Bravado, 1a: blustering swaggering conduct, b: a pretence of bravery, 2: the quality or state of being foolhardy.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
When I landed in Nairobi in February 2020 after spending Christmas at home, I realized I had forgotten the key to my apartment. Unable to get hold of Arthur, to whom I had given my spare key, I sent Samuel a text message asking him about our friend’s whereabouts. While I was waiting for my luggage, Samuel called to tell me that a group of police officers had stormed their apartment a few hours ago. They had found Arthur in possession of a stolen phone and a detailed map of Pipeline that I had asked him to draw. The police officers had accused Arthur of being the mastermind behind the theft of a box of expensive smartphones from a warehouse and had confiscated the phone as well as the map that Arthur allegedly had used to navigate the maze that is Pipeline. Despite Samuel’s pleas, the policemen had taken Arthur to the police station and thrown him into a cell that had previously been a pit latrine. Though Samuel and Eric had managed to pool 8,000 KSh to pay the bail, Arthur would only be released the next morning, with the order to return to the police station for further interrogation.
When Arthur returned to the police station the day after he had been released, I accompanied him, partly out of curiosity and partly because I felt somewhat to blame. After all, the police officers had used the map I had asked Arthur to draw as evidence of his guilt. On our way to the matatu stage, Arthur spotted a pair of used leather shoes, went to the vendor, and returned to me with a broad smile and his new shoes: ‘Only 1,000 bob’ (Sheng, ‘Kenyan Shillings’). Not knowing that Arthur would be let off the hook, I felt that he should have saved the money. I asked him if he thought buying these shoes with his remaining money had been a good idea, to which he responded: ‘Of course, I will wear these shoes when I am rich.’
This incident is another example illustrating the drastic influence that external and, to a large degree, uncontrollable factors had on the lives of male migrants in Pipeline. Arthur had done nothing wrong. He had simply bought a used phone that turned out to be stolen. Yet, within an hour after being arrested, he found himself in a dirty cell being bitten by mosquitoes, his phone confiscated, and with new social obligations toward Eric and Samuel. However, the fact that Arthur purchased new shoes with his last money gives me the opportunity to elaborate on how practices of pretence helped migrant men to simulate success in front of others, whereby they simultaneously convinced themselves of their future economic achievements. Arthur was far from the only male migrant who spent his meagre resources on expensive consumer goods such as an Apple Magic Mouse or a tailor-made suit. These and other commodities, which often cost more than a migrant man’s monthly income, did more than match their consumerist desires and signal their economic success to others. Talismans of future success, they also enabled male migrants to cling to their own migratory dreams and expectations.
Purchasing consumer goods that they could not actually afford was not the only way male migrants tried to convince themselves and others of the certainty of their financial prowess and their ability to comply with the ideal image of ‘a hardworking, focused, fashionably dressed attractive young man’ (Spronk 2012: 187). Young men working out in gyms, for instance, took pictures in which they held weights that were too heavy for them to perform a proper lift. In these cases, other gym members helped to lift the weights to the perfect position so that a photograph could be taken quickly. Others used photographs of a friend’s child to seduce women by portraying themselves as responsible fathers, or took pictures in front of an expensive motorcycle or car and pretending that it was their own. These practices resemble the ‘photographic self-creations’ observed by Heike Behrend on the Kenyan coast, where actors used photographic self-portraits to communicate their ‘true’ selves to others (Behrend 2002). To identify the social factors that produced these and comparable practices of pretence, it is helpful to know a bit more about Arthur’s biography, a poignant example of what happens when rural expectations and individual achievements become unsynchronized.
Born close to Chabera in 1995, Arthur came from one of the area’s more affluent families. In contrast to most children, for instance, Arthur went to a private academy for his primary school education. Due to his outstanding performance in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams, a nationwide test conducted in all primary schools, Arthur was invited to a prestigious boarding school in Nakuru, from which he emerged with the highest score in all subjects in the exams for his Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). This gave him the chance to choose from the most respected university courses, thus promising him a well-paying job and financial success. Being a remarkably good student, Arthur was the subject of much celebration when he returned to Chabera. Both his family and the rural community were expecting miracles from one of their brightest members. According to a linear understanding of the path from educational to financial success still prevalent in rural western Kenya, his KCSE results had secured his own and the economic future of his rural kin. Fuelled by his educational achievements, and looking forward to a successful life in the city full of romantic adventures and economic success, Arthur began to study digital marketing at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology, a course that combined economics, statistics, marketing, and computer sciences, which meant it was promising in terms of employment opportunities in Kenya’s booming financial technology sector.
Arthur had yet to graduate when I got to know him in 2019. Already under economic pressure, he took the advice of Samuel and other friends and applied for a job at a supermarket in Nairobi’s CBD in 2020. When the employer saw Arthur’s KCSE certificate, he laughed and told him to stop wasting time and finish his university degree. Not only was Arthur effectively overqualified for the job as a cashier, the erstwhile employer also expected more of Arthur. By that time, some people in Chabera had begun to spread rumours that Arthur could have only achieved his KCSE results by cheating. Although Arthur had failed to meet the expectations of some, he, and those who knew him better and could therefore vouch for his intelligence, still believed in his potential. According to him, and his close friends and family, he still had the opportunity to prove the others wrong. To use his own words, he would start wearing those nice leather shoes when he was rich.
When I asked Samuel what he thought about practices of pretence that more often than not involved deception or lies, he told me that migrant men living in Pipeline were inclined to engage in what he called ‘acts of bravado’ whereby he hinted at three characteristic traits. First, they were based on a superficial demonstration of an alleged underlying financial success. Second, these acts risked being discovered, which, third, made them dangerous and potentially foolish. Despite Samuel’s critique, which mirrored how women discussed migrant men’s behaviour, he too engaged in practices of pretence, such as walking around in expensive suits when he was unemployed (see chapter 1). Individual instances of practices of pretence were thus like double-headed figures. While some saw them as rightful appropriations of a successful future, others considered them deceitful or foolish frauds.
In contrast to the young and economically disadvantaged men in Abidjan’s low-income estates who embrace ‘bluffs’ as social practices that pretend without disguising and thereby both imitate and criticize social hierarchies (Newell 2012, see also, for instance, Gondola 1999, Masquelier 2019, Weiss 2009), my male interlocutors’ practices of pretence were built upon their sincere belief that they would soon be successful. By ‘inhabiting the fantasy’ (Weiss 2002) and the expectations of others and themselves through, for example, posing in suits on their Facebook profiles, migrant men complied with and circumvented prevalent notions of masculinity based on economic success. They emulated the narrative of the man as the economically capable provider, which was good enough until an intimate other, such as a wife or a close male friend, demanded material proof. Expecting to achieve financial success in the near enough future, therefore, also bore the danger of being too ambitious. It could lead to shameful exposure, thereby adding more impetus to the vicious cycle of aspirational expectations, increased pressure, feelings of looming failure and depression.
Practices of pretence perpetuated the image of Pipeline as an aspirational place imbued with the potential for economic success. Though most male migrants worked in the industrial area or Pipeline’s overcrowded informal sector, some did have well-paying white-collar jobs or ran thriving small-scale businesses. At the same time, the prevalence of acts of bravado made it hard for migrant men and women to assess with certainty if signs of success reflected actual economic achievements. By reproducing Pipeline as an aspirational place, practices of pretence thus also created an atmosphere of mistrust toward one’s own economic success and that of others. It was hard to distinguish between ‘realistic fictions’ and ‘fictitious realities’ (Newell 2012: 101), a difficulty that was also responsible for how male and female migrants viewed me. It remained unclear for many if I was an authentic odiero (Dholuo, ‘white man’, Kiswahili, mzungu, Sheng, mlami, from Kiswahili, lami, ‘asphalt’) with a lot of money or a mzungu mwitu, a ‘savage’ or fake white person whose financial abilities were not in line with what his skin colour promised.