Pipeline’s urban geography, architecture, and materiality were saturated with promises and expectations of wealth and modernity, especially from the perspective of rural migrants. It was an aspirational estate where landlords lured migrants with the promise of tiled and clean housing, a free subscription to Premier League football and a supposedly reliable supply of water and electricity. For less than 4,000 KSh per month, for example, you could rent a single room with shared bathrooms. While the estate’s fancy bars allowed men to participate in the ‘sweet life’ of those with money, proudly displayed consumer goods such as flat screens, smartphones and laptops reassured others of a migrant man’s upward trajectory. Even so, few of my interlocutors thought of Pipeline as a long-term place to stay. Instead, they viewed the estate as the launching pad for their personal development and professional careers. Preparing their onward migration to greener pastures, some attempted to save a portion of their meagre salaries, while others bought into Kenya’s narrative of entrepreneurship and tried their luck by becoming ‘self-employed’ (see Dolan and Gordon 2019) in Pipeline’s thriving local economy, where vendors sold almost everything from pre-cooked food, electronic gadgets, children’s toys, and clothes to illegally brewed alcohol (Kiswahili, chang’aa), drugs, and sexual services.
~
Map 1 Southwestern Kenya. Map drawn by Robin von Gestern.
Male migrants from western Kenya had to deal with many of the pressures created by the narrative of the male breadwinner in an intensified way. The spatial movement from the rural to the urban entailed leaving behind what many perceived as a life of the past (see map 1). Through talking with migrants who had lived in Nairobi for some time, I realized that they viewed their parents’ lifestyle as infected with a burdensome traditionalism and governed by social rules that they perceived as suffocating. Somewhat ironically, when they first arrived in the city, their clothes, bodily and sexual practices, language, and material goods immediately gave away their rural origins. If they did not want to be branded as ‘village’ or ‘farm boys’ (Dholuo, apuodho, from puodho, ‘farm’), male migrants had to adjust to urban dress codes, acquaint themselves with the city’s complex public transport network (Mutongi 2017), and learn how to deal with the many perils of urban life such as pickpockets, con artists as well as unexplored sexual practices such as kissing and oral sex.
Upon arriving, they immediately came face to face with these pressures to adapt to urban life as well as the demands from home. Rural kin soon wanted proof of success, and those relatives who had contributed to their secondary education expected remittances and regular updates on their educational or economic progress. However, because of the differing challenges of urban and rural life, expectations of friends in the city and relatives at home did not always match. For many of my male interlocutors, the allure of urban living, such as women, material goods, alcohol, and drugs, which could be enjoyed in the shadow of the city’s anonymity,
1 During their youth in the village, many of my male friends could not invite a girlfriend to their father’s house to ‘chew her’ (Dholuo, nyamo nyako, ‘to chew a girl’, nyamo is exemplarily used for sugar cane, which is chewed and then thrown away), as this would have constituted a ritual transgression. To get round this, Samuel and some of his friends used an abandoned house in Chabera to perform what they called their ‘nocturnal surgeries’ (see Githinji 2008 on sexist language in Kenya). Other opportunities for sexual exploration arose when young men visited boarding schools or attended funerals, when people engaged in night-long dancing and partying (known as disco matanga, or lawo thum, Dholuo, ‘chasing the music’) and young women could be seduced in nearby fields. ate up the same meagre monetary resources that relatives were anticipating. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into even sharper relief the ongoing economic and social relevance of this ‘urban-rural connection’ (Geschiere and Gugler 1998, see also Ross and Weisner 1977, Weisner 1976). The measures to curb the spread of the virus not only restricted travel between Nairobi and western Kenya, but also led to an economic crisis that made it more and more difficult to send remittances home, which upset carefully negotiated financial arrangements.
To contextualize migrants’ lives and economic expectations in Kenya’s capital, the next section describes Kaleko, the rural place I know best. A short introduction to life in Kaleko and neighbouring market centres such as Chabera, illustrates the extent of the urban–rural contrast and helps us understand why many male migrants initially, and quite euphorically, conceptualized Nairobi as a launching pad for their careers, and for masculine success more broadly, only to later realize that things would not work out as smoothly as expected.