Description
How is the state produced in 2022? The exacting of unpaid labour in Africa has been through various iterations, through the colonial, early independence and contemporary neoliberal/post-liberal periods. While voluntary labour is becoming better covered in academic literature, we believe its relationship to state-building and the legitimacy of the state has been overlooked. We explore how 'voluntary work' is produced through the fusing of historical and contemporary, domestic and international, repertoires of voluntarism that have very real material implications in the wake of state retrenchment in Africa. We compare voluntary labour within the health sector, community policing and local peacebuilding, justice and governance interventions in Kenya. Studying such and the kind of society that people seek to establish through their labour reveals their imaginations of society, statehood and personhood. Voluntarism is thus a broader techne of governance, enacting and re-enacting a moral and political process of responsibilization, duty and political identity vis-a-vis the state. We conclude, therefore, that voluntary work, now-entrenched in public service provision, increasingly maintains the state in Kenya and beyond.
