5
Lifting Weights and the Performance of Brotherhood
You can’t be there just alone.
No Mercy Gym member
The No Mercy Gym was basic: two adjacent single rooms with wooden doors, peeling paint, no mirrors, no advertisements, a pungent smell emanating from the communal latrines, rats running around, mould on the walls, and the irritating beeping of electricity meters announcing the upcoming disappearance of stima (Kiswahili, ‘electricity’) if not fed with money soon. The gym was located on the ground floor of one of Pipeline’s older plots. While the upper floors housed tenants, Carl and his wife had rented the entire ground floor and converted it into one of Pipeline’s many private primary schools. Walking to the gym, therefore, meant being warmly welcomed by troops of schoolchildren who ran around during their breaks, peeped out of their classrooms smiling, or gathered in front of the gym’s window to catch a glimpse of adult men lifting weights.
The school consisted of ordinary single rooms that would otherwise be used as housing units. Yet, in as much as they offered enough space for a bunch of children to hunch over their schoolbooks, Carl had figured that they were spacious enough for a gym focusing on the essentials of weightlifting. He had been forced to close his old gym soon after the Kenyan government had prohibited social gatherings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of renting another single room to reopen the gym once the pandemic restrictions were relaxed, Carl and his wife decided to squeeze a few more children into one of the other rooms so that two of the school’s single rooms could be used as a gym. There were few jobs available, and diversifying the family’s income by training migrant men who wanted to become stronger would assist Carl’s family financially and keep him occupied.
While one of the rooms was also used as a storage room for school furniture and utensils, it primarily functioned as a training room for beginners who needed to learn the exercises Carl considered essential for the development of a naturally strong body. These included squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. The second room was reserved for more advanced lifters who could perform these exercises with good form and had reached a basic level of strength. Though the weights and machines in both rooms had been built by local craftsmen according to Carl’s instructions, the second room was better equipped than the one for novices. Apart from different barbells and dumbbells, the room had a more stable rack, a refurbished bench that included the possibility to perform leg extensions and curls, a machine for pull-down exercises, weights ranging from 500 grams to 30 kilogrammes, and a jerrycan with water that members drank using the same cup. COVID-19 could not, according to the gym’s members, affect strong and healthy men.
The limited space of the No Mercy Gym forced members to synchronize their training routine and adjust to one another’s movements, making it compulsory for them to interact. This was one of the reasons why members considered the No Mercy Gym less competitive and antagonistic than other gyms ‘where the big guys take all the weights and don’t care about you’, as one member put it. In as much as male migrants who came to the gym wanted to transform their individual physical bodies, these training conditions also led to the development of the members’ social body. In the No Mercy Gym, male migrants concentrated on becoming stronger under the sympathetic gaze and with the help of other migrant men. Lifting weights made members not only physically stronger, but also created an atmosphere of brotherhood which allowed migrant men to momentarily forget about the social and economic pressure they experienced in their marital homes.