Focusing on heterosexual male migrants’ experience of pressure triggered by their own expectations as well as those of intimate others, Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi empirically and analytically complements the scholarly output on African masculinities that increasingly has zoomed in on non-heteronormative and queer notions of what it means to be a man in Africa as well as the literature on male youth born and trying to make ends meet in sub-Saharan Africa’s relentlessly growing cities. While the latter has explored how young men creatively ‘hustle’ through what they perceive as an uncertain present (Thieme et al. 2021), my descriptions of how educated and skilled migrant men aged between 25 and 40 tried to attenuate an almost overpowering experience of pressure paint an alternative picture of masculinity and its discontents in a twenty first-century African capital.
Male migrants in Pipeline attenuated the pressure caused by the expectations of their intimate others by creating and maintaining spaces of male sociality, such as pap and the No Mercy Gym, where they reassured each other of their value and masculinity. In these male refuges established in one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated estates, migrant men did not attempt to alter or overcome the ideal of the male provider. Rather, socializing in these spaces enabled them to evade the pressure created by what they interpreted as a female distortion of men’s provider role. In the company of other men, male migrants relaxed and regained the strength necessary to continue on what they perceived as their preordained road toward becoming economically successful men, husbands, and fathers. Migrant men thereby ignored the structural conditions of Kenya’s capitalist economy that were responsible for their inability to fulfil the dominant norm of the male breadwinner. Rather than criticizing the latter, they remained intimately attached to it because they were unwilling to give up the expectation that they would soon reap the ‘patriarchal dividend’ (Connell 2005 [1995]: 79).
These men’s intimate attachment to the notion of the male provider also points to a few crucial analytic benefits of the emic/etic term ‘pressure’ when conceptualized as an experience of stress caused by expectations that migrant men viewed as justified and reasonable in kind, but unreasonable in degree. Such an understanding of pressure allows us to differentiate the experience of pressure from the experience of oppression which, I suggest, tends to be caused by expectations that are perceived as neither qualitatively nor quantitatively justified. Masculinity consultants influenced by the red pill movement, such as Amerix, for instance, tried to turn men’s experience of pressure into an experience of oppression by framing women’s expectations as both qualitatively and quantitatively unreasonable, thereby attempting to liberate men from their allegedly harmful attachments to women. Conceptualizing pressure in this way, moreover, enables us to explain why only a few migrant men sought divorce or blocked communication with their relatives in the village, even though they felt pressured by the expectations of their wives and their rural kin. The fact that women and rural relatives expected migrant men to provide was not seen as problematic as such. Most of my male interlocutors simply felt that their intimate others demanded too much.
Male migrants in Pipeline experienced pressure because they had tied their own wellbeing to the wellbeing of others, such as their urban and rural kin. They had committed themselves to the ideology of the male breadwinner as well as to Nairobi as the place where their consumerist dreams would become reality without admitting that they did not have the means or the ability to do justice to these commitments. Their experiences of pressure, in other words, enabled male migrants to remain attached to ideologies, people, and narratives that were ultimately detrimental to their well-being. If witchcraft is best understood as the dark side of intimacy, as suggested by Peter Geschiere (2003), pressure might be conceptualized as the unintended consequence of premature commitment. Victor was thus right when he suspected that something was ‘lying’ to male migrants expecting success in the city. Yet, he failed to realize that the pressured men of Pipeline – such as husbands who turned into ‘bachelors’ (jo-pap) when leaving the house, struggling migrants who presented themselves as successful city dwellers when visiting their rural homes, or adherents of the red pill ideology who desired to be with trustworthy women while propagating that such women do not exist – actually lied to themselves and thereby helped Kenya’s capitalist economy to continue to produce and exploit their pressured bodies and minds.
It would, nevertheless, be misguided to assume that migrant men’s defence of the patriarchal breadwinner narrative was forced upon them by the economic situation. Rather, and as Matthew Gutmann, one of anthropology’s pioneering scholars of masculinity, has recently argued, we should not agree to ‘let men off the hook’ (2019: chapter 10) by placing political responsibility for changing gender relations only on the shoulders of women. If we want to make men responsible for what they are thinking and doing, however, we must first understand what they are thinking and doing. As a sympathetic but honest portrayal of male migrants’ practices, dreams, expectations, and experiences of being under pressure in high-rise Nairobi, this book hopefully contributes to an empirically saturated discussion about the future of masculinities in urban Kenya. Furthermore, I hope that Kenyan men and women reading this book will be inspired and encouraged to build new narratives of what it means to be a heterosexual man in twenty first-century high-rise Nairobi that risk going beyond the capitalist image of the male breadwinner.