When I asked Samuel about estates built according to the guidelines of ‘neighbourhood units’, he suggested we visit his aunt Marceline in Makadara, an estate ‘developed from 1954 onwards as an area where individuals, landlords or employers could build at their own expense along prescribed lines’ (Hake 1977: 64). Not far from Pipeline, Makadara is located alongside Nairobi’s Jogoo Road, and we arrived after a short ride in a matatu. On our way to Marceline’s house, we passed dozens of identical one-story buildings. In stark contrast to Pipeline’s maze-like architecture, there was ample communal space in front of and next to each house. I was surprised that Samuel greeted and exchanged news with neighbours who were sitting in front of their houses enjoying the cool breeze or washing clothes, a form of neighbourly closeness and warmth that was hard to come by in Pipeline, where such relations were more fleeting and pragmatic, or could even turn hostile if, for instance, an item was stolen. ‘You can clearly see that people had a plan here, not like in Pipeline,’ Samuel lamented before we were greeted by his aunt, who had taken him in when he arrived in Nairobi. By living in his aunt’s house, which his grandfather had also inhabited, Samuel followed in the footsteps of many other urban migrants who expected help from family members when they first came to Nairobi.
Although Samuel had appreciated the neighbourly atmosphere of Makadara, he left his aunt’s tidy, spacious, and comfortable house in search of independence and distance from his relative. He took his first step toward independence by sharing a university hostel room with Arthur Omondi, a childhood friend who had come to Nairobi to study for a bachelor’s degree in digital marketing. After they had to vacate the university hostels, they pooled resources and moved to a house in Jericho, an estate close to Makadara. In Jericho, which had also been built in the 1950s and radiated the same atmosphere of neighbourliness as Makadara, a house-owner sublet one room to Samuel and Arthur for more than 200 per cent of what he had paid for the house, a common exploitative practice in municipal estates where rents had remained relatively cheap. To complicate matters further, most tenancy agreements were given over to relatives, making it almost impossible for migrants to find empty houses. Uncomfortable with the lack of privacy in Jericho, Arthur and Samuel finally decided to move to Pipeline in September 2017. They hired a mkokoteni guy (Kiswahili, ‘handcart’) to help them to transport their few belongings, including a mattress, household utensils, and clothes. Eric, a student friend of Arthur’s who had migrated from Nakuru County, had recommended Pipeline as an estate where they could find affordable modern rooms and plenty of cheap food. Unlike Makadara and Jericho, which had problems with violent youth gangs and theft, Pipeline was also known for being one of the safest estates in Nairobi because many of its inhabitants went to and came back from work throughout the night.
When I asked him about his first months in Nairobi, Samuel, whose ancestral home is in Seme but who grew up in Chabera, where his father had been a teacher, laughed while he told me that he had arrived much like any other typical village boy full of high expectations that quickly clashed with reality:
When I came to Nairobi, I didn’t even have a suitcase or backpack. All my stuff was in a gunia (Kiswahili, ‘large sack normally used for transporting food such as maize or potatoes’). Before I arrived, I had thought that in Nairobi, jobs would chase me and not the other way around. I did many odd jobs in the beginning: washing the blood-stained clothes of butchers, mjengo (Sheng, ‘job on a construction site’) and others. But now I am living in Pipeline. That’s progress, like in a movie.
Samuel, who had come to Nairobi to study law but had to battle for a while until his family had pooled the resources to allow him to start his course, did not share the middle-class sentiments of Pipeline as a nightmarish place. His opinion was more ambivalent. While aware of some of its problems, Samuel, like most male migrants in Pipeline, viewed the estate as a launching pad for his professional career and as a place where he could satisfy his longing for consumerist commodities, independence, money, and sexual adventures in a relatively anonymous way. Despite this comparatively positive view, Samuel strongly held onto the idea of moving to an estate like Nairobi’s Karen, home to famous politicians, well-off Kenyans and rich expatriates, or back to his rural home after completing his studies and establishing himself as a prominent lawyer. For him, like most male migrants I met, Pipeline was a place of transit to a better life.