ABSTRACT
On 31 March 2012, Kiplangat and I are on our way to the wedding ceremony of Abeid and Zulaikha. I have been doing a fieldwork for four months in Kibera, one of the biggest slums in Nairobi (Kenya). I usually introduce myself as a geographer, and people usually laugh about my non-geographical object: festivity. In the field, I spend most of my time explaining why I am wandering around. Indeed festivity does not happen anywhere, anytime. One day, I met Kiplangat, a 30-yearold man from Olympic (one of the 15 villages composing Kibera), in front of his second-hand clothes shop. He told me about something that might interest me: a forthcoming wedding between a Nubian young man from Makina (another village), and a Luo2 woman, recently converted to Islam. We could go together to the ceremony and stay for the party afterwards, he said. He offered to host me for the night. I could not miss this double opportunity: witnessing a traditional wedding – or what I thought it would be, with a cup of naiveté, I admit it – and having a little walk across Kibera by night.
