You meet a girl […], you don’t even know her second name, and you tell her to come to your house, as long as she sees that you have bought her chips and soda, she will come and you will have sex. I think here in Nairobi, sex is rampant (Dholuo, Aparo ni Nairobi kae, sex is rampant).
Wellington Ochieng
Wellington Ochieng, a 33-year-old casual labourer and moto-taxi driver from Migori County, was not the only inhabitant of Pipeline who commented on the estate’s unrestrained sexuality. Many male migrants made the availability and transactional nature of sex responsible for infidelity, gender-based violence, single parenthood, homosexuality, and the materialism of women. A member of the No Mercy Gym even went so far as to compare Pipeline to the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah: ‘This place is Sodom and Gomorrah. Where else in the world do you see teenagers carrying their babies proudly in front of them and mother and daughter fighting over the same guy? I witnessed that. Such things really happen here.’ Sex and love were indeed tragically involved in many, sometimes deadly, events. On a September morning, for example, a friend sent me a text message saying nothing but ‘Romeo & Juliet are dead!’ After inquiring what had happened, he told me that one of his neighbours had ‘slaughtered his wife like a chicken’, after which he critically injured himself in a suicide attempt. This incident was the most dramatic of many atrocious ones during which love had turned into its opposite: a drunk
ja-pap who did not realize that he brought his equally intoxicated girlfriend to the conjugal bed until his wife started screaming, a man who committed suicide by jumping from the seventh floor because his wife had left him, or a friend’s girlfriend who had aborted their child without telling him, fearing that giving birth would only make their dire economic situation worse.
1 I do not mention these incidents to refuel debates about an African sexuality characterized by permissiveness, promiscuity, or the virility of black men (Ahlberg 1994, Ndjio 2012). Such racist discussions rightfully have been discarded because they perpetuate colonial discourses about the alleged savage nature of black men and women. While male discussions about the frequency of sex and the number of sexual partners seemed to be guided by what migrant men considered society’s standards of masculine virility, remarks about Pipeline’s unrestrained and ‘rampant’ sexuality allowed female migrants to distance themselves from such immoral acts (Spronk 2012: 118-9).Male migrants frequently engaged in conversations about these and similar events, which often ended in debates about the alleged materialism of women and the impossibility of having a functioning marriage without money. Migrant men, in other words, felt that the intricate relation between love and money threatened the stability of their romantic relationships (see, for instance, Cornwall 2002, Cole 2010, Smith 2017). Insufficient economic and emotional support, as well as a lack of romantic affection, could, so the stories went, impel a wife to become unfaithful, and the sexual offers by slay queens and sex workers could compel a migrant man to start a ‘side project’ (Kiswahili, mpango wa kando, used to refer to sexual affairs). The intimate connection that male migrants assumed existed between romantic love and the expenditure of money becomes palpable in the translation of ‘romance’ as duso hera (Dholuo, ‘to decorate love’). Victor’s answer to the question of how he displays romantic affection toward his wife Elizabeth, for instance, was that ‘you are only going to be romantic as long as you have Shillings’ (Dholuo, ubiro duso herano so long as un gi shillings).
Migrant men thus did not interpret romantic love as an ideology of equality and emotional support (Spronk 2009, see also Illouz 2008). Rather, they felt that women had embraced romantic love in the form of consumerist expectations, which required men to provide expensive commodities to demonstrate their genuine and exclusive love. Spending money on a woman marked a man’s romantic interest as serious and distinguished it from mere sexual interests hidden beneath meaningless palaver. From the perspective of many migrant men, women’s evocation of romantic love, therefore, had only generated new financial responsibilities. They complained that they were no longer merely responsible for providing material things necessary for the upkeep of their families but now also had to surprise their wives with romantic things, such as expensive clothes, flowers, or invitations to eat out. In addition, they were confronted with the expectation to adopt romantic and erotic techniques that they had not heard of in their rural homes,
2 Migrants often juxtaposed narratives about an urban sexuality out of control with ‘a romantic iconography of rural African life’ (Callaci 2017: 29) as sexually modest. By invoking this contrast, they painted a picture of themselves as less promiscuous than men and women who had grown up in the city. such as cuddling or oral sex, which further increased their experience of pressure. Wellington, for example, criticized women’s romantic expectations in an interview on gender relations by claiming that they would hinder male migrants from meeting other men as well as from focusing on their professional careers:
When you come to Nairobi, our girls want that you hold their hands when you are going to buy chips, you hug them when you are going to the house, I hear there is something called cuddling (Dholuo, awinjo nitie gimoro ni cuddling). […] at what time will you cuddle and tomorrow you want to go to work early? […] you don’t go to meet your friends so that you show her that you love her, you just sleep on the sofa and caress her hair, to me, this is nonsense because that is not romantic love. I think that romantic love, so long as I provide the things I provide, and we also sire children, I think that’s enough romance (Dholuo, Aparo ni romantic love en so long as aprovide gik ma aprovide to nyithindo be wanyuolo, aparo ni mano romance moromo). […] Another girl told me to lick her, and I asked her ‘Why do you want me to lick you?’ She said that she wanted me to lick her private parts. Are those places licked? […] Those things are things that people see on TV, let us leave them to the TV people (Dholuo, jo-TV).
As a consequence of the lasting influence of the narrative of the male breadwinner who was increasingly expected to also provide expensive consumer goods to signal genuine love, migrant men not acting in compliance with these economic–romantic expectations were described as ‘useless’, whereby women stressed men’s financial inabilities, or as ‘dogs’ (Dholuo, guok, Kiswahili mbwa) interested in nothing but sexual seduction. Considering these circulating stereotypes, many migrant men concluded that they would remain without a long-term partner if they did not become economically successful and therefore felt compelled to resort to practices of pretence to convince women to have sex with them. While most men agreed that they should provide food, clothes, shelter, and education for their wives and children, they were overwhelmed by women’s economic-romantic ‘over-expectations’ that increased their experience of pressure, as Wellington diagnosed during the aforementioned interview on gender relations:
Over-expectation is where you find someone who maybe has just graduated, he is out of campus, you expect that he is going to get some big job and you live happily ever after (Dholuo, Over-expectation en moro miyudo ng’ato saa moro koka ograduate, oa campus, iexpect ni odhi yudo tich moro maduong’ and you live happily ever after). […] like when COVID came there was no one who knew that COVID is coming. The job that you used to have and that paid you that little money has ended, now you are laid off, life must change. Maybe you lived in a bedsitter or one-bedroom, now you are forced to go back to a single room, because life needs to continue, and you find that your wife does not want to understand that life has changed. It is her expectation that life must move forward (Dholuo, En expectation ne en ni ngima nyaka move forward).
Subtle changes of the narrative of the man as the breadwinner were also highlighted by the semantic difference between ‘providing’ and ‘spending on’. While most male migrants used the English word ‘provide’ to describe their duties, women sometimes replaced ‘provide’ with ‘spend on’, thereby signalling a shift from the provision of necessities that kept social groups, such as families, intact to conspicuous expenditure that only benefited individuals. Breadwinners, in other words, were under pressure to become ‘sugar daddies’ or sponsors. What migrant men perceived as the increasingly difficult task of balancing economic, romantic, and sexual expectations furthermore became manifest in discussions and rumours about four female archetypes that encapsulate some of the challenges that male migrants lamented upon when they talked about love, sex, and marriage: the slay queen, the village girl, the single mother, and the prostitute.