‘Many schoolchildren had no shoes, there was no electricity, no blackboards, and our desks were placed on bare soil. On top of all that we had to fetch firewood for our teachers, imagine, early in the morning before school.’ After we had finished our dinner, Samuel and his close friend Caleb Omondi, who also hailed from Chabera, began to tell stories about life growing up in rural western Kenya. Maybe trying to impress Jane, a friend who had grown up in a village close to Nairobi, Samuel and Caleb engaged in a practice I had observed among other male migrants. By portraying western Kenya as backward and underdeveloped (Morrison 2007), migrant men painted a picture of their journey as ‘a rite of passage in which the migrant must confront risk and the unfamiliar to ensure his social becoming’ (Kleinman 2019: 13) and of themselves as pioneers who had transformed from boys walking barefoot and dressed in torn clothes to men wearing suits and designer shoes. Irrespective of their absolute wealth, many male migrants from western Kenya (see map 2), a region viewed by most as politically and historically neglected, arrived in Nairobi with a feeling of superiority vis-à-vis poor urban residents or migrants from places closer to Nairobi. Puzzled by the difference between her school days and those of Samuel and Caleb, Jane told us that those stories reminded her of how her mother had described going to school when she was young. In coming to Nairobi, it seemed, Caleb and Samuel had not only travelled in space but also forwards in time.
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Map 2 Piny Luo (Dholuo, ‘Luo land’). Map drawn by Robin von Gestern.
Urban Kenyans considered places such as Kaleko and Chabera not only far away geographically but also as temporally distant and backward. Rural villages did indeed offer few economic opportunities for young men. In 2009, when I visited Kaleko for the first time, I felt as if I was being transported back in time. Donkey carts transported bricks that local youths had made by hand, and women in colourful traditional clothes carried sacks of maize on their heads to the local market. Passing through the maize fields that surrounded polygamous homesteads (Dholuo, dala, see figure 2), which were organized according to patrilocal and patrilineal principles that were more than a century old, I quickly realized that social and political relations were still influenced by the clan and lineage structures referenced by E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1949). Few houses had electricity and there was no running water or a basic sewage system. It was not surprising that many young people perceived Kaleko as a place stuck in the past. Other than farming and selling the produce at the local markets, working in the local informal economy, or becoming a teacher or nurse, job opportunities were limited. When asked why so many men migrate to Nairobi, one male migrant from Homa Bay County stated that ‘if money could be found in the village, we would not be in Nairobi’. Most young men, in other words, did not see a future in Kaleko (Schmidt 2017a).
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Figure 2 Patrilocal homestead in Kaleko. Photograph by the author, 20 April 2015.
The narratives of entrepreneurial and professional success in the capital and signs of urban modernity, such as the newest technological gadgets, sparked and catalyzed the migratory dreams of young men from Kaleko and other places in rural western Kenya throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989). During my fieldwork, many men still considered migration the most promising way to explore new worlds and make money, and then return home later in life. Due to a high population density and an increasing shortage of land around Kaleko, many young men were well aware that they would not necessarily be able to build homesteads adjacent to those of their fathers’ or uncles’, as had long been traditional cultural practice (see Geissler and Prince 2010: chapter 4). The majority would either have to buy land elsewhere or be content with tiny plots that would barely allow any form of subsistence agriculture. This impending scarcity of land in western Kenya further intensified the pressure on young men to migrate to the capital to make enough money to be able to retire in their natal village.
A successful migration would fulfil the promises of a narrative of migrant modernity, one to which many Kenyans still adhere. Focusing on excelling in the domains of ‘schooling, formal employment, and households’ (Smith 2008: 114), these expectations of migratory success have historical roots in western Kenya’s colonial history as a labour pool and have also been perpetuated by stereotypes of jo-Luo as excellent academics, lawyers, and politicians. Such expectations were further reinforced through the narratives of success shared by elder migrants. However, the structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, coupled with an explosion in the number of college and university degree-holders, made it difficult for migrants to achieve economic success in Kenya’s capital. Three decades later, the economic recession and inflation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine further impeded migrants’ attempts to meet their rural families’ expectations, never mind their own. Caleb, whose salary was cut by 50 per cent during the first months of the pandemic and who shared his Nairobi apartment with his girlfriend and three relatives, summarized this predicament as follows:
Due to the economic pressure, you know, maybe what you were offering before might be different from what you are offering now. […] Like right now there are priorities, right? And maybe your cousin or somebody tells you like, ‘I need this amount of money’, and you don’t have that money right now, because you know with them, the expectation is still intact, they have the mentality that you are working, and that you are in Nairobi, the mentality they have is that you have money.
Relations between the village (Dholuo, gweng, Sheng, ushago, shags) and the city (Dholuo, boma) were complex, and both places figured in the minds and plans of migrants as more than geographic locations. While the virtual presence of money and urban commodities influenced the dreams and visions of male migrants long before they left for the city, behavioural traits that were associated with rurality and backwardness, such as speaking with an odd accent or refusing to eat unknown food, shaped how migrants were seen during their first few months after they arrived. For many migrant men the city was simply a place to make money, experiment with new lifestyles, and make a family of their own before returning to their ancestral homes. However, as this book will show, these goals tended to obstruct one another.