As he did every other Sunday, Benson, the aspiring politician and chairman of HoMiSiKi introduced in chapter 1, had invited all members of the investment group as well as myself to meet on the balcony of the fifth floor of Leonida’s unfinished plot. While a few members stood, the rest sat on chairs, empty plastic buckets, the rail of the balcony, or half-empty sacks of cement. Before officially starting the meeting, Benson explained the rationale of the investment group to me. He and the other founding members had started HoMiSiKi to raise financial assets to support its economic growth and the professional success of its members. Benson emphasized that members should learn new skills and attend seminars and workshops during which they would hear about new business ideas for the group, thereby copying Kenya’s ubiquitous discourse on self-employment and entrepreneurialism. Comparable to Benson’s suggestions, many local politicians and NGOs also propagated, alongside other neoliberal strategies, the acquisition of new professional skills and saving money to start a ‘micro-enterprise’ as the most appropriate methods to overcome the staggering level of youth unemployment (Dolan and Gordon 2019).
Being a member of an investment group was thus far from extraordinary. During the time of my fieldwork, almost every Kenyan was a member of at least one rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA), a savings and credit cooperative (SACCO, government-registered), or an accumulating savings and credit association (ASCA). These organizations enabled members to save, lend, and invest money. Though comparable organizations have existed in sub-Saharan Africa for centuries (James 2012, see also Carotenuto 2006 for a history of welfare groups among Luo migrants), they received a boost after the development aid sector began to advertise them as a bottom-up and infrastructurally simple way of financializing the poor in the second half of the twentieth century. Like other investment groups, HoMiSiKi depended on its members making regular contributions. It was therefore unsurprising that most HoMiSiKi members had been formally employed when I encountered the group for the first time in 2019. Among the members were, for instance, a salesman for an insurance company, a lorry driver, a forklift operator, a teacher, a hotelier, and an electrician.
HoMiSiKi’s official goals were to offer social and economic assistance to its members and to provide a platform for discussing business ideas that would benefit the group as a whole. The constitution, over ten pages long and written in formal English, clarified the responsibilities of the chairman, secretary, treasurer, and auditor. After being vetted as eligible for membership, new members registered by paying 5,000 KSh and providing a photocopy of their ID, a valid email address, a phone number, and the personal details of a relative. The constitution also specified the amount of the monthly contributions, different fees, and how much money every member had to pay if a member or a relative of a member died, thereby doing justice to the high costs of transporting a corpse to the family’s ancestral home in western Kenya, where members of HoMiSiKi, as jo-Luo, were supposed to be buried. While the constitution thus clearly defined how members had to behave in case of a member’s death, it described HoMiSiKi’s business agenda only in very vague terms by mentioning that the group should ‘do business as much as possible to achieve its development dreams’.
Comparable to the formal character of HoMiSiKi’s constitution that entailed precise protocols, such as those outlining the requirements for membership, the group’s meetings were well-structured and followed agendas that had to be officially sanctioned by the chairman before each meeting. Moreover, in contrast to the use of Dholuo in their daily lives, members tended to switch to English when they discussed issues related to HoMiSiKi. The highly formalized structure of their meetings and their constitution, as well as their use of English, which many Kenyans considered the language of politics and business, echo Maia Green’s observations about saving groups’ ‘public performance of social and developmental responsibility’ (2019: 110) that creates ‘an institutional space in which persons assume an identity as “savers”’ (2019: 105), or, in the case of HoMiSiKi, as prudent investors and cosmopolitan businessmen. However, despite the important role the group played in the lives of its members, who contributed financially and invested a lot of their time, HoMiSiKi did not yield any economic profit. Though its members helped one another to find jobs or training opportunities, it would be a stretch to conceive of HoMiSiKi as being engaged in a form of ‘solidarity entrepreneurialism’ (Kinyanjui 2014: 90). After all, the dream of buying a bus to join Nairobi’s thriving matatu economy remained just that, a dream. The group was, in other words, first and foremost a burial society.
Considering the investment group’s lack of economic growth, I suggest that HoMiSiKi’s official financial development agenda and its high level of formalization helped to transform the investment group into an institution of pretence. By framing the group as an economically serious and prospectively successful initiative, members who talked about HoMiSiKi primarily as an investment group and not a burial society retained ‘the mystique of the project’ (Smith 2008: 65) and convinced themselves, their wives, and their families that they would be successful. Furthermore, understanding and portraying themselves as businessmen who had founded and contributed to an investment group made it easier for these men to participate in social activities that their wives and girlfriends considered an unproductive waste of time and resources. The ‘norms, values, attitudes and beliefs’ members of HoMiSiKi displayed overtly thus acted as a ‘banner’ (Kapferer 1969: 209) in the shadow of which migrant men could engage in wasteful forms of masculinity. HoMiSiKi, in other words, helped cover up migrant men’s irresponsible and wasteful behaviour on what they called their ‘playing field’ (Dholuo, pap).