In March 2021, a meme depicting a handwritten love letter was shared in the WhatsApp chat group of jo-pap. Phrases such as chunya oheri to kendo ber bende iberna maka apari to kata nindo tamore tera (Dholuo, ‘my heart loves you and you are also good for me, when I think of you, even sleep refuses to take me’) exemplify that the letter was hopelessly romantic, and the discussion that followed in the chat group reflected migrant men’s nostalgic longing for their rural youth, during which women were allegedly not yet materialistic and romance still pure (see Parikh 2016). In the last decades, however, love letters were almost completely substituted by communication through social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and, most importantly, WhatsApp. While migrants used WhatsApp for sending each other sexual invitations, nude pics, pornographic material, or romantic greetings, they used the WhatsApp status feature to share messages on a public wall that was immediately visible to all their contacts. These messages could be texts, pictures, or short videos, and were not automatically integrated into the private chat of all contacts, who could comment on it in a private message.
While love letters directly addressed a specific person and were only meant to be read by him or her, a WhatsApp status update thus addressed a large group of people at the same time. It was, for instance, very common for younger women to post status messages such as ‘birthday loading’ or ‘only a few days left until I turn 25’ and to upload pictures of beautifully decorated houses, expensive restaurants, and cars. Male migrants interpreted such status updates as a more or less subtle way in which women demanded monetary or other gifts from potential boyfriends and husbands. After proudly announcing that he tends to forget his own birthday, Samuel once summarized these female practices under the label of an ‘extortion racket’ fuelled by women’s unrealistic consumerist expectations (see Newell 2012: 135).
The WhatsApp status option also allowed migrants to indirectly criticize intimate others in order to create public awareness of private issues. After a friend’s relationship with a single mother called Martha had gone sour, for instance, she posted new status updates daily that everyone in her contact list, including myself, was able to see and comment on:
Some people think I hate them, but I don’t even think of them. Relax.
When you needed me, I was there, when I needed you, all of a sudden you are busy.
Never hide your kid just to save a new relationship! If you love the mother, also love the child, or just leave!
While these status updates revealed Martha’s emotions to everyone in her contact list, including her estranged boyfriend, who was supposed to see her status as well, they did not address anyone in particular. Though Martha thereby dragged a private issue into the public sphere and implicitly accused her ex-boyfriend of not having shown enough affection for her daughter, she did so in a manner that allowed immediate disavowal. If approached by her ex-boyfriend, Martha could pretend that her status updates were just general comments about love and romantic relationships.
Updating their WhatsApp status enabled women to indirectly articulate expectations toward men and to launch ambiguous forms of critique directed at intimate others that everyone in their contact list could see and comment on. Such digital forms of gossip fostered social relations between women and reminded men of their moral duties (Gluckman 1963). A further advantage of the WhatsApp status feature was that it allowed women to upload messages no matter where they were. Unlike their movement in and out of the house, this could not be easily controlled by men. It was, in other words, impossible for male migrants to completely curtail female gossip, and the creation of anonymous communities of communication via women’s WhatsApp status was one way that mistrust became socially productive (Carey 2017). For example, after a friend from Siaya County had left a girlfriend, the latter kept uploading photographs of a male mzungu (Kiswahili, ‘white person’) posing half-naked in bed, standing on a rock, and in other heroic postures along with pictures of expensive food and drinks. She commented on her status by writing how she had been lucky, and how her mzungu had helped her to heal and move forward from a toxic relationship with one of those Kenyan ‘dogs’. The message was clear. She was living a good life thanks to the economic prowess and romantic inclinations of a white man, and Kenyan men should watch and learn how to treat a woman.
WhatsApp was not the only technology that helped migrants avoid direct confrontations with their romantic partners. Several of my male interlocutors, for instance, had installed an unremarkable app that looked like it was for recording and editing audio files. The app’s icon was entirely misleading; it actually enabled users to receive and then hide messages from specific phone numbers. This allowed men with ‘side projects’ to let their girlfriends or wives scan through their phone’s contacts and messages in case they were jealous or suspicious, a common demand in romantic relationships. WhatsApp and this fake audio app thus gave men and women the ability to engage in carefully orchestrated games of pretence. Mobile phone users could pretend to be faithful, show off signs of their alleged financial success, and navigate ‘the tensions between display and disguise’ (Archambault 2017: 21) by sending potential partners ambiguous offers to engage in sexual affairs that could easily be withdrawn if necessary.
1 A less refined practice of coordinating ‘display and disguise’ was to delete messages if the other person did not respond as expected. Migrant men, for instance, could receive invitations of a sexual nature that were ex post deleted by the woman who had sent them if they had not shown any interest. Local notions of respect were thus not only influenced by considerations of doing or being morally good, but also by attempts to appear to be morally good (Archambault 2017: 60–2).The presence of rural kin and Pipeline’s ‘micro-politics of proximity’ (Bjarnesen and Utas 2018: S4), however, risked rendering such practices of carefully balancing social distance and proximity futile. The physical presence of relatives and neighbours, some of whom were viewed as misleading role models and potential witnesses of marital conflicts, made it difficult to negotiate romantic feuds privately. Though Pipeline’s population density and chaotic high-rise architecture appeared to grant anonymity to the estate’s residents, tenants were actually continuously challenged to ‘negotiate the transparency imposed by dense housing arrangements’ (Bjarnesen and Utas 2018: S5). This was something I became aware of during the collapse of Samuel’s marriage to Immaculate.