4
Investing in Male Sociality and Wasteful Masculinity
Re: Pap onge kun (Dholuo, ‘No hard feelings on the playing field’). In the aforementioned, pap means an open field for celebrations and fun-making such as dancing, feasting, wrestling […] with the expected results being joy and laughter such that no one is expected to frown even if you lose a wrestling match, dance competition, athletics, etc.
Quote from a WhatsApp chat with Arthur
‘Ho … Mi … Si … Ki’. While we walked through the muddy streets of Pipeline, Patrick Ouko pronounced the syllables carefully, and with a small break between each one:
It stands for Homa Bay, Migori, Siaya, and Kisumu. We, the young Luo of Pipeline, had to come up with our own investment group. […] By now, we have around 30 members, all men apart from one, but we are expanding. […] One day we will buy a minibus and join the matatu business.
With a few exceptions like Patrick, who was born in Pipeline (see chapter 1), most of the 30 or so members of HoMiSiKi had grown up in western Kenya and come to Nairobi as migrants full of expectations of a better life. What united Victor, Joel, Patrick, and the other members, apart from being ethnic Luo, was a sense of being overlooked by politicians, invisible to the international aid sector, and excluded from municipal initiatives. Pressured by the expectations of their rural and urban families, they had sensed the need to experiment with communally organized attempts to achieve economic progress and forms of male conviviality that allowed them to briefly forget their economic pressures and romantic frustrations.
Theories of gift exchange, corruption, and patronage show that the degree to which actors make productive use of their social network influences their economic success (Berman 1998, Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006). Economic wealth, in other words, emerges from what Jane Guyer (1993) has called ‘wealth-in-people’. The interactions and debates I observed during HoMiSiKi meetings, however, suggest a reversal of this causal relation between the social and economic spheres. Against the background of narratives circulating nationwide about entrepreneurship and self-employment, talking and meeting under the banner of the investment group’s future economic success allowed members to engage in socially approved forms of male bonding. HoMiSiKi’s use of economic buzzwords such as ‘skills’, ‘self-employment’, ‘insurance’, ‘capital’, and ‘investment’ should thus not only be interpreted as a naïve rehearsal of Kenya’s new economic paradigm celebrating the skillful entrepreneur (Dolan and Gordon 2019). Rather, the members of HoMiSiKi employed such a rhetoric to justify to themselves, as well as to their wives and girlfriends, why a group of male strangers stranded in the liminal and aspirational space of Pipeline socialized with one another. It was in the shadow of the economic rationality of the official investment group HoMiSiKi that its members created and maintained a space for wasteful masculinity they called pap (Dholuo, ‘arena, playing field’). In pap, migrant men behaved in ways that were structurally opposed to the expectations of their rural and urban families. Instead of being responsible boyfriends, husbands, sons, and fathers, they acted as irresponsible ‘bachelors’ (Dholuo, jo-pap) ‘transgressing’ (Groes-Green 2010) the prevailing norm of the male breadwinner.
Simultaneously pretending to be economically successful as members of HoMiSiKi and embracing wasteful masculinity in pap depended on carefully negotiating conflicting notions of masculinity and was, therefore, a delicate affair. Jo-pap, for instance, were well aware of the fact that by diverting resources from their families, they risked being more intensively criticized for not providing enough. Achieving the balance between providing for one’s family, investing money in HoMiSiKi, and wasting resources in pap was already difficult before the COVID-19 pandemic reached Kenya. Together with political frictions caused by the general elections of 2022, the economic effects of the pandemic led to the breakdown of HoMiSiKi as well as increasingly violent and socially problematic behaviour in pap. In other words, while HoMiSiKi was collapsing, pap was steadily getting out of control. Before taking a closer look at this dynamic, it is helpful to narrate the historical emergence of jo-pap and HoMiSiKi, which was characterized by violence, political opportunism, and male camaraderie, and thereby exemplary for Pipeline’s transformation into one of the world’s most densely populated high-rise settlements.