There is pressure in rent, pressure in what we will eat, pressure on what people will eat back in the village, my mother and father, now that they are aged, they no longer work, so, all that is pressure.
Victor Omollo
Victor Omollo was born near Asembo, a small and quiet market centre along the shores of Lake Victoria, roughly 30 kilometres from Bondo. Like many rural jo-Luo, he had dropped out of school before finishing his primary education due to financial burdens. The second eldest son in a monogamous family, and with four siblings, Victor described his family as living in poverty and narrated how he had to take on responsibilities early in life. Instead of enjoying a carefree childhood and youth, he had to look for casual jobs, such as herding cattle, to assist his parents and younger siblings. After spending some time in the homestead of an economically better-off family friend, Victor began working as a moto-taxi driver in the area around Asembo. This brought him into contact with well-off migrants whom he picked up and transported to the main road at night so that they were not confronted with financial demands of other villagers. Victor shared his challenges and dreams with one of these customers, who subsequently invited him to learn how to repair cars and lorries in a small town not far from the Ugandan border. Having mastered the techniques involved, Victor returned to Asembo and found a job as a car mechanic. After repeatedly being denied payment by his employer, Victor became increasingly frustrated with his life in the village, where his progress was stunted. Luckily, friends told him that a company in Nairobi was looking for mechanics to maintain their fleet of lorries. After taking a bus to Nairobi, he found a place to stay in an informal settlement along Mombasa Road and began to work for the company. Shortly after settling in Nairobi, Victor married Elizabeth, a Kisii woman from Nyamira County, and they moved to a house in Pipeline in 2016. Life was good, Victor had made progress, and his development (Dholuo, dongruok) was visible.
Victor was almost 30 when I met him for the first time in 2019. This tall, physically intimidating and boisterous man, whose smooth voice could be misleading, was living with Elizabeth and their three children and worked as a forklift operator for a cargo company at JKIA. Like many other migrants working at the airport, or in Nairobi’s transport or hotel sector, Victor was hit hard by the measures enacted to curb the spread of the COVID-19. Soon after the pandemic reached Kenya on the 13 March 2020, all inbound and outbound flights were banned, schools, hotels, restaurants closed, and all of Nairobi went into near-lockdown. In the first two months of the pandemic, Victor’s salary was slashed by 50 per cent, and soon after he was asked to work only two or three times a month. When my long-term research assistant Jack Omondi Misiga interviewed Victor in July 2020,
1 Because I could not travel to Kenya during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack Misiga conducted the qualitative interviews for the project on the economic effects of the pandemic. Of the 50 respondents he interviewed in July and August 2020, seventeen were interviewed again in November or December of the same year. In addition to the interviews on the pandemic, I rely on seven one-on-one interviews with men working out in gyms, six interviews with men who betted on football games regularly, six biographical interviews with jo-pap, and roughly a dozen interviews with men and women focusing on gender relations in Pipeline. While most interviews were between 60 and 90 minutes long, some of the jo-pap interviews lasted three or more hours. The interviews were conducted in Dholuo, Kenyan Swahili, Sheng, and English. They were audio-recorded, and then transcribed and translated by my research assistant Isabella Achieng Oluoko. Due to my knowledge of Kiswahili and Dholuo, I was able to doublecheck and, if necessary, adjust the translations. his savings had been wiped out, and he was surviving by relying on friends and members of the HoMiSiKi investment group (see chapter 4). His wife had also been forced to close her business selling clothes due to a lack of capital and the need to buy food and necessities for the family.
Victor summarized his problematic situation by concluding that the amount of pressure he experienced was ‘comparable to the distance between heaven and earth’. His carefully balanced life had been derailed by the pandemic; he was unable to meet the expectations of his landlord, his wife, his children, his creditors, and his rural kin. This forced him to adjust mundane day-to-day practices. As he owed money to several shops and food vendors, he had to vary his walking routes to try to avoid being seen by his creditors. The relationship with his wife had deteriorated in tandem with his economic decline, and he reported that he had stopped smiling when his children were around because he feared that they would approach him and ask for money to buy chips or sweets. In an attempt to force Victor to pay the rent, the landlord had not only threatened to throw him out but also disconnected the electricity.
2 Disconnecting electricity forced tenants without solar-powered lights to use candles, which made neighbours aware they had not paid their rent. By inducing feelings of shame, landlords thereby increased pressure on their tenants. In an aspirational place like Pipeline, nobody wanted to appear poor. To avoid being locked out of the house, he constantly had to plead with the caretaker and ask for more time to find money. He was also under increasing pressure from his rural kin as he could no longer send remittances and couldn’t spare the money to buy airtime to call them. Victor had to choose between buying food for his urban family or phoning his kin back home. Moreover, he had taken out loans using different mobile loan apps, whose employees were either calling or sending him text messages almost daily to remind him to repay what he had borrowed. When the debt collectors of one mobile loan company who were, as he phrased it, ‘waiting with an open mouth to devour me’, called while Victor was sitting with other
jo-pap, one of them grabbed the phone and told the debt collector that Victor had died in a road accident and that his corpse was in the city mortuary. If anything, Victor’s friend suggested, the mobile loan company should contribute to the funeral expenses. To make matters worse, monetary flow in and out of two financial cooperative groups had run dry due to the pandemic, and friends were increasingly hesitant to help. As Victor put it, ‘ninety-nine per cent of them are no longer there, it is only one per cent that has remained.’ The situation so intensified pressure on Victor that he had to ask his family to leave him alone when he was at home so that he could sleep for long hours.
When re-interviewed in November 2020, Victor and his first-born son had moved to a house in Fedha, on the other side of Outer Ring Road, leaving behind his wife and the other two children. He had a more regular working schedule that had reduced the economic pressure on him. Despite this financial ‘recovery’, which also allowed him to support Elizabeth and the children, he had decided that things had become too much with his wife and that he would never return to his marriage. Pressure, in other words, had destroyed his family.