‘Why are you dressed that smart?’ I blurted out when I found Samuel sitting on his bed and staring at the wall, wearing a freshly ironed shirt and the trousers of a tailor-made suit. He had quit an internship at a law firm in town a few days before because they had only been paying him 8,000 KSh per month, and his boss had not allowed him to take a day off to take care of his pregnant wife, Immaculate Chepkemei, a migrant from Kericho County who worked as a sales agent for a travel company. Not taking his gaze off the wall, Samuel responded: ‘I want to build the impression that I am working.’ ‘For whom do you intend to build that impression?’ I asked, to which Samuel, who had confessed to me in the weeks before that he felt ‘down’ and without energy, answered solemnly: ‘For myself alone.’
When I first moved to Pipeline, I was fascinated by the speed with which people conducted their business. Everyone appeared to be always on the move. In contrast to many other estates in Nairobi, Pipeline had the atmosphere of a proper urban space. It was loud, chaotic, dense, anonymous, fast, and overcrowded. The streets acted as arteries transporting goods and people from one place to another, and anyone who stood around on the estate’s main thoroughfares risked blocking the flow of cars, lorries, moto-taxis, commodities, and people. It took me a while to realize that quite a few unemployed men just roamed around the estate aimlessly, hung out with friends who owned a shop, spent their days indoors watching television, or simply sat around doing nothing, sometimes dressed in their nicest clothes.
In sharp contrast, employed men joined the masses in the early morning to walk to the industrial area or to commute to their places of work in town, only to return late in the evening. Going to and coming home from work was a means to an end during which men engaged in what Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’ (1963: 83–8). They registered the actions of, yet rarely interacted with, a multitude of strangers. When Samuel had landed another internship with a law firm in Nairobi’s west, for instance, he left his apartment before seven a.m. and returned at around eight or nine p.m. The only public male social space that Samuel frequented on his way to work was a carriage of the morning train in which a group of male Luo migrants met and shared stories until they arrived in town 30 minutes later, thereby turning their journey to work into a period of entertaining male braggadocio.
Men without work or regular business activities had limited options for socializing in Pipeline, as public spaces that were free for men to use were almost entirely unavailable. While women could socialize on balconies, men either had to stay in the house or spend their dwindling savings to visit a bar, a videogame joint, a pool hall, or a gym (see chapter 5). Due to a lack of financial resources, these options were not available to everyone, and some migrants simply did not have the social network to enjoy such places. When I found Samuel idling in his apartment, for instance, he did not have the money to visit a gym on a regular basis or go to a bar.
1 An alternative I explore in chapter 4 was to reclaim the urban space as a ‘playing field’ (Dholuo, pap). Behaving as a ja-pap turned the vice of failing to embody economic value into a virtue by repudiating the expectation to become economically successful. Such appreciations of wasteful masculinity were probably also responsible for portrayals of Pipeline as a perfect place for single men with enough money to enjoy the estate’s bars and engage in sexual adventures. While offering an opportunity to enjoy male camaraderie, hanging out in pap was frequently described as a waste of time by male friends, girlfriends, and wives. Pipeline’s urban geography and architecture, as well as the inhabitants’ shared aspirations, in other words, excluded unemployed men from public space. To keep their own and others’ expectations alive, men without a job or business were pushed to look for money elsewhere if they did not want to remain stuck inside their rooms, hiding their economic failure but risking slowly sinking into depression or being ridiculed as useless by their wives and girlfriends.
Pipeline was not built according to a specific plan. Rather, its genesis depended on investors copying each other, trying to profit from Kenya’s ongoing housing crisis. For those landlords who turned Pipeline into one of the world’s most densely populated places, the estate thus had mere ‘exchange value’ (Lefebvre 1996 [1968]: 67–8). Migrants who came to Pipeline were also not interested in transforming the estate into a more humane place. It neither had social spaces open to everyone nor community projects that aimed at improving the living conditions of its inhabitants. Pipeline was a hypercapitalist place where everyone depended on the capitalist aspirations of someone else. Migrants looked for jobs to make money, landlords wanted to invest their capital, and Kenya’s business elite and entrepreneurs needed men who were willing to work in the industrial area or at the airport. This shared understanding of Pipeline as place into which people invested economically but not emotionally made it hard for migrant men and women to feel at home and posed a challenge for politicians who wanted to gain traction with Pipeline’s population.