The Delusionary Pact, an Act of Political Informality in Kibera, Kenya

This article aims at analyzing informal interactions between citizens and local representatives of the authority (police, senior councils, administrative chiefs) in a slum of Nairobi (Kenya). A fieldwork relying on anthropological methodologies has led to identify the notion of "delusionary pact" as a pertinent analytical grid for qualifying such interactions. The delusionary pact can be understood as the capacity of the actors to lie and to accept lies from others, provided that such a pact serves a common interest. In other words, places, rights and prerogatives of community members in the political game are based on a negotiated balance, which derives from the construction of a plausible common story. Relying on this analytical grid, the stake of the analysis is to bring forward the importance of space in the negotiation/renegotiation process of the pact. This attention to space highlights the logics of ritualization at work in the political game, allowing both exclusion and reincorporation of deviant citizens within the community pact.