BSAS Department Seminars: Peter Lockwood (University of Manchester)

Patronage as predation: Hunting for cash in Kenyan elections 

In the build-up to Kenya’s elections, politicians take to the streets, school fields and church yards distributing cash to prospective voters in a bid to get elected to office. Whilst political scientists see cause for describing such instances of distribution as ‘vote buying’ in transactional terms, anthropologists have sought to temper these accounts of brute exchange by insisting on the moral relations forged between voters and politicians on the campaign trail – that politicians do indeed care for voters through such gift-giving, during campaign season, and afterwards. In this article, I depart from both of these approaches choosing to emphasise the cynical stance voters take towards their suddenly generous politicians. Drawing on his ethnographic vantage point living in a peri-urban neighbourhood of central Kenya during the country’s 2017 election campaign, I show that there is little love lost between voters and politicians, the latter perceived as supremely neglectful outside elections. Precisely because voters gauge politicians as neglectful of their own hardships – their lives gleaning piecemeal incomes in the informal economy – voters turn to the campaign trail to ‘take what they can get’, as it were, from their leaders. They describe the time of elections as a ‘dirty game’, one in which they can ‘eat’ politicians’ money by pretending to voice their support at campaign rallies and meetings. Grasping such knowing chicanery through the lens of anthropological theories of predation, their emphasis on trickery and duplicity, I show how the performed intimacies of campaign events mask these deeper ambivalences, the periodic cycles of hope and despair that characterise the temporal arc of Kenya’s elections.
 

Peter Lockwood is an economic and political anthropologist whose research focuses on the local transformations and moral articulations associated with capitalist dynamics and change. The mainstay of his research has focused on the predicament of Africa's 'surplus people' - unemployed and underemployed youth caught up in worlds of destitution - and the struggles for adulthood, reputation and upstanding morality that characterise their predicament. He has published articles in respected African Studies journals on Kenya’s 2017 elections, exploring the salience of ethno-nationalist alliances (Journal of Modern African Studies) and moral debates over patronage (Journal of Eastern African Studies), and is currently working on a forthcoming book called ‘I’ll never eat the sweat of another: Masculine destitution and the struggle for morality in central Kenya’.