Despite its analytical potential, and in contrast to buzz words such as poverty or economic marginalization used by politicians, aid agencies, and NGOs to formulate political claims, pressure as a factor has largely been ignored by scientists and policy-makers alike. This is surprising, given that the concepts of aspiration and stress have been receiving increasing attention from anthropologists (Appadurai 2004, see Izugbara and Egesa 2020 for men in Nairobi, and Di Nunzio 2019: 82–3 for a recent critique), the development aid sector (Haushofer and Fehr 2014), and the discipline of development economics (Genicot and Ray 2020). In an attempt to fill this scholarly gap, chapters 2 and 3 zoom in on how the feeling of being under pressure emerged at the interface of the economic, the romantic and the social, and how it reproduced prevalent notions of masculinity and male success among migrant men in Pipeline.
Although male migrants sometimes blamed greedy politicians as well as corrupt police officers and employers for their lack of economic success, they felt that these external factors were ultimately beyond their control. Instead of critiquing, or even attempting to improve, the wider Kenyan political-economic constellation, migrant men situated the cause of their inability to meet economic expectations inside of their most intimate social relations. Be it rural kin who asked for remittances, girlfriends who wanted to be taken out for dinner, or wives who demanded their husbands find jobs despite the lack of opportunities, male migrants’ economic misfortunes were aggravated by what others expected of them. The gap between their economic situation and their own and others’ expectations was an existential challenge that created sometimes almost unbearable somatic reactions such as sleeplessness, depression, hypertension, increased aggressiveness, ulcers, and suicidal thoughts. During the pandemic, men in Pipeline found it increasingly difficult to succeed in ‘balancing on the edge of a knife between success and failure, between maintaining an affective sense of forward momentum in their everyday lives, and sinking into a sense of stagnation’ (Fast et al. 2020: 1). As an effect of their inability to provide for their families, men’s self-esteem diminished. More and more male migrants felt that they were no longer of use to anyone.
The concept of expectation helps analyze men’s fear of their expendability caused by the experience of pressure because it straddles the normative and the epistemic, the individual and the social, as well as the moral and the ethical. While many male migrants believed that society at large, as well as their most intimate others, held the opinion that they should (normative dimension) and will be (epistemic dimension) successful providers, they also wanted (ethical dimension) and felt obliged to (moral dimension) have economic success. Migrant men and women had internalized the expectation that men should be economically successful, or at least stable, through decades of being told that education and migration would turn dependent boys into providing husbands and fathers. This expectation of economic success exacerbated feelings of pressure and individual failure. The fear of being unable to meet personal, familial, and public expectations created a fertile ground for the emergence of practices for depressurizing and for pretending to be successful that momentarily alleviated the negative feeling of pressure without permanently changing its cause.
Many male migrants embraced forms of short-term depressurization by resorting to activities provided by financially capable investors who had realized the economic potential of pressure-releasing valves. Alcohol, betting on football games, dancing to the newest ohangla music, watching movies and TV shows the whole day, smoking weed, spending time in the gym, taking painkillers and other pills, engaging in male-to-male and gender-based violence against their wives, or having sex with sex workers were among the most common forms of letting off steam among male migrants in Pipeline. Migrant men also engaged in what I call ‘practices of pretence’ (see Archambault 2017) that allowed them to pretend to already be wealthy. Contrary to male migrants’ intentions, practices of pretence that ‘simulated’ wealth (Lockwood 2020: 46) tended to increase pressure because they led to expectations that spiralled out of control, which was one reason why Samuel called them ‘acts of bravado’. Since most migrant men pretended to be better-off, smarter, stronger, or wealthier than they were, the economic, social, and romantic expectations of friends, spouses, and relatives increased even more.
Practices trying to attenuate the experience of pressure involved the need to acquire, spend, and invest money. Migrant men needed money to present themselves and act as capable providers and breadwinners. The extent to which money defined masculinity and encompassed other values in Pipeline becomes manifest in a proverb Samuel mentioned when pondering his lack of economic progress: Paro ogik e pesa (Dholuo, ‘Thinking ends in money’). Only money’s ‘generative potential’ (Green 2019: 109) could permanently reduce pressure and bring planning and structure into a male migrant’s life. With money, men could give their daily lives form (Sheng, ‘plan, agenda’), or, as another male migrant from western Kenya phrased it: ‘Money is the denominator, money is everything, other than God, money is the second thing, […] kionge pesa, to ionge ngima’ (Dholuo, ‘if you don’t have money, you don’t have a life’). Every migrant man in Pipeline was thus judged and valued against the amount of money he had or, at least as often, pretended to have.