The pressure always mounts from the twelfth, the agent appears by the twelfth, we promise to pay by the fifteenth, when the fifteenth comes and you don’t have the cash, you go into the dark.
Mark Odhiambo, migrant and ja-pap from western Kenya
The most common types of apartments (which many locals often called ‘houses’) available for rent in Pipeline were single rooms (from roughly 3,500 KSh to 5,000 KSh per month), bedsitters (6,000 to 8,500 KSh), and one-bedroom apartments (9,000 to 15,000 KSh). The number of units per high-rise block varied according to the size of the plot and the type of apartments offered. While Milele Flats, for instance, had slightly over 100 bedsitters, the plot where Samuel and Arthur lived had over 300 single rooms. Both the bedsitters in Milele Flats and the single rooms in the plot where Arthur and Samuel resided were roughly sixteen square metres in size, the standard for most apartments across Pipeline. Despite their similar external appearance, the quality of housing plots offered differed greatly. Recently built plots generally had tiled rooms and steel doors, while many older ones had wooden doors, concrete floors, and poorly maintained latrines. Some older plots had additional problems such as insect and rat infestation, mould, or peeling paint. Water was rationed in most plots and was either available every other day, twice a week, or less. A few remaining mabati structures were also still used for housing. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some plots in Fedha – the estate across Outer Ring Road – had lifts, CCTV surveillance and biometric access.
While bedsitters offered the convenience of a private bathroom, their living area was smaller than that of single rooms, whose inhabitants shared bathrooms with the other tenants residing on the same floor. As a result, bedsitters were typically occupied by financially better-off single men and women, or by single parents. Most families without the financial means to rent a one-bedroom apartment tended to occupy single rooms, dividing the space into an eating and living area and an area for sleeping (Mwau 2019). By placing a curtain or a length of cloth across the middle of the room, tenants created a private and a public section, thereby copying the arrangement of domestic space common in rural homes. Since many migrants housed nephews, nieces, cousins, or siblings who had recently migrated to the city to study, look for work, babysit, or assist in the house, the eating and living area was sometimes turned into a second sleeping area during the nights.
When furnishing and decorating their apartments, migrants included as many signs of urban success as possible. Because of the thirst for material goods, their rooms resembled cramped or scaled-down versions of middle-class apartments. In contrast to the inhabitants of houses in Makadara, whose owners tried to make ‘a home amid urban decay’ (Smith 2019: 9), the inhabitants of Pipeline were not interested in transforming their apartments into permanent homes. They confined themselves to collecting what could be called ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour 1986) highlighting different degrees of urban middle-class success: flat-screen televisions, empty bottles of expensive alcohol, ceramic cups and plates, beautiful glasses, fridges, carpets, sofas, tables, chairs, and drinking water dispensers. By occupying specific positions in a hierarchy of commodities finely ranked from cheap soap bars to expensive liquid soaps, from wooden tables with a village flair to modern glass ones, or from small analogue to large digital televisions, these consumer goods, like written rental agreements, employment contracts, and other indexes of formality and order (see Gastrow 2020b), signalled a migrant’s position on the ladder of modernity.
Nevertheless, living conditions in Pipeline were far from convenient. Apart from frequent electricity blackouts and water shortages that forced residents to buy water from vendors who illegally tapped into the municipal water supply (Kimari 2021), the relations between tenants and landlords were strained. As most landlords were not interested in being known to their tenants, they delegated the collection of rent and the maintenance of their plots to agencies that employed caretakers and watchmen. This made it hard for tenants to voice complaints directly to the agencies or their landlords, a stark contrast to many other estates in Nairobi where landlords and tenants sometimes lived in the same house or close to one another. The absence of landlords turned caretakers into middlemen who absorbed the complaints of tenants, only to put forward the excuse that their hands were tied by the landlord’s decisions.
As the demand for housing was constantly high, tenants who had difficulties finding money to pay the rent could not expect to be treated with leniency. Electricity could be cut off a few days after the beginning of the month, and after a week or two, tenants might come home from work and find their rooms padlocked, forcing them to seek shelter at a friend’s place.
1 Though almost all apartments had prepaid electricity meters, most were installed on the ground floors and controlled by the caretakers. Tenants paid for electricity through a gadget plugged into a socket in their apartments, but the meter could be switched off at any time, even if the tenants had purchased electricity in advance. If a tenant continued to default, the agency could force open the apartment and remove the tenant’s belongings to keep as collateral until the arrears were paid in full (see Huchzermeyer 2011: 215–16). Tenants also had to deal with a range of other issues. For example, due to the density of Pipeline’s architecture, apartments on the lower floors received almost no natural light (Njanja 2020); the mobile network was at best unstable; and the lack of ventilation made rooms very hot and humid. Having to leave one’s room to get some fresh air or to make a phone call helped to create a rudimentary form of neighbourliness that was often organized along ethnic lines but it seldomly lasted beyond the period during which people lived in the same building. The balconies and corridors became social spaces where women plaited each other’s hair, washed clothes and chatted with one another, thereby familiarizing themselves with the newest fashions and hairstyles, rumours, and other useful information. It was along these corridors and on the rooftops that children played football or other games, and tenants engaged in side businesses such as small-scale tailoring. Though social interactions occurred throughout the building, balconies and corridors were almost exclusively the domain of women and children (see also Huchzermeyer 2011: 208–9). This is unsurprising as balconies were not only situated near the archetypical female place – the house – but were also understood as breeding grounds for rumours and gossip, practices that both men and women characterized as female.