Documentary Evidence: Navigating Identity and Credibility in Africa's Urban Estuaries

Abstract

In this article we argue for closer intellectual attention to the intersection between the unstable materiality of urban spaces on the one hand, and anxieties about the materiality of official documents on the other. Based on initial evidence from two cities in Africa, namely Nairobi and Johannesburg, we have observed that official documents as material objects matters most in precisely those parts of the city where formal state and civil society institutions appears most absent, i.e. those marginal or estuarial urban spaces, characterised by precarity, informality and mobility, where the majority of African urban residents reside. This is because anxieties about credibility, legitimacy and belonging are most acute in precisely these grey spaces. Yet we argue that the preoccupation with the materiality of these documents does not only reflect broader anxieties about inclusion into or exclusion from the wider urban economy. Instead we suggest that the materiality of documents is...