While working out in the No Mercy Gym on a sunny afternoon, I received a text message from Benson Ouma inviting me for a beer in one of Pipeline’s bars. I quickly finished my last set of reps and went straight to the bar, which was less than 25 metres from the gym. Benson, a 31-year-old bank clerk who grew up in a small village close to Maseno in Kisumu County, was already waiting and sipping a Guinness. Enjoying the view into one of Pipeline’s urban high-rise canyons and waiting for my cold lager, I started talking about some of the challenges I faced, such as noise, lack of water, fear of collapsing buildings, and electricity black outs. Benson, who was preparing to contest the seat of the Member of the County Assembly of Nairobi representing Kware ward in Kenya’s general election in 2022, agreed that these matters were obstacles that justified calling Pipeline a slum, just like Kibera or Mathare, and tried to convince me to cooperate with him on some business projects that would improve the livelihoods of the estate’s inhabitants: ‘Kibera is not the only slum of Nairobi. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. We can start some projects here in Pipeline. We don’t have NGOs here.’
Benson’s portrayal of Pipeline as a slum without NGOs reminded me of the fact that hundreds of NGOs had tried to improve the livelihoods of the inhabitants of Kibera, one of Nairobi’s best-known informal settlements. In contrast, and as a result of ‘donor agencies’ focus on the global “slum” problem’ (Huchzermeyer 2011: 224), Nairobi’s emerging high-rise settlements received no attention from the development aid sector. Though I had seen one NGO in Pipeline, I later found out that it was dominated by members of the officially banned but still well-organized Mungiki youth gang, who used it as a cover for illegal activities such as extorting protection money from migrants active in the informal economies in Pipeline and Mukuru Kwa Njenga.
After I expressed my agreement with his diagnosis that Pipeline lacked political grassroots organizations, Benson told me about his attempts to raise political awareness among Pipeline’s population and tenants interested in political change and improvements to their living conditions. Benson was not only an aspiring politician and the chairman of the ethnically based investment group HoMiSiKi (see chapter 4) but he had also founded two WhatsApp groups: one in which members discussed general political issues and one for tenants living in plots owned by the landlord who owned the plot where Benson lived. In these rather dormant chat groups, he tried to instil a feeling of community by, for instance, addressing group members as ‘people of Embakasi South’. He urged members to voice their frustrations, thereby trying to ignite their interest in political change. At the same time, Benson was striving to involve people from the corporate sector in his political aspirations by convincing them to donate money. With that money, Benson could start some projects aimed at improving the livelihood of Pipeline’s inhabitants, of which a community hospital was the most ambitious idea. Keeping in mind his voter base, he also planned to direct some of these funds to the members of HoMiSiKi, for whom he wanted to purchase water tanks so that some younger members could start a car wash business.
A quiet and reserved man, Benson did not strike me as a typical Kenyan politician. Though he regularly handed out small sums of money to friends and acquaintances, was a good orator, and knew how to show off his nice clothes and expensive technological gadgets, he sometimes appeared insecure about his political ambitions. After spending more time in Pipeline, however, I realized it was not Benson’s character or conduct but rather the urban environment of the estate and its character as a place of transit that had few historically deep kin or kin-like political ties that made his activities appear pointless. Whenever I discussed my living conditions with others by, for instance, trying to convince them that it was my right as a tenant to have water delivered as outlined in the rental agreement, most suggested I should vote with my feet and move to another plot. Some male migrants like Samuel and Arthur even embraced the estate’s challenging living conditions as an ordeal on their way to a better life, chiming in with the widespread narrative that if you make it in Nairobi, you can make it everywhere. Benson, I realized, was shouldering an almost impossible task, one that the authors of the 1948 master plan had called the main ‘problem of sociology’, namely, how to ‘convert a conglomerate of individuals into a functioning community’ (White et al. 1948: 9).
In light of these ethnographic observations, I refrain from agreeing with Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s diagnosis that economic livelihoods in Nairobi are characterized by a humanistic ‘utu-ubuntu business model’ that ‘refutes and resists western culture’s exaltation of individualism and its veneration of wealth and technology as solutions to human problems’ (2019: xiii). Though I observed a few ‘grassroots and friendship-based initiatives among tenants’ (Huchzermeyer 2011: 246), such as HoMiSiKi or WhatsApp groups in which neighbours shared complaints about the housing conditions, capitalistic, materialistic, and individualistic assumptions about what constitutes success in life dominated the discourse and influenced economic and social practices in Pipeline far more than in any other place in which I have lived. Most male migrants had an opportunistic attitude toward the estate and its residents. They considered Pipeline as a place to advance their economic careers and instil their romantic schemes. Aware of the estate’s problematic living conditions and infrastructure, they did not plan to stay in Pipeline forever (Maina and Mwau 2018: 221). Nobody, as Samuel observed once, considered the estate his or her home. Any investment of financial resources or political energy that would not create more money or transform into transportable consumer goods appeared futile to most of my male interlocutors. If the ‘neighbourhood unit’ of the 1948 master plan was assumed to have the potential to produce an upwardly mobile class of Africans, the dark and poorly ventilated single rooms of Pipeline crammed with consumer goods and indices of success helped reproduce the middle-class aspirations of migrant men and their families by reminding them that a man’s stay in Pipeline should be nothing more than a short interlude on his way toward economic success.
The two chapters that follow explore some of the more deplorable economic and social effects of migrants’ lack of personal investment in, and their instrumental attitude toward, the estate. By considering Pipeline a place to become economically successful without striving to turn the estate into their home, Pipeline’s inhabitants intensified migrant men’s pressure to perform well economically. If they did not make money in Pipeline, male migrants had no reason to be there. The expectations of being economically successful and providing for their girlfriends, wives, as well as their urban and rural families, created and exacerbated economic and romantic pressures, leading to a demand for masculine spaces where men could decompress, find new and promising solutions to their problems, or just escape the agonizing experience of constant pressure.