Nairobian girls, man, acha tu (Kiswahili, ‘just leave it’)! If some hapless guy with disposable income and sensible behaviour shows some interest, the girl will put her acting mask on, and can easily fool the man proper. Nothing wrong with that, as life is a game. You play. They play. We play each other.
Silas Nyanchwani (2021a: 104)
‘What was her profession?’, asked one of fifteen middle-aged Nairobian men sitting around a bonfire next to a wooden cabin on the slopes of Mount Kenya after another one had shared his frustrations and the challenges he had experienced with his ex-wife. ‘She was just a scammer’, he answered, and most of us broke out in laughter. Our laughter was in no way belittling; it seemed to result from the release of what Marcus, an IT professional who described himself as a former feminist who had turned to the red pill ideology because of his experiences with Kenyan women, later called ‘pent-up bitterness’. One man after the other narrated similar stories: an emotionally cold girlfriend who had cheated with a colleague, a wife who had run away with the children, despite the husband’s genuine attempts to provide and be a good father. In contrast to the painful topics discussed, the atmosphere was conducive to male bonding. Whisky, beer, and the absence of women paved the way for an open and honest discussion. While the first stories were narrated in an almost confessional tone, as if the men felt ashamed of opening up, soon the stories were met with laughter and self-ridicule about one’s past days as a ‘simp’. Sipping my too-cold beer and sharing my own romantic failures, I realized that I had become part of a communal catharsis.
The two-day retreat had been organized on a non-profit basis by three ‘popular urban intellectuals’ (Callaci 2017: 15): social media personality and psychologist Chomba Njoka, and the aforementioned authors Jacob Aliet and Silas Nyanchwani.
1 While Jacob Aliet’s Unplugged (2022a) is a summary of the red pill ideology interspersed with captivatingly written accounts of Kenyan men’s experiences, Aliet also tries to incorporate red pill ideology and terminology into his fictional work (see, for instance, his recently published short story collection Transference [2022b]). Silas Nyanchwani plays around with different literary genres as well, including ethnographic descriptions, direct advice, and hyperbolic fictionalizations celebrating male sexuality and wastefulness (comparable to some Kenyan authors of the 1970s and 1980s such as Charles Mangua, David Maillu and Meja Mwangi, see Kurtz 1998, Odhiambo 2007). Nyanchwani’s oeuvre – his ironic column ‘The Retrosexual’, which he used to publish in the weekly newspaper The Nairobian until Brian Guserwa took over, the novel Sexorcised (2020) about a man in his forties who starts dating a younger woman after his marriage collapsed, and Man About Town (2022), a collection of everyday observations on how gender relations unfold in Nairobi – thus constitutes an often ironic, almost kaleidoscopic collection of different perspectives, ideas, and narrative styles, trying to map out and understand what it means to be a man in contemporary urban Kenya. Some of the attendees had passed through Pipeline when starting their lives in Nairobi and a few were still struggling professionally. In comparison to most male migrants in Pipeline, however, they had well-paying and prestigious jobs. There was, for instance, an IT consultant, a journalist, a lawyer, and a psychologist. Even so, both social groups complained about similar problems. Increasing economic pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic and an inability to meet the expectations of their girlfriends and wives were thus topics that cut across different economic classes. However, and in contrast to most
jo-pap, such as Mark, or the gym members who, if at all, only consumed the red pill ideology through Amerix’s social media outputs, the men who met on the slopes of Mount Kenya had fully adopted the narrative and language of the red pill movement. Over the two days, the men categorized women’s sexual attractiveness on a scale from one to ten (O’Neill 2018: 169-70), discussed women’s hypergamous nature, and shared advice on how to find out with how many men a woman had really slept. Nonetheless, as the meeting progressed, it became palpable to me that the men engaged in more than what Rachel O’Neill aptly called ‘tactical fraternity among men’ (ibid.: 63), whereby they tried to help each other to be sexually, romantically, and economically more successful. They also felt relieved to be able to talk about their frustrations with like-minded men.
In stark contrast to the rigid and military atmosphere of Amerix’s Telegram channel, where anyone who did not embrace the red pill ideology risked being banned, some men who had attended the meeting on the slopes of Mount Kenya expressed to me that they were grateful to have found a group of men who neither judged nor ridiculed them for their past mistakes and current shortcomings. In addition to providing explanations and corresponding advice, spending time with other men had created what the former feminist Marcus called a ‘family of peers’ who offered each other emotional support. Satisfying the men’s ‘need to be heard and connect with kindred souls’, as Marcus phrased it, the meeting had allowed them to discuss their frustrations and doubts about their roles as husbands, fathers, and boyfriends in a safe space. Despite their misogynistic nature, Kenyan men’s anti-feminist portrayals of women thus also reflected their deep-seated anxieties. Unlike the US-American men’s rights advocates observed by Jonathan Allan (2016), who only talked about their feelings to reclaim a position of power, the men who met on the slopes of Mount Kenya genuinely feared becoming expendable soon.