‘Majengo is a golden place’: Making the ‘same’ and ‘different’ in urban Kenya

Pumwani Majengo, the first residential estate for Africans built in Nairobi in the early 1920s, is a historic site of arrival for Muslims and Christians and for Africans of different ethnicities. Given ethnic and religious tensions in post-colonial Kenya, one might expect there to be similar social fault lines in Majengo. However, I argue that the most salient distinction for local sociality is between long-time residents and newcomers or outsiders, reflecting wider socio-economic and geopolitical changes, as well as a long history of coexistence. The article examines how these diverse long-time residents (have) come to see themselves as a ‘we’, before turning to consider how they make sense of ostensibly religious conflict by re-working lines of difference. In doing so, I reflect on the contingency and relationality of sameness and difference in the making of kin and community in this informal settlement.