MAKING AND REMAKING THE AFRICAN CITY: STUDIES IN URBAN AFRICA

Mario Schmidt

Series Editors

Taibat Lawanson, Marie Huchzermeyer, Ola Uduku

Series Description

This series is open to submissions that examine urban growth and its delivery and impact on existing and new populations in relation to the key issues of the moment, such as climate control, sustainability and migration. Showcasing cutting-edge research into how the African city and urban environments are being made and remade across the continent, the books in this series will open up debate on Urban Studies as a dynamic social interaction and urban encounter, and bring a fresh perspective to its exploration. Broad-ranging and multidisciplinary, the series will be mainly monographs, but we also welcome edited volumes that enable a continental, multidisciplinary approach. Innovative, and challenging current perspectives, the series will provide an indispensable resource on this key area of African Studies for academics, students, international policy-makers and development practitioners.

Please contact the Series Editors with an outline or download the proposal form at www.jamescurrey.com.

Professor Taibat Lawanson, Professor of Management and Governance, University of Lagos: tlawanson@unilag.edu.ng

Professor Marie Huchzermeyer, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Witwatersrand: Marie.Huchzermeyer@wits.ac.za

Professor Ola Uduku, Head of School, Liverpool School of Architecture: O.Uduku@liverpool.ac.uk

Previously published

1. Architecture and Politics in Africa: Making, Living and Imagining Identities through Buildings, edited by Joanne Tomkinson, Daniel Mulugeta and Julia Gallagher

Details

Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-269030

Open Access license

Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi’s marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes.

Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya’s capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces – an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help
books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood – this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity.

This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.

Author

Mario Schmidt

PublisherJames Currey

Print publication date Feb, 2024

Print ISBN 9781847013521

EISBN 9781805432050

Base text size -

MAKING AND REMAKING THE AFRICAN CITY: STUDIES IN URBAN AFRICA

Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi

Chapter illustrations ()