The literature on African urban livelihoods rarely zooms in on the experience of economic pressure. Rather, scholars have focused on creative practices through which their interlocutors make ends meet in an uncertain present while criticizing the political elite and hoping for a better future. Recently, for instance, the widespread use of the term ‘hustling’ in Nairobi has been identified as a key entry point for a conceptual debate on economic livelihoods. The editors of a special issue published in
Africa, for example, describe ‘hustling’ as ‘an agentive struggle in the face of harsh circumstances, where opportunism, playfulness, fierce persistence […] generate particular logics and localized practices of adaptation and improvisation’ (Thieme et al. 2021: 7). This focus on hustling and uncertainty has done more than help to analyse the livelihoods of unemployed male youth born and living in sub-Saharan Africa’s informal settlements. It has also shed light on hope as ‘an existential force of productive uncertainty and indeterminacy’ (Lockwood 2020: 46).
1 Some languages use the same word to express the theological concept of hope and the more secular concept of expectation. In Dholuo, for instance, ‘to hope’ is translated as geno, which can also be translated as ‘to expect’ or ‘to trust’ (Odaga 2005). In contrast to the concept of hope, though, the concept of expectation does not point toward an uncertainty mediated by a third, such as God or luck.Migrant men in Pipeline rarely mentioned their hustles or the practice of hustling when they discussed their current or future economic situation. The reason for that might lie in their lack of interest in being identified as hustlers. A statement about men in Pipeline that Caroline Mwangi made during an interview on gender relations in Pipeline corroborates this assumption. Being asked how men of Pipeline differ from men in the village, Caroline, a shop owner and migrant from central Kenya in her thirties, concluded that migrant men in Pipeline ‘have relaxed’ (Kiswahili, wamelegea) and ‘don’t want to be associated with hustlers’. Due to their immense expectations and aspirations, migrant men in Pipeline did not have a reason to piggyback on the hustling discourse to create a form of ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld 2016) with Nairobi’s poor, like its middle-class, or, like Nairobi’s poor, to present themselves as hustlers in front of other actors who might be willing to enter into patron–client relationships based on pity for their struggles or admiration for their ingenuity.
Instead of imposing the hustling analytic on migrant men’s economic livelihoods in Pipeline, this chapter ethnographically described their experiences of pressure caused by circulating expectations of economic success, which they perceived as reasonable in kind but not always in degree. It showed how mostly well-educated male migrants from western Kenya dealt with their own as well as other actors’ expectations, which had started to develop when they were still attending school in their rural homes. Rather than embracing uncertainty and employing ‘a political-economic language of improvisation, struggle and solidarity’ (Thieme et al. 2021: 2), most male migrants clung to the certainty of their future economic success and used a capitalist language of persistence, material wealth, as well as individual accomplishment and responsibility. Following Pete Lockwood’s apt critique of anthropology’s understanding of ‘hope as an existential force of productive uncertainty and indeterminacy’ (2020: 46), I propose assessing migrant men’s expectations as an existential force of unproductive certainty and determinacy. Male migrants in Pipeline, in other words, were certain that they would be economically successful one day, which supported them in their decision to remain in Nairobi despite their blatant lack of success.
Migrant men’s attitudes toward their future thereby stand in stark contrast to how Naomi van Stapele described the life of Fake, who lived in Mathare:
His imagined pathways were not intentional, single or linear routes that were obvious in direction and had clearly defined destinations, but unfolding, multiple, ambiguous and diverging imaginings without fixed outcomes. […] The metaphor used by Vigh to describe social navigation, namely as the ship that sails through dark and unpredictable waters towards still invisible, and thus imagined, and shifting horizons, aptly fits the deep uncertainty that marked Fake’s daily deliberations and everyday life. (Van Stapele 2021b: 138, see also Vigh 2009)
Rather than comparing male migrants’ lives with a ship sailing through ‘dark and unpredictable waters’, I suggest imagining them as standing on a ship’s deck with a detailed map and a functioning compass trying to reach a destination decided upon a long time ago. They had migrated to Nairobi to find a permanent and well-paying job or to start a business that would produce enough profit to provide for their urban and rural families. When they were lost at sea, they fell into depression and slept in their berths until it passed, after which they returned to the deck with new energy. Instead of adjusting the course in order to reach their destination, they continued to follow the same route, relying on the map they already had. This is unsurprising considering that, being well-educated migrants from rural homes without electricity and running water, they felt that they had already accomplished much more compared to people born in or close to Nairobi. Living as eternal apprentices of a better future that they and their relatives and friends from the village had always dreamed of since childhood, they believed that they were on the track toward modernity and economic success (see Ferguson 2006: chapters 6 and 7).
The concepts of pressure and expectation help in understanding the vicious cycle of depressive passivity and aspirational activity in which some male migrants were trapped. The interplay of shame arising from failing to meet the expectations of their intimate others and the lack of self-efficacy caused by the failure to live up to their own expectations produced feelings of excruciating pressure and led to practices of pretence that created a fleeting sense that things were not always as good as they seemed. Though providing the daily necessities proved challenging to many male migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, they remained preoccupied with assuring themselves and others that they were on the brink of an economic and personal breakthrough. They were, in other words, at least as much pressured by their attempts to reach a future in which they would be responsible and wealthy husbands and fathers as they were pressured by the demands of the present.
The next chapter analyses how the experience of pressure, the expectation of economic success and the fear of staged wealth influenced sexual and romantic relations in Pipeline by catalyzing an increasingly ambivalent communication between romantic partners, resulting in the erosion of trust in committed relationships and marriages. While husbands justified their practices of pretence as ‘a display of potential’ (Newell 2012: 1), whereby they invested in and showcased their future success, wives viewed such practices as lies or as unnecessary spending of money needed for food, rent and school fees. A similar logic was observable in the initial stages of romantic relationships as well as friendships. While men engaged in practices of pretence to impress potential friends and romantic partners, once they were in committed relationships, they started to complain that their partners and friends did not understand that their careers and businesses needed more time to develop. Men who had pretended to be more successful than they were to impress a woman or another male migrant were suddenly confronted with the justified demands of intimate others who expected to benefit from their alleged economic wealth.