Faith in paper? Title deeds as temporal fix on Nairobi’s real-estate frontier

On the urbanising outskirts of Nairobi, where public land registries are open to manipulation by private interests and land prices skyrocketing, this article explores how middle-class aspirations for property ownership are confounded by experiences of fraud and deception. In a context where ownership documents are duplicated and land double-sold, buyers and landowners desperately try to resolve these tensions, pursuing documentary evidence of land ownership as temporal “fixes”, guarantees that land will not “become double” at a future point in time and alternative claims revealed. The article concludes by showing how anxious subjectivities linger in the knowledge that “faith in paper” remains a precarious ward against land grabbing. This constellation is argued to be indicative of capitalism’s general tendency to undermine middle-class property-owning ideology.