Introduction
I hustle every day … When I come home with nothing I feel I am nothing. I tried but I did not get anything, she [his wife] is asking me for money. I go out every day, early bird, to catch the worm. If she asks and I have nothing, she makes me feel I am nothing. That moment I want to drink and be with my friends, so that is what I do … Those nights home is only for sleeping.
In 2010, Cosmos was a twenty-six-year-old (illegal) alcohol distiller in Mathare, an urban settlement in Nairobi, married with two children. In his eyes, his wife accentuated his failure by demanding money he had not been able to earn, but which he felt he needed to earn to actually go and be home. This was a sentiment his wife affirmed to me in another interview. His friend Samii, who was seated next to him on a wobbly bench near the illegal alcohol (chang'aa in Swahili) distilling site, responded to Cosmos by saying: ‘We are scared to find out they can hustle better than us.’ Samii, Cosmos and many other young and poor urban men with whom I have done research over the past fifteen years told me that their wives worked as laundry women, housekeepers or micro-business owners. While the women often did not share what they earned, and nor did their husbands expect them to, the men were expected – and expected themselves – to share everything they had. They considered themselves to be ‘the provider’, and they often used the term ‘hustling’ (or kuhustle in Sheng; see below) to describe their experiences, practices and trajectories in actualizing this particular masculine ideal.Footnote 1 During our conversation, Samii and Cosmos both revealed that the (in)ability to hustle impinged heavily on their gendered selves, and Samii's anxiety that his wife might surpass him in hustling derived from a profound fear of becoming redundant as a man. This ethnographic moment begs the following questions: what meanings do young men ascribe to the term ‘hustling’ in urban settlements in Nairobi? What kind of practices constitute and are configured by hustling? And how and why does hustling connect so deeply to their gendered selves?
The English use of the term ‘hustling’ in Sheng, an urban dialect in East Africa that mixes Swahili, English and other vernaculars, is inspired by Black Atlantic music cultures (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993) such as hip-hop, reggae and dancehall music (Thieme Reference Thieme2018). Hustling has been extensively explored with regard to notions of manhood in, for instance, African American contexts by many scholars (e.g. hooks Reference hooks2003; Hunter and Davis Reference Hunter and Davis1992; Majors and Billson Reference Majors and Billson1993). These works reveal that hustling is often deployed by young African American men to capture their lived experiences of trying to build meaningful livelihoods within the context of race discrimination, economic uncertainty and gendered expectations. Accordingly, hustling seems to largely describe meaning making and making do in the context of economic, social and political struggles brought about by experiences of ‘multiple marginalization’ (Vigil Reference Vigil2003), particularly among young African American men who often feel confined to the imagined space of ‘the street’ (Oliver Reference Oliver2006).
Hip-hop as the ‘CNN of the Black community’ (Chuck D cited in Gladney Reference Gladney1995) broadcast the inner-city experiences of young African American men to a world audience, and terms such as ‘hustling’ and ‘ghetto’ found fertile soil among young people living in urban settlements in Nairobi and elsewhere. These terms were not new, but the emergence of gangsta rap (Dyson Reference Dyson1996) gave new connotations to them that resonated compellingly with my young male interlocutors in Nairobi settlements, and they provided these young men with a colloquial lexis not only to voice but also to theorize and politicize their own situated experiences of marginalization, oppression and exploitation. Many young men I work with in Nairobi express a sense of ‘diasporic intimacy’ (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993) with young African American men in inner-city USA or Jamaican ‘ghettos’Footnote 2 that derives from experiencing comparable social realities (Samper Reference Samper2004). Hustling as a concept has thus travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban spaces (Wacquant Reference Wacquant, Hutchison and Haynes2011), bouncing off the rickety walls of rusty iron-sheet shacks in Nairobi ‘ghettos’ and vibrating from gritty speakers in overcrowded matatu minivan buses.
The widespread rearticulation of the term ‘hustling’ in a broad range of urban languages (such as Sheng) reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This article focuses on the modes in which poor young men in Nairobi (re)deploy, translate and practise hustling to fit immediate circumstances and imagine possible futures, and on the new meanings these men produce in the process. As brought out by Cosmos above, hustling in Sheng echoes and reinterprets Black Atlantic definitions, which often emphasize acuity, command and tenacity, while giving expression to and organizing around situated injustices. I argue that interrogating hustling as a practice provides insights into gendered experiences of urban life worlds in the underserved and highly policed areas of Nairobi, which may tentatively resonate with young men in comparable positions worldwide. I specifically look at positions of (junior) manhood brought into effect by localized hustle practices to elucidate how navigating fear and hope while facing extreme uncertainty simultaneously defines and undermines these young men's sense of manhood.
Poor young men in Nairobi carefully build their ‘reputations’ (Salo Reference Salo, Bay and Donham2006) while facing ‘social death’ (Patterson Reference Patterson1982; Vigh Reference Vigh2006: 240) in society. The concept of social death captures how and why certain people are criminalized, dehumanized, dispossessed and considered second rank or non-members of a given society (Guenther Reference Guenther2013; Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003; Cacho Reference Cacho2012). This article looks at the perspectives of urban, poor, young men who are positioned as ‘socially dead’ in Kenyan society (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2016) and how this amplifies their fear of being considered ‘lesser men’ (Connell Reference Connell1987: 184; Reference Connell1995; Reference Connell2000; Willemse Reference Willemse, Hassan and Ray2009: 226) within their ‘community’ (by which they mostly mean among family members, neighbours and friends living nearby). The men featured in this article are positioned as ‘socially dead’ in Kenyan society because they are predominantly framed and policed (and often killed) as ‘thugs’ (Jones et al. Reference Jones, Kimari and Ramakrishnan2017), following the widespread belief that they engage in crime and other illegal and immoral behaviours. As a result, many of these men draw sharp distinctions between ‘society’ and ‘community’. ‘Society’ is often referred to as ‘the city’, or even ‘Kenya’, to which many do not experience a sense of belonging (even if they might still harbour a longing to belong), while they locate their own ‘community’, which they term ‘ghetto’, outside ‘society’ (van Stapele Reference van Stapele, Albreght and Mynster2020). By doing this, they deliberately comment on decades of government neglect and police violence beleaguering their low-income neighbourhoods. Furthermore, this distinction makes explicit the implications of risk involved in them venturing outside their neighbourhoods. With hardly any space to manoeuvre outside, the ‘ghetto’-scape has become the focus of their social ambitions, and they capture this with the term ‘community’.
All the young men in this study spoke incessantly about their fear of not meeting their responsibilities as men vis-à-vis their ‘community’ in general and their mothers, siblings, wives and children specifically. This article looks at how such fears intermingle with (brazen) hope and together inform their hustle practices. Consequently, it analyses young men's anxieties over their ability or inability to actualize the ideal of ‘the male provider’ and to achieve a position of male respectability. This goes against dominant views that often cast young and poor men in African cities as perpetrators of violence and threats to the social order and the authority of older (male) generations (Bay Reference Bay, Bay and Donham2006: 10–11; Ighobor Reference Ighobor2013; Sommers Reference Sommers2011; Reference Sommers2012; Anderson Reference Anderson2002). I aim to challenge pervasive essentialized notions of ‘African masculinity’ through the lens of hustling, by highlighting multiplicities and fluidities that unsettle such fixed concepts. A growing body of research is looking at (poor young) men in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. van Klinken Reference van Klinken2013; Morrell et al. Reference Morrell, Jewkes and Lindegger2012; Ratele Reference Ratele2013). This article contributes to this growing field by considering hustling as a set of practices and experiences associated with becoming a man in low-income Nairobi neighbourhoods. Focusing on this particular gender dimension of hustling enables us to tease out the specific meanings these young men ascribe to hustling and how this shapes their practices (Khoury Reference Khoury2018), while also keeping in sight the similarities with broader uses of the term. As such, the analyses here add to theories on ‘precarity’ (Standing Reference Standing2011; Reference Standing2014; Scully Reference Scully2016) by exploring situated connections between economic uncertainty and gendered forms of hardship in contexts of urban marginality (Kimari Reference Kimari2016; Médard Reference Médard, Charton-Bigot and Rodriguez-Torres2010). Finally, it aims to investigate new avenues in youth studies by looking at how shared fears of protracted juniority (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2010; Vigh Reference Vigh2006; Reference Vigh2009) inform their aspirations and orientations to the future (L'Estoile Reference L'Estoile2014; Appadurai Reference Appadurai2013) and shape practices and experiences in the present.
In the sections that follow, I first briefly explore the history of the hegemonic masculine ideal of the provider. I then delve into positions of junior manhood and discuss particular individual experiences constituted by and constituting hustling as a trope of becoming a man in Nairobi neighbourhoods that are highly marginalized and face everyday uncertainty (Cooper and Pratten Reference Cooper, Pratten, Cooper and Pratten2015) but also experience an oppressive stream of surveillance, stigma and extra-judicial violence (Jones et al. Reference Jones, Kimari and Ramakrishnan2017). Accordingly, building on my previous work, which focused on young men and everyday forms of violence in their neighbourhoods, this article expands in novel ways on the ‘hustle economy’ (Thieme Reference Thieme2018) as a generative form of urban social life among a specific group of young men living in a ‘ghetto’-scape that is described by my interlocutors as a kind of quicksand.
A brief history of the male provider
The ideal of ‘the male provider’ (Silberschmidt Reference Silberschmidt2004: 45–7) is central to all hegemonic models of masculinity in present-day Kenya. What this imaginary entails in precise terms is constantly redefined in relation to ever shifting contexts, but to this day it remains centred on particular conceptions of male responsibilities to provide the bulk of financial support to the family household (which, alongside wife and children, also often includes parents and siblings, even if they do not live together or even near each other). Contemporary connotations of the male provider are in part influenced by particular economic structures that were put in place by the British colonial government that ruled Kenya from 1899 until 1963. One of the economic structures was the demand for a ‘hut tax’ (Gertz Reference Gertz2007: 58) that had to be paid by ‘African’ men. This and other taxes had to be paid in cash, which was to be earned through wage labour (Tarus Reference Tarus2004: 144; Ocobock Reference Ocobock2017) outside the Native Reserves (these were designated rural areas where the African population was forced to reside during the colonial era; see Berman and Lonsdale Reference Berman and Lonsdale1992; Kanogo Reference Kanogo1987; Silberschmidt Reference Silberschmidt1999). In some cases, African women paid their own taxes and/or migrated outside the reserves to work and help their families pay taxes,Footnote 3 but in general men were legally required to take up this role under colonial rule. As a result, women commonly became more responsible for the daily running of the household inside the reserves, relying heavily on subsistence farming, whereas men functioned more and more as ‘absentee heads of the family’ (Silberschmidt Reference Silberschmidt2004: 45) and earned money outside the reserves for personal and family upkeep, and for paying the various taxes.Footnote 4
Before colonization, gender norms varied immensely among different ethnic groups and even within groups, and over time. Such variations make it difficult to define which were dominant in the geographical area that later became known as Kenya prior to the colonial period. Notably, varied and shifting gender norms became increasingly homogenized and fixed as a result of colonial inscriptions (Shaw Reference Shaw1995), even if variation continued to exist through contestation and adaptation. Much has been written about how colonial inculcations of gender norms met, merged and collided with gender concerns among African people (White Reference White1990b; Ocobock Reference Ocobock2017; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2017; Nelson Reference Nelson1978; Reference Nelson and Caplan1987; Reference Nelson and Gugler1997). It suffices to state here that the rapidly changing discursive and material circumstances during the colonial era instituted the ossification of a dominant notion of manhood that bestowed men with particular – and novel – obligations and responsibilities, epitomized in the imaginary of the male provider.
Towards the end of the colonial era, men's anxiety over their inability to live up to this particular gender role increased following a convergence of events. Population growth put mounting pressures on land within the reserves (Elkins Reference Elkins2005: 23), which gradually hindered subsistence farming and made families more dependent on the cash economy. Many migrant labourers were men who worked on colonial farms (Kanogo Reference Kanogo1987; see also Cooper Reference Cooper1980), and, during the 1940s, many of them lost their jobs to the growing mechanization of farm work (Maloba Reference Maloba1993: 28; Kanogo Reference Kanogo1987; Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale2008). These and other developments made it increasingly difficult for men to live up to the male social obligation of providing cash for their families. Chased from white settler farms and unable to find space in the reserves, a growing number of young men were impelled to flock to the city. Even if work was equally scarce in the city, other opportunities were available, such as helping female sex workers sell alcohol to soldiers in Nairobi's Mathare (White Reference White1990a; Nelson Reference Nelson1978; Reference Nelson and Gugler1997). However, their meagre earnings were hardly enough to survive on, let alone to send money home (White Reference White, Hay and Stitcher1984). The increasing inability of growing numbers of men to live up to the masculine ideal of providing financially challenged their male prerogatives, authority and ability to belong to a family and to society at large (Silberschmidt Reference Silberschmidt2001).
The historical parallels of the social, economic and political positions of poor young men with present-day Kenya are striking. Large groups of poor young men today also struggle to live up to the ideal of the provider. Following drastic economic restructuring after independence, such as the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) (Gibbon Reference Gibbon1996; Babb Reference Babb2005; Gertz Reference Gertz2007), the place of poor young men in patronage configurations that make up the economic and political power relationships in post-independence Kenya has become even more confined (Berman Reference Berman1998: 310–11; Ocobock Reference Ocobock2017; Rasmussen and van Stapele Reference Rasmussen and van Stapele2020). SAPs led to widespread land dispossession among farming communities, which accelerated migration to urban centres where wage employment was virtually unavailable, and most people relied on highly insecure small-scale enterprises. Especially in urban areas such as Nairobi, where two-thirds of the city's population make do in extremely uncertain, under-resourced and volatile settings, poor young men in particular bear the brunt of state-sanctioned violence (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2016).
In May 2012, I sat down with Tosh for lunch in a roadside restaurant in Mathare. While I ordered rice and beans and as he was halfway through cutting an avocado for us, his phone rang. He looked at it and his jaw tightened. He hesitated before answering. It was his mother. He reluctantly talked with her and looked at me with wide eyes, as if asking me for help. After he hung up, he said: ‘Sometimes, I don't pick up, but then she complains to my grandmother that I ignore her. She never asks how I am. She always asks for money. If I say I don't have money, she tells me I am not a good son.’ Tosh shared with me many times how stressed he felt by the burden of taking care of his mother, his grandmother, his disabled sister and her daughter. He was married, and as the sole provider he was also financially responsible for taking care of his wife and their three children. Despite being a relatively young man in his mid-thirties, he suffered from high blood pressure, which seemed to spike every time he received a call from his mother. Since he had become a teenage father, he had worked eighteen hours a day on average: distilling alcohol at the riverside in the morning for his grandmother (a former sex worker and small-time alcohol producer/seller); selling chickens in the afternoon; serving coffee in the evening; and volunteering at a local youth programme on Sundays. ‘Providership’ is a gendered ideal, but this does not exclude women from such social pressures (see Thieme Reference Thieme2021). In general, people who are perceived to be more stable than most – a relative notion considering the level of income and material poverty in these neighbourhoods – are also expected to provide for family and friends. However, for men it is widely considered mandatory regardless of their economic situation. How the struggle for male respectability plays out among poor young men who themselves aspire to the ideal of providership against the odds and how this connects to hustling practices are explored in the next sections.
‘We youthman in ghetto’
Most young men in my research conflate family, neighbourhood and community and imagine these as decidedly female spaces to which they can forge belonging only through male providership. They position themselves as youth in society (Rasmussen and van Stapele Reference Rasmussen and van Stapele2020) but as men in ‘their’ community.
In February 2017, Hasso, a twenty-one-year-old man from Majengo, an informal settlement in Pumwani in Nairobi, reflected on the position of youth in society as follows: ‘We youth are in prison now, we youth we need a future.’ Many of the young men discussed here have been raised by single mothers and have accessed long-term, though tenuous, work opportunities (such as distilling alcohol and selling heroin) through connections with female relatives and neighbours. A majority of their older male relatives and neighbours had died (of AIDS, alcohol addiction or police bullets), or had moved to other neighbourhoods and even to rural areas. So, the ideal of the provider marks their identification as men in their ‘communities’, and this contrasts with their identification as youth in ‘society’ following their distinctions between ‘society’ and ‘community’, suggesting that mainstream ‘society’ inherently excludes these kinds of ‘communities’. Nevertheless, they do conceptualize a distinction between msee (which generally means ‘young man’ in Sheng) and mzee (‘older man’ or ‘elder’ in Kiswahili). Inspired by dancehall music, a friend of Hasso later said to me, with a clear Jamaican drawl: ‘We youthman in ghetto, we serve our community.’ Being a ‘youthman’, however, turned out to be a fragile endeavour for most, imbued with anxiety over foreclosed opportunities.Footnote 5
The term ‘prison’ used by Hasso offers an insight into how he, and many others like him, experience his social, economic and political situation in society as one of confinement, seemingly without power to change or move beyond this position. Hasso's use of ‘prison’ resonates with a state of social arrest among young people in Africa often described by the term ‘waithood’; this was first coined by Singerman (Reference Singerman2007) and further developed by Honwana (Reference Honwana2012). This term denotes ‘waiting for adulthood’ and implies a liminal space in which young people are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults. This notion may be helpful to understand young men in Kenyan society to some degree, yet it loses analytical purchase when exploring their positions and practices with regard to their ‘community’. Here, the position of msee, also articulated as being a ‘youthman’, is considered a social phase on its own, and not just a liminal space between two social categories. Junior men in Nairobi ‘ghettos’ are adult men who are husbands and fathers and who perform other (junior) male duties within the (predominantly female) family and community set-up. However, as they grow older, the danger that their position as ‘socially dead’ (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2016) in society spills over and also circumscribes their position in their communities becomes more imminent. It is in light of their anxieties about a feared inability to transition from msee to mzee as they grow older that these men in particular use the term ‘hustling’ to express their strife while enacting the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai2013) and to imagine themselves as very much alive and capable.
Here, a particular cultural practice and rite of passage is worth noting. Most young men in Nairobi settlements move from a position of boyhood into one of junior manhood through the ritual of circumcision. Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork and during my years of research, I have discussed circumcision with over forty young men from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds in low-income neighbourhoods in Nairobi. A majority of ethnic groups in Kenya practise male circumcision as a rite of passage for boys between the ages of eight and sixteen (Spronk Reference Spronk2012: 96, 181–6). The performance of this rite is not set in stone; rather, it varies immensely according to ethnic group, social class, and the urban or rural setting. In mtaa (Swahili for neighbourhood, often used intermittently with ‘ghetto’ in Sheng), it is common for circumcised young men to leave their family home and live together.Footnote 6
In the first few years after circumcision, most of these young men are not yet expected to contribute financially to the family household, although they do chores such as fetching water in the morning or picking up younger siblings from school, and they perhaps chip in for school fees for their brothers and sisters. In return, however, they cannot rely on being catered for, even though they still occasionally join in with family meals. In February 2017, Hasso shared the following with me:
When I was twelve [after circumcision], I had to depend on myself; all of my friends here in [the] ghetto, they share rooms from twelve, thirteen, fourteen – you can no longer depend on your family. You look up to thieves because they have nice clothes and beautiful ladies. You want that, you want to be them, you want to join them. It is very easy to join in crime. You see your sister, she stays at home and helps with cooking, she is eating a nice lunch, but you have to hustle for yourself.
Hasso describes how some young men have to fend for themselves from a very young age, and these experiences set them apart from their families and particularly from their siblings. His reference to his sister illustrates that his conception of hustling expresses an experience of comparative hardship. All the young men in my research used the term hustling to express similar experiences of comparative hardship while growing up. Such memories were often narrated with a combination of pride and pain – pride in surviving such hardship and pain about the lack of support and guidance from family and elders. In this usage, hustling not only connotes engaging in particular practices, as in something one does, but also expresses sentiments about such practices and perhaps even about life in general.
At eighteen or nineteen years old, many young men feel that they could not visit their (often single) mothers without bringing some shopping with them or without leaving money behind for rent and school fees for their siblings. Hence, they forge belonging to their family homes through providing, and some young men experienced acute pain over this. The hustle narratives of the young men in this article tell of constant oscillations between pride and pain, between trying and giving up, and of the shifting agentive possibilities and limitations of the baze (groups that are often perceived as gangs). Tensions between pride and pain are not resolved; rather, they are constantly navigated and made productive through hustling imaginaries. Pain was sometimes the source of pride while at other times it was just too much to bear.
Hasso stared into the distance, seemingly contemplating his hardship, and then suddenly he looked up and said: ‘Money, eh, you are constantly hustling, looking for money, everywhere, anywhere, you look for work, anything, to get some money. You can do anything to get money so you can go to your mother and buy some food for her and go home.’ Accordingly, hustling, for Hasso and for other men, also meant looking for work and being open to ‘doing anything’ to ‘get money’; this tightly ties hustling practices to popular ideas of manhood, as will become clearer below.
Hustlers and fools
Hustling as theorized and practised by young men in Nairobi settlements, and as it pertains to positions of junior manhood, is imbued with contestations that also shape relationships between them. Such everyday negotiations of hustling allow deeper insights into its local varieties and how these may underlie tensions between particular individuals and groups. This was illustrated by One Touch, an alcohol-distilling baze in Mathare, when it tried to develop a ‘savings and loans’ group. The youth at this baze organized their work of distilling alcohol together, but they desperately wanted to become independent from the baze by setting up individual micro-businesses. To achieve the latter, the baze members engaged former members who had become independent. A closer look at the conflicts that arose in the process sheds light on the shifting boundaries of what hustling means to differently positioned men – in this case current and former baze members.
The hustle in mtaa is often a collective practice, frequently illicit, sometimes illegal and always imbued with rivalry and uncertainty. Faced with a daily struggle to ‘get money’ (kupata doh in Sheng), young men in Nairobi settlements engage in all kinds of work (Thieme Reference Thieme2013; Ference Reference Ference2016) throughout the day and night: this ranges from unloading trucks, brokering stolen goods and dealing drugs to working in waste management or in public transport, and is topped up by many with sports betting. Some work is organized collectively as a baze, such as alcohol distilling, whereas other types of work, such as selling coffee, are more individual endeavours. Despite its predominant criminal connotations, the baze is an emic term that refers locally to a network of friends – generally age mates who live in the same neighbourhood – and to the particular site where they tend to hang out (Githinji Reference Githinji2006). At the baze, friends chat, smoke, drink, chew khat, gamble (using cards) and organize access to work together, and each baze has its own name. Most bazes are dominated by young men, although mixed bazes and exclusively female bazes also exist. In prevailing views, concepts such as baze and ‘gang’ have become conflated and epitomized by ‘the thug’, making them all targets for police brutality (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2016). Yet, the rather fluid groups belonging to the bazes where I conduct most of my research can perhaps best be understood as organizations of work (collective and long-term work as well as odd jobs and casual labour) within a context of urban precarity (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2015; Thieme Reference Thieme2013; Reference Thieme2018). Alongside collective work and casual labour, almost all bazes are also engaged in some type of ‘savings and loans’ scheme (chama in Swahili) to help members set up private micro-businesses and become economically independent from the baze.
One morning in early October 2010 in Mathare, I carefully descended the narrow pathway to rowe (riverside in the Kikuyu language). I met a few alcohol distillers who forcibly grabbed my arms and shouted excitedly in my face. They dragged me along the rocky, slippery alleyway and sat me down on an empty jerrycan near the steel drums. With admiration, I watched a young man adjusting the fires of two drums below me while I caught my breath. I remember thinking how incredibly difficult this work must be, and then it hit me: only two drums! Normally, this site had at least six lined up. Lately, however, the work had seemed to be steadily declining.
This part of Mathare, Bondeni, is known for chang'aa, an illegally distilled alcohol, and most of the 10,000 residents living here are engaged in work that is directly or indirectly connected to this highly lucrative industry (van Stapele Reference van Stapele2015). Alongside the countless bars scattered all over Bondeni, other businesses focus on the wholesale distribution of this alcohol to other parts of Nairobi or on bringing in firewood to fuel the twenty-four-hour economy of chang'aa production. Bondeni is divided into distinct parts, each with a ‘kitchen’ at the riverside where the alcohol for that specific area is produced. Each kitchen has different teams working for particular bosses, and all the teams working at one site form a baze.
That day in October, the One Touch baze members all crouched around me. Motion smiled at me, his face only a few inches from mine, so I could smell the stale alcohol on his breath: ‘All we need here is ideas. We lack ideas, you can give us ideas.’ The rising sun lit up his scarred face, and his bloodshot eyes beamed with eagerness – and with something else. Like most of the baze members, he had woken up to the shaking hands that only a glass of chang'aa can alleviate. Cosmos interrupted impatiently: ‘We want to be a group like before and start a business. Chang'aa is down, ngutu [‘sugar waste’ in Swahili] is too expensive. What do you think we can do to change this life?’ He gestured to the two drums: ‘This is not a life!’
After brainstorming with them for the entire morning, the baze members decided that they wanted to set up a chama, a savings and loans group, to help individual members start up their own businesses and gradually gain independence from their bosses. Their ideas varied from opening their own chang'aa den to selling second-hand clothes or becoming a manicurist. Kingi was a former One Touch alcohol distiller and now worked as a trained social worker in different community-led development programmes in Mathare. Motion and Cosmos asked him to train them in business skills. Economic independence – that is, being your own boss – was considered locally a key step to eventually achieving senior manhood.
Early on during the training, tensions emerged around ideas of junior manhood. Kingi and two other trainers portrayed themselves as janja (‘streetwise’ in Sheng, a trait they associated with the figure of the hustla) and increasingly judged the current baze members as mafala (‘fools’ in Sheng). This is an extremely offensive term, because it denotes men who lack the masculine power to perform ujanjess (‘streetwise-ness’), which is considered crucial for hustling with its emphasis on being alert, focused, creative and ready to recognize and make use of emerging opportunities when and where these arise.
One afternoon in a Nairobi park, in November 2010, Kingi recounted how he had struggled to leave chang'aa in late 2007, explaining how he had felt stuck while distilling chang'aa seven days a week for nine years. ‘Sometimes weeks passed,’ he lamented with a sad smile on his face, ‘without going up the cliffs to the main road and see vehicles pass by.’ Some of the men sitting around Kingi murmured in recognition and agreement, and one of them said that he felt as if he were in a prison called rowe. Motion responded that it was ‘OK to brew for a short period to build a life [as a junior man]’, but he also shared that he now felt like he was going nowhere as there were very few opportunities for young men who were growing older like him. Most of them woke at four in the morning to make their way to the distilling site near the river to face a day – come rain or shine – either of waiting for work at the baze or of backbreaking work that earned them no more than KSh 30 (just over £0.20) an hour.
During the training sessions, the current group members opened up about their fear of the future and their complete lack of hope. Their anticipation of such bleak ‘social horizons’ (Vigh Reference Vigh2006: 30) at times triggered a sense of powerlessness among these young men, and many dared not think of tomorrow. Motion said: ‘Leo ni leo, kesho ni baadaye [‘Today is today, and tomorrow is later’ in Swahili], and you don't think of tomorrow because you are scared.’ The struggle between the hustler and the fool centres on the courage to imagine a (better) future. A hustler, as Kingi put it, ‘has to stay alert and focused [kukaa rada in Sheng] and take opportunities’ to build tomorrow (see also Vigh Reference Vigh2011; Jeffrey and Young Reference Jeffrey and Young2014), whereas the group members persistently emphasized that they had no power to change their situation because there were no opportunities. However, this, the current baze members claimed, did not mean that they were fools. At one point Kingi said to Cosmos: ‘You, ha, OK so there is no work so you drink to forget your problems and not think of tomorrow … You have problems because you have no work, but you don't get work when you drink!’ This evidently made Cosmos's head spin and he looked at me with his big, misty eyes: ‘Naomi, do you think I would drink if there would be work?’
A rift between the trainers on the one hand and the other participants on the other became increasingly evident and led to frequent outbursts during meetings, until the project was stopped by Motion and Cosmos, who scolded Kingi and the other trainers for treating them like fools. The trainers consistently emphasized that there were always prospects, and they equated not being able to see and seize them with being a fool and not a hustler. To them, the fool is slowly trapped in the space of the baze (see, for example, De Boeck and Plissart Reference De Boeck and Plissart2004: 181), yet the current baze members resisted this label with fervour and continued to point to the lack of opportunities to explain their plight while reaffirming themselves as hustlers. To them, they were still trying, but they merely lacked opportunities. Yet the trainers did not accept them as hustlers because in their view the baze members had stopped trying. Kingi expounded: ‘Without hope there is only death; you can't stop trying.’ The fear of death always compelled the hustler back into action (see also Vigh Reference Vigh2011) – to stubbornly try, because, as the trainers told me, it is in the act of trying that the true hustler reveals himself.
Popular conceptualizations of hustling refer to making do with what is on offer, although there are important variations and tensions between differently positioned men (e.g. the participants versus the trainers). Their reflections also often include ‘having focus’, which indicates having one's eyes set on the social horizon and keeping the ambition of senior manhood and providership in mind and sight, while navigating a perilous present. Emphasizing the act of navigating, and not necessarily the effect of social navigation, was a significant mode for hustlers to traverse such immediate and volatile currents of possibilities and constraints (Vigh Reference Vigh2006). The hustler is predominantly imagined by these young men as always on the move in the present while thinking about the future – plotting, scheming, creating and carving out possibilities from a position of purported comparative disadvantage. The imagined counter-position of the fool instead suggests someone who stands still and looks only at today because tomorrow is too frightful to think about – thus implying a loss of hope and eventually of life itself. Fear of becoming perceived as the fool, a ‘lesser man’, drives the movements of the hustler and congeals his commitment to not give up and to always try harder and harder, whatever the odds. Accordingly, imagining themselves as hustlers allows men to aspire and take key steps along their path to senior manhood.
The baze as refuge
In contrast to the above, the baze represents a space of confinement not only for men who keep growing older without the means to leave it. A few men have left and returned to the baze as a space of refuge.
In April 2011, Blue and Malik, two heroin dealers from Kosovo, another ‘village’ in Mathare, were discussing their lives as newlyweds, both proud fathers of young babies. Malik's wife had just finished her maternity leave and had gone back to work that day as a hairdresser in the city centre, and Malik explained that he would not ask his wife about her income. Blue nodded in agreement and exclaimed: ‘You know what we say? Ha ha – chake ni chake, changu ni chenu [what is hers is hers, what is mine is yours]. So yes, we need to provide and they can ask us for anything. Even for hair!’ Blue here deliberately used chenu (‘yours’ in the plural sense), which signifies the multiple responsibilities many of these men feel towards their mothers, wives, children, etc. Blue and Malik laughed and tried to trump each other by confessing to the extraordinary items they had paid for for their wives, which varied from beauty and styling products to school fees for siblings-in-law.
Yet, Malik remained strikingly silent during this discussion about the fact that he had recently paid off a KSh 40,000 (£285) debt for his wife, which was money he had saved up to use to pay a part of the bridewealth (locally dubbed ‘dowry’ or mahari in Swahili) to his mother-in-law. On top of this, Malik had recently replaced a perfectly good sofa because his wife preferred a different style, requiring the spending of another KSh 25,000 (£180) within the space of three months. These are just a couple of examples of the money Malik spent, seemingly at the request of his wife, on items and commitments that included things, such as the sofa, that are commonly deemed to be luxuries in Mathare. Accordingly, he was already heavily in debt with several local savings groups on the day his prematurely born twin daughters were discharged from the hospital. He paid the hospital bills by taking on even more loans from different savings groups in different localities to avoid exposure. This was a highly dangerous endeavour, because these groups generally had no hesitation about involving the police in order to settle outstanding loans. Indeed, many people have ended up in prison through such acts. Malik thus took exceptional risks, because he imagined himself as the sole provider:
My wife, she thinks she can be the head because she makes more money. She works in town, and is proud. But even if she makes more money, I am the husband. She can give me advice, but I am the head; the neck can't take over the head. I can't give her permission to do what she wants, she can't take that freedom. Money is not the head of the house. But she thinks it is. She makes more money, she wants to complain, so we fight. She thinks money is the head of the house, but I am.
Malik went out of his way to show his wife and others that he was able to provide food, rent, furniture and clothes, and take his young family on lavish outings, and should thus be regarded as a man and the head of the house according to popular notions of manhood. The modes in which he and many other young ‘ghetto’ men continued to affirm the role of the provider against all odds stemmed from a deep desire to feel in charge despite – or perhaps precisely because of – their position as ‘socially dead’. It was not long before Malik and his wife were arguing over money almost every night, and one day he came back home from work in early 2012 to find his house completely empty; his wife had left him for a wealthier man and she had taken their daughters and literally everything else in the home.
Even after failing to live up to his wife's expectations, as well as his own, Malik continued to endow this dominant standard with certainty and judged himself accordingly. This was further affirmed by the way in which his family and neighbours (‘his community’) appraised him according to this standard. To compensate for his failed status as a man in his community, he invested increasing amounts of money and time in dressing well and going out with Blue and other friends. He went to reggae clubs, football matches in city stadiums and even to Uganda to watch the Harambee Stars (Kenya's national team) lose against Uganda's national team. Facing more and more obstacles, Malik increasingly sought refuge in the space of the baze, investing valuable resources in concomitant bonding practices. He often defaulted on rent, and he slept on the concrete floor because his wife had taken their bed. Yet he continued to go out, spending beyond his means, dressing in a stylish manner because, as he put it: ‘I can't lose my value; I have to look smart to keep my value as a man in [the] ghetto – ha ha – kuwaonyesha picha poa [‘to show them a good picture’ in Sheng].’ He went out of his way to show his friends and fellow baze members that he was still a hustla. After losing almost everything in life, dressing well and going out with his baze members became two of the only modes available to Malik to perform the hustla and maintain some kind of social status as a man, at least in the eyes of his peers.
His performance of conspicuous consumption (Newell Reference Newell2012) was to some extent an illusion of success that was designed to hide, at least from his friends, that he was not successful according to other circumscribed standards of masculinity. However, his skilful demonstration of urban swag (‘style’ in Sheng) in fashion, action and speech was widely admired among his peers, and feeling a fala (a fool) in his community – his mostly female family and neighbours – made him invest all his energy in trying to at least keep his ‘value’, as he put it, with his male peers. So, dressing, talking and acting swag are significant modes through which young men like Malik are able to claim power in relation to peers inside and outside mtaa. With great skill and enthusiasm, Malik observed the styles of dancehall, international hip-hop and many other types of Black Atlantic music cultures, as well as of wealthier Kenyan youths. He appropriated, incorporated, imitated and restyled elements, thus constantly broadening his registers of possibility. Using fashion, he sometimes intentionally downplayed his putative ‘ghettoness’ by switching codes and using styles from different cultural repertoires. He told me that he liked to confuse people and impress rich girls, and his sense of style helped him navigate the cityscape without too much police interference. Dressing a certain way, he discovered, even fooled the police, as they too considered him to be mpunk (‘a rich and trendy young person’ in Sheng). Such aesthetic practices (Durrant and Lord Reference Durrant and Lord2007) and their affective dimensions (Berlant Reference Berlant2011; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014) illustrate the imaginative acts that allow young men like Malik to keep ‘the fool’ at bay, even if only to some extent. His fear of failing as a man in the last space he felt was left to him, the baze, made him desperately invested in performing success. His ‘show’ of success, however, required money he did not have.
One night, Malik was persuaded by some of his friends to join a group of other young men who had planned a hijack on a City Hoppa bus (a privately owned, large public transport bus) in the city centre. Malik was so deep in debt that, in his words, he ‘could not resist the temptation of easy money’. During the robbery, the group of five young men from Mathare, Kariobangi and Dandora attempted to take phones and other valuables from the passengers, but, unfortunately for them, one happened to be an armed policeman in plain clothes who instantly started shooting at them. They all fled on foot in different directions, except for one of them: Malik's best friend was shot dead on the spot. Shaking away the tears in his eyes, Malik narrated this incident to me right after it had happened:
Here [in Mathare] we are mahustla; we don't belong to the city, we belong here, this is our university. There is nothing for us out there, we have to survive, to hustle … here. I can't go to tao [‘city centre’ in Sheng] and feel like I belong there. I can try to fit, but I know I don't fit. I have to be rada [‘alert’ in Sheng], not like mapunk who belong there. You know, I am proud to be ghetto, we are together. I have learned everything here. But you feel pain, why do we have to live like this? We can just be chased like that and you don't know. Where can we go? And we see the big houses just here … in Muthaiga [a very wealthy neighbourhood across from Mathare that houses diplomats, embassies and UN employees]. We can't reach that, but I will, one day. I will drive my own car.
Malik emphasized the difference between ‘the city’ and ‘the ghetto’ by explaining his belonging to ‘the ghetto’ while also uttering his desire to belong to ‘the city’. This distinction resonates with the already mentioned difference young men imagine between society and community. He simultaneously expressed hope and the lack of hope, and he decisively situated hustling in the space of the ‘ghetto’, mtaa, by contrasting it with a wealthier neighbourhood, again accentuating both pain and pride (see also Simone Reference Simone2015). Mobility is deeply valued as part of hustling, while spatial, social and temporal boundaries constantly weigh these young men down, slow them in their tracks and break through the ‘cool pose’ (Majors and Billson Reference Majors and Billson1993; Spraggins Reference Spraggins1999). Despite constant setbacks, these young men continue to be highly invested in showing their friends, family and neighbours that they are going places, in space, time and status. Being able to move and progress is at the core of popular masculine ideals captured in the hustla position. The hustla is always moving towards a discursively circumscribed point on the horizon, on which aspirations of economic, social and political independence are projected. He is driven along his path by the male responsibility to provide and the desire to belong – that is, until a police bullet stops him dead in his tracks (MSJC 2017).
Conclusion
As this article argues, taking the emic term ‘hustling’ to analyse experiences, practices and trajectories among urban poor young men allows us an insight into the gendered dimension of hardship in contexts of broader structures of urban marginalization and precarity. From the perspective of poor young men in underserviced and highly scrutinized neighbourhoods in Nairobi, hustling revealed itself as a relational concept bringing into view gendered aspirations and expectations. These converge in situated experiences of comparative hardship and shape deeply embodied masculine positions and practices. Hustling thus captures particular types of experiences and practices of growing up and becoming a young man in these neighbourhoods, experiences that are imbued with an unsettling mixture of pride and pain.
My interlocutors’ experiences of comparative hardship as young boys (relative, for instance, to their sisters) became a running thread tying together their experiences and practices as young men throughout their life trajectories. This is not to suggest that other social groups, including young women, do not face extreme struggles of their own – or, indeed, that they do not hustle in other ways – but, in my conversations with them, the young men in this research conveyed experiences of having to fight harder than imagined ‘others’ to achieve the same outcomes through ‘hustling’. Young men feel cut off from and set back within ‘their community’ merely because they are born as boys in ‘the ghetto’.
Strikingly, hustling practices and related positions discussed in this article relate closely to the act of trying and not necessarily to achieving the ultimate status of a senior man. The hustla position informs particular everyday practices, such as getting up early, being open, ready and available to do ‘anything’ to earn money, and investing ever more effort. Imagining the act of trying as the mainstay of the hustler allows these men to claim pride and demand respect, despite the fact that only a few ever achieve the position of senior manhood (in terms of both social status and old age). Even if all other aspects of their lives are contingent on all kinds of volatilities, they can still weka bidii (‘make an effort’ in Swahili). Yet, when trying leads nowhere and young men become paralysed by pain and fear, the hustler as an imaginary proves again a flexible idea that can include a wide variety of dressing, talking and acting swag to enact agency in the space of the baze and with regard to their peers, even if fleetingly. However, swag turns out not to be solid enough to fulfil their desire to ultimately achieve recognition by the women in their lives (their wives, mothers and grandmothers). Given that they feel that ‘society’ is already out of bounds, these men crave recognition by the (mostly) women who, in their view, embody ‘their’ community.
Most of the young men featured in this article constantly shifted their positioning and practices along the way and reconfigured the hustler on the go to accommodate temporal feelings of powerlessness. As such, they constructed new and unfolding meanings. Hence, identifying as a hustler enabled these young men to challenge their dehumanization in society and reposition themselves in their communities as very much alive and capable of aspiring to and creating new, dignified meanings for their individual lives, their contemporary social worlds and their longed-for futures. Such imaginative acts constituted by and constituting hustling reveal how agency emerges in situations of extreme marginalization and dehumanization, thus opening up avenues to explore the creation of social worlds against the grain of mainstream society in highly marginalized settings in African cities and worldwide.
