FIGURES

Mario Schmidt

FIGURES

1. Milele Flats. Photo: author

2. Patrilocal homestead in Kaleko. Photo: author

3. One of Pipeline’s many bypasses connecting the estate’s main streets, ensuring that high-rise blocks can be constructed next to each other without wasting space. Photo: author

4. Muddy road in Kware ward. Photo: author

5. Kenya Pipeline Company housing estate next to Outer Ring Road, established at the end of the twentieth century. Photo: author

6. Spared mabati structure. Photo: author

7. View into one of Pipeline’s main streets. Photo: author

8. Campaign posters at a makeshift dumpsite, Kware. Photo: author

9. Sign giving direction to the Phenomenal Gym. Cartoonish figure with emphasized arm, chest and abdominal muscles, the so-called ‘Johnny Bravo look’. Photo: author

10. Self-help literature sold in a bookshop in Nairobi’s central business district. Photo: author

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials to which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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 -

FIGURES

Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi

Chapter illustrations ()