Carl was a quiet and caring, and occasionally even shy, 40-year-old migrant with the sturdy look of a man who had lifted weights and had worked hard physically throughout his life. He had come to Pipeline when he was around twenty. Comparable to the trajectory of other male migrants, his first jobs in Pipeline involved exhausting manual labour, but Carl soon discovered the economic potential of a big body. Being drawn into the world of squats, barbells, and bicep curls, Carl realized that it was profitable to combine lifting weights with being a bouncer in one of Nairobi’s clubs and hotels, where ‘bodybuilders were paid a lot of money,’ as he remembered nostalgically. Reflecting on his days as a bouncer, he laughed and told me how applicants for positions were not interviewed but just had to really fill out a T-shirt. Being big was good enough to make money. When Carl started lifting weights, the gym scene had been more closely connected to the security business and the economic activity of being a bouncer than it was today. Around ten to twenty years ago, almost no one viewed lifting weights primarily as a recreational activity. Neither did Carl and his friends start ‘carrying stones’ (Dholuo, ting’o kite) to become physically more attractive. Though it helped migrant men to remain healthy and allowed them to spend time with male friends while working out, lifting weights was first and foremost considered a necessary qualification for the job of a bouncer or bodyguard. Paying the daily or monthly fee was thus an investment in one’s professional career.
After his daughter was born in 2007, Carl stopped working as a bouncer. Despite having gone through a range of self-defence classes, he no longer felt safe. He had witnessed people being seriously injured with fists, guns, knives, and glasses. As a former instructor in the Power Iko Gym, one of Pipeline’s oldest gyms and, in the early 2000s, the estate’s only one, he understood both the intricacies and the economic potential of owning a gym. He had already advised men on how to train, watched out over the property, and collected entrance fees if the owner was not around. Carl realized that as an instructor he had basically run the gym. He might as well have his own, he thought. Following his instincts, he opened the No Mercy Gym not far from the Power Iko Gym at the end of 2008. This entrepreneurial move negatively impacted his friendship with John, the owner of the latter. While members of the Power Iko Gym still trained with barbells and dumbbells to which they had attached self-made cement blocks, members of Carl’s gym, to quote a famous Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary from the 1970s, ‘pumped iron’. To make matters worse, the roof of the Power Iko Gym leaked and the floor was not made of concrete. Its members thus had to put up with rainwater dripping into the gym and turning the floor to mud, which made it difficult to remain stable during exercises.
1 Carl and John’s relationship improved once John had managed to upgrade his gym. During the time of my fieldwork, both gyms coexisted peacefully. By opening the No Mercy Gym, Carl had taken advantage of a solid business opportunity that gave him an income to raise his daughter and provide for his family.
Carl’s pragmatic understanding of weightlifting was reflected in his gym’s minimalistic furnishing. Its makeshift and run-down atmosphere stood in stark contrast to some of Pipeline’s newer gyms that carried flamboyant names such as Phenomenal Gym, Springfield Gym, or Digital Fitness Centre.
2 Carl and I identified roughly a dozen gyms in Pipeline, but probably missed several others that, like Carl’s own, did not advertise their existence with a sign. Although these gyms could not compete with the quality of those located in Nairobi’s more affluent neighbourhoods, they were certainly more spacious and better-equipped than the No Mercy Gym. Many of them had mirrors as well as photographs of famous bodybuilders on their walls and sold nutritional supplements, such as whey protein powders, creatine, or amino acids. In addition, they used sound systems to entertain members with the latest Kenyan and US-American hits. Almost impossible to find as it was not situated adjacent to one of Pipeline’s main roads, the No Mercy Gym had none of these. Operating without official opening hours, the gym, furthermore, had to be opened by the caretaker of the plot if Carl was not around. To make matters worse, we were regularly forced to train in the near-dark, using candles or the lights of our mobile phones, if the area was experiencing one of the frequent blackouts or the electricity meter had not been fed. In short, nothing made the No Mercy Gym an attractive place to work out in from an outsider’s perspective. It was a business run by Carl for people he knew and for those who were brought to the gym by other members. The only thing that the gym had to offer, besides the minimal equipment to perform the essential lifts, was the presence of other men and the total absence of women.
Leaving aside these differences, the development of Pipeline’s gym landscape mirrored the history of recreational weightlifting in other places of the world. Weightlifting began as a circus attraction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and remained a niche sport for bouncers, prison inmates, and competitive Olympic weightlifters and bodybuilders until the 1980s. Since then, weightlifting and strength training have become recreational activities for a broader audience. Being pushed by the fitness boom and the rise of Hollywood’s action stars (one member of the No Mercy Gym was nicknamed ‘Commando’ after a famous Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie), weightlifting was forced out of its niche in the 1980s. During this time, more and more men and women started to engage in strength training for a variety of reasons ranging from achieving a higher level of fitness, becoming physically more attractive, or wanting to compete with other athletes in feats of strength and endurance. The global south was no exception to this trend. Since the early 2000s, people across the globe have flocked to gyms and sparked a worldwide ‘fitness revolution’ (Archambault 2021: 521, see also Baas 2020 for an analysis of bodybuilding in India and Quayson 2014: chapter 6 on gyms in Accra).
The inclusion of weightlifting into the everyday routine of actors from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds increased economic competition between gyms, forcing them to either focus on a specific group of athletes or to diversify their training programmes in order to remain attractive to a variety of customers. While some gyms in Europe, for instance, only accept female athletes, others try to create an atmosphere in which women feel comfortable enough to train alongside men (see, for instance, Sehlikoglu 2021). Though some gyms in Pipeline attempted to tap into a female customer base by offering aerobics classes, an activity considered decisively female, most men and women viewed lifting weights as a masculine practice and gyms as male spaces where men discussed their romantic frustrations and latest sexual escapades. During the course of more than 150 training sessions in the No Mercy Gym, I only saw one woman come for a training session, but she never returned. It is thus fair to assume that nobody went to the No Mercy Gym to present his chiselled body to, or flirt with, women. Several of its members emphasized that they had come to Carl’s gym after feeling too intimidated by physically bigger and aggressive men who took up all the space and kept the equipment for themselves. Caleb, a friend of mine from western Kenya we got to know in the introduction, for example, was surprised about the tight-knit sociality of the No Mercy Gym and compared it favourably to other gyms where, as he described it, men trained while listening to music through earphones, ignoring everyone else. While most gyms in Pipeline did indeed radiate an anti-social and aggressive atmosphere, the No Mercy Gym was a hospitable and non-antagonistic space where migrant men could meet to lift weights together and forget about their economic challenges and romantic frustrations.
The No Mercy Gym was thus neither a space for masculine competition nor an arena to start a sexual affair or relationship. Rather, joining the No Mercy Gym promised new members a transformation of their physical bodies as well as an integration into a tight-knit group of male friends. In contrast to jo-pap, however, the social body of the gym members was not formed along ethnic lines. Though most members were born in former Western and Nyanza provinces, the gym attracted male migrants from all over Kenya. Regular members included Anthony, an electrician who worked for the Kenyan railway and hailed from the former Western province, Andrew and Isaac from Kisii County, Arthur from Chabera, Joel, a ja-pap from Migori County, Edward, a manual worker from Kenya’s coastal region, Carl from Ukambani, and Godwin, part-time DJ and former owner of a cybercafé born in Bomet. While these migrant men went to the No Mercy Gym to acquire a stronger and more muscular body, the big bodies men showcased in Pipeline’s streets and bars were, despite a superficial resemblance, far from the same. Many men just appeared strong because their huge but weak muscles, like the astonishing wealth of some landlords, had been built with the help of illicit shortcuts and corrupt behaviour.