While walking through a bypass on my way to meet some friends in late August 2021, I heard a familiar voice calling my name. Turning around, I saw Thomas Okeyo, a member of HoMiSiKi and ja-pap. After exchanging pleasantries and greetings, Thomas invited me to his single room, which he shared with his wife, children, and nephew. While drinking nyuka (Dholuo, ‘liquid grain porridge’), I inquired about the violent past of some jo-pap I had heard about. Thomas broke out in laughter before he answered: ‘That is just diplomatic chaos. We stay up the whole night before the election and make sure that our people are the first in line. Ochieng in the first line, Omosh in the second, and Ocholla in the third.’ After enough votes had been cast for their preferred candidate, jo-pap would start fighting with one another to scare other voters away. During the nomination for the Orange Democratic Movement’s contestant for the position of the Member of the County Assembly of Nairobi representing Kware ward in the 2017 general election, for instance, jo-pap had stirred up such ‘diplomatic chaos’ to help their favourite candidate to win. Relying on a strong ethnic network of Dholuo-speaking migrants, jo-pap continued organizing political campaigns for their candidate, thereby crucially contributing to the candidate’s electoral victory. While such an instrumentalization of carefully planned and orchestrated electoral violence has remained a common political strategy in twenty first-century Kenya (Klaus 2020, Mueller 2008), here I want to highlight the personal and social effects that were at stake for those male migrants who participated.
During the time when Victor Omollo, the migrant from Asembo I introduced in chapter 2, was taking care of the fleet of lorries for the transport company, other young men alerted him about the opportunity to earn extra money by becoming a member of a youth group that protected illegally acquired land for wealthy politicians and businessmen. Lured by promises of substantial material and financial rewards, Victor joined without hesitation and employed violence against members of rival youth gangs trying to encroach on the land of his patron, who was rumoured to be a close associate of a prominent Luo politician. When reflecting on this period of his life, Victor expressed regret for the violence he had witnessed and participated in. In the end, most material promises had never been fulfilled. Soon after he moved to Pipeline, however, Victor’s violent involvement in the defense of the economic interest of his political patron caught up with him in the form of Leonida, who had also been a close political acquaintance of Victor’s patron.
Holding a high position in a parastatal, Leonida, who also hailed from western Kenya, had acquired enough money to invest in the construction of a plot in Pipeline. In 2016, her yet-to-be-finished building already housed a small restaurant on its ground floor that was run by a male Luo migrant known for his hospitable character. The restaurant was visited almost exclusively by other migrant men from western Kenya who came there to drink porridge, eat something small, and meet other male migrants. Casual workers constructing the plot’s upper floors and migrants telling each other stories in the restaurant soon realized that they shared the same ethnic background and began to meet informally in front of the plot, where they installed a wooden bench to hang out together without having to visit each other’s houses, whereby the ‘base’ of jo-pap was born. Through sharing and listening to amusing stories and political debates, more and more migrants joined and helped to expand the network of jo-pap, which turned into what one male migrant described as ‘a market for friends to get acquainted with one another’ (Dholuo, market mar osiepe mar ng’erwuok).
Being interested in supporting a friend who was vying for a seat in Kenya’s national parliament at that time, and recognizing the political potential of an informal group of Luo supporters, Leonida decided to tap into this human infrastructure of migrant men (Simone 2004) by regularly giving small handouts to jo-base (Dholuo, ‘members of the base’). In an attempt to secure their political loyalty, she offered jo-base around 10,000 KSh and suggested that they establish an investment group. After heated debates among the members of the base (while many felt that an investment group would be beneficial, some preferred to use the money to buy drinks), the majority decided to go along with Leonida’s suggestion. They founded HoMiSiKi at the end of 2016, after which the members of the group began to meet once a fortnight on the fifth floor of Leonida’s plot, which also housed Patrick’s barber shop (see chapter 1).
The genesis of HoMiSiKi and jo-pap was characterized by fraternal hospitality and political opportunism. While male migrants’ violence helped some rich patrons to acquire land in Nairobi’s east, Leonida relied on a group of young migrant men to support her political ally in the elections. At the same time, the restaurant and the base also served as spots where Luo migrants exchanged news, shared meals, offered advice about jobs and urban life to recently arrived migrants, and planned nocturnal escapades sweetened by alcohol and scantily dressed Kamba women exposing their exoticized brown thighs. A support group for aspiring politicians, as well as an ethnically based association for wasteful and misogynistic conviviality, on the one hand, and an investment group trying to become economically successful, on the other, HoMiSiKi’s economic goals and the social and political practices of jo-pap had a tense relationship from the outset.