The interactional construction of brotherhood

A typical training session included around five exercises and lasted up to two hours. After warming up our muscles, we started with the most fundamental exercise for developing the body part we were training. In the case of legs, for instance, this would be weighted squats. After loading the barbell with weights, one person started the first set of twenty repetitions and the other members waited for him to finish.1 A repetition is one completed movement. In the case of a barbell squat, it means starting while standing, lifting the barbell onto the back, squatting down until the upper thighs are below parallel to the floor, and standing up again. A set is a number of completed repetitions, after which the athlete rests for a specific time. The duration of the break and the number of sets and repetitions depend on the training style. After everyone had finished their first round, we increased the weights and did eighteen repetitions for the second set, until we reached the final set of around twelve heavier repetitions. By thus progressively increasing the weight while reducing the number of repetitions, we went through so-called ‘pyramid sets’. After the main exercise, we moved on to supplementary exercises; in the case of the legs, for example, these being lunges, dumbbell and reverse squats, or leg extensions and curls.

The limited space of the gym, the number of weights available, and the number of people training – most of the time around three to six but sometimes more – made it almost impossible to train more than two compound exercises simultaneously. Depending on the body part and the equipment involved, we would at most engage in three different exercises at a time: one compound exercise requiring a lot of weight and two supplementary exercises that required less weight. As the second room of the gym was rarely occupied, especially during our morning routine, restricting us to one room was, however, a choice. Arranging ourselves in the cramped room not only increased the temperature that members believed would keep the muscles active and prevent them from cooling down, but also raised the humidity level, which our bodies responded to by increasing sweat production, reassuring us that we were working hard. Rather than an externally imposed constraint, training together among friends was a deliberate attempt to create an intimate atmosphere where ‘you just feel the psyche’, as Godwin explained.

When lifting heavy weights we employed ‘an array of tactics that include ridicule, encouragement, harassment, and direct physical assistance’ (Klein 1993: 68) to reassure each other of our strength. It was, for instance, common to ‘psyche’2 I could not establish how the concept of ‘psyche’, which also circulated in the bodybuilding scene of the US-American Westcoast in the 1990s (Klein 1993: passim), ended up being used in Pipeline’s gyms. each other by shouting positive remarks such as ‘Big legs! Big legs!’, ‘Strong! Strong!’,3 ‘Strong’ also functioned as a form of greeting and, more common, of saying goodbye. ‘Power iko’ (Kiswahili, ‘Power is there’), or ‘Light weight, light weight!’ These remarks were meant to increase the confidence of the lifter and to assure him that he had the strength to ‘squeeze the weight’ (Kiswahili, kufinya weight) to complete the lift. Frequent misogynistic comments further contributed to an atmosphere of masculine bravado and male power, thereby boosting members’ confidence. These comments included ridiculing someone for not properly getting into what was known as the ‘polluting position’ (pushing back the hip and bending over one’s torso to start rowing a heavy weight), comparing a 50-kilogramme weight to a petite slay queen to motivate the lifter, or accusing a gym member of having recently engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman if he was weaker than the week before. While such accusations perpetuated the image of women as drawing away male energy both in the form of money and physical strength, the equation of weights with women signalled a male control over the female body. Apart from calling weights ‘sexy’ when psyching oneself or others, Joel, for instance, used to shout ‘Yes, madam’, ‘Yes, sweetheart’, or ‘Yes, jaber (Dholuo, ‘beautiful one’)’ after every repetition.

As communicational cues encouraging oneself and others (Sherouse 2016), practices of increasing ‘psyche’ are best understood as positive forms of putting pressure on members attempting to lift heavy weights. By psyching each other, gym members expressed the expectation that the person trying to lift a weight would manage to finish the repetition. At the same time, they were ready to support the athlete if he could not manage to complete the lift on his own. In contrast to their friends at the gym, who understood that a man was sometimes unable to push a heavy weight off his chest without support, male migrants often expressed that their wives and girlfriends were unwilling to offer sympathy and emotional support when they failed to progress economically. Instead of being ridiculed as ‘useless’ despite working hard and trying their best, migrant men wanted to be psyched by their intimate others as well. They desired to be praised for their economic potential and work ethic and to receive emotional support whenever external constraints impeded their economic progress. When asked about the most important character trait of a woman during an interview, Godwin thus unsurprisingly answered that a girlfriend or wife should ‘understand you […]. Understanding meaning, if you have money or you don’t have money, she will understand.’

Weightlifting has been depicted as a heroic fight between man and iron, an ‘intra-relational contest’ (Lockwood 2015: 15) in anonymous gyms that are ‘no place for sociability’ (Wacquant 1995: 164). It has been suggested that the sole social component of lifting weights lies in the competition with other weightlifters (Klein 1993: 54). In contrast, working out in the No Mercy Gym depended on adapting one’s movements and training routines to those of others. Working out well meant working out well with and caring about others. Even setting up the gym and loading weights on barbells depended on cooperative practices. Shifting equipment around and looking for weights hidden beneath each other or behind something else required members to move their bodies carefully to not disturb anyone already lifting. Just standing or sitting somewhere blocked space and the crowdedness of the gym forced us to avoid any movement not specifically aimed at facilitating the training.

Moreover, members seldomly engaged in individual exercises. If we trained the legs by doing squats, everyone trained their legs by doing squats. Even more remarkable, we did not use different weights while working out together. Despite the strength differences between the five or six men who regularly attended the morning routine, we started and finished each exercise with the same weights. Those unable to finish their set were supported and psyched. If we were bench-pressing and progressed from 50 to 110 kilogrammes, everyone had to persevere, or at least try to lift the heavier weights. The chain was considered to be as strong as its strongest link, not its weakest, and the resting time between sets was spent helping others to lift the weights and to become stronger.4 A mentally and neurologically taxing exercise type known as a ‘drop set’ required the involvement of three additional people. During a bench press drop set, for instance, the lifter would start with 80 kilogrammes and finish five reps, then two people would remove five kilogrammes on each side and the person would, without placing the barbell back on the rack, lift 70 kilogrammes eight times until he had reached, for instance, 40 kilogrammes to be lifted twenty times. Throughout the exercise one person remained available for potential support. Drop sets exemplify that lifting weights in the No Mercy Gym could indeed be considered a team sport. Unlike other gyms in Pipeline where ‘my speed might be high, and his speed might be slow’, as Godwin had explained to me once, our body movements had to synchronize. While working on our bodies, we thus also strengthened our feeling of ‘brotherhood’ as Andrew, the former KDF soldier from this book’s vignette, had called the gym members’ intimate attachment to one another.

Supporting each other and spending time with one another outside of the gym further consolidated the strong social connections between the No Mercy Gym members. We invited each other for dinner or tea, ate goat head and drank bone soup in one of Pipeline’s butcheries, gulped down cups of muratina (an alcoholic drink from central Kenya), or took post-workout porridge or medical concoctions in a place called Loliondo, named after a Tanzanian village where a local healer allegedly had performed miracles (Vähäkangas 2015). Furthermore, the core group of the gym members assisted each other financially during emergencies and funerals, and unemployed members informed each other about jobs at construction sites where men with muscled bodies had a better chance of being employed. Interactional and institutionalized practices such as psyching one another, sharing meals, working together at a construction site, or supporting a member financially thus created and maintained the No Mercy Gym as a masculine space characterized by an atmosphere of brotherhood and braggadocio that helped men to momentarily evade the economic pressure they experienced in their marital houses.