Introduction
Most men don’t confide in their wives about their problems and frustrations. You can’t discuss your malaria with a mosquito.
Meme circulating on Kenyan social media
‘Have you heard about the soldier who was killed by his wife here in Pipeline?’ Andrew
1 Most personal names as well as the names of a few places and organizations, such as Kaleko, the No Mercy Gym, or the NGO Maendeleo, are in fact pseudonyms. To further protect various identies, I sometimes rely on composite characters. asked after completing a set of biceps curls while Carl and I were waiting for Isaac to finish his set of bench presses. ‘Strong, strong, light weight, light weight’ was how Isaac, a manual labourer who worked in the nearby industrial area and came to the gym whenever his day- or night-shifts had ended, ‘psyched’ himself while finishing the last repetitions of his set: ‘Big chest, big chest! Sexy weight, sexy weight!’ ‘Someone who has been to Somalia, has survived landmines, grenades, and AK-47s only to be killed by his wife. He must have been a weakling,’ said Andrew, a former soldier of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF), shaking his head, probably wondering how a woman could have killed one of his former comrades. ‘Maybe she also lifts weights like we do here in the No Mercy Gym,’ I suggested. Isaac, by then sitting upright, trying to regain his breath and sweating profusely, joined the conversation: ‘In the Bible, it is not specified how many days or weeks Adam lived alone in peace. Then Eve came and brought stress. Everything became complicated. Women….’ ‘They say she bit him in the shoulder and chest. Who dies from biting? Maybe she was a vampire’, ‘Yeah, or a member of the Illuminati’. While Andrew and Carl, the owner of the No Mercy Gym, exchanged rumours, I lay down on the bench, stabilized my back, grabbed the barbell, and began my own set. ‘Strong, strong!’, ‘Light weight, light weight!’, ‘Big chest, big chest!’
As soon as I had left the gym, I started to search online for information about the alleged murder. The first article I found featured on the homepage of The Star, a Kenyan newspaper (Ombati and Odenyo 2021). The deceased was indeed a KDF soldier. The incident, however, had not happened in Pipeline, a low-income high-rise tenement settlement in Nairobi’s east and the main location of this book. His wife was highly unlikely to be a member of the Illuminati, an organization feared by many Kenyans who believe that its members are involved in satanic activities such as sacrificing human blood for material riches. What, then, had happened? The 37-year-old soldier had discovered that his wife, a former gospel singer who had begun trying her luck in the Kenyan pop music scene, was renting a second apartment on the quiet. Upon finding out, the jealous soldier had left his military base at Gilgil, 100 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, and rushed to the couple’s home in Kahawa Wendani. When he arrived, he confronted his wife and an argument broke out. The argument escalated and turned physical. The wife bit her husband with what the Kenyan television channel NTV called her ‘jaws of death’, after which he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital, where he subsequently died.
Given its cartoonish absurdity, the ‘jaws of death’ incident could easily have been created by a Nollywood screenwriter. Even so, the fact that Andrew, Carl and Isaac – three migrants who had come to Nairobi with high expectations of a better life – spoke about it while working out alludes to some of the issues that Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City tries to make sense of: stressed-out men who feel that they have ‘lost control’ over their wives and girlfriends, rampant misogynism, invocations of brotherhood voiced against the ‘threats’ of feminism and homosexuality, incommensurate marital expectations, and gender-based violence. In some way or another, these issues speak of a social constellation characterized by increasing mistrust between Kenyan men and women who perceive the reciprocal understanding of male and female perspectives as crumbling due to encompassing economic and social pressures, which were further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the urban geography of Pipeline, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated estates, largely inhabited by blue-collar workers, students, and people active in its vibrant local economy.
This book
reveals how heterosexual male migrants between the ages of 25 and 40 dealt with the above-mentioned challenges in Kenya’s capital. It describes how migrant men from western Kenya (mostly, but not exclusively,
jo-Luo (Dholuo, ‘people of Luo descent’, singular
ja-Luo)),
2 Nairobi is characterized by a multitude of different languages and constant code-switching. Most of my interlocutors spoke and mixed at least three languages: their mother tongue (in this study usually Dholuo), English, and Kenyan Swahili or Sheng, this being ‘a variety of Kenyan Swahili closely associated with Nairobi’s urban youth’ (Githiora 2018: 1). Whenever I mark something as ‘Kiswahili’, I refer to the Kenyan non-standard variety of Swahili. made sense of the gender relations and the economic situation they encountered in the city and how they tried to carve out successful lives for themselves and their rural and urban families. I show how male migrants’ understanding and enactment of masculinity changed when they travelled from the village to the city, taking with them high expectations of a better life. For most young men who lived in rural western Kenya, migrating to Nairobi was a crucial step in their ongoing transformation from dependent boys and sons to successful men and fathers. Moving to the capital city promised economic success, sexual adventures, and personal development.
Although some came to Pipeline straight from their rural homes and others had been living elsewhere in Nairobi, the male migrants I met during my fieldwork faced similar economic and romantic challenges and spent time in the same masculine spaces: barbershops, gyms, videogame joints, pool halls, betting shops, and bars named after exotic places such as Sahara, Caribbean, Emirates, or Amazon, as well as mental states such as Oblivion and Amnesia, which point to alcohol’s ability to make men forget, if only momentarily, about the pressures they were facing. It was inside these masculine spaces that migrant men planned and enacted their personal and economic visions and discussed their frustrations as they tried to fulfil the expectations they believed Kenyan society in general, and Kenyan women in particular, obliged them to meet, thereby downplaying the extent to which these expectations also circulated and structured relationships between the men themselves.