Making Memory Matter: claiming Place and Belonging in Johannesburg and Nairobi

This paper explores how and why memory matters for religious adherents through an analysis of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Johannesburg and the Kenyan-Nubian Muslim community in Nairobi. We argue that memory—like belief—is not located in the interiority of the subject. Rather, a religious community’s memory is materially produced and mediated through its engagement with matter and place, fostering a sense of belonging and shared identity. We introduce the concept of “material autochthony” to elucidate how these communities strategically employ material practices to critique state-led erasure of histories (“chronophagy”) and assert themselves in the political memory of the city by claiming spaces and belonging to them. Finally, this paper provides ethical insight into the care that researchers who are outsiders to the community can employ to navigate the affective and emotional dimensions of participants’ memories during and after the research process.