Conclusion: Pipeline to Nowhere

In addition to these infrastructural changes, some of my key interlocutors had left Pipeline to return to their rural villages. Samuel had gone back to his ancestral home in Seme, close to the lakeside city of Kisumu, where he had started his pupillage in a law firm around July 2021. Thinking about the problems he had gone through in his dissolved marriage with Immaculate, and annoyed by the pressure and the stress of the city, he had decided to start afresh in Seme, where his father had recently settled after retiring from his job as a teacher in Chabera. When I visited him, Samuel told me that he was sure that he would never return to Nairobi. He saw his future in Kisumu, where he could speak his mother tongue Dholuo and was far away from the hustle and noise of Pipeline that he had once described as a ‘sleeping giant where people are ever busy but achieve nothing’. In the village, well water was freely available every day and electricity was, ironically, also not much less reliable than in Pipeline. Maize, beans, and vegetables came directly from the fields, while milk and eggs were supplied by one’s own cows and chickens. In addition, Samuel realised that many of his peers had already built their simba (Dholuo, ‘bachelor hut’) and had a better standard of living than he had had in Nairobi. It was high time to sow the seeds for a bright future in his ancestral home.

Carl, the owner of the No Mercy Gym, had separated from his wife around the same time as Samuel had left Pipeline. Disappointed with the lack of personal economic development and troubled by his marital problems, he had moved back to his rural home in Ukambani to try his luck at groundnut farming and trading. He had left the gym in the hands of Anthony and Isaac, who were struggling to keep it running, especially after some weights were stolen and their attempts to recover them had failed. They only managed to keep the gym afloat with the help of some fundraising organized by the members. Encouraged by the mental boost they received from decorating the gym with posters of bodybuilders they had found in a demolished gym in Mukuru Kwa Njenga (Ashly 2022) while strolling through the neighbourhood one evening, they began making plans to add new machines and weights. Though Carl was gone, the No Mercy Gym was still in business.

For Carl and Samuel, expectations of a better life in the city had not come to fruition. Unsurprisingly, as issues of love and finance went hand in hand in Pipeline, they had left Nairobi for romantic and economic reasons. The decision to leave Pipeline and return to one’s ancestral home, however, did not always imply that a male migrant had rejected the narrative of the male breadwinner or changed his view of Nairobi as a place of economic success. Carl, for instance, regularly called Anthony and Isaac to check on the gym, and Arthur, who had also returned to Chabera at the end of 2021 due to the impossibility of finding a well-paying job in Nairobi, despite having completed his bachelor’s degree, continued to raise money to pay the rent for his single room in Pipeline. Back in his village, where he lived what he described as a boring life, Arthur frequently complained about the lack of economic opportunities. Besides raising guinea fowl and occasionally overseeing his parents’ shop, there was not much he could achieve in Chabera. Going back home was a result of a bleak economic situation, not a choice based upon a well-founded rejection of his migratory dreams of attaining economic success in Nairobi. Men like Arthur saw life in the village as a mere break from the mounting pressure caused by chasing money and pretending to be successful in Kenya’s capital. They returned home to temporarily depressurize and recharge their energy (see Kleist 2017).

Apart from moving back to their rural homes, another solution to the pressure male migrants faced in Nairobi would have been to criticize and try to overcome Kenya’s deeply unjust capitalist economic system and the related ideology of the male breadwinner. However, when I brought up the possibility of more radical economic change to some of my friends after returning from a panel discussion on ‘Why does nobody speak about capitalism in Kenya?’ held in a community centre in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, they unanimously agreed that the organizers of the panel were unwilling to accept reality. Capitalism had come to stay, and nobody should expect to be helped by society at large. This positive acceptance of capitalism and related moral values, such as individual responsibility, coupled with a pragmatic attitude toward the emancipatory potentials of politics and democracy, might seem surprising given their bleak economic situation and the all-encompassing experience of pressure. Embracing capitalism and its values, however, is common among labour migrants worldwide who have already invested too much in pursuing their dreams to give in easily (Schielke 2020, Xiang 2021, see also Berlant 2011). For most male migrants in Pipeline, the main problem was not the economic system or traditional gender roles. Rather, it was their marginal position in the economy, a position that most migrant men still expected to soon overcome.

Yet, no male migrant I was acquainted with had upgraded to a better apartment in Pipeline, and neither had anyone moved to a more desirable neighbourhood in another part of Nairobi. Although they thus felt that they were ‘languishing in abject poverty in a developed slum’, as Thomas had phrased it dramatically, most of my male interlocutors carried on trying to carve out successful lives in the high-rise tenements of Pipeline. Migrating to the city had been a deep desire throughout their lives, and they were far from ready to give up on the promises of achieving material wealth and finding romantic love in Kenya’s capital. The alternatives were either to return to their rural homes to recharge their energy, thereby acknowledging temporary defeat, or to remain in perpetual suspension in Pipeline, always feeling close to, yet being far away from, economic success. In such a context of perpetual suspension (Xiang 2021), objectively unrealistic goals, such as Philemon’s idea to mine minerals on Mars, HoMiSiKi’s plan to purchase their own matatu, or Godwin’s goal to look like Dwayne Johnson, acquired a critical function. Relying on an extended temporality of delayed accomplishments (Guyer 2007), expecting implausible success in the far future allowed male migrants to continue believing in the certainty of their economic breakthrough. In contrast to less ambitious ideas, these plans were not easily falsifiable. Being projected far into the future, even insignificant actions could be interpreted as meaningful steps toward achieving these lofty goals. As eternal apprentices of their future economic success, most male migrants in Pipeline thus remained attached to the promises of Nairobi. One day, they kept believing, they would be wealthy, providing, and generous fathers and husbands.