Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi is a highly readable, intimate ethnography focused on rural-to-urban migrant men's efforts to fulfil their hopes and expectations for success in the city. Through rich storytelling, Mario Schmidt brings the reader into the everyday lives of his male interlocutors, whom he came to befriend and know well by living as their neighbour for over a year in a massive, recently built, bustling area of high-rise apartment buildings. Despite its scale, and maybe in part because of its population density, men in these new urban spaces formed tightknit social networks that offered crucial opportunities for mutual support. At the same time, the masculine spaces, activities and relationships served as distractions from the ubiquitous and nearly impossible-to-fulfil pressures to earn significant incomes to provide for others, especially women and children.
Schmidt employs the term ‘pressure’ as the book's key concept to frame and analyse the intersection of aspirations, obligations and frustrations experienced by the men he studied in contemporary Kenya. One of the author's most compelling insights is the observation – backed by extensive evidence – that the pressure men feel to perform expected masculine roles is not simply imposed on them by women, by male peers or by society more generally; rather, men themselves desire the very things that others expect of them. Indeed, the conceptual leverage that ‘pressure’ brings to Schmidt's analysis builds precisely on its capacity to render complexity and contradiction as central features of migrant men's daily lives.
The book is organized in two parts. The first examines the ways that migrants in the high-rise housing estate experienced pressure in the often-intertwining arenas of economic advancement and romance. Success in each requires one thing above all else: money. The book's up-close accounts showcase men's enterprising initiatives and their insecurities and failures vis-à-vis the imperative need for money. Men's entrepreneurial enterprises and efforts to find gainful employment are inextricably entangled with their pursuit of women. Even as most men subscribe to the dominant idea that the ultimate measure of manhood is the capacity to support a wife and children, men also commonly blame women for being obsessed with money, depicting them as the main source of the stressful demands that men experience.
The second part of the book includes three chapters that show how men evaded the pressures to earn and share money, activities that Schmidt labels as ‘wasteful masculinity’. One was a kind of rotating savings association or investment group that in fact served as an excuse for men to fraternize, mostly while drinking alcohol, without the encumbrances of girlfriends, wives and children. Another was an all-male gym where men lifted weights together. The third was a realm of so-called masculinity counsellors, some with celebrity status and known to Schmidt's friends through books and media, but others being local men offering face-to-face advice – much of which blamed women for men's woes.
One of the most intriguing elements of the ethnography – and the source of much of its depth and its sense of authenticity – is the extent of the author's participation in the full range of his interlocutors’ masculine activities. Schmidt is quite clear about how he spent much of his time during fieldwork, and he is candid about some of his ambivalence regarding men's discourse and behaviours vis-à-vis women. Nevertheless, I still wondered about his position as an ethnographer as it related to his interlocutors’ relationships with women, both their actual connections and their ideas and expectations about womanhood and femininity more generally. The book left me with the impression that Schmidt did not often overtly push back against men's sometimes quite misogynistic views and portrayals of women. But it strikes me that the trust he established with his friends, neighbours and other associates might have enabled him to challenge them in constructive ways – which may not have changed their gendered politics but might have yielded additional insights.
Finally, in several places throughout the book, Schmidt suggests – quite correctly, in my view – that blaming women for the pressures men face about money serves to protect the dominant capitalist political-economic order by displacing the object of critique such that the larger system is left unchallenged. The book is in many ways highly persuasive about this point, primarily by giving readers enough ethnographic detail to draw their own conclusions. A bit more about why (in addition to how) men blame women rather than the larger political economy for their predicament would have enhanced what is already an absorbing and insightful book.
