2
Economic Pressure and the Expectation of Success
Thinking ends in money. (Dholuo, Paro ogik e pesa)
Samuel Onyango
As I branched into the street leading to the No Mercy Gym on a sunny morning, I encountered a circle of roughly 100 people. Forcing my way through the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a body lying in the middle of the small crowd. At the end of the street, I could see Carl, Godwin (one of our training partners), and Carl’s wife sitting opposite the gym. ‘What happened?’, I inquired when I reached them, and Carl answered: ‘The guy came to fetch water. He wanted to cook for his children, then he collapsed, and it seems that he is dead. There is no pulse.’ The crowd was agitated, wondering why it had happened and what should be done. Much of the wild chattering suggested that it must have been Corona. After what struck me as a very long time, a healthcare professional arrived, asked bystanders to stop taking pictures with their phones, checked the body for signs of life, raised his hands to indicate that there was nothing that could be done, and declared the man dead. ‘Does anyone know him?’, I asked Carl and the others. ‘Nobody knows him. We looked through his pockets, but there was nothing apart from some slips from the pawn shop. He had many debts. It seems that he died of pressure.’ We continued to discuss the possible identity and fate of the unknown guy who might have died of high blood pressure, excessive stress, or a combination of both. When the crowd began to disperse, we entered the gym and went through our routines as if nothing had happened.
Though life in Pipeline could be anonymous, especially when a recently arrived migrant was not keen on forming social bonds, livelihoods in the estate were, largely as a consequence of widespread economic pressure, influenced by a myriad of social obligations between relatives, friends, and colleagues (see Shipton 2007). These landscapes of entrustment, which were reproduced by a multitude of transactions across Pipeline, Nairobi, and the whole of Kenya, had massive effects on the estate’s infrastructure and how migrants socialized. Beneath the smooth flow of daily transactions, not only of money but also of sexual favours, words, food, and other forms of hospitality, lay a carefully balanced web of latent economic and social obligations whose threads crisscrossed social, spatial, and ethnic boundaries. The flow of money, goods, and promises organized relations between friends, family members, neighbours, and colleagues. While migrants came to Pipeline with the aspiration to progress economically as individuals or individual families, economic and social pressures would form obligations to others. It was indeed hard to find a migrant who was not a debtor to some and a creditor to others.
Many debts and social obligations remained dormant until a situation forced male migrants to claim them. The measures put into place to curb the spread of COVID-19 created such a situation during which many male migrants felt compelled to try to make use of some of these dormant obligations by asking for a favour or demanding repayment. The sudden increase in these demands had dramatic social effects. An increase in social atomization, coupled with an overburdening of the nuclear family, led to a spike in gender-based violence and mistrust between spouses, neighbours, and friends. Financial obligations, in other words, not only created and maintained social relations, but also threatened them. In an environment where ‘everyone was crying’, as a friend phrased it, it was difficult for people to ask for money successfully. The pandemic had equipped everyone with a handy excuse to reject requests, and hence it was hard to be sure who was sincere about his or her inability to help. In the end, everyone could blame COVID-19. The most drastic economic change was a rush toward formal loans offered by banks, shop owners, credit sharks, pawn shops and, most importantly, mobile loan apps (Donovan and Park 2022). Landscapes of informal social entrustment transformed into landscapes of formal economic debt (see Shipton 2010).
1 These formal debt relations were not treated in a purely instrumental or impersonal way. Employees of mobile loan companies, for instance, reminded debtors of their patriotic duties toward other Kenyans or pressured them to accept loans from friends. Unsurprisingly, those offering loans were well aware of the local importance of pressure. An advertisement for Kenya Commercial Bank’s mobile loan made the connection clear: ‘Need cash?
Usitense!’ (Kiswahili, ‘Don’t tense’ or ‘Don’t feel pressured’), advice that no longer applied to the man who died of pressure just up from the gym.