The vast majority of the 50 respondents whom my research assistant Jack Misiga interviewed for the interdisciplinary research project on the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were migrants. Thirty-two were male and eighteen were female. Slightly over half of the respondents were ethnically Luo, the others were Kisii, Kamba, Kikuyu, and Luhya. The average age was 30 (22 to 55), and 35 identified as married (one polygamist), four as divorced or separated, and eleven as unmarried.
1 The high number of people who self-identified as married could lead to the conclusion that respondents perceived their romantic life rather positively, which would be an incorrect assumption (see chapter 3). Moreover, self-identifying as married did not necessarily mean that relatives knew about the relationship or that bride-wealth had been paid. More often than not, couples simply began to self-identify as married once they were living or raising children together. Thirty-nine had children, and four were single parents (with an average of 1.87 children across the sample). The average household comprised 3.25 members, and twenty households sheltered at least one relative who did not belong to the nuclear family. Twelve respondents were involved in Pipeline’s informal economy, twelve were formally employed, and nine engaged in informal labour arrangements. Many migrants, however, alternated between formal and informal working arrangements or added a small business to their formal jobs. This diversity was an effect of Pipeline’s volatile economy. Migrants felt that they had to rely on different income-generating activities so that they still had access to cash if their main strategy failed. The livelihood activities of the respondents included being a security guard, a bouncer, a
boda-boda driver, a shop assistant, a teacher, a data clerk, an owner of a child day care centre, working in a café, owning a grocery store, selling chips, or trying to get day jobs in the industrial area. Of the seventeen migrants without stable income-generating activities, only one did not blame the COVID-19 pandemic for their situation. Unsurprisingly, considering Kenya’s transformation into a ‘debt society’ (Kusimba 2021: 45), 38 respondents reported having debts ranging from bank and mobile loans, soft loans at shops, to money taken from a merry-go-round or other such financial self-help groups. Our sample of 50 Pipeline residents thus corroborates the perception of the estate as a place for young families with a migratory background who had aspired to start a promising life in the city but were struggling to meet their own and others’ expectations of economic success.
Most migrants felt that their economic and social life had deteriorated massively due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They reported incidents that spoke of increasing social atomization and mounting levels of pressure that had become almost unbearable. In addition to the problems of paying rent, and electricity and water being cut off, respondents told us about deteriorating relations with rural kin and neighbours, collapsing investment and saving groups, restlessness, taking long walks through Pipeline to avoid spending time with their families, headaches, sleeplessness, keeping phones turned off to avoid calls from debt collectors, the feeling that friends from the city were not to be entrusted with personal problems and frustrations, skipping meals, shaving off their hair to avoid having to go to a salon, and an increase in gender-based violence. One migrant woman mentioned a neighbour whose husband had choked her until she had passed out, and another reported that her husband slept with a knife under his pillow to instil fear in her and their children.
In light of the widespread feelings of pressure and collapsing landscapes of social obligations, one might assume that male migrants would have taken their frustrations to the street, joining some of the protests organized in Nairobi’s CBD against the economic consequences of the COVID-19 lockdown measures. However, instead of contributing to political mobilization, the dire economic situation and the conflict between costly practices of depressurizing and the need to meet expectations of success led to intensified fights and arguments between family members. The wives of some
jo-pap, for instance, had to deal with their husbands’ growing aggression, which often caused fights with other migrant men in bars and on the streets, their increasing alcohol consumption with other
jo-pap,2 In an environment where one beer cost as much as a meal for an entire family, buying alcohol for oneself or for others was an ambivalent form of conspicuous consumption or ‘conspicuous redistribution’ (Smith 2017: 18-19) inside each male’s peer group (see chapter 4). as well as their failure to provide for their families. In response, some decided to make use of what one wife of a
ja-pap called her ‘hidden mind’ (Kiswahili,
akili zingine hidden), referring to the common practice of asking one’s husband for more money than was actually needed to buy something and keeping the change. However, this practice sowed the seeds for further mistrust when husbands began to suspect that their wives were using the money for unnecessary purchases. Instead of bringing families together, ongoing expectations of success coupled with the challenging economic situation further intensified migrant men’s pressure to provide, enhanced the mistrust inside families, and compelled male migrants to pretend that they were already or soon would be financially successful.