"Burnt brains": Waste, Toxicity and Heat in Nakuru, Kenya

Ayo, standing inside an excevation pit, explains the various layers he’s coming across. “in this pit there are about four layers,” he tells us. “The bottom is scrap metal, followed by waste from the Eveready Battery Company, then a soil layer covering the waste, and finally polythene papers on the surface.” Waingo asks if Ayo has passed the ash layer while digging. Ayo shakes his head. “No, here we’re just digging on luck,” he says.

Migodi digging up valuables at Gioto dumpsite in Nakuru

Waingo turns toward me and elaborates, “Sometimes, you’re lucky to find a pocket of scrap metal dumped in one place. Other times, you have to dig horizontal corridors when the metal parts are scattered across a bigger area.” An ash layer often serves as a reliable marker, bearing traces of fires that swept through the dumpsite in the 1980s. During that period, large quantities of sawdust were discarded by wood processing companies, creating highly flammable conditions that fueled frequent fires. When Waingo and Ayo spot it in the strata of the dumpsite, they know they’re likely to hit something valuable soon. Metals are found just below the ash layer and lower.  “When we dig, scrap metal gives off a particular smell. That’s how we know we might find the valuable stuff.” Laughing, Ayo jokes, “We’re like dogs sniffing out a scent.” Waingo nods and adds, “Everything has its own smell, even medical waste. That’s how you can tell it apart from the rest.”

Waingo adds to the description of the layers we are seeing. “At the bottom of the dumpsite, the first thing you’ll find is either scrap metal or glass bottles, and sometimes they alternate with each other.” The next layer is waste from the Eveready Battery Company. Battery waste has many layers because the company used to dump here so often. Then comes the soil or ash layer, and finally polythene paper and plastics at the top.” Pausing, he adds, “When you hit unusual amounts of condoms, you’ve reached around 1985 - the time of the AIDS pandemic. Between 1994 and 1998, HIV/AIDS was at its peak.”

Joel, working inside another pit about two meters deep, is digging horizontally. “I’ve found the battery layer, there’s a lot of metal and zinc here”, he explains, pointing to a sack by the pit filled with metal and zinc scraps. “This is the third layer from the top and the last before the ground level. The top layer is polythene, and the second layer is compacted soil and ash.” He has started tunneling along the metal layer when cracks appear just below the layer of polythene bags. Shortly after, the pit collapses, and Joel jumps out just in time. Ben explains what just happened, “When county officials use bulldozers to flatten the dumpsite again, it creates a risk. The vibrations cause cracks, and the pits collapse.” While the group packs up for the day, they discuss where to bring their harvest.

The vignette above introduces the central theme of this post: an exploration of waste work at Gioto, the largest dumpsite in one of Kenya’s secondary cities, Nakuru. My current research traces the city’s industrial afterlives by sifting through the landfill’s layered strata together with the informal waste pickers who live and work there.

One might ask what this has to do with “heat.” Among waste pickers, heat spans material, bodily, geological, and moral registers that structure life and labour at the landfill. In fact, Gioto, in Kikuyu language, literally means “a place of heat.” The landfill is on top of volcanic fault lines that link the Menengai volcano north of Nakuru to Lake Nakuru in the south. Heat emanates from decomposing waste, from volcanic heat pockets and from the intense bodily labour of excavation itself. At the same time, heat circulates as a moral and psychological force. Life at the dumpsite is often described as producing burnt brains (akili imechoma, swahili) due to stress, pollution, and the pressures of making do. Heat in this blog post thus indexes a range of vernaculars through which my interlocutors articulate life at the dump. This way of thinking about heat is in line with my broader research interest in how hotter conditions give rise to new forms of thermal consciousness—or heatways—that shape how people move, work, relate, and act within their transforming environments. Heatways are vernacular modes of sensing, navigating, and making sense of heat that extend far beyond the temperature metrics through which hotter futures are conventionally mapped. They encompass the embodied, cultural, and relational practices through which my interlocutors re-craft moral and spiritual orientations, metabolise toxicity and uncertainty, and carve out pathways toward viable futures as their worlds heat up.

Fieldwork at Gioto focused on how waste becomes a medium through which colonial afterlives, toxic exposures, and futurity are sensed, read, and navigated. Waste pickers such as Ayo and Waingo identify as migodi—literally “gold diggers”—who excavate the landfill as a mine. As privatisation, relocation plans, and new waste management regimes increasingly restrict the flow of valuable materials toward the dumpsite, migodi are compelled to dig deeper into older, hotter, and more dangerous layers of the city’s landfill to find valuables they can sell.

Their waste-work makes visible a broader tension between informal waste economies and the state-led green futures that seek to regulate, sanitise, and increasingly displace informal waste pickers. Heat, here, is therefore also interpreted by my interlocutors as a historical force and a political condition through which viable life is negotiated at the city’s margins. This history in itself is “heated” in an affective and material sense, marked by displacement, industrial decline, and postcolonial violence as lived through my interlocutors’ bodies and memories.

For them, the dumpsite's stratified layers of waste serve as a site where vernacular memory can be produced. The discarded materials become tangible markers of the violent histories that shaped and still shape their life worlds. Vernacular memory-making refers here to the process through which they actively construct, interpret, and repurpose the past through their daily work with waste. In bringing valuables such as zinc and metal to the surface, they also unearth the city’s industrial histories as well as their place within it. Gioto exemplifies how dumpsites function as planetary archives, where histories of industrial capitalism, colonial afterlives, and economic precarity are layered, contested, and actively reworked through informal waste work.

I'm much inspired by Kathryn Yusoff’s book “A Billion Black Anthropocenes,” which argues that the Anthropocene is not a race-neutral concept but a racialised project rooted in the extractive violence of colonialism. Yusoff asserts that the post-racial “we” of the Anthropocene fails to acknowledge that “black and brown death” is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story. This violence has shaped concrete, situated histories across the African continent and structured the uneven distribution of environmental degradation, dispossession, and economic precarity. This reminds of Peša’s (2023) notion of ‘toxic coloniality’ which refers to the lingering traces of colonialism’s toxic legacies that keep on shaping contemporary life on the continent. In Gioto, I argue, the city’s sedimented waste constitutes the epistemic ground from which waste-picking communities moralise the their Anthropocene and assert their contested place within it.

Whereas geologists define the Anthropocene through sedimented markers such as ice cores, nuclear fallout, or plastic residues - so-called “golden spikes” - Gioto dumpsite functions as a counter-site, where planetary transformation is localised into layers of industrial debris, toxic accumulation, and the lived experience of the city's waste workers rendered surplus to mainstream society.

Let’s pause for some contextual information. The presented ethnography emerges from Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya with a population of approximately 600,000 people, according to the 2019 census. The city is situated about 160 kilometres northwest of the capital Nairobi. Historically, Nakuru was known as the “capital of the white highlands,” a region under colonial rule inhabited and agriculturally exploited by European settlers. As a thriving economic centre, Nakuru became the industrial epicentre of Kenya.

Industries such as pyrethrum processing, the Kenya Seed Company, Eveready Batteries, Eliott’s Bakeries, and Sam-Con Limited steel factory contributed to Nakuru’s peak as a heart of economic growth and high employment from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. The city's strategic central location and agricultural resources supported robust processing industries, including food, animal feeds, textiles, and agrochemicals such as pyrethrum. However, the liberalisation of Kenya's market beginning in the late 1980s led to an influx of cheaper imports, driving many of these industries to either downsize or shut down completely. What remains are the traces of what these companies discarded at Gioto, settling over time into the city’s own geological record.

I need to explain my use of the concept of ‘traces’. I use “tracing” as both a methodological and analytical approach, drawing on Geissler’s (2023) concept of traces as complex temporal layers. Tracing entails drawing connections between past events that result in present decay that allows future possibilities. For Nakuru’s waste pickers, discarded remnants gain value when meticulously traced and reclaimed, circulating through networks of meaning-making and value creation. Through this process, waste ceases to be debris and instead becomes a site of historical reconstruction of Nakuru’s violent industrial histories. Working with this waste allows them to challenge their perceived marginalisation as “surplus populations”—once labourers in the city’s thriving industries, but now cast to the fringes of mainstream society where they suffer "bare life".

Many of Nakuru's waste pickers are descendants of families who migrated to Nakuru seeking opportunities in the city's then-thriving factories, such as Eveready Batteries and the Kenya Seed Company. These families came to Nakuru fleeing from waves of violence, land dispossession, and the complexities of Kenya’s post-independence land resettlement schemes. These schemes, intended to redistribute land from colonial settlers to Kenyan citizens, often favoured the elite and politically connected, leaving many landless or trapped in precarious arrangements. Corruption, Unequal distribution of land, and contested land titles exacerbated displacement, forcing many to migrate to urban centres like Nakuru in search of stable livelihoods.

Arriving in Nakuru, they first moved into informal settlements such as Biafra, Soweto, Bangladesh, City Carton, Githiga, and Kenya Meat - neighbourhoods in Nakuru that were established on public land such as former railway property and government land, much of which has been reclaimed by government over the past few decades. With the liberalization of Kenya’s markets in the late 1980s and 1990s trade barriers were removed and state-owned enterprises privatised, leading to reduced government support for local industries. Many factories struggled to compete with the influx of cheaper imported goods, which led to the downsizing or closure of numerous industries. The country subsequently experienced widespread and economic decline. The employees of these companies gradually moved to the dumpsite as a means of survival. Other waste pickers arrived in the aftermath of the brutal 2007–2008 post-election violence and a smaller group migrated from Uganda, fleeing political upheaval during Idi Amin’s regime in the 1970s and 1980s.

visualisation of the waste layers of Gioto

At its core, waste picking is a deeply sensorial act. As waste pickers sift through the toxic layers of the dumpsite - feeling the textures of decay, reading the imprints of past industries, and inhaling the distinct scents of the layers they cut across  - they engage in a form of stratigraphic interpretation. Each layer is part of a material archive, a sedimented history of the city’s industrial past. In this process, waste is imbued with both moral and material significance. They first of all distinguish between what is worthless and what still holds value. Secondly, while they sift through the layers, they also unearth family memories, connecting the materiality of waste with intimate recollections of belonging, displacement, and survival in the city.

Waingo and Joel explained that their work as migodi involves "reading the layers" (kusoma mchanga). They work in shifts, with one person digging, another transporting the materials, and a third sorting the items. Deciphering the dump’s strata requires a wide range of knowledge. In September 2024, for instance, Waingo’s pit was already about two meters deep and revealed several distinct layers: topsoil, a dense stratum of polythene and plastics, followed by black soil, and a brownish ash layer. They tracked this ash back to notorious fires that occurred in the 1980s-90s when piles of sawmill waste ignited during Nakuru’s dry season. Waingo explained that the ash layer indicates the potential for finding zinc. The fires happened around the time the Eveready factory dumped a lot of zinc waste in these older gullies of the dumpsite. To access this zinc, they begin with digging vertical trenches while carefully reading the distinct layers of waste they come across. Some metals they find have already deteriorated due to age and are therefore useless. Occasionally, Waingo would unearth well-preserved newspapers, some dating back to 1978, which he uses to navigate in time through the strata. Many recalled the remarkable story of a migodi who dug up an entire scrap car that was said to have been dumped at Gioto after one of Kenya’s legendary Safari Rallies which go back as far as 1954.

The process of excavation involves a significant amount of trial and error. As bulldozers flattened the soil at Gioto to make room for more dumping, it became difficult to know where specific materials were originally dumped. The locations for their digs are determined based on recollections by older community members. They remember best where Nakuru’s previous industries used to dump their waste in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s when recycling was still relatively unknown. Every truckload of waste had its own story, and some waste pickers possess a deeper understanding of these histories than others.

Digging is generally safer in the first few meters when migodi work through Nakuru’s plastic era as the plastic fibres prevent the pits from collapsing. Deeper down, spontaneous fires can erupt caused by trapped gasses and hidden heat pockets. At these depths, low oxygen levels and the emission of harmful fumes are serious health risks. Migodi must navigate these dangers and often rely on the support of local healers to maintain their physical and spiritual wellbeing. But despite these precautions, Waingo lost one of his siblings during a pit fire.

Because of these harsh living and working conditions, Nakuruans consider Gioto a source of “madness”. This was part of the broader belief that there was a sharp increase in so-called “zombies” wandering around the streets of Nakuru (Rahier 2024: 18). Kenyan urban centres are considered to be increasingly overwhelmed by the pressures of late capitalism which leads to heightened toxicity, economic hardship, and widespread stress (ibid.) The figure of the zombie is an often-quoted example of how madness manifests itself. It refers to drunk people wandering the streets in a state of “zombification”, usually high on kumi kumi or chang’aa. The dumpsite being a hotspot for the production and distribution of these illicit alcoholic brews fuelled perceptions that it was the source of this madness. People from across Nakuru and often from all kinds of social backgrounds visit Gioto to enjoy cheap liquor. Vendors also distribute their brews through middlemen to customers outside of Nakuru, further reinforcing the perception that the landfill is a source of the nation’s broader “zombification.”

A zombie-like mental state is also associated with the idea of “burnt brains” which is believed to be the result of increased stress that causes bodily overheating. Madness can equally be caused by lacking a “clear direction” in life which is often described with the Kikuyu idiom “gīthīūrùrī”, depicting a halted life flow that causes a corporeal and spatiotemporal blockage that can drive one directionless (ibid.). Njuguna, a healer and herbalist who grew up on the dumpsite but eventually secured land bordering Menengai volcano, believed that the roots of madness could be traced back to the aforementioned experiences of displacement and resettlement. In his view, these experiences produced a deep sense of directionlessness that is most visible in places like Gioto, but also in other nearby areas such as Kwa Gitau and Rigogo on the northern edge of Menengai volcano, all places he identified as "hotspots" of madness. Njuguna attributed this madness to ancestral curses and lacking ties to land that deprived communities of the spiritual guidance of one’s ancestors. He described this as a situation wherein people are “trapped” (Swahili, -tegwa) and confusion and disorientation – gīthīūrùrī – are passed down across generations. As a result, many youths are caught in prolonged states of “idleness” – what has been theorised as “waithood” (Honwana 2014) - and therefore often drifting aimlessly between bars and food joints either intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. The disconnection from land, lineage, and stability, Njuguna argued, thus lay at the heart of the zombification of society.

Excavating Gioto’s toxic layers and dealing with its heat therefore uncovers not only a material stratigraphy but also a moral one. Interpreted from within Gioto's social world, digging allows migodi to produce their interpretation of what they consider a viable life, beyond dominant framings of the dumpsite as a source of madness. Drawing from the Latin vita (life), viability traditionally denotes “capable of living” or “able to remain alive”. This meaning is well established in fields such as medicine, ecology, and economics. Yet, in my research I propose a conceptual extension that traces viability also to the latin via (way, path, or route). This expands its meaning from the capacity to survive to the broader interpretation of “carrying on along a path" or "keeping a way open." This interpretation foregrounds trajectory, futurity, and ongoingness rather than just survival. Vi(a)-ability then — a nod to Barad (2007) and Haraway’s (2016) “response-ability”— signals the ability to forge pathways into the future to sustain the very possibility of “cooler” horizons. It is an ongoing, situated praxis of forging trajectories for flourishing: strategies, practices, and relationships through which people anticipate and experiment with more viable, "cooler," futures. For Nakuru’s waste pickers, digging up the city’s industrial remains becomes a way of forging such possible pathways into the future amid the city’s toxic entanglements—past and present. Ghassan Hage’s (2025) recent theorisation of viability is useful here. Drawing on Bourdieu, Hage argues that viability operates as a “political economy of being”: a socially structured struggle through which people seek to accumulate the conditions that make life feel liveable, meaningful, and recognised. Viability, in this sense, is not only about survival or material reproduction, but about the ongoing effort to augment one’s mode of existence. It's about expanding dignity, aspiration, social worth, and future possibility.

Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, illusio, and capital, he shows how struggles over viability are shaped by embodied dispositions that orient future possibilities, by investments in particular domains of action, and by unequal access to economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital that allow some to forge life along established pathways while forcing others to forge new directions under far more constrained conditions. Hage thus shows how people continuously adjust themselves to the world while also seeking to reshape the world so that it better accommodates them. Because these conditions of possibility are unevenly distributed, viability is always shaped by power, inequality, and competition over access to the resources that sustain and augment life.

Nakuru's Waste pickers indeed forge their specific pursuit of a “cool life” (maisha poa) framed around deriving sustenance and meaning from substances that mainstream society so desperately tries to avoid. They turn dispossessed pasts and toxic presents into grounds for more viable futures. Their pursuit of a “cool life” is anchored in the tension between broken promises of the past, the hazardous conditions of the present, and the indeterminacy of what the dump’s future might hold. By digging through the city’s history sedimented in the dump’s strata, waste pickers render uncertain futures actionable in the present, reoccupy Nakuru’s geosocial strata differently and exercise governance through the city’s detritus in deeply embodied ways. In this context, toxicity serves as both a foundation for viability and the "perpetuation and augmentation of being" (Hage 2025) at the city's margins.