This book
has two parts, each consisting of three chapters. The first part –
Experiencing Pressure – introduces Pipeline and discusses the romantic and economic challenges men encountered after migrating to Nairobi. It describes how their own expectations and those of their rural kin, wives, girlfriends, and male friends structured, influenced, and disrupted their attempts to find success.
Experiencing Pressure thus outlines the social and economic consequences of the ongoing relevance of the narrative of the male provider and explores some of the frustrations male migrants experienced. The second part –
Evading Pressure – focuses on three homosocial spaces in which men tried to evade or overcome the experience of pressure: an ethnically homogenous investment group of Dholuo-speaking Kenyans who socialized with one another in the bars and pubs of Pipeline, the interethnic No Mercy Gym, and the sphere of self-help culture embodied by those I call ‘masculinity consultants’, such as pastors, authors and motivational speakers who tried to capitalize on male migrants’ experiences of pressure by giving advice on how to become an economically and spiritually successful man, husband, and father.
1 I focus on these places because they differ from other masculine spaces such as barber shops, open-air pool halls and videogame joints in one major respect. Male migrants who wrote or read self-help books, participated in investment groups, or worked out in gyms tried to change their futures actively. These spaces seemed better suited to gaining an understanding of the influence of the expectation of success. Although men also frequented betting shops to change their futures actively, I decided not to include them as a case study in this book. It is nevertheless important to mention that betting shops were one of the social spaces that migrant men visited after work to avoid spending time with their families. Aware of the economic and social pressures men faced, the owners of betting shops allowed potential customers to hang around and watch the evening news or chat with friends even if they did not have money to bet. Furthermore, engaging in systematic betting, which not only demanded a detailed analysis of the strength of players and teams but also fiscal prudence, allowed unemployed men to experience the dignity of having something comparable to a business or job (Schmidt 2019). Going to bars and clubs, working out, or reading self-help literature allowed periods of release, renewing the energy male migrants required to sustain their efforts to provide for their urban and rural relatives. Ultimately, though, these practices failed as lasting solutions for their economic and social frustrations. The most socially validated form of masculinity – economic success – remained both a sought-after ‘privilege and a source of lived insecurity’ (Hendriks 2022: 144) for most male migrants in Pipeline.
Chapter 1 offers an introduction to Pipeline’s materiality, history, and geography. It shows that the emergence of the estate must be understood against the background of Nairobi’s colonial and postcolonial history and housing policies characterized by racial segregation, political corruption, and illegal land grabbing. The chapter closes a research gap in the scholarly literature on Nairobi that has predominantly focused on informal settlements, such as Kibera or Korogocho, by portraying some of the challenges and forms of exclusion caused by Pipeline’s urban architecture, the state’s neglect of the significant increase in tenement housing that began in the early 2000s, as well as the residents’ rather instrumental approach to living in the estate’s high-rise accommodation. I conclude by suggesting that in being ignored by the state yet catalyzing the aspirational dreams of migrant men and landlords alike, Pipeline is best understood as a place everyone expected a lot from while no one was really willing to emotionally invest in it.
Chapter 2 describes Pipeline’s economy and the strategies male migrants employed to navigate both ‘landscapes of debt’ and ‘horizons of expectation’ (Cole 2014). It distinguishes the experience of pressure from the experience of stress by defining the first as a negative somatic reaction resulting from an actor’s assessment of expectations as reasonable in kind but not in degree, that is to say, qualitatively justified but quantitatively excessive. This conceptualization of pressure has several benefits. Apart from explaining why migrant men’s experience of pressure was often accompanied by quantitative qualifiers, such as ‘not yet, but soon I will be one of those successful men’, or ‘you are right, but you ask for too much’, it also allows us to grasp the intimate and culturally as well as socially inflected nature of the relation between the cause of pressure and the person who experiences it (see Jackson 2013 on the history of stress as a diagnosis and metaphor in the twentieth century). Male migrants were intimately attached and emotionally committed to what they perceived as the causes of their pressure, such as the narrative of the male breadwinner, urban life, or the expectations of their wives, girlfriends, and rural kin. Finally, understanding migrant men’s pressure as caused by expectations that they considered qualitatively justified helps to explain why they rarely engaged in more radical political critiques of Kenya’s highly unjust capitalist system. Male migrants did not want to change the rules of the game. They just wanted to win it.
Chapter 3 focuses on how migrant men’s experience of pressure destabilized their romantic relations. After illustrating how men classified women according to various categories that were constantly threatening to merge, I discuss how migrant men and women employed practices that aimed at stabilizing the marital house as a social unit. As these practices derived their alleged efficacy from the economically unsustainable idea of the man as the main breadwinner, they further complicated the already intricate relations between money, sexuality, and love. The resulting mistrust and the anxiety of being unable to perform traditional gender roles intensified public negotiations of sexual performances, economic responsibilities, and romantic requests. These public negotiations took place through new forms of smartphone-based communication such as WhatsApp. The chapter ends by extending the discussion of mistrust and secrecy to the issue of urban–rural kin relations. In an environment where many couples lived together in interethnic relationships, husbands and wives often did not know each other’s in-laws or mother tongue, which led to further misunderstandings.
Chapter 4 focuses on a welfare group called HoMiSiKi, which consisted entirely of Luo migrants and was named after the first syllables of the four western Kenyan counties predominantly inhabited by jo-Luo: Homa Bay, Migori, Siaya, and Kisumu. The group’s main goal was to support members in case of sickness or funerals and to save enough money to invest. The chapter illustrates how its official structure and ambitious aims provided a justification for married men to leave their apartments and spend time with other men in their ‘playing field’ (Dholuo, pap, traditionally denoting a field where people danced, initiated sexual relations, organized wrestling matches and other social activities). As jo-pap (Dholuo, ‘people of the playing field’, singular ja-pap), they engaged in practices of wasteful masculinity, such as extramarital sexual relationships, physical violence and an excessive consumption of alcohol. The chapter concludes with a description of how the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected HoMiSiKi’s economic plans but intensified celebrations of wasteful masculinity among individual jo-pap, which ultimately led to the collapse of the investment group.
Chapter 5 outlines the history of recreational weightlifting in Pipeline by narrating how Carl, one of the estate’s gym pioneers and the owner of the No Mercy Gym, started his career as a gym instructor twenty years ago. Following an introduction to Pipeline’s gym scene, I delve into the experiences of five members of the No Mercy Gym who trained together almost daily, demonstrating how small interactions (looks, comments, or instructions, for example) and institutionalized practices, such as contributing to funeral costs or participating in post-workout meals and drinks, defined the gym as a masculine space and fostered a strong sense of belonging among its members. The chapter goes on to argue that the recreational weightlifting at the No Mercy Gym represents a paradigmatic form of coping with the experience of pressure produced by a situation in which the causes and effects of economic success appeared to have been disentangled. Lifting weights provided meaning to migrant men by giving them a sense of self-efficacy that they could not find in Kenya’s ruthless capitalist economy.
The final chapter explores how masculinity consultants offered guidance to Kenyan men who were seeking ways to alleviate economic and romantic pressures. While Philemon Otieno, a migrant and motivational speaker from western Kenya, suggested combining practices and narratives of charismatic Christianity with those of US-American self-help culture to achieve economic success (see Boyd 2018, Fay 2022), other masculinity consultants such as Amerix, who rose to nationwide fame by giving Kenyan men advice on social media, as well as self-published authors Silas Nyanchwani (2021a, 2022) and Jacob Aliet (2022a), recommended that male migrants reject feminist values and adopt practices focused on re-establishing the patriarchal norms that they believed would transform them into strong and self-sufficient men. These recommendations were strongly influenced by ideas found in the digital ‘manosphere’, this being a conglomeration of websites, blogs, chat groups, and online forums centred around an anti-feminist redefinition of masculinity (Ging 2019, Kaiser 2022, Van Valkenburg 2021). Widening the book’s perspective by focusing on how Kenyan men appropriated, disseminated, and contextualized such masculinizing strategies links the experiences of male migrants in Pipeline with nationwide discussions about the dire state of gender relations, which were further fuelled by men’s growing fear of becoming expendable (see Schmidt 2022a).
The conclusion draws out the structural similarities of the three case studies and summarizes the book’s findings against the background of the concepts of the experience of pressure and the expectation of success. It recapitulates how discussing and trying to overcome male frustrations and failures has become an integral part of constructing man-, father-, husband- and brotherhood in contemporary Nairobi, where migrants coped with economic and social pressures exacerbated by the narrative of men as providers by creating and frequenting masculine spaces where a feeling of manhood and brotherhood was created, maintained and celebrated (see Fuh 2012). However, this celebration of brotherhood did not entail a critique of but merely allowed migrant men to momentarily evade Kenya’s increasing capitalist focus on economic actors’ entrepreneurial work ethic. In Pipeline, male validation continued to be characterized by trying, and often failing, to be the breadwinner. Masculinity, in other words, was not only defined by meeting the normative expectations of others but also by genuine efforts to meet them. Trying one’s best or simulating success often had to suffice. Being a man in Pipeline was thus a balancing act of trying, pretending, and failing to meet self-expectations and those of others.
Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi portrays what Philippe Bourgois has called ‘the individual experience of social structural oppression’ (2003 [1996]: 15). It shows how, amidst economic crises and the Kenyan state’s failure to offer affordable healthcare and education, migrant men remain under continuous pressure to provide for their loved ones. The book thereby complements the burgeoning literature on how social units such as families (Cooper 2019) or NGOs (Muehlebach 2012) are compelled to or willingly take over responsibilities from a neoliberal state that neglects its citizens. Instead of criticizing the state’s negligence and demanding their rights, men and women in high-rise Nairobi remain entangled in a blame game that continues to escalate their economic and romantic pressures. The alleged crisis of masculinity is not primarily a problem of gender relations, but more a result of Kenya’s capitalist economy, which relies on the production and exploitation of migrant men’s pressured bodies and minds and pits their interests against those of women (see Ntarangwi 1998). Rather than looking to support from the state, men and women in Pipeline expected everything and nothing from each other, a situation that led to misunderstandings, mistrust, violence, and even death.