One Black Anthropocene: Nakuru’s Dumpsite as a Counter-Archive of Anthropocenic Memory

The dumpsite in Nakuru, Kenya functions as a subaltern Anthropocene archive, where waste layers act as alternative stratigraphic markers to document histories of industrial expansion, economic collapse, and environmental transformation. Unlike formal geological strata, the dump is an active site of Anthropocenic memory-making where waste pickers excavate and interpret the afterlives of Nakuru’s industrial boom in deeply embodied ways. This paper introduces the concept of an embodied stratigraphy to describe how waste pickers engage with the dump’s strata as lived, material histories, navigated through touch, labor, and memory. In doing so, they become insurgent geologists, reading discarded materials as historical texts that reveal the shifting materiality of Nakuru’s Anthropocene and its cycles of accumulation and abandonment. Their labor challenges dominant geological frameworks undergirding the Anthropocene debate by asserting that the true markers of this proposed geological era are not found in objectively designated scientific sites but in the toxic, localized and subjective ruins of racialized labor and urban discard, where environmental crisis is lived and endured on a daily basis. Excavation and stratigraphy serves here as both a practice of survival and an act of resistance, whereby waste pickers refuse exclusion from formal economies and assert value over the city’s waste. This stratigraphy is also fundamentally necropolitical; a ruined landscape of human disposability where waste pickers are exposed to toxins, structural abandonment, and environmental precarity and become as much a part of the landfill’s (social) strata as the objects they unearth. This paper argues that by thinking through an embodied stratigraphy, we can reframe the landfill as a counter-archive of planetary crisis, where capitalism’s wreckage is unearthed, actively reinterpreted, revalued, and reclaimed as a history that refuses erasure and objectification.