Colonial Infrastructure and its Post-Independence Afterlives in Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda

Abstract

Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (2017a) is constructed around two structures, the Kenya-Uganda Railway and the Jakaranda Hotel. In this article, I argue that the narration of these structures and their survival in independent Kenya enable a revisiting of the histories of the country’s entry into global modernity, post-independent reconfigurations of imperial power, alongside the decolonial impulses they engender. Beginning with the railroad as a metaphor of mobility and arrival, I contend that as the railroad moves towards the interior, the novel invites a reading of the country’s ‘journeying’ into global modernity alongside the attendant socioeconomic and political entanglements and disruptions. In addition, the railroad is also read alongside the present-day Standard Gauge Railway in an attempt to account for the genealogies of power and domination across time. Further, while drawing in other trenchant representations of colonial houses in Kenyan fiction, I analyse the Jakaranda Hotel as a space that represents colonial masculinities’ attempts at domesticity and domestication of both their ‘spouses’ and the colonial nation, and as a space that showcases their excesses and undoing. Ultimately, my focus on colonial infrastructure and its postcolonial afterlives is an attempt to problematise ‘development’ and ‘progress’ narratives that accompany infrastructure projects in Kenyan public discourses by showing how they have historically atomised and racialised well-being.