3
Romantic Responsibilities and Marital Mistrust
Dating a woman from Nairobi is like buying a swamp with the intention to build a house.
Proverb circulating on Kenyan social media
The romantic relationship between Immaculate Chepkemei and Samuel Onyango began where many romances in Pipeline begin: on the balcony.
1 While men and women flirted on balconies, communal bathrooms were places for extramarital affairs (Kiswahili, kugeuza diet, ‘to change diet’) or quick sex between neighbours. They were also potentially dangerous zones for women, who were at risk of being sexually harassed there. The anonymity and sexually heated atmosphere of Pipeline was indeed uncomfortable for many women. A friend’s girlfriend, for instance, expressed in an interview that men in Pipeline were too aggressive in their sexual advances, often refusing to leave a woman alone if she let them know that she was not interested: ‘They try to give you their line, you say that you are not interested, they extend to a point of, you are like, sometimes you start to feel like it is a threat to you […], the way he is pursuing you, it’s like he has a hidden agenda or something until you start to be scared.’ Samuel was living with Arthur in a single room when Immaculate and one of her younger sisters moved into an apartment on the same floor. After flirting for a while whenever they were both out on their balconies, their relationship turned more intimate and Immaculate soon began to spend most nights with Samuel in his and Arthur’s flat. Though common, such arrangements can lead to conflicts between male friends. In this case, for instance, Arthur either had to sleep at another friend’s apartment, wait on the balcony, or roam around in Pipeline whenever the couple wanted to be intimate. Trying to ease these tensions, Samuel and Immaculate decided to find a place of their own and moved into a single room in the plot that was directly opposite. Samuel continued to pay half of Arthur’s rent to avoid straining their friendship, as it would have been difficult for Arthur to meet the costs on his own. A few months into their new life as a couple, Immaculate was pregnant.
Their love story is not only typical in terms of how marriages developed in Pipeline, but it also illustrates some of the differences between contemporary urban marriages and the rural marriages of my interlocutors’ parents. Most obviously, Samuel and Immaculate’s marriage was interethnic: Samuel was a ja-Luo, Immaculate was a Kipsigis. Though rural marriages between these two ethnic groups were not completely unheard of, partly because the ancestral land of the Kipsigis bordered Kisumu County, most rural jo-Luo felt that marrying a Kipsigis man or woman was risky due to linguistic barriers and cultural differences. Interethnic romantic relationships in Pipeline had little in common with the trans- or post-ethnic relationships between young professional Nairobians who strove to overcome or downplay each other’s ethnic backgrounds in order to paint the picture of a modern, post-ethnic Kenyan couple (Spronk 2012). For male migrants in Pipeline, the ethnic background of romantic and sexual partners was a constant topic of conversation that emphasized the importance of skin colour. They also discussed the sexual preferences and performances of women from different ethnic groups. Young migrant men were, for instance, curious to know how it felt to have sex with a circumcised nyar Kisii (Dholuo, ‘a daughter of Kisii’) or a brown-skinned Kamba woman (Dholuo, lando, ‘brown-skinned woman’, in contrast to dichol, ‘dark-skinned woman’). Many sexual and romantic relations in Pipeline were thus ‘ethno-erotic’ encounters (Meiu 2017).
Another important difference between traditional and contemporary marriages was that potential spouses among jo-Luo were traditionally scrutinized by jogam (Dholuo, ‘marriage mediators’, see also Evans-Pritchard 1950). Though the final decision rested with the two individuals, who only had to come from different clans due to the norm of exogamy, marriage had always been a social affair. Jogam informed each partner about the potential spouse’s background and character, and the woman would end up leaving her parent’s home after successful bride-wealth negotiations to move in with her husband in his father’s home, where she entered the vicinity of what Michael Dietler and Ingrid Herbich called the ‘long arm of the mother-in-law’ (2008, see also Schellhaas et al. 2020). In contrast, many contemporary urban ‘come-we-stay’ marriages (Neumark 2017: 750) began with chance encounters and flirtatious exchanges on the balcony or the street. Moreover, and enabled by Pipeline’s anonymity, young male migrants could hide their marriages and children from rural kin if they felt that disclosing this information would lead to unsolicited advice or criticism.
‘Double-Double’, a popular song by ohangla artist Prince Indah, contrasts these different approaches to marriage by celebrating romantic love, which has become a strong trope across sub-Saharan Africa (see, for instance, Smith 2001, Stasik 2016), and highlighting the fact that the strong bond between two individuals will always produce jealousy and conflict between the couple and their rural relatives.
Safar mar hera, wachako ji ariyo kodi. | We started the journey of love, the two of us. |
Ang’o makelo mor maloyo hera? | What brings more joy than love? |
Herawa kodi biro kelo koko e kinda gi anyuola. | Our love will cause conflicts between me and my family. |
Herawa kodi biro kelo koko e kinda gi mama. | Our love will cause conflicts between me and my mother. |
Herawa kodi biro kelo koko e kinda gi baba. | Our love will cause conflicts between me and my father. |
Ni hera mit kiparo mapariga. | Love is sweet when you think of someone who thinks of you. |
Ni hera mit kileko malekiga. | Love is sweet when you dream of someone who dreams of you. |
Miya double-double marito herawa. | Give me double-double that protects our love. |
Kata e chan, kata e dhier, jaber, wenda nobed wendi, oda nobed odi. | Even in poverty, beauty, my guests will be your guests, my house will be your house. |
Asingo tho kende emapogowa kodi. | I promise only death can bring us apart. |
Since many of the problems that young couples and marriage partners faced revolved around economic hardships, Prince Indah’s suggestion to love one another unconditionally regardless of the financial situation struck me as naïve. Despite the widespread romanticization of love, dating had not become a purely romantic issue. Rather, it was still shot through with economic considerations. In the eyes of many migrant men in Pipeline, dating, courtship, and marriage had potentially devastating financial and personal consequences. As alluded to by the proverb equating a potential wife with a piece of swampy land, a woman might turn out to be an investment that demanded continuous but ultimately fruitless reinvestment. The lyrics of another song that was popular during my fieldwork, Brizzy Annechild’s Hera nyalo sandi (Dholuo, ‘Love can punish you’), illustrate migrant men’s fear that romantic love might not only demand material resources but could also lead to financial bankruptcy.
Hera nyalo chandi kendo hera nyalo sandi […], | Love can trouble you, and love can punish you […], |
saa miyudo pesa, iluongi honey […], | when you have money, you are called honey […], |
saa ma pesa onge, hera onge, | when there is no money, there is no love, |
ok ocham alot, odwaro smokie […], | she does not eat vegetables, she wants sausages […], |
kok itang’, onyalo negi. | if you are not careful, she can kill you. |
After analyzing how migrant men and women conceptualized the relationship between sex, money, and love, this chapter examines the different categories men used to classify women. Male migrants assumed that these categories threatened to collapse into one another unexpectedly due to money’s corrosive influence. This produced stereotypical narratives and rumours that revolved around wives who go out during the night as sex workers (Dholuo, ochot, Kiswahili, kahaba), naïve village girls who turn out to be dangerous ‘slay queens’, or teenage schoolgirls who become single mothers shortly after arriving in Nairobi and are subsequently forced to ‘sell themselves’ (Kiswahili, kujiuza). The sections after that illustrate the structural importance of the house (Dholuo, ot, Kiswahili, nyumba) and how living under one roof stabilized gender roles while increasing the expectations husbands and wives had of each other. This spiralling of expectations was further catalyzed by new and often ambiguous forms of digital communication between men and women, resulting in a further escalation of male migrants’ experience of pressure. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how Samuel and Immaculate’s marriage failed due to incompatible expectations and the interference of neighbours and relatives.