The archiving that RDS seeks to practice is not simply to “save” or “preserve” but primarily to provide grounds for further questions, working with people to take care of the data while also documenting to understand the processes, relations and considerations at play. The point of this kind of an archive is to scaffold a deutero capacity to think about the world and support a rethinking of habituated ways of understanding the world. Instead of worrying over the sharing of data for greater reproducibility or transparency, I echo Indigenous STS scholar Michelle Murphy who asks us to think about the infrastructures of relation that make some kinds of flourishing possible and other kinds of flourishing not possible (Kasdogan 2018). I see the technical scaffolding provided by RDS as offering continued ties across space and time. The archive does not promise to be comprehensive or representative. It is not expressly designed to focus on particular topics but rather, its contents will be determined by those who invest the time in working on it. For now that has been myself (depositing my own research data on social science research in Kenya), and other Kenya-based researchers who have been collaborating on a project archiving experiences of COVID-19 in Kenya.
Nairobi is and has been a city fragmented by race and class (Wanjiru and Matsubara 2017). This is not a coincidence but by design. The city emerged as a nexus for capital–the East African trading company preceded the development of the city--and Nairobi was established to help further its business. The city’s first colonial planners established the city not as a residence for Africans, but as a residence for themselves, white colonial bureaucrats. Housing was built for the clerks and other African men required to run the city but the housing was intentionally small and not meant for entire families but rather for individual men. This changed as the winds of decolonization began to sweep in the 1950s. Fed up with the excessive and degrading policies of the white settlers, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) or popularly known as Mau Mau, Kenya’s independence movement led resistance against the colonial settlers. In 1963, Kenya gained national independence from Great Britain but the new African leaders also inherited a system of entrenched structural racism, embedded in national policies, the build environment, and alterity entrenched in internalized concepts such as “tribe”.
While many of the explicit aspects of these systems were dismantled, there remain traces of structural racism that scholars like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Shiraz Durrani, and other resistance writers have called out. The RDS archive is inspired by the long-standing tradition of Kenyan resistance (see Durrani’s work for more details) and intertwines this history to call for more conscious and careful contemporary research work that understands Kenya not just in terms of deficiency narratives but also with its long history of resistance and transnational entanglements. This kind of temporal contextualization is often missing from development work that is quickly done in the country and so a rich archive of materials that help to remind researchers of this recent past could help (continue) to intervene in narratives about the country. Here we see ourselves in alignment with a new cadre of Kenyan digital humanities specialists working in the Nairobi library and archives ecosystem such as the African Digital Heritage initiative (https://africandigitalheritage.com/), focusing on the application of technology in the preservation, engagement and dissemination of African heritage; the Museum of British Colonialism (https://www.museumofbritishcolonialism.org/) which has digitally recreated Mau Mau detention camps; Wer JoKenya (https://www.werjokenya.com/), an online journal that seeks to document, highlight, protect, and celebrate Kenya's diverse musical history; and Paukwa (https://paukwa.or.ke/), a counter-narrative online library of Kenya’s histories.