Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi - (Making & Remaking the African City: Studies in Urban Africa) by Mario Schmidt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Examines how young male migrants in urban Nairobi navigate the tension between expectations of success and repetitive failure.

Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi's marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes.

Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya's capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces - an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood - this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity.

This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.

Review Quotes

Fascinating, thought-provoking, crucial ethnography of masculinity in the context of youth, aspiration, and structural precarity. The details matter and the stories are vivid, sympathetic, and critical. You can feel the pressure of life in Nairobi's high-rise tenement housing. This book charts new territory for masculinity, migration, and urban studies in Africa.--Bettina Ng'weno "Associate Professor, UC Davis"

This astute book that combines Schmidt's well-written personal narrations with intercalary sections adds insights to important social and political discussions given the ongoing debate on (rural-urban) migration.-- "PEOPLE DAILY"

Ethnographically rich and revealing, this highly readable book brings alive the experiences of Nairobi's migrant men at home and in the workplace, among family and friends, and with women and male peers. In vivid, accessible prose and with obvious empathy, Mario Schmidt shows how economic constraints and social obstacles constantly frustrate-but never extinguish-his interlocutors' desires to live up to widely shared expectations of manhood.--Daniel Jordan Smith

In this engrossing and highly readable ethnography, Schmidt traces the changing contours of gender relations among migrants to Nairobi. Both theoretically grounded and ethnographically nuanced, the book sheds important light on how men navigate the relentless anxieties and pressures that mark their day to day lives. Few studies offer such an intimate and textured portrayal of urban lives on the continent.--Catherine Dolan "Professor of Anthropology, SOAS, University of London"