Most of my male and female interlocutors did not intend to replace the narrative of the male breadwinner and provider with radically different understandings of masculinity. There were only a few male migrants who, often cautiously, tried to change what was considered proper male behaviour by taking over family responsibilities that other men and women marked as female and emasculating, such as changing nappies. Instead, most migrant men I encountered tried to challenge, downplay, or adjust to what they perceived as a female distortion of the prevailing narrative of what it means to be a successful man. The traditional narrative of the male breadwinner has its roots in sometimes violently enforced colonial wage labour (Cooper 2003) and was further intensified through the economic effects of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs, as well as through what Ngala Chome called ‘a wider “Pentecostalization” of Kenyan society, through which Christian religious symbols, imagery, and language were rapidly entering the domain of public life’ (2019: 547). This Pentecostalization, which began in the 1990s, further solidified social notions about men as authoritative husbands and fathers who provide dutifully for their families. According to this narrative, the husband and father should be an economically stable, stoic, strong, pious and prudent provider and ‘head of the house’ (Dholuo, wuon ot), whose actions and conduct demand and bring forth ‘respect’ (Kiswahili, heshima, Dholuo, luor). This attitude was aptly summarized by a member of the No Mercy Gym, when he mentioned that the first rule in his home was ‘My way or the highway’.
The male migrants I worked with characterized what they perceived as the female distortion of this narrative as an extreme and exclusive focus on monetary wealth and the material goods women expected at the very beginning of romantic relationships. Comments posted online in response to the ‘jaws of death’ article in The Star, and to a music video of one of the dead soldier’s wife’s songs, ironically called ‘Gimme Love’, which was uploaded to YouTube, allude to the gendered dimension of this distortion:
Corona has brought a lot of stress. Women are now biting your thing when on their knees if you don’t give more money. Mjichunge. (Kiswahili, ‘Take care of yourself’)
This can’t be a wife but mtu wa kunyonya pesa yako tu aende! (Kiswahili, ‘someone who just sucks away your money and leaves!’)
It’s time for men to date and marry Gynoids, aka female robots, aka sexbots! A Gynoid will never drive you nuts or kill you […]! Dangerous women!
Men should avoid red flags like single mother, model, social media, long painted nails, funny hairstyles. Men should change or perish.
These comments construe women as materialistic and money-minded sociopaths who could potentially castrate their boyfriends and husbands if they were to withdraw their financial support. ‘Auma
’, a famous song by Musa Juma, also disapproves of the detrimental effects that the equation of love and money had on romantic relations, thereby echoing the sentiments of most of my male interlocutors. Describing the behaviour of an unfaithful woman called Auma, the song blames money for her immaturity: ‘Today’s love needs money, […] if you don’t have money, you will feel ashamed’ (Dholuo,
Hera masani dwaro pesa, […]
kionge pesa, iyudo wich kuot).
1 Both benga music, which emerged in the 1960s and was further popularized by artists such as Okatch Biggy, Musa Juma, and Johnny Junior in the 1990s and 2000s, and the more recent ohangla music by artists such as Freddy Jakadongo, Prince Indah, Emma Jalamo and Musa Jakadala were important reference points for Luo migrants in Nairobi. Titles of popular songs such as ‘Dag e ngima miyiero’ (Dholuo, ‘Live the life that you choose’) or ‘Kwach ogolo koke’ (Dholuo, ‘The leopard has shown his claws’) were used in everyday discussions and printed on T-shirts, which were popular with migrant men. Predominantly performed by men, many of these songs discuss relations between the village and the city, as well as romantic and economic issues, often in the form of praise songs dedicated to specific women (Awuor and Anudo 2016 offer a critical analysis of misogynism in ohangla music). Ohangla artists also acted as role models in terms of their sartorial style, which was characterized by expensive suits, ties, hats, and shoes. For many male migrants, money (Dholuo,
pesa) was indeed desirable, not only as an end in itself, but also because it brought respect, which was paramount for every social relation. Poor men risked being seen as worthless, for it was difficult to establish sustainable social relations without money.
Equating a ‘good man’ with one who was rich and generous influenced how male migrants who struggled to make ends meet conducted their daily lives and planned their futures. Under constant economic pressure to succeed, the majority aspired to show off their wealth by inviting friends round and giving their girlfriends or wives expensive gifts. It was thus not only the expectations others had of them, but also their personal understanding of how to ensure a brighter future that shaped and sometimes unsettled male migrants’ lives, complicated their practices and plans, and helped to foster dominant narratives about what it meant to be a man. As a consequence of the pressure the economic expectations forced on them, many migrant men emphasized other aspects of the cluster of traits characterizing success without directly challenging the equation of a good man with a rich man. These traits included prudence, physical strength, a natural and religiously vested primacy of the male gender, and the playful mastery of the urban space.
Yet, and this is the main political economic contribution of this book, migrant men’s diagnoses of women’s distortions of an ideal form of masculinity based on the capability to provide, as well as their own defence of this ideal, reproduced the notion of the man as the breadwinner. This reproduction of the notion of the male breadwinner obviated systemic problems of Nairobi’s urban economy, which was characterized by widespread unemployment, underemployment, and precarity. These problems were further exacerbated as a result of 1.7 million Kenyans losing their jobs during the three-month period after the COVID-19 pandemic reached Kenya (April–June 2020) (Omondi 2022). The dire state of Kenya’s urban economy made it close to impossible for many families to survive on men’s income alone. In addition, migrant men felt that the expectations of rural kin as well as wives and girlfriends had actually increased. Rather than receiving sympathy for their hardships, many of them felt even more pressured.
Instead of actively criticizing the problems of Kenya’s economy (for instance, through political protest), male migrants employed creative practices that were a result of what I call the social disposition of ‘expecting success’, thereby taking up Marcel Mauss’ observation about the ‘importance of the notion of expectation’ as ‘a form of collective thinking’ (1969 [1934]: 117, my translation; see also Bryant and Knight 2019, Ferguson 1999). In Pipeline, most men and women had normative expectations of male success. They subscribed to the notion that men should be economically successful. However, many of the men I spoke to engaged in practices, narratives, and discourses that revealed their imbued expectations of success. They thus also believed they would be economically successful. By creatively postponing true success, socializing the path toward an economic breakthrough, employing the language and behaviour of successful men and wearing and showcasing signs of success, male migrants in Pipeline reassured themselves and others as to the certainty of their future achievements. In so doing, they lessened the intense pressure that resulted from what they perceived as society’s expectation of male success.
Some of these practices resembled those explored in the literature on male youth worldwide, such as ‘hustling’ (Thieme et al. 2021, Van Stapele 2021a), ‘bluffing’ (Newell 2012), ‘waiting’ (Honwana 2012, Masquelier 2019), or ‘zigzagging’ (Jeffrey and Dyson 2013). Even so, male migrants’ practices in Pipeline cannot be reduced to any one of these. The type of practice enacted by my interlocutors, both by those who were formally employed and those who were not, was contingent upon the context and who was involved. Depending on his own expectations – as well as those of his girlfriend, his wife, or his male friends – a young male migrant, for instance, could exaggerate his success in front of his rural kin even though he was making do with minor jobs because of his wife’s expectation for him to put food on the table and pay the rent.
What I did not encounter during my fieldwork, however, was a predominant focus on the uncertainty of the present. In as much as my interlocutors struggled to earn enough money to get by, prior expectations and their ongoing desire for a successful future continued to drive them forward. Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi should thus be read as an attempt to complement the scholarly interest in understanding how disadvantaged urban men in impoverished informal settlements dealt with existing economic stressors (Thieme 2013). However, transferring concepts such as ‘navigating’ (Vigh 2009) or ‘hustling’ to the lifeworld of male migrants in Pipeline risks misunderstanding their perspective on their environment, which was neither characterized by ‘anxiety’ (Falkof and Van Staden 2020) nor by an atmosphere of mere ‘survival’ (Simone and Abouhani 2005). In fact, Pipeline struck me as a place of aspiration, whose inhabitants believed they would thrive and prosper (Dawson 2022).