Their marriage had, from the very beginning, been marked by misunderstandings typical of interethnic relationships in Pipeline. Samuel, for instance, often complained that Immaculate spoke her mother tongue Kipsigis and not Kiswahili with her sisters and female cousins, thereby excluding him from the conversations, which left him feeling disrespected. Immaculate, on the other hand, appeared to be disappointed by the fact that Samuel’s promises of a good life had yet to materialize. Though Samuel had embarked on a promising career path as a lawyer, Immaculate still had to work six days a week as a sales agent for a travel company to help support their young family. As Arthur and I feared that the arguments between Samuel and Immaculate could soon get worse if they stayed in the same apartment, we convinced Samuel to move back into Arthur’s single room until things had calmed down. As Immaculate left Pipeline early in the morning and returned from town late in the evening, Samuel’s young son stayed with his father and Arthur during the day. The spatial separation seemed to ease some of the tension, but Samuel and Immaculate continued to exchange bad words. The situation escalated when one of Immaculate’s neighbours falsely claimed that, looking into Arthur’s house from her balcony situated directly opposite, she had seen us drinking whiskey with a group of known slay queens while Immaculate’s baby was crying in the corner.
Probably aware of the limited chances of finding a new romantic partner as a single mother of a son and, more importantly, still in love with Samuel, Immaculate continued to try to fix the relationship.
1 Due to the patrilineal regulation of kinship among jo-Luo, single mothers with sons were considered difficult marriage partners because of the fear that the biological father would later lay claim to his son or that the son would demand inclusion into his biological father’s family. It was thus not easy to find a man willing to ‘wash the seeds’ of someone else (Dholuo, luoko kodhi). Samuel, on the other hand, no longer believed the marriage could be repaired, but remained committed to his responsibilities as a father by providing financial support and spending time with his son. His behaviour stood in stark contrast to the attitude of many of our male friends, who advised Samuel that he should withdraw from spending time with his son to avoid getting emotionally involved.
2 Some migrant men confided to me that they lacked the instinct for dealing with younger children. In case of a separation from his wife, it would therefore be best for a father to provide financially from a distance until a child started primary school. In light of these assumptions, it is thus unsurprising that Samuel felt that other men looked down on him because he was involved in the upbringing of his baby despite having left his wife: ‘Typical Kenyan gentlemen would just leave the child alone and let the woman suffer. Then tell themselves that they come back after the child has grown. You know men think that Immaculate rules and dictates me because I take the baby in the morning. A man is not supposed to carry a baby like I do.’ When he returned to Immaculate’s house a few weeks later to pick up his son, Samuel encountered one of Immaculate’s female cousins and an argument broke out between the two. Alerted by the ongoing commotion, as Samuel had recounted to me later on, a Luo male neighbour of Immaculate and acquaintance of Samuel intervened, dragged the cousin to the staircase, gave her a slap, and lectured her that she was not supposed to disturb him or other neighbours. Neither, he concluded, should she cause problems in the house of her cousin’s husband.
These incidents were the final blows to the marriage of Immaculate and Samuel. In addition, they also illustrate how difficult it was for the inhabitants of Pipeline to fulfil a model of romantic love based on ‘the sovereignty of the individual above and against the claims of the group’ (Spronk 2012: 232). In contrast to this romantic ideal, which had been adopted as a sign of migrant modernity by many of my interlocutors and was celebrated in ohangla songs such as Prince Indah’s ‘Double-Double’, relations between relatives, neighbours and members of different ethnic groups continued to affect Samuel and Immaculate’s marriage and, as a result, the lives of Samuel’s friends, such as Arthur, who had to be careful when conducting his day-to-day activities. After the rumour about the party with slay queens, for instance, he now kept his curtains closed during the day. Though apparently offering anonymity, Pipeline’s density was thus shot through with the potential of unwanted sociality, meaning that the estate’s residents had to carefully navigate the ‘micro-politics of proximity’, where ‘practices of alliance, respectability and display intersect with strategies of avoidance, accusation and deceit’ (Bjarnesen and Utas 2018: S4). Gossip circulated offline as well as online, and ungrateful gazes were exchanged across balconies, solidifying what Patrick Desplat aptly called ‘closed circles of mistrust’ (2018).
Male migrants ascribed their experience of pressure to the unreasonable nature of women’s expectations, which they perceived as insatiable and thus impossible to meet. It is therefore unsurprising that many of them developed what John Remy called ‘an extra-familial, extra-patriarchal impulse’ (1990: 48). The next two chapters explore this impulse by describing how migrant men related to one another in two different homosocial spaces where they tried to evade the encompassing atmosphere of pressure created by women’s expectations. It is important to emphasize that men did not try to get rid of pressure. Precisely because they viewed women’s expectations as unreasonable only in degree, but not in kind, they used these male spaces to momentarily evade pressure, not to shake it off completely. Comparable to other practices of depressurizing (see chapter 2), visiting male spaces gave migrant men time to take a deep breath and refuel their energy. While chapter 5 zooms in on how recreational weightlifting helped to build a feeling of close-knit brotherhood among the members of a local gym, chapter 4 recounts the establishment and demise of an economic investment group and an associated circle of friends who, although mostly married, addressed each other as ‘bachelors’ (Dholuo, jo-pap). Scrutinizing practices that created a social arena for acting out impulses of wastefulness, violence, and raw masculinity gives ethnographic flesh to the observation that the demands of being a good father and husband sometimes conflicted with the demands of being a good friend. Feeling under pressure to provide and perform as married men, some male migrants decided to let off steam as jo-pap.