What made migrant men susceptible to the misogynistic hate of anonymous Telegram channels, the religious sermons of self-help pastors, and the clandestine atmosphere of a men’s meeting on the slopes of Mount Kenya? More importantly, what does it tell us about the state of gender relations in Kenya that close to 100,000 Kenyan men felt at home in Amerix’s Telegram channel, where they found solace through engaging with his anti-feminist, anti-democratic, and pseudo-scientific advice? Pondering these questions, I remembered the many instances during which my male interlocutors had expressed fears of becoming economically or sexually expendable. When Samuel, for instance, visited me in my house one day after passing the neighbour’s apartment where a group of women was celebrating a birthday, he just shook his head and solemnly uttered: ‘We live like animals in the jungle. Women and men separately. We only meet for mating and making babies. Maybe that’s where we’re heading to’. Samuel was not alone with his assessment that the future of gender relations looked bleak. One ja-pap, for instance, mentioned in an interview that he believed that ‘most women of today prefer to be single mothers because they see that, in this life of today, as long as you can work, you are good to go. You can just get a man for leisure, it is not a must you must live with a man. […] These our ladies, most of them, they will not live with men in the future.’
Such comments did not only entail a nostalgic longing for clear and stable gender relations. They were also imbued with fears about a future during which the ‘boy child’ would be forgotten (Pike 2020) and women would be able to live fulfilling lives independently of men, fears that became manifest in the stereotypes of money-minded slay queens and morally dubious single mothers. Unacknowledged male vulnerability, moreover, shone through in discussions about homosexuality and feminism. While some migrant men imagined that most women would soon embrace lesbianism and same-sex marriages, others attacked feminism when asked about it in interviews. For example, Wellington Ochieng, the moto-taxi driver we got to know better in chapter 3, called feminism a ‘scam’ and ‘dead on arrival’, while Victor Omollo, a ja-pap introduced in chapter 2, rejected feminism outrightly by evoking images of male strength and masculine prowess: ‘How can you compare a man with a woman? If you want to compare a man and a woman, put a handcart out there, tell the man to be shirtless, and the woman, then they push the handcart. You know that this thing cannot happen’. The fear of male expendability, furthermore, became palpable in the discussion of a collection of insults shared by those men who had been at the retreat on the slopes of Mount Kenya. After analyzing the insult makwapa ya konokono (Kiswahili, ‘armpits of a snail’), the men agreed that it was particularly powerful because it alluded to a disgusting thing that actually did not exist, thereby simultaneously evoking men’s uselessness and their expendability.
Sharing one’s frustrations while sipping cold beer at a bonfire, seeking pseudo-scientific explanations for the behaviour of women in the manosphere, or striving to re-establish religiously vested male authority, all these practices stemmed from the same lingering feeling that the world had turned against men, and that men would soon no longer be needed by women. Seeking validation from other men in pap and gyms, rejecting feminism, struggling to become economically successful providers, as well as looking for financial, sexual, and romantic advice from masculinity consultants should therefore be seen as different ways in which male migrants, without radically challenging the narrative of the male breadwinner, tried to make themselves, or at least feel, socially and romantically indispensable. Not one of the masculinity consultants who provided a variety of advice to assist men in overcoming their fear of expendability, however, had identified Kenya’s political-economic system as a possible culprit for migrant men’s emotionally challenging and economically often destitute situation.
Instead of criticizing or trying to change Kenya’s capitalist economy and the related narrative of the male breadwinner, men directed their anger at women and focused their minds on winning what Silas Nyanchwani called the nation’s ‘gender wars’ (2021b). Even so, the fact that many Kenyan men found the advice of masculinity consultants attractive illustrates that they were looking for a compass to orient themselves in an increasingly chaotic world. Migrant men, in other words, were longing for explanations and solutions for their experience of pressure. Blaming the unrealistic expectations of intimate others and evading pressure by lifting weights or by spending time in pap was no longer enough for those male migrants who were ready to fight larger societal forces to overcome their plight. Seeing and experiencing ‘themselves as the beleaguered party in a zero-sum game in which every gain for women entails a loss for men’ (O’Neill 2018: 147), they resorted to attacking the entire female gender, homosexuality, and feminist politics instead of criticizing Kenya’s economic and political system.