The consequences of Apathy: How Nyayo House becomes an actor for intergenerational solidarity amid the absence of state justice in Kenya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the basement of Nyayo House, a government office tower in downtown Nairobi, hide abandoned torture chambers, built during the Moi Era to imprison political dissidents and enforce his authoritarian regime. Despite decades of memorial advocacy since the end of the Moi Era in 2002, these former torture chambers remain derelict and the recommendations of the Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (2008–2013) to memorialise the site continue to go unrealised. In 2024, youth-led protests against the current government erupted across Kenya, facing extreme state violence that echoed the ‘dark days’ of the Moi Era. From this, it is clear that transitional justice has been ineffective in Kenya; continuities between past and present injustices dominate the political landscape and manifest in both the youth calls for justice and the government’s response. In this context, how might Nyayo House, as a site of violence and memory, function towards justice? This article argues that the absence of official memorialization turns Nyayo House into a discursive symbol for a lack of justice . As such, the site is untethered from its specificity, becoming an ‘unbound symbol’ that mnemonically organises intergenerational and intersectional forms of resistance to state violence today. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘disenclosure’ alongside qualitative interviews with survivors and young social justice advocates, this article proposes that this ‘unbinding’ capacity of an unmemorialised site of atrocity under a regime of ongoing state violence makes it a powerful force for claims for justice beyond a transitional justice paradigm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".