Sovereignty

Abstract

This article excavates the imperial origins behind the recent turn towards digital biometrics in Kenya. It also tells the story of an important moment of race-making in the years after the Second World War. Though Kenya may be considered a frontier market for today's biometrics industry, fingerprinting was first introduced in the early twentieth century. By 1920, the Kenyan colonial government had dictated that African men who left their reserves be fingerprinted and issued an identity card (known colloquially as a kipande . In the late 1940s, after decades of African protest, the colonial government replaced the kipande with a universal system of registration via fingerprinting. This legislative move was accompanied by protests from members of the white settler community. Ironically, the effort to deracialize Kenya's identification regime only further normalized the use of biometrics, but also failed to fully undermine associations between white male exceptionalism and exemption from fingerprinting.

These are all run by people with migrant backgrounds, who perhaps due to a distrust of authority brought from their homelands, or perhaps to a wish to avoid the taxman, seem most keen on cash. There is widespread concern in Sweden about the shadow economy, which is being targeted as part of the “Safer Malmö” project.

This is the problem with groups pushing for 'cashless' societies. They see cash as emblematic of crime or as this unclean thing. Sovereignty is the issue. The rest are more or less distractions.