Colonial Alien: House Crows, Disposability and Necropolitics in Urban Tanzania

Abstract

ABSTRACT Which lives are allowed to flourish in the city, and which are rendered excessive, alien, or disposable? This article examines kunguru (a Swahili term for crows/ravens, commonly referring to the house crow, Corvus splendens , in urban Tanzania) in Dar es Salaam as a lens through which to analyze colonial afterlives, urban waste infrastructures, and the biopolitics of multispecies life in a postcolonial African city. Kunguru in urban East Africa were initially introduced to Zanzibar Island by the British colonial administration as scavengers and were incorporated into urban hygiene projects. Over time, however, their ecological success exceeded the narrow functions assigned to them, leading to their reclassification as invasive aliens and subsequent targets of eradication. Kunguru introduced in Tanzania through colonial ecological interventions are presently proliferating by fragmented waste infrastructures and governed as unwanted excess in the contemporary postcolonial cities of Tanzania. Analyzing kunguru eradication as a necropolitical practice, the article argues that these programs displace accountability for the city's infrastructural failures onto the urban poor and the crows themselves. By foregrounding the concept of the colonial alien, the article develops an analytic for tracing how colonial and postcolonial governance incorporate particular forms of life into their projects, only to later revoke that incorporation and recast them as excess, unwanted, or disposable.