated through practice rather than discourse.