When I started my fieldwork in June 2019, it was not with the intention of writing a book about how notions of masculinity impacted the lives of migrant men in Pipeline. I had just begun a project on the experimentalization of development aid, analyzing how the paradigm of evidence-based intervention influenced the livelihoods of the inhabitants of Kaleko. My long-term field site, this small western Kenyan market centre in Kabondo-Kasipul constituency is roughly an eight-hour bus ride from Nairobi. Realizing that I needed to interact with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nairobi at least one or two weeks each month, I asked my friend Samuel Onyango, a 28-year-old Luo migrant whom I had met in Chabera (a market centre not far from Kaleko) while he was waiting to start his law studies in Nairobi, if he could help me to find an apartment in Nairobi, preferably one not far from his own. Renting an apartment in Nairobi’s less affluent east would not only cost less per month than a few nights in a hotel but would also allow me to combine my stays in the city with visiting and hosting friends. Less than a week later, Samuel informed me that he had found a bedsitter – a single room with a private bathroom – less than a five-minute walk away from his own.
Milele Flats (Kiswahili, ‘Eternity Flats’, see Figure 1), a massive tenement block painted green, orange and black, had just been finished. Only a few of the more than 100 bedsitters were still vacant. After climbing up to the seventh floor, Samuel and I inspected the bedsitter, a room less than fifteen square metres with a small bathroom and a tiny kitchen area equipped with cupboard, sink and tap. Tiled and freshly painted, it was large enough for one person. I indicated my wish to rent the apartment, and the caretaker gave me the bank account details for the deposit and the first month’s rent, after which Samuel and I went to one of the numerous shops offering bank services, paid the rent (6,500 Kenyan Shillings [KSh] for the first month plus the 6,500 KSh deposit, a total of roughly 130 US), and returned to Milele to give the transfer slip to the caretaker to secure the deal.
During the three years I spent in Pipeline, I leaned on networks I had established in western Kenya. Samuel’s assistance in finding accommodation helped me find my feet and I mostly hung out with friends I knew from western Kenya as well as friends of theirs. My integration into rural-urban networks intensified when, fed up with nearly two months of no running water, I met up with William Odhiambo, one of Samuel’s childhood friends who had gone to secondary school in Chabera but had grown up in Kaleko and whom I had come across a couple of times. William and I decided to move into a one-bedroom apartment that was a five-minute walk from Milele Flats. Shortly thereafter we were joined by Dennis Okech, a mutual friend from Kaleko, who had just left his wife.
1 I lived in my Milele Flats bedsitter from August to December 2019 and February to March 2020, when I had to leave Kenya because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2020 and from January to March 2021, I shared a one-bedroom apartment with Dennis Okech and William Odhiambo, who moved out in March 2021. I continued to live with Dennis until I returned to Germany in May 2021. After spending the summer in Germany, I returned to the one-bedroom apartment in Pipeline, where I lived on my own from August to December 2021, February to March 2022, and May to September 2022. Over time, we housed relatives and friends from Kaleko, Chabera and other places in Nyanza who were passing through Nairobi.
~
Figure 1 Milele Flats. Photograph by the author, 2 June 2022.
Pipeline’s maze-like layout fascinated me from day one. The estate struck me as unique, yet in terms of the scholarly literature on Nairobi it was all but completely overlooked (Huchzermeyer 2011, Ondieki 2016). Even though huge tenement blocks housing hundreds of people had replaced older housing structures all over Nairobi, the population density of Pipeline was unparalleled, except for some areas along Thika Road (especially in the constituency of Kasarani), and far surpassed the density of informal settlements such as Kibera. Intrigued by the myriad ways of how the estate’s inhabitants made ends meet, I decided early on to gather data for one or two articles on Pipeline’s history and economy. I spent my days conducting participant observation in the offices of Maendeleo, a research and advisory firm that had the infrastructure to implement behavioral economic experiments, and my evenings, nights, and weekends in Pipeline, where I watched football, went out for drinks, and shared my professional and romantic struggles with friends old and new.
Shortly before I had to leave Kenya due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I realized that my perspective on Pipeline and the lives of its inhabitants was decisively male. I fraternized with male labourers who worked in the nearby industrial area, played endless rounds of pool with men, drank beer with aspiring male politicians and landlords, worked out in a gym whose only regular female visitors were the owner’s wife and young daughter, and played checkers and the FIFA videogame with, and surrounded by, teenage boys and young men. When I returned to Pipeline in November 2020, my new research focus was clear: migrant men and their experience of economic and romantic pressure.
Being around men tended to mean not being around women. Even though I can rely on roughly 25 long qualitative interviews with female migrants who lived in Pipeline, I spent far less time with women than men. This imbalance resulted from the ‘social invisibility of women in male-dominated contexts’ (Smith 2017: 129) as well as the relatively strict separation between the sexes. Most of my male friends would interpret any social encounter with a woman as flirtatious, often with sexual undertones, which sometimes led to uncomfortable comments about the woman’s physical traits. If she was known to them personally, they would also discuss her virtues and vices. Consequently, most of the women I got to know were female relatives of my male interlocutors. In an effort to correct this imbalance, I chatted with and spent as much time as possible with women I met on a formal, regular basis, such as the owner of a shop where I bought daily necessities or the female security guard in the high-rise block in which I lived. Nonetheless, everything I write about in this book is influenced by a male perspective.