When I was in school, I was told, ‘Bwana (Kiswahili, ‘boss, sir, friend’), you have done mechanical engineering and you have advanced (Kiswahili, umefanya mechanical engineering na umeadvance), you will be paid a hundred and twenty thousand.’ Yes, I was told that bwana, you are going to be paid one twenty (Dholuo, in idhi chuli one twenty).
Joel Opiyo, migrant and ja-pap from Migori County
After being forced to leave Pipeline due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, I joined an interdisciplinary research project on the economic effects of the pandemic. Trying to understand how the pandemic influenced the lives of Nairobians living in different parts of the city, three of our long-term research assistants interviewed around a total of 150 people living in Pipeline, the wealthier estate Kileleshwa, and the well-known informal settlement of Kibera (Stephan et al. 2021).
1 Comparing Pipeline and Kibera was particularly illuminating. When we asked interview respondents to rate their feeling of pressure on a scale from one to ten, respondents in Pipeline reported higher scores than those living in Kibera, alluding to a lack of reliable, long-term kin- and friendship networks, pressure from mobile loan apps and the expectations of rural relatives, among other things (see Yose 1999). Considering that inhabitants of Pipeline were economically better off than those in Kibera, this was a surprising finding. During the same time, I cooperated with a group of political scientists and anthropologists, the main goal being to take a serious look at economic actors’ experience of pressure (Wiegratz et al. 2020). Respondents and our daily interlocutors expressed that they felt ‘stressed’, ‘depressed’, ‘under pressure’, that things ‘disturb their mind’ (Dholuo,
chapo paro), that the ‘world weighs heavy on them’ (Dholuo,
piny pek, see also Schmidt 2017a), that they ‘think too much’ (Dholuo,
paro medre, see also Osborn et al. 2021,
paro mang’eny, ‘many thoughts’), or that ‘all ways are completely blocked’ (Dholuo,
yore odinore te), among other things. Male migrants in Pipeline juxtaposed these and similar discursive descriptions of stress, pressure, and depression with reports about somatic symptoms such as fatigue, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, high blood pressure, and ulcers.
Unpacking migrant men’s experience of pressure and their ‘idioms of distress’ (Nichter 1981) is important because they lived a life that could too easily be portrayed as bordering on a successful middle-class life in terms of the amount of money some had at their disposal. With the average formal wage being around 20,000 KSh or slightly less, many policy standards would not deem Pipeline’s inhabitants as poor. However, with monthly rent, electricity and water costing around 5,000 KSh, food at least 2,000 KSh per week for a family of four, and transportation often requiring another substantial share of a man’s salary, 20,000 KSh was not enough to quench male migrants’ thirst for middle-class success and economic development. It was not surprising that some male migrants quit their formal jobs to try their luck in Pipeline’s informal economy. They no longer lost time and money on transport and could mingle with other migrant men during the day. After all, they had not migrated from the village to Nairobi to suffer and barely make ends meet.
Joel Opiyo, 25-year-old migrant from Migori County, is a good example. A mechanical engineer, he had come to Nairobi a few years ago with salary expectations hovering around 120,000 KSh. He had been lucky to find a job in the nearby industrial area during the COVID-19 pandemic but his salary was only around 16,000 KSh per month. As he had to pay roughly 6,000 KSh for his single room and electricity, 6,000 KSh for his Higher Education Loan Board loan, and buy food for himself and his girlfriend, his monthly salary was almost consumed by necessary expenses. However, known as employed in his rural home and among friends in Pipeline, he was often asked to buy drinks for jo-pap or to contribute financially to the education of his younger siblings.
Most male migrants, more so those with jobs or businesses such as Joel, did not go hungry. Nonetheless, the expectations they were confronted with exceeded the bare minimum, such as the provision of food and rent. The experience of pressure, in other words, was not an effect of a migrant man’s absolute monetary wealth but resulted from an assessment of an imbalance between, on the one hand, his and other actors’ economic expectations and, on the other, the ability to fulfil them. In contrast to mere stress, pressure was furthermore based on an underlying attachment to its cause. Migrant men were not simply annoyed, overwhelmed, or stressed by their and others’ expectations. They were under pressure to meet these expectations because they agreed that while quantitatively unreasonable, they were qualitatively justified. After all, it was a migrant man’s job to provide and carve out a good life for his rural and urban family. Joel, for instance, did want to help pay his siblings’ school fees, but what was requested of him was just too much to manage.
Two types of expectations were particularly pressure-inducing for migrant men in Pipeline. They felt their families in Nairobi, as well as their rural kin, expected their essential needs satisfied as well as a continuous display of newly purchased signs of economic progress and success. Whenever I ate at a friend’s house, for instance, his wife would remind him to buy a new dining table in a joking but serious way. From the wife’s perspective, welcoming guests in a house without a beautiful table was inappropriate.
2 Such female demands clashed with migrant men’s pride in being able to survive with makeshift furniture and simple utensils. When moving in with a girlfriend after living alone or together with other male migrants, men had to change their perspective on what commodities counted as signs of economic progress. While male migrants who lived alone or with other men could use their money on clothes, alcohol, and electronic gadgets, many men who had begun to live with their girlfriends or wives suddenly faced different demands, such as the expectation to buy expensive furniture. On the other hand, it was hard for men to save money as three ‘crisis-inducing financial burdens’ (Smith 2017: 96) repeatedly demanded large lump sums of money: school fees for one’s own children and those of relatives, healthcare emergencies, and funeral costs. Male migrants felt that these obligations were exclusively placed on them as household heads and were significantly larger if the man was the first-born son, like Joel. Focusing on the experiences of pressure thus helps us to grasp the intimate links between life’s temporal, sensory, and spatial dimensions. Circulating economic deadlines, such as the payment of school fees or the monthly rent, as well as social and romantic expectations, created an encompassing atmosphere of pressure exacerbated by a dense, anonymous, noisy, and congested urban architecture and geography neglected by the Kenyan state (Rose and Fitzgerald 2022).
As most migrant men depended on their salaries and profits, or on money being distributed to them by relatives or friends who had jobs or successful businesses, any economic recession and the resulting unemployment and business meltdown caused serious financial throwbacks. The example of Victor Omollo indicates what could happen to a male migrant’s life in Pipeline if he lost his job or if his business collapsed. Although his story is drastic, most respondents faced similar problems during the period of our interviews, coinciding with the time when the Kenyan economy was hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic (June to November 2020), which threatened to derail Pipeline’s ‘zero-balance economy’ (Donovan and Park 2019). In the wake of the pandemic, pressure became almost unbearable.