Becoming Jinja - The Production of Space and Making of Place in an African Industrial Town

THIS IS THE doctoral thesis of one of the founding members of the research programme on People, Provisioning and Place in Africa, at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University. It draws on theoretical work by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and Lefebvre, as well as from comprehensive archival study and ethnographic fieldwork, to examine how projects and architectures of sociospatial ordering instituted by dominant producers of space have impacted on the everyday projects of people in place, in colonial and post-colonial Uganda. It seeks to grasp the entangling of lines of power that have engendered the making, re-making and becoming of place, and the tensions involved in the attempted emplacement and displacement of a number of hegemonic representations of space and their associated diagrams of power. It shows how the industrial town of Jinja typically constituted a node of shifting functions in the transition from pre-World War II sovereign diagrams of power built around cotton production to more disciplinary and “bio-political” ones bolted together around the “model modern cogwheel” in the first two decades of the post-war era. These diagrams required specific sociospatial architecture to channel and code the mobility of specific populations and to produce a “proper” form of social conduct. The author examines the ideas at the root of such projects, how they were produced, in relation to whom and against what. He looks at how populations were to be canalized and their relations coded according to these project models, and analyzes the specific effects and contestations that were brought about, before questioning their impact on the longer term. This is done, in part, through an historical and spatial analysis of the Wakuba “African” housing estate built between 1949 and the mid-1950s.