Abstract
Matsuda discusses urban organizations with a focus on Nairobi, Kenya. He examines those promoted by international aid agencies, national governments or large non-governmental organizations (NGOs), led by highly educated individuals and based on internationally recognized principles—such as democracy, transparency and an audit system—and those formed from within communities without any special leadership or formal principles and based on local residents’ everyday life knowledge and wisdom. Organizations of the first kind are well structured and may deal with large-scale development projects. Those of the second kind tend to emerge almost spontaneously and are inherently unstable; as they usually lack a set philosophy and a clear structure, they arise and disappear as core issues arise and are settled. Matsuda discusses the limits of the first type and the creative potential of the second, and he attempts to evaluate their potential effectiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
According to the household account books of one migrant family for 1991 and 2010, food accounts for more than 90% of expenditure (house rent and remittance are recorded separately in the urban books). School fees, medical bills, clothing and transportation costs cannot be cove re d (Matsuda 1998; Matsuda 2011, in Japanese).
- 3.
The Maragoli, together with 16 other Bantu-speaking ethnic groups, who settled in Western Kenya have formed a new ‘super ethnic group’ called the Luyia. The use of the name Luyia to denote a ‘super ethnic group’ is comparatively recent. The first recorded mention of the name was in a general meeting of the North Kavirondo Central Association, he ld in June 1935 (Ogot 1967, 139). Kangemi was located on the western fringes of Nairobi along the main road connecting Nairobi with hub cities in Western Kenya . Since Western Kenya was the homeland of the Luo and Luhya—two of Kenya’s largest ethnic groups—from the 1960s, Kangemi developed and expanded as an enclave for these groups.
- 4.
This kind of resistance , embedded in urban everyday life, was called ‘soft resist ance’ (Matsuda 1998).
- 5.
This has been an urban colony since the 1910s.
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Matsuda, M. (2018). Two Types of Community Organization in Urban Africa. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_21
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