I have heard of slay queens and I think that Pipeline has many of them, more than any other estate. Slay queens are those girls that have long nails, right? And they have painted their mouths red, and they have plaited their hair, I don’t know, green. […] Even in the plot where I used to live, what made me move was because my wife felt that there were slay queens living nearby and she felt, maybe, when she was away, I was looking at them. […] I have not been with one, but I think when you look at the life they live and the clothes they put on and how their nails are long, they have nails that look like the nails of the devil. […] If I stay with someone like that for two days, I will be finished, my friend.
Wellington Ochieng
Wellington was trying to eke out a living in Nairobi’s east, working hard but also taking loans and placing bets. He had been living with his wife, three children, and a sister-in-law during our first interview in August 2020, but economic circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic and insurmountable marital disagreements had forced him to relocate to the informal settlement Viwandani, taking with him his two older children, and leaving behind his wife and the youngest child in Pipeline. Though confessing that he regularly visited sex workers whom he described as ‘curing him’ – he had even saved the phone number of his favourite under
daktari (Kiswahili, ‘medical doctor’) – his attitude toward slay queens was dismissive.
1 Though the term ‘slay queen’ arose during the last decades, the history of the social character it describes goes back well into the middle of the last century. In the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek’s famous Wer pa Lawino (Acholi, ‘Song of Lawino’) published in 1966, for instance, Lawino describes her husband’s girlfriend Clementine in a way resembling Wellington’s portrayal of slay queens: ‘the beautiful one aspires to look like a white woman; her lips are red-hot like glowing charcoal, she resembles the white cat that has dipped its mouth in blood […] Tina dusts powder on her face and it looks so pale; she resembles the wizard’ (P’Bitek 2008: 37, see also Emily Callaci’s description of kisura, Kiswahili, ‘good looking girl’, in Dar es Salaam in the 1970s, 2017: 136–7, similar descriptions can be found in Powdermaker 1962: 163). Their desire for expensive commodities such as phones, televisions, western food, wigs, make-up, perfume, and designer clothes could ‘finish’ (Dholuo,
rumo) men and leave them penniless. Slay queens were only interested in men’s economic wealth and offered nothing in return apart from sexual adventures and fake love. In contrast to sex workers, about whom migrant men rarely talked in a negative way, slay queens pretended to be in love with a man while having other sponsors on the side who also contributed money to their limitless desire for material goods. The fact that slay queens financially relied on men but did not express any interest in getting married was perceived as a sign that they lacked a proper plan for their lives.
2 From the perspective of some women, the lifestyle of slay queens was the result of a correct assessment of contemporary gender relations. Because most men were ‘dogs’ and players, it was rational to exploit them financially by turning them into sponsors as long as one’s beauty lasted. In line with the observation that economic uncertainty forces people to ‘cultivate relationships of dependence and mutual obligation with more than one person […] as insurance against the loss of patrons’ (Scherz 2014: 25, see also Ferguson 2013, and Hunter 2015), one ja-pap commented on the habit of slay queens to ‘have five or ten men, one paying the house, one buying food, the other doing what and what.’ The structural similarity between slay queens’ practices and men’s practices of pretence was, despite being obvious, neither commented upon nor even recognized by most male migrants. Though exclusively referring to slim women, the term
GB moja (Sheng, ‘one gigabyte’) encapsulated slay queens’ focus on western ideals of beauty, commodities, and technology by drawing a parallel between the lack of sustainability of one gigabyte of data with a slay queen’s petite body and unreliable character. If at all, slay queens should – this was the moral lesson – only be entertained for a short period and without wasting any money on them.
In contrast to a slay queen, a nyar agweng’ (Dholuo, ‘village girl’) was considered sexually inexperienced, generous, obedient, easy to satisfy, and pious. Ohangla artist Odongo Swag’s song Nyar Agweng’, for instance, praises a village girl whom the musician loves, ‘because she does not bring losses’ (Dholuo, nikech oonge hasara). In contrast to ‘city girls’, who ‘disgust’ him (Dholuo, nyi town ojoga) by asking for money for chips and soda when they visit (Dholuo, saa ma obiro wendoni, soda gi chips nyaka ing’iewo), the village girl does ‘not even ask for transport money’ (Dholuo, kata fare ok okwa). To protect her from the corruptive influences of the city, the best trajectory for a village girl was, therefore, to be taken as a wife by an experienced city dweller as soon as possible after she had arrived in the city. By providing for her, the husband would ensure that the village girl dropped her superstitious beliefs, learned proper English and Kiswahili, and kept her good qualities, such as showing respect to her husband and guests, keeping the house tidy and clean, and being faithful in front of God. The husband would, in the local idiom, ‘straighten’ her (Dholuo, rieyo, see also Hunter 2010: 171–3), which was also the framing men and women used to justify some forms of gender-based violence, such as slapping, which many approved of as a way of reprimanding the behaviour of women who failed to behave in accordance with their husbands’ expectations.
The categories of the slay queen and the
nyar agweng’ did threaten to collapse into one another. Many circulating stories about women’s individual lives even suggested that, without the guidance of a male, most village girls would inevitably turn into slay queens. If not transformed into a responsible wife by a man, a naïve village girl would be seduced by Pipeline’s sexual atmosphere and the allure of consumer goods. Pressured by her sexual and economic desires, she would try to find male sponsors
to support her financially. Due to the unsustainable lifestyle of a slay queen, which required multiple and changing sexual partners, one of the sponsors
would impregnate her at some point and then ‘throw her away’ (Dholuo,
wito) because he had no interest in providing for a child. Being left to live the life of a single mother, the village girl of a few years back would then be forced to start selling her body in the dark bypasses of Pipeline. The corruptive influence of Nairobi and money, in other words, could turn a naïve
nyar agweng’ into a cold-blooded sex worker.
3 The corresponding narrative for male migrants assumed that economically unsuccessful men would turn to petty crime, become gambling addicts, or join a gang such as the Mungiki.This male narrative concealed the economic opportunities single mothers had and embraced. Most single mothers did not engage in sex work but worked hard to provide for themselves and their children. Moreover, male migrants relied on this narrative to portray single mothers as morally dubious and as entirely responsible for their status, allowing men to deny responsibility for any pregnancy resulting from a sexual affair. The characterization of single mothers as morally inadequate also helped justify all kinds of male misconduct. Instead of blaming men for their actions, their problematic behaviour was explained by alluding to the possibility that they had been brought up without a disciplinary father, a common trope in globally circulating self-help narratives about the crisis of masculinity (see chapter 6, see O’Neill 2018: 131–2 for a British discourse on single mothers).
4 Characterizing women as slay queens, ‘daughters of Jezebel’, or irresponsible single mothers resonates with men’s portrayal of progressive women who defy traditional gender roles as ‘wicked’ in different locations and during other historical periods (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001, on single mothers in postcolonial Kenya, see Thomas 2003: chapter 5).The classification of women as either a slay queen, village girl, prostitute, single mother, or responsible wife corresponded with a ‘love continuum’ (Archambault 2017: 104) ranging from feelings of paternal care toward a younger female migrant, sexual lust toward an attractive, but dangerous slay queen, and true love toward one’s wife. The instability of this ‘love continuum’ and the ambiguity of men’s classification of women was reflected in rumours about wives who secretly worked as sex workers while their husbands worked night shifts or male fears about wives being seduced by other men on balconies or in Pipeline’s bypasses, where flirtatious comments and flings were common. As a consequence of these ambiguities and fears, marriages depended upon stabilizing practices, which were not only viewed as securing marital peace but also as paving the way for financial success, as illustrated by the proverb pesa oluoro koko (Dholuo, ‘money fears noise’).