When someone is living with a woman in the house, you find that issues are many because money is little (Dholuo, weche ng’eny nikech pesa tin), and sometimes she finds men outside there who court her. She believes that she is very beautiful and should not be suffering.
Wellington Ochieng
Joel Opiyo, a ja-pap and member of HoMiSiKi, lived in one of Pipeline’s older plots with his wife Faith. The single room’s wallpaper was peeling in some places, and the couple had partitioned their room into a sleeping area and a sitting area, where they welcomed guests. As in many apartments, the walls were decorated with posters, one of which depicted a white family next to a big car in front of a beautiful house. Joel had invited Arthur and me for lunch after we had spent two months training together in the No Mercy Gym. When we arrived in the apartment with Joel, who had picked us up in front of the plot, he asked his wife in a commanding tone why she had not cleaned the sitting area. Faith quickly wiped the table and removed some pieces of cut tomatoes and onions before she disappeared behind the curtain to finish cooking. After around 30 minutes, during which Joel, Arthur and I had exchanged stories, Faith brought us water to wash our hands, and we drank tea and ate the chapo mayai (Kiswahili, ‘flatbread rolled in fried eggs’) Faith served us. When we had finished, we thanked Joel’s wife, left the dirty plates and cups on the table, and went to play some pool.
The communication and division of labour between Joel and his wife hints at a structural dichotomy between the house and the world outside. This dichotomy influenced most practices and discourses around marriage and love in Pipeline. In analogy to the female body, migrants conceptualized the house as a container into which the husband was obliged to deposit not sperm, but money, which was then transformed into marital peace through female reproductive practices such as cooking, washing clothes, mopping the floor, being sexually available, and taking care of the children. While the man put the house and its inhabitants in order through the flow of money and by giving moral advice, the woman’s job was to clean it and act in morally exemplary ways by being a good host, caring mother, and faithful wife. At the same time, the house was viewed as the primary place of romance and sexuality. It was the only place where most migrant men felt comfortable enough to show signs of affection toward and sexual interest in their wives. The house was thus marked as a female sphere, and the presence of the husband inside of it was considered aberrant unless he was eating, sleeping, or having sexual intercourse with his wife.
1 If male friends lived together, they shared domestic duties. In case of a hierarchical relation between male kin, for instance when an elder brother hosted a younger sibling, the hierarchically inferior man often took over more female tasks. The underlying expectation was that men were at work or, if they did not have a job, engaged in what was known as ‘tarmacking’. Instead of sitting in the house, men should, quite literally understood, walk on the streets ‘hunting’ for jobs in the industrial area or elsewhere in Nairobi.
Mama Cyrus (Kiswahili, ‘mother of Cyrus’) was a woman in her mid-twenties who had migrated to Nairobi from western Kenya. She had a small shop next to Milele Flats that sold daily necessities such as, among other things, milk, tea, bread, and eggs. Her marriage offers a good example of how the enactment of strict gender roles allowed men and women to live a peaceful marital life. One of few interlocutors who described their marriages positively, Mama Cyrus had met her husband when she was still going to school in her rural home. She was only sixteen when he impregnated her, but instead of leaving her alone with the baby, he ensured that she had everything she needed to raise the child. Throughout their relationship, her husband had accepted his responsibility to provide for Mama Cyrus and their child. He paid rent, bought clothes and electronic gadgets, refilled the cooking gas, and paid the school fees. He had even decided to rent and stock the shop for Mama Cyrus so that she could earn some money for herself. Consequently, Mama Cyrus respected her husband by being what she called a ‘good wife’ (Kiswahili, bibi mzuri). She cooked, washed clothes, cleaned the house, took care of the child, was sexually faithful, and made sure that her husband never came home without finding her there waiting for him. Mama Cyrus concluded that although being a wife was ‘not an easy thing’, once a woman had decided to be a wife, she was supposed to ‘sit in the house’ and subordinate herself to her husband. Instead of going to birthday parties and visiting clubs like an irresponsible slay queen, a wife should prioritize her family, her house, and her business activities.
When asked about the role of money in her marriage, Mama Cyrus claimed that for things to ‘run smoothly’, money had to be there. According to her, money was ‘everything, this house needs money, the TV needs money, utensils and what else.’ Yet, the money she earned and the money that her husband earned were not supposed to be treated equally. Reminiscent of what male migrants criticized as Kenyan women’s financial motto of pesa yangu ni yangu, pesa yako ni yetu (Kiswahili, ‘my money is mine, your money is ours’), Mama Cyrus voiced the opinion that a husband should not ‘control’ his wife’s income. While men had clear duties such as paying rent and school fees, women were only responsible for buying ‘small things’ such as kitchen utensils. Other than that, they were free to use their money in any way they felt was the most appropriate.
This ‘ideal image of urban life as shaped around […] the male being responsible for income and the female for the domestic realm’ (Neumark 2017: 759) seems to resonate with how gender relations were organized in migrants’ rural homes. Even so, these superficial resemblances are misleading because, in Pipeline, the social organization of space did not mirror kin relations as it does in the village, where brothers build homes next to one another and women move into the homesteads of their husbands’ families. Instead of a few brothers and their families who speak the same language, share a past, and are bound to one another through practices establishing kinship, social life in Pipeline meant being surrounded by thousands of unknown neighbours of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. While the rural public space was congruent with the husband’s kinship order and wives could be controlled comparatively easily through the gaze of the husband’s family (Schellhaas et al. 2020), the public space of Pipeline was perceived as impossible to survey. Pipeline’s anonymity thus threatened to destabilize male control. This led some men to discourage or even forbid their wives from leaving the house or spending time on the balcony where they would only ‘gossip’, compare their hairstyles and clothes with those of better-off neighbours, and become susceptible to the seduction of migrant men with ‘deeper pockets’.