Sorting Paper: Archival labour of digitising land records in Kenya (2024)

by Ayona Datta and Dennis Muthama

(2024) The Geographical Journal (click here for Open access version)

Nairobi’s land digitisation programme presents continuous challenges to the state’s aspirations of reforming land administration in Kenya. By drawing upon insights from archival sciences and geographies of archives, this paper argues that digitisation of Kenya’s land administration records presents us with an opportunity to pay attention to how information flows from paper to digital systems, and the nature of human condition that makes it possible. Based on the study of land digitisation initiatives in Nairobi and its peripheral counties, this paper explores first, how digitisation initiates a large-scale state exercise of sorting paper in the land records departments that is the archival apparatus of the state; and second, how the archival labour of state officials in this process is at the same time unequal and devalued. Through interviews of state officials in different county and state departments, we argue that the digitisation process is far more complex and messier than the rhetoric of seamless transition to automated land administration in Kenya. Digitisation involves a slow embodied labour in sorting paper by state officials who have very little power in shaping the design of the platform that they are expected to use. The devaluation of the archival labour of state officials who are not professionally trained in ‘archival practice’ and are voiceless in the production of digital platforms leads to subversion and non-cooperation with the platform. The paper concludes that an expansive lens of seeing digital platforms through the tools, technologies and archiving practices enables us to understand why platforms fail, why and how paper increases value within digital systems and how archival labour is central to the politics of digitisation and platformisation in the future.

Keywords: paper archive, land administration, digitisation, state actors, sorting, archival labour