Becoming Jinja - the production of space and making of place in an African industrial town

At the end of W.W.II there was almost no planned African urban housing and only a few hundred industrial jobs in Jinja Town in Uganda. By the mid-1950s an 'industrial complex' had been laid out which comprised a dam, industrial work-places, 'African' housing estates, labour quarters and associated physical and social infrastructure/institutions. All of this in a town and in a territory that, in the very estimation of the creators of what I term this 'model-modern' project, had so little going for it in terms of the perceived viability of manufacturing industry. What ideas was this project produced from, in relation to, and against what? How were populations to be socially and spatially canalized and their relations re-coded?

Drawing from the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and based on a range of methods including archival study and lengthy ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the colonial production of space and the making and becoming of place. This is channel-led through a historical and spatial analysis of the Walukuba 'African' Housing Estate, built between 1949 and the mid-1950s. I examine this estate as having been a key disciplinary space in the transition from the pre-W.W.II sovereign diagram of power to a more disciplinary and bio- political diagram in the post W.W.II era.

Andrew Byerley is a founding member of the research programme on People, Provisioning and Place in Africa at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University. This work is his doctoral dissertation.