It was 3.30 a.m. in Huruma, a low-income residential estate located near Mathare, one of the oldest and largest informal settlements of Nairobi.Footnote 1 Kennedy, the youth group leader of an area known as Kibichoi base, along with two other group members, Mathenge and Elias, were conducting their bi-weekly rounds of garbage collection. Eliza had lent me her overalls and gloves. There were fifteen plots to collect from (most are eight-storey walk-ups, a couple are shanty structures), and we had until 8 a.m. to finish. Kamba music played loudly from the local bars, where sex workers stood outside waiting for customers, and boda boda (motorcycle) drivers sat for another smoke. From outside we could see the shadows of drunken souls having a last drink inside the bar. Kennedy and his crew passed by the slow nocturnal pace of things with bemusement and fervour as they pulled their handcarts past the bars where men would drink until dawn. Different nocturnal spaces, sounds and rhythms of labour (Crang Reference Crang, May and Thrift2001) co-mingled and coexisted, each supplying a different service, largely invisible to slumbering residents.
An hour later, around 5 a.m., a ribbon of light appeared under the doors of ground-floor dwellings as some of the mamas started their morning chores, cleaning, going through the multiple steps involved in making morning tea (fire, boiling water, boiling milk, tea leaves, stirring constantly). It was still dark but the night was over, giving way to the crescendo of the morning bustle. Tilted young bodies left flip-flop footprints in the dirt paths as their slight frames carried heavy jerry-cans of water fetched from the local water points; uneven wooden tables were set up as working surfaces for the first hour of preparation involved in making mandazis (fried dough) and chapatis (flat bread) – mixing the flour, oil and water, working the dough, and separating out the small balls of dough before frying. Near the Kibichoi primary school, the water point and the corner where collected garbage was stacked until the truck arrived to take it away, Geoffrey's mandazi table was well frequented. He had been making and selling mandazis for the past twenty-eight years, and his attention to his craft was coupled with efficiency and dexterity. Without precise measurement he managed to make each small ball of dough equal in size to all the others, forming uniform hand-cut triangular shapes that became differentiated only once they flared up in the hot oil before being carefully displayed in the wooden crate next to the working table. This small business included every stage of production, a one-man assembly line marked by speed and calm.
Myriad forms of behind-the-scenes labour harmonized and provided the backdrop for the rest of the day's economic and social activity, with a collective understanding that something might fall through. In Nairobi, it is common (even expected) that infrastructures and services might break down, so disruption and all manner of crises are the norm (Mbembe and Roitman Reference Mbembe and Roitman1995). Constant adaptation thus becomes vital to people's skill sets and a modality not just for everyday maintenance but for urban life tout court. Despite water shortages and the mornings when the garbage truck doesn't arrive on time (or at all), people's orientation towards work and life involves keeping choreographies of the day moving no matter what. The prep time for mandazis could not be delayed, or Geoffrey would miss the first flurry of customers on their way to school or work. Garbage collection had to happen on schedule, even if the truck wasn't going to arrive on time.
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The vignette above offers a window onto the social forms of labour (Hart Reference Hart2009) that are intimately entangled with everyday uncertainties, urban street culture and ecologies of belonging in neighbourhoods cut off from mainstream urban services, waged employment and political representation. In these neighbourhoods, a significant source of income generation for youth involves collecting, sorting, reselling and recycling post-consumer residential waste. These home-grown waste economies are increasingly common across rapidly growing cities in the global South where ‘urbanization without industrialization’ (Davis Reference Davis2006) has generated a vicious cycle of largely informal and erratic earnings, a minimal tax base, and public under-investment in basic services (Parnell and Pieterse Reference Parnell and Pieterse2012; Myers Reference Myers2005). Yet, as recent ethnographies of urban waste labour have shown, closer attention needs to be paid to the relationship waste workers living and working in marginalized neighbourhoods have to the urban economy, and to the city (Fredericks Reference Fredericks2019; Millar Reference Millar2018).
This article opens up and develops the conceptual frames for seeing and theorizing urban life and labour in popular neighbourhoodsFootnote 2 (Simone Reference Simone2018), at the nexus of urban marginality and possibility (Di Nunzio Reference Di Nunzio2019). It deepens familiar theories that have conceptualized economic relationships structurally excluded from state regulation and support (Breman Reference Breman2013; Hart Reference Hart1973; Standing Reference Standing2011; Neilson and Rossiter Reference Neilson and Rossiter2008; Vosko Reference Vosko2000; Waite Reference Waite2009) – notably, informality, precarity and makeshift urbanism (Vasudevan Reference Vasudevan2015). It enhances conceptualizations of work beyond the wage (Ferguson and Li Reference Ferguson and Li2018), contributing to theorizations of ‘making do’, ‘getting by’ and débrouillardise (Jones Reference Jones2010; Richardson and Skott-Myhre Reference Richardson and Skott-Myhre2012; Mabala Reference Mabala2011; McKensie Reference McKensie2015; Waage Reference Waage, Christiansen, Utas and Vigh2006), with a particular focus on the ‘rhythms of endurance’ (Simone Reference Simone2018) and place-making in popular urban neighbourhoods in African cities. As Simone explains, ‘no matter how improvised, lives need to be held, supported. They need a somewhere in which to take place’ (Simone Reference Simone2018: 4). Drawing on Simone's attention to both rhythms and places of improvisation and endurance, this article builds on my previous writing on Nairobi's hustle economy and informal waste labour (Thieme Reference Thieme2010; Reference Thieme2013; Reference Thieme2015; Reference Thieme and Lancione2016; Reference Thieme2017) by focusing on the temporal and spatial dimensions of hustling, the rhythms and the ‘somewhere’ in which ‘improvised lives’ take place. By exploring the temporalities and terrains of hustling, following over a decade of ongoing ethnographic engagement in specific sub-neighbourhoods of Mathare and youth groups who live and work there, I investigate how hustling as a narrative and an urban practice evolves over time within particular neighbourhoods, and how the specific conditions of urban life work with, but also confront, ever-shifting economic, political and social (dis)orders.
This article centres on a group of youth born and raised in Mathare, and examines their modes of self-representation, belonging, calculation, place-making, accumulation and endurance over time. In this life world, my interlocutors refer to the social forms of urban life and labour as a ‘hustle’ (Thieme Reference Thieme2013; Reference Thieme2017). Used in everyday street Sheng Footnote 3 in Nairobi (Githiora Reference Githiora2018), hustling carries a performative function, a shared language reflecting local codes and affirmations of one's street credibility. As such, from an etic perspective, hustling reveals the strategies and pragmatics of young people cut off from mainstream structures of opportunity and support as they negotiate their relationships to different institutions across diverse terrains situated along the formal–informal, licit–illicit continuum (Hart Reference Hart2009).Footnote 4 As an urban practice, it involves resourcefulness that is profoundly fragile and full of risks, but also capable of yielding surprising rewards. As an expressive articulation, it is a way for youth to theorize, celebrate, lament and share their own experience of social and economic navigation and endurance under conditions of adversity and uncertainty (Caldeira Reference Caldeira2010; Cooper and Pratten Reference Cooper and Pratten2014; Vigh Reference Vigh2006; Simone Reference Simone2018). Thus, the hustle economy is both a narrative and an urban practice of shared struggles and solidarities grounded in street-oriented knowledge. As the article illustrates, it encapsulates rhythms of resourcefulness, diverse adaptations and contingency plans in the face of constant interruptions, uncertain returns, potential breakdown and marginalization.
Hustling has several descriptive and analytical registers. To echo Gautam Bhan (Reference Bhan2019), paying attention to ‘articulations of knowledge’ embedded in the empirical contexts we try to understand as ethnographers enables what he calls a ‘Southern urban practice’. Bhan discusses the notions and practice of ‘squatting’ and ‘repair’ to show how these familiar but often underrated or stigmatized terms and practices are rooted in the real expressions of makeshift urbanism and should be recognized as instrumental in shaping urban modes of dwelling, resources and skills that merit validation and reconsideration. Similar to ‘squatting’ and ‘repair’, the emic use of the term hustling in Kenya serves as a local articulation of and response to economic precarity and urban marginality in the face of protracted uneven development under neoliberalism (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006). Building on my previous conceptualization of the ‘hustle economy’ (Thieme Reference Thieme2017), and as the introduction to this special issue elaborates (Thieme et al. Reference Thieme, Ference and van Stapele2021), hustling can be read as a ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993) performative expression of what Gibson-Graham (Reference Gibson-Graham2008) has called ‘diverse economies’, reflecting different ways of performing the economy and situated ways of knowing and expressing everyday struggles and solidarities in the face of uncertain urban terrains and unpredictable temporalities of labour.
Over the years, Nairobi youth from under-resourced neighbourhoods have been lured into various government youth employment and ‘empowerment’ schemes, such as Kazi kwa vijana (Work for Youth) following the post-election violence in 2008 (Thieme Reference Thieme2010), or the National Youth Service (NYS), originally set up in 1964 and restructured in 2014 by the recent Kenyatta administration. But the nepotism, short-term contracts and delays in pay have consistently drawn youth back to neighbourhood-based livelihoods. For example, the benefits associated with residential garbage collection and recycling included the freedom to work on one's own terms and the refusal to be, as youth in Mathare claimed, ‘someone else's donkey’. This expression had a double meaning: it was a critique of the modes of colonial subservience that they perceived in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, who had laboured either for the ‘white British settlers’ or the Wahindi (Indian Kenyan) businessmen, and a perception of the exploitation they would experience (or knew their peers to experience) working in the industrial sector for insecure wages in degrading conditions.
The article draws from longitudinal ethnographic encounters with key interlocutors whose stories and trajectories I have followed since 2009. These ‘portraits’ (Jeffrey and Dyson Reference Jeffrey and Dyson2009) reveal the diffuse forms of knowledge, barriers and dreamscapes that animate the everyday lives and imaginaries of young people in a ‘position of marginality’ (Honwana and De Boeck Reference Honwana and De Boeck2005: 5). By examining how a group of youth cope with and subvert this position of marginality, the article reflects on the paradoxical condition of youth who constantly adjust to the dual sense of being stuck and unstable at the same time (Honwana Reference Honwana2012; Sommers Reference Sommers2012). Through three ethnographic portraits, I depict a set of conundrums connected to the temporal and spatial dimensions of urban life and labour in Mathare: the article explores generational and gendered identities and dynamics, revealing the shifting demands on ‘older’ versus ‘younger’ youth, and sheds light on local logics of wealth redistribution among youth who belong to the same neighbourhood but whose claims to particular resources shift over time. It also examines understandings of place-making and territorial zoning, revealing the ways in which attachment to the neighbourhood ‘base’ (or baze Footnote 5 in Sheng) are contingent on particular social ties and obligations.
Nairobi: city of (unrealized) dreams and hustling terrains
Nairobi exemplifies urban extremes at work. The pace of ICT innovations, speculative urban development and international development interventions contrast with persistent uneven development and systemic inequality. Although Nairobi epitomizes the rapidly changing landscape of twenty-first-century African urbanism, its profound contradictions date back to its colonial past, and inequalities across all domains of urban life have persisted despite the transition from British colonial rule (1899–1963) to Kenyan independence (Wrong Reference Wrong2009).
Since 1899, when Nairobi was known as a ‘white garden city’ and off limits to Africans outside Kibera, the city has continuously contended with the legacies of exclusionary master plans, unregulated real-estate markets, and makeshift infrastructures (Hake Reference Hake1977). During the colonial era, Kenya's primary wealth was based on its agricultural production. Nairobi itself lacked an industrial economy, so the majority of economic activity in the city depended on migrant service-sector work (White Reference White1990). Some of the only livelihood opportunities in the city were informal and unwaged service jobs, albeit intimately tied to the formal and regulated economy, either filling a gap or complementing existing economic activity. As White (ibid.: 1) argues in her study of sex work and casual labour during the colonial era, ‘the illicit often supported the respectable’.
Today, Nairobi is rife with ‘speculative urbanism’ (Goldman Reference Goldman2011), with Tatu City (Watson Reference Watson2014) and Konza Technology City (Van den Broeck Reference Van den Broeck2017) projecting futuristic visions of African ‘smart’ and high-tech urban development. Yet, over 60 per cent of the city's residents live in informal settlements, cut off from reliable basic services (Huchzermeyer Reference Huchzermeyer2011). The dreamscapes of Nairobi's future city contend with the everyday realities of Nairobi's majority residents: the economically active poor and lower-middle classes who experience frequent power and water shortages, while being the customers, retailers and repair technicians of sophisticated ICT products and services. Against the odds, the majority of Nairobians have long developed a constellation of ‘real’ (MacGaffey Reference MacGaffey1991) economic practices that may appear makeshift and peripheral to state purview (King Reference King1996; Myers Reference Myers2005), while being entangled with the more mainstream East African capitalist ‘success stories’ of the mobile banking sector and other tech innovations. Youth living in popular neighbourhoods thus experience a paradoxical twenty-first-century reality: at once marginalized by the formal labour and housing market, yet super-connected to digital life.
For the ‘vulnerable urban majority’ of the city (Simone and Pieterse Reference Simone and Pieterse2017), there is a deep history of youth-led social, economic and activist organization. Writing in the decade after independence, Hake (Reference Hake1977: 9) referred to Mathare Valley as a ‘self-help city’. Here, Hake differentiated between what Barbara Ward called ‘odd job men’ (Ward 1970 in Hake Reference Hake1977: 9) – often urban migrants scrambling for any work to make ends meet in any corner of the city – and the ‘self-help jobs’ that were made and undertaken in Mathare Valley. At the same time, Mathare Valley came to be regarded as ‘beyond the city's responsibility’, partly due to its complex history; waves of displaced people settled there in the 1930s before later being evicted, anti-colonial freedom fighters came and went during the 1940s and 1950s, and squatters came back to settle at the time of colonial independence in 1963. So Mathare acquired a reputation for operating ‘outside the law and conventions of the colonial regime’ (ibid.: 147) and became a place where men and women ‘without jobs or houses set about building a new suburb of the self-help city’ (ibid.: 148).
Mathare was segmented into different ‘villages’, and, despite having grown significantly in population over the past fifty years (from about 30,000 to 300,000), residents still refer to their ‘village’, with its own social and economic organization. Against the backdrop of persistent profound inequality, with the ‘future city’ and the ‘real city’ continuing to operate in tandem, Mathare represents the coming together of several factors: a rapidly growing and underserved youth population is faced with a lack of employment opportunities and formal education (especially secondary school and vocational training), and yet youth comprise the majority of residents. Given the settlement's dense population with a high concentration of households and inadequate municipal provision, Mathare youth have asserted their place in the urban economy and their political hold over a home-grown, ‘self-help’ and youth-led business of residential waste management.
In Mathare, the key objective is to keep moving, even when work is scarce, and kuzurura (loitering) becomes a kind of proxy for being ‘in between’ states of activity. Although there may be no clear sense of direction, the imperative is to not just stand still. Youth are always ‘somewhere’, as a popular exchange between friends illustrates: the response to the humorous accusation ‘Umepotea!’ (‘You've been lost!’, implying that you haven't been seen) is ‘Niko tu’ (‘I'm just here’ – i.e. I've been around), often followed by ‘Ninahustle tu’ (‘I'm just hustling’). Fist bumps are then usually exchanged, as both parties understand that ninahustle suggests simultaneously being on the move and stuck in one place. By extension, the often used plural expression ‘Tunahustle’ (‘We hustle’) has become a euphemism for the shared struggle to ‘get by’ but also an affirmative phrase recognizing the ‘hard work’ involved in constantly contending with uncertain returns. And yet, ‘to keep moving’ includes continually returning to the baze, to be seen and to keep an eye out for what's going on. The baze thus serves as a base camp for dealing with all manner of mundane emergencies, a stage for recounting all kinds of exploits, and a place to be bored, to wait, and to scheme together.
Comprising over half of the residential population of Mathare, youth have been left to their own devices to make a living in a highly diverse but unregulated urban economy. With limited prospects of getting a formal job, and an inability to attain the culturally recognized milestones and life stages for a young person moving into adulthood (such as a stable job, property ownership, being able to afford to marry), many youth are caught in a sense of suspension and ‘waithood’ (Honwana Reference Honwana2012). Waithood is individually felt but collectively experienced, so friendship-based youth groups become crucial foundations for social and economic organization in the various Mathare ‘villages’. Young men and women who self-identify as hustlers (mahustla) face daily threats to their livelihoods, health and social justice. As they learn to manage overlapping social, environmental and economic risks, they experiment with different (sometimes rogue) aspirations, dealings and plans to reconfigure the world around them (Jeffrey and Dyson Reference Jeffrey and Dyson2009; Katz Reference Katz2004; Thieme Reference Thieme2017; Pieterse and Simone Reference Pieterse and Simone2013). The following section sheds light on Mathare's home-grown waste economy to explore how hustling has evolved over time and space among a group of youth coping with a precarious urban environment. Both empirical sections expose the everyday rhythms of investment, labour and sociality that have shaped young urban lives on the periphery of formal education, waged employment and tenure rights. These ethnographic vignettes reflect the undulations not only of endurance in a protracted period of waithood, but also of the continual attempts to improve the collective environment. Here, waste labour is both a metaphorical and literal expression of ‘reclaiming the discarded’ (Millar Reference Millar2018), turning what might be deemed void of value and unseen into a gritty politics of possibility and visibility.
‘Younger youth now want to redraw the map’: intergenerational relations in the garbage economy
The terrains and temporalities of hustling intersect when the little wealth that is accumulated on a daily basis and across longer periods of time needs to be shared constantly across multiple social groups to account for the fragility and uncertainty of gains. The following offers three ‘scenes’ of hustling in practice, focusing on how youth negotiate the daily unpredictable rhythms of work and community relations within their neighbourhoods, the punctual political manoeuvres to access resources from different institutional actors, and the modes of redistribution with younger peers who have become the new generation of ‘jobless’ youth looking to make work.
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By 8 a.m., all the garbage had been collected and new burlap bags had been put in place for each floor of each building. All that was left to do was wait for the truck, so Kennedy announced that it was time to have chai and some mandazi. During the breakfast break, Kennedy broke down the business numbers, scribbling on my tattered field notebook.
We do collection twice weekly. But Monday is worse than Thursdays, because it's after the weekend and people have consumed more, you see … OK, the truck that comes makes two trips each time, from Huruma to Dandora there … There are four trips per week from Kibichoi baze … Each trip can carry 15 tons of garbage, so that's 60 tons a week … In each plot you see here [he points up to the four- to eight-storey walk-up buildings all around Huruma], there are fifty-seven apartments on average. That's 855 households, each paying KSh 150 [US$1.47]. So that's … that's a total of KSh 128,250 a month [US$1,255]. OK, the costs include the sacks, paying the guys who collect and wash the sacks, and paying the lorry driver KSh 2,000 per month (approximately US$20).
For each morning of work, Kennedy enrolled three or four young people from his baze, who each got about KSh 500 (nearly US$5), considered a decent daily wage for a ‘casual worker’ in Nairobi. Kennedy's youth group managed fifteen plots, which was typical for youth groups who had been involved in the business since the early days of garbage collection. Over time, any person in the garbage business would progress from starting as a collector to eventually managing a plot, and then potentially having a regular crew of two to four co-workers. They would build the business incrementally, one plot at a time. If you were a good leader, you started to allow some of your crew (who showed interest and potential) to manage their own plot. But the territorial limits were mutually understood: as youth often explained in response to my queries about the spatial zones of garbage collection, ‘You don't go beyond your baze.’
The oral histories I have heard since 2009 suggest that youth-led residential garbage collection started in Mathare in the 1990s. Today, the waste hustle is widespread, hyper-local, fragmented and territorial. Combining time on their hands and an imagination, entrepreneurial youth in Mathare had captured the underutilized resource of household garbage in their highly condensed and congested neighbourhoods. In these neighbourhoods, post-consumer waste was both a systemic problem no one was prepared to deal with and a perfect commodity enabling youth to ‘turn trash into cash’. Each group collected residential garbage from up to 400 households for a monthly fixed fee – a kind of ‘shared self-provisioning’ in a part of the city that lacked basic services (Kinder Reference Kinder2016). In order to insert exchange value into this solid ‘waste’, groups sorted through the collected garbage materials to measure what was worth shredding (such as plastics), reusing (such as metal), fixing (such as electronics), or reselling to the industrial area or to a broker with connections. For many youth born and raised in the ‘slums’, with few opportunities in formal education or employment, the lack of public service provision in their neighbourhoods rendered residential garbage a material, social and territorial currency (Millar Reference Millar2018).
When the truck driver finally arrived at around 9 a.m., Kennedy quelled the anxiety he had felt since 7 a.m. and started loading the collected garbage onto the truck before the morning foot traffic got in the way. As if there were no rush at all, he asked the driver if he had had breakfast – to which, of course, the driver said no. And for the next twenty minutes, Kennedy and the truck driver sat together under the corrugated metal roof of Mama Caro's tea stall, next to Geoffrey's mandazi stand. This moment was more than ‘small talk’; it was a careful investment in mutual trust, and a performance to everyone else around that Kennedy had connections. Kennedy later explained that the driver was a ‘friend’ and there were ‘no issues’ with him. But the driver was also contracted by the city council. And if the city council failed to pay him, he wouldn't come to these difficult-to-reach neighbourhoods, because he wouldn't have the money to hire the truck in the first place, let alone pay for petrol and his time. Both men depended on the cooperation of the city council, but, in the meantime, they had developed their own working relationship, and these small acts and performances of reciprocity (such as the shared mandazi and chai in Kennedy's baze) were important social investments in securing the bridge between the garbage economy operating in neighbourhoods cut off from municipal services and the fragile cooperation of the city council willing to outsource the collection.
This arrangement was an example of Kennedy's savvy political manoeuvring, as he negotiated numerous forms of provisioning on behalf of his neighbourhood over the years. Kennedy had cultivated strong relationships with all the caretakers of the buildings he serviced and had direct contact with the city council's youth officer, Susan, who in turn felt she had an entry point to a neighbourhood where most people from other parts of the city never venture. As Kennedy put it:
many organizations have a mission, but it doesn't match youth's reality and timescale. The unique thing about Susan's approach: anakuja mtaani [she comes to the ghetto], and she asks youth to take initiatives.
It was no coincidence that Kennedy's base had a water tank, a ‘gift’ from the local MP of that constituency. ‘I helped her during her campaign a while back,’ Kennedy admitted. He explained that ‘Bishi’ (as she was affectionately known to supportive youth in her constituency) ‘did a lot for us youth’.Footnote 6 The water tank was placed in a crucial spot at the junction of residential alleyways and the strip of commercial stalls a block away from the matatu (minibus) stage. There was a fee for accessing water from this water point, but it was reasonable compared with most other water points in the area. It was also next to public toilets that were cleaned daily by Kennedy's youth group, metres away from chicken coops where organic waste was taken after the morning garbage had been collected and sorted.
In 2017, Kennedy sent me a photograph of Kibichoi baze and said: ‘T, look, the space that is always so muddy where we leave the hand carts, you see, they have come to pave the road there.’ When I saw him in person a few months later, I asked Kennedy to explain how he managed to get the road paved. I knew there had to be a ‘deal’. He smiled: ‘I was an eye for the MP.’
Here, Kennedy's social navigation (Vigh Reference Vigh2006) involved carefully managing multiple personal and political connections within and outside the neighbourhood, combined with a public performance of job creation for youth and community-based upgrading. This was happening during the early stages of pre-election violence across Mathare and Huruma communities, so ‘keeping youth busy’ was a form of peacebuilding. This was also a time when younger youth had started contesting the established hierarchies of the garbage collection system across Mathare bazes. The teenage school dropouts were seeing older founding members of youth group-led garbage collection ‘doing well’ as shareholders of the business. Younger youth started to make demands, claiming that ‘we need our share’, which called for ‘redrawing the map’ of garbage collection. Against the backdrop of potential intergenerational tension and claims over scarce resources among the larger cohort of ‘youth’, Kennedy became a subcontractor of roadworks, a key liaison between the community and the local MP. At that time, he figured that the best way to mitigate tensions would be to ensure that the pavement made the community happy (local businesses and mamas bringing their children to school), but also gave work to potentially idle youth who teeter between ‘making’ and ‘breaking’ (Honwana and De Boeck Reference Honwana and De Boeck2005; Jones Reference Jones2012). Kennedy made sure that he gave different young people work for three days at a time, and then gave work to another set of youth. This meant training new people each time, which could be regarded as inefficient by any business manager unversed in the micro-politics of the mtaa (the street/neighbourhood), but it was a pragmatic and opportunistic strategy of diversifying distribution (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015) among local youth.
This approach resonates with other hustle economies in Nairobi, where there is an implicit understanding among different generations of youth that the older youth need to provide for the younger group in the absence of other forms of support. That logic of intergenerational distribution and obligation is reflected in a careful negotiation between individual investments and collective returns.Footnote 7 That is partly why Kennedy persists, to this day, in doing the garbage work, rather than simply getting paid to manage a set of plots and have underlings do the work for him. Maintaining his position as a humble leader in his neighbourhood involves working alongside the young boys, and knowing that making his work ethic visible but unpretentious builds a kind of insurance against potential intergenerational insurgency.
Kennedy's deliberate attention to redistribution among his peers and younger youth ‘coming up the ladder’ differed in social form from another youth group I have been following since 2009: Mathare Number 10 Youth Group (MANYGRO), fellow veterans of the garbage collection economy in Mathare, based in another sub-neighbourhood along Juja Road. During my last two field visits, there were signs that the MANYGRO youth I had spent time with between 2009 and 2012 were now ‘old boyz’. They no longer sat under the hot sun near the public toilet they had cleaned and managed daily since 2007, but instead sat under the shade of a tree that had been planted during one of the World Environment Day (WED) community celebrations that had elicited attention from various NGOs aiming to ‘engage with the local community’. Over the years, their hustle had included learning the development lingo to become savvy navigators of the NGO sceneFootnote 8 and one of the ‘go-to’ youth groups for various youth entrepreneurship schemes (Thieme Reference Thieme2015), as one form of external support rendered MANYGRO visible to others. Near that tree, an M-Pesa (mobile money) kiosk set up in 2016 was being manned by two of the older MANYGRO members, serving multiple functions: the kiosk also featured a water tap that had been rerouted to serve all of those needing to refill their jerrycans for household use. (M-Pesa kiosks were widely used but rare to see inside ‘slum’ neighbourhoods.) The most recent addition to the micro-revenue streams of the group was a fridge filled with glass soda bottles, in a neighbourhood where a cold drink is a luxury people are willing to pay for.
The founding group members were less of a collective now; each had their own side business, spoke of their family, joked that they were now ‘well fed’ and had ‘less time to train’, patting their kitambe (pot belly). And yet they still assembled under the tree most days at one point or another. They had the view of the public toilet they used to clean daily and over which they worked so hard to negotiate maintenance rights in 2007 with a local landlord. On the outward-facing side of the door, the painted logo of the social enterprise brand, Community Cleaning Services, they were part of between 2008 and 2013 (Thieme Reference Thieme2015) had faded. There was no need to freshen it up because people just knew it was the MANYGRO toilet. Younger youth (aged eighteen to twenty-five) were the ones tasked with the daily cleaning now, while the old boys occasionally shouted orders from their shared stoop. The old boys managed the water point, the financial services, the urban farming business a few metres away, and the recycling business. The confluence of mobile money services, water and cold drinks shaped a shared public space of individual labour, consumption, leisure and place-making, all in proximity to their foundational businesses of garbage and sanitation services. But just as this portfolio of MANYGRO businesses reflected how far this youth group had come, the banter between the old boys and the younger youth hanging around (but never under) the shaded tree revealed the intergenerational tensions between the older and younger youth at the baze. The old boys complained that the younger boys didn't want to work hard. The younger boys ‘wanted a piece of the pie’. Notably, as the old boys upgraded and further diversified their portfolio, they persisted in speaking about their diverse forms of labour and life in Mathare as ‘hustling’.
Over the years, hustling for the MANYGRO boys involved defying rules and finding alternative routes to access or distribute both basic services (such as electricity and water) and ‘nice to haves’ (from Timberland shoes to a smartphone) that equipped local struggles with global consumer cosmopolitanisms (Weiss Reference Weiss2009; Ntarangwi Reference Ntarangwi2009). Along Juja Road, up the hill from MANYGRO's baze, everyday commerce was punctuated by imaginaries of elsewhere, as stylized portraits of popular culture icons featured on the murals of small shops and matatus driving by, with graffiti puns such as ‘Straight Outta Dumpsite’. At the MANYGRO stoop, where the old boys and the younger boys sat near each other, performances of apathy for lost futures were coupled with an urgency to hang on to hopeful outcomes. Across these stations of hustle imaginaries and lived temporalities, the appeals to elsewhere were paradoxically juxtaposed with the inability (or resistance) of many to ever fully leave the baze. For MANYGRO, this characterized the older boys’ liminal position in space and time. They lived and worked in one of the poorest neighbourhoods but occasionally travelled to middle-class enclaves of consumption and leisure, only to return to the baze where they had made a life and felt they belonged.
If time was one of the primary currencies of the hustle, hustle carried a loaded generational and temporal dimension: it was about a ‘precarious present’ (Millar Reference Millar2014), but also about hanging on to the exploits and claims to certain resources and places of the precarious past. So, for MANYGRO, the baze manifested the palimpsests of youth imaginaries and publicly visible community-based entrepreneurial ventures that combined turf claims and service provision: certain bodies got to sit under the shade, while ‘servicing the neighbourhood’ was performed through an assemblage of physical infrastructures (M-Pesa, water, soda, toilets) and social gathering points. For Kennedy, as he once explained: ‘The baze is not about a structure, it's a feeling that I belong here … it's a place you must pass by every day coz u get to know the breaking news, and about new hustle. It's also a place to buy time when you have little to do.’ So, for Kennedy, the baze was more than a place where youth assembled to spend time and assert their turf, a place to be found and be seen in. It was all at once a network, a mood and the representation of a time in one's life – a reminder of where one came from, and where some risked no longer feeling welcome if social ties and economic contributions were not continuously cultivated and shared. It was thus an infrastructure in which collective investment could be channelled and harvested, because it was collectively protected. As the baze evolved over time and morphed with the years, retaining its functionality and meaning, it developed new forms of support for the local hustle economies that depended on having a physical, social or affective tie to the baze.
Over these past ten years, the terrain of hustle has been reflected in how these street corner bazes that were built around the strategic proximity to local landmarks of waste work – the transit point for waste collection or a pay-per-use toilet – were eventually developed into other services or material improvements, such as a waterpoint or a paved road. These investments in the local environment shifted with time, subject to intergenerational negotiations among younger and older hustlers. For both Kennedy and the youth of MANYGRO, their conundrum as ‘older youth’ who were no longer young was staying relevant and retaining a hold on a set of resources that had symbolic and material significance in their life world. The MANYGRO ‘old boyz’ managed the carefully built but ultimately fragile hierarchies within the baze that all started with their garbage collection and plastic recycling business. They were now the sonko (boss) figures of these seemingly horizontal youth-led businesses premised on youth solidarities and shared returns. Because younger youth now had less to lose, and perhaps more gall, demonstrations of care towards younger counterparts served as a form of self-preservation and street credibility maintenance. But while MANYGRO delegated toilet cleaning and garbage collection to younger youth, Kennedy continued to do those early morning garbage runs, and perhaps strategically wanted to be seen, in his dirty overalls, by younger youth and the truck driver. In different ways, both these examples show the continuous labour involved in securing and retaining accumulation within, for and thanks to the mtaa economy. To be ‘streetwise’ in both these contexts included knowing how to take care of your own, but how to be seen doing so differed from one baze to another. While the MANYGRO old boys could be ‘seen’ in the shade, Kennedy was mostly ‘seen’ on the move.
‘When the day hustle goes down, the night hustle goes up’
This section focuses on a young woman named Eliza, who was one of the few female waste workers I met in Mathare. Young women's stories and their own paradoxical subjectivities as ‘hustlers’ are often missing from youth and slum studies, other than to emphasize their gendered dispossession in a number of spheres. In part, their status of ‘youthhood’ is reduced once they become mothers, which is not the case for young men who face cultural markers of adulthood that are increasingly unattainable (Honwana Reference Honwana2012). For young women, in contrast, their ‘adulthood’ is often accelerated. Eliza's story builds on the previous accounts of hustling discussed in relation to Kennedy and MANYGRO that emphasize the importance of intergenerational distribution. As discussed above, hustling can both normalize dispossession and offer affirmative pathways at the same time, involving continuous calculations in order to manage diverse obligations to both kin and community relations. Eliza's story offers an additional vantage point: her struggles involved, first, negotiating access to a largely male-centric informal waste economy and, second, negotiating the drawback of eventually ‘doing too well’ because she was able to secure periodic waged work. Her story highlights the way in which the performative gestures of hustling provide unlikely forms of solidarity and security. This reflects three dimensions of the hustle in this part of Nairobi: gendered subjectivities, the success penalty, and hustling as a performance of shared struggle.
Eliza was born and raised in Huruma. Her story shares some of the familiar characteristics of Mathare life for young women: as a young adult, Eliza fell pregnant at seventeen and became a single mother. But unlike many young girls in her situation, she refused the path of early marriage, or dropping out of school and staying at home. ‘In the ghetto,’ as she always referred to her neighbourhood,Footnote 9 Eliza was able to challenge the cultural norms that were less negotiable ‘up-country’, where her situation would have been considered shameful (Thieme Reference Thieme and Lancione2016).
Despite becoming a single teenage mother, Eliza finished school, and soon afterwards she started to navigate the youth-led waste business, a popular entry point into the labour market for youth in these neighbourhoods. She was one of the very few women who became a garbage collector, and she soon rose through the ranks, starting to manage plots and hiring other youth under her. She did this alongside various forms of community activism. She became a well-respected ‘hustla’, one of the guys, but she was also committed to helping teenage girls overcome the challenges and stigma associated with early pregnancy. She could be found hanging out on the stoop with the guys, but also spending a few hours of her Saturday afternoon getting her hair braided with the girls.
By 2010, Eliza was managing to earn a decent living, combining waged employment with a sanitation social enterprise and various side hustles. But during this period of sustained stable revenue, Eliza encountered a kind of success penalty. In neighbourhoods where precarity is the norm, there is a cost to doing ‘too well’. ‘Everyone comes over for lunch!’ she joked one day to explain that the imperative of redistribution that allows for strong social bonds and ‘sharing’ in low-income communities becomes a burden if you are always the one who is earning enough to ‘provide’.Footnote 10 Within her own family, Eliza was caught in a perpetual cycle of redistribution, as all her earnings sustained not only her son's education but also her parents and her two underemployed brothers. In 2011, Eliza's small family farm up-country burned down one night. It was immediately expected that Eliza pay for all rebuilding costs, as the main breadwinner at that time. Her life savings, about US$2,000, went straight to reconstruction.
As a single mother, and as a woman from the Luo community where land inheritance is patrilineal, her son would never have the chance to inherit land, a crucial cultural signifier of male pride and identity in Kenya. Eliza's driving goal for years had been to save up to buy Kevo some land, so that he could have a place to call his own. At the time of the fire, Eliza was US$200 short of being able to buy a small plot of land for her son. As Eliza eventually slowly rebuilt her savings over the subsequent months, she also decided in 2012 to move out of her family home and upgrade her living conditions outside Mathare Valley. As she put it, ‘It's not everyone who will be happy about your progress. So you have to leave the ghetto.’ Yet, when I asked her if her new neighbourhood felt like home, she said, ‘No, this place is my bedroom, but the ghetto will always be my sitting room.’ The perceptions and experiences of ‘doing well’ were in themselves full of vicissitudes. When I returned to Nairobi in June 2016, Eliza had moved back to her old neighbourhood. She continued to pay for her son's boarding school education, wishing him away from life in the urban slums, but in the meantime Eliza was raising her young daughter (born in 2013) in the thick of it, in part because she could count on her vast networks for ad hoc childcare support. ‘My daughter can learn how to be a little survivor,’ she once said proudly. Eliza's own social navigation and hustle involved a careful balancing act: she recognized and took advantage of the affirmative possibilities and skills associated with knowing how to hustle ‘in the mtaa’, riding on the street credibility of her earlier days as a waste worker, but she also knew when it was time to find housing elsewhere during periods where her income stream was coming from outside Mathare, with the proviso that she could always return if need be.
In 2018, Eliza's income-generating activities included a ‘day job’ with yet another sanitation social enterprise where she worked as a field officer with a strong reputation for understanding community issues relating to urban environmental management. She was paid a wage and had a uniform – markers of ‘professional work’ in Nairobi. But her working identity was not tied to her day job. She still self-identified as a hustla among others in Nairobi and her everyday labour combined forms of remuneration and accumulation, unpaid social activism, an actively curated Facebook presence, and concerted efforts to ‘be seen’ in her own neighbourhood when it mattered and disappear when it suited. Eliza supplemented her wage with a series of side hustles, including a small property investment up-country where she built and rented out three small single-room units on the family property of her new partner. Her in-laws allowed her to use the family plot in exchange for building and running a small property rental business. Eliza's brother initially gave her a loan of KSh 200,000 (US$1,950), and, as Eliza explained, ‘we hustled for the rest’ as an upfront cost of KSh 320,000 (US$3,110) was needed to build the units and the toilets. She explains that she now has KSh 60,000 (US$580) left to pay back to her brother. ‘Once I can earn a profit, I'll expand and build more units.’
In contrast to her male counterparts, Eliza knew that performing the hustle took on particular forms of security provision for a woman. First, during moments of intertribal tension around pre- or post-election periods, she knew how to ‘switch on’ multiple dialects of Sheng depending on whom she was with at the time, a kind of multilingual skill that has become part of her risk mitigation strategies. As she explained, this was almost a matter of survival that any wazaliwa (those born here) cultivated, in order to camouflage their tribal identity when needed. The wakucome (those who have migrated to Nairobi from rural areas) were less adept at switching from Kikuyu to Luo, for example, which can be a disadvantage. Second, as she explained in 2017: ‘You see, when I see those boys who snatch at night, I walk alongside them and I say, “Hey maboyz, mnafanya hustle? Mimi pia ninafanya hustle [Hey, my boys, you guys are hustling tonight? [implying bag snatching] Me too, I'm hustling [inferring sex work]].”’
Although Eliza was not a sex worker, in that instance performing as such was a form of ensuring mutual empathy with the young men who might otherwise have seen Eliza, a woman walking alone after dark, as an easy target. In this theatrical scenario, the bag-snatching boys and the sex workers were peers, both night mahustla whose ‘day hustle had gone down’. Devoid of moral judgement for either line of work, Eliza's greeting demonstrated an expression of camaraderie that cunningly relied on (and transcended) performative gendered lines to manage potential risk. In the mtaa, a female sex worker doing her rounds elicited respect among others in the night economy;Footnote 11 the mutual respect among night mahustla was partly due to the lack of competition (although they sometimes targeted the same ‘clients’) and the knowledge that you had a few hours of darkness before you could ‘feed your stomach’ by morning, let alone pay your rent by the end of the month. There was a shared understanding that the ‘night hustle’ sometimes involved activities categorized as illegal, or at least socially stigmatized as illicit, but the choice to engage in these forms of income generation also reflected shared urban struggles in under-resourced neighbourhoods where, as Malcom X once noted, ‘everyone hustles to survive’ (cited in Wacquant Reference Wacquant and Bourdieu1999: 143). This scenario also disrupted the presumption that certain hustle economies were deemed noble if demeaning (e.g. waste collection), while others were deemed illicit (e.g. drugs, robbery, prostitution). In Mathare, the performance of hustling was a kind of continuum, where hustlers inserted themselves into an endless permutation of social situations in ways that were both ‘banal and necessary’ (ibid.: 143). Eliza's manoeuvring here showed that, in order to stay safe after dark – something that is often impossible for women in popular neighbourhoods (Datta Reference Datta2012) – performing her hustle involved bluffing (Newell Reference Newell2012) in order to establish a shared connection and expression of care with other night mahusta.
Eliza explained: ‘For us youth, opportunity is where you stay [live], and you can hustle in a place where you stamp your authority’ – a kind of street credibility that was earned over time. Yet there was a success penalty, as any notable gains in the mtaa have to be redistributed somehow to those whose hustle ‘is down’. So Eliza's steady and continued accumulation over the years (hampered by several setbacks from which she has always managed to recover) meant that she had paid for her children's school fees, started other businesses on the side, and upgraded her living situation multiple times. And yet, she remarked, ‘It is best that people don't know where I stay exactly.’ For a time, Eliza stayed on the top floor of an eight-storey tenement walk-up in Huruma. Kennedy, one of Eliza's closest male friends in the neighbourhood, lives on the top floor of a nearby building. They both joked that it was the ‘penthouse’, with the advantage that ‘no one knows exactly where you stay, and no one's wet laundry is dripping down on yours’. The downside was that it was the first floor to run out of water. But that was a small price to pay for the perks of anonymity and a little privacy, the two rarest commodities in the mtaa.
For Eliza, hustling was about knowing how to read social situations and how to adapt one's battle plan, knowing when to march against the injustice of extrajudicial police brutality, but also ‘knowing that police are not all bad’, because ‘knowing officers in charge in your district’ could give someone the necessary levers to bail out a friend who had been arrested and was being detained. Hustling was knowing that nothing was fixed; any enemy could become an ally, just as any semblance of security could be overturned overnight.
In June 2019, Eliza lost her ‘secure job’, unable to ‘meet the sales targets’ of the social enterprise that had started to tighten its criteria for people to stay on the payroll. For some time, she had expressed that she felt like a foot soldier within the organization despite the accolades and occasional incremental pay rises from her ‘wazungu’ (white European) bosses. Eliza knew that these social enterprise schemes come and go in Nairobi, a city that has rapidly become the hub of sanitation entrepreneurship and business-led development. When I asked her what she was going to do now that she had lost her main source of income, Eliza shrugged her shoulders, smiled and said, ‘I'll always find something.’ As if able to foresee what was to come, three months before losing her job, Eliza had decided to move back into the building where she grew up, where rent was lower, and where she knew the landlord well. This deliberate and pre-emptive downgrading of her living situation was smart personal budget management and a strategic ‘hustla’ move. By explicitly returning to the neighbourhood where she had cultivated long-standing social and working ties, she reaffirmed her street credibility alongside those whose ‘day hustle was down’, figuring out how to make work and find opportunity elsewhere, and when and how to share eventual gains.
Conclusion
From the mosaic of early morning activities of street economies to the practices and pragmatics of place-based day and night hustles, the vignettes presented in this article shed light on the multiple rhythms and spaces of the hustle economy. The stories of inter-youth relations evoke the temporal dimension of hustling and the shifting sense of obligation to redistribute, in tension with the persistence in keeping hold of certain resources, street corners and credibility. As the three vignettes have illustrated, the dynamics of redistribution and belonging shift over time as those who were once the neighbourhood ‘youth’ become older and a new generation of youth assert their claims. These temporal shifts are inextricably tied to place-based contestations and sociality, thus exposing the spatial and social terrains of hustling.
Considered relationally, the terrains and temporalities of hustling play a significant role in shaping contemporary urban life in Nairobi's popular neighbourhoods today. Laced with insecurity and protracted uncertainty, these terrains reveal affirmative moments and pathways grounded in local codes and shared street knowledge that merit better empirical understanding, more nuanced ‘re-description’ (Simone and Pieterse Reference Simone and Pieterse2017) and conceptualization.
The everyday strategies of hustling discussed here reveal a particular relationship to time, place and urban practice: the time spent hanging about and place-making around the territorial markings of the baze is also a chance to perform momentary kuzurura (idleness or ‘joblessness’) while recounting one's engagement in ‘self-help’ jobs that may variously be improvised, ad hoc or routine. But to evoke one's hustle can also provide the necessary ambiguity (about what the hustle actually involves) to get out of trouble and to build a sense of solidarity and shared struggle. All the while, sometimes hustling involves particular deals behind the scenes to get things done. Here, both the narration and the social practice of hustling inflect one another, understood socially as shared hurdles in the face of the uncertainty and fragility of even seemingly regular work.
Through an ethnographic account of the experiences, subjectivities and pragmatics of Kennedy, MANYGRO and Eliza, this article argues that hustling can be read as an urban condition (the hustle), a practice (to hustle) and an identity marker (to be a hustler) that evoke multiple forms of prosaic, industrious and political labour: combining everyday survivalism and waiting, strategic diversification of income streams to mitigate risk, punctual contestation of – but also alliances with – authority in order to access key services and resources, and the ability to navigate and even shape local politics of distribution. As such, hustling is at once entangled with persistent legacies of uneven development and socio-economic injustice and yet continuously gives way to possibly generative social forms of experimentation, provisioning and reciprocity (Simone and Pieterse Reference Simone and Pieterse2017). For Kennedy, MANYGRO and Eliza, engaging in the waste economy has either been a temporary springboard to other work or a long-term investment in shaping their territorial hold on a particular area through garbage collection and recycling. In their own way, they show that the skill involved in seeing value and possibility in what is discarded or broken is not merely a last resort strategy or the ‘end of the line’ but rather an ‘experience of continual return’ (Millar Reference Millar2014: 33), a form of endurance in a corner of the city that may at times seem uninhabitable (Simone Reference Simone2018).
In closing, the question is whether this form of return and endurance suggests that the hustle produces a protracted state of liminality, where youth in Mathare mainly extend themselves across short-term projections of time, space and demands in the absence of longer-term future imaginaries. While some articulate ‘life plans’, others orient themselves towards particular ‘life pieces’Footnote 12 or fragments of projects. If ‘hustling’ in Mathare Valley refers to a condition, a way of life, a persistent struggle, and a logic and interpretation of hard work, it can simultaneously evoke stunted futures and an endless repository of resourceful experiments and renewed attempts. Here I am reminded of one of the expressions that often follows the refrain ninahustle tu (I'm just hustling) with a mix of humour and melancholy: ninajaribu (I'm trying). It is as though ‘trying’ acknowledges the inevitability of setbacks but the persistent potential for gains, however ephemeral and modest. Thus, as a constantly changing pattern of struggle, advancement, loss, banter, social connection and individual experimentation, hustling emphasizes the significance but ultimate fragility of place-based youth-led kaleidoscopic urban practices and performances. Although many of my key interlocutors have joked, and lamented, that they are soon no longer going to be classified as youth,Footnote 13 they continue to subscribe to the narratives and logics of hustling, as an expression of continued struggle, endurance and possibility across time and place, and of their relationship to life and labour in the city.
Acknowledgements
The research on which this article is based benefited from an ESRC Case Award (2008–13) which enabled me to conduct fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi and return on two follow-up trips during my PhD. I am grateful to the British Institute of Eastern Africa, which later invited me to organize a workshop and potential publication project in response to the 2017 theme ‘Spending Time’. The BIEA generously supported two trips to Nairobi (in 2016 and 2017) to reconnect with my field site and work with the Nairobi BIEA office to host a workshop in March 2017 called ‘Harnessing the Hustle’. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the first submission of this article, my UCL colleague Jenny Robinson for her input on a final draft, and Meghan Ference and Naomi van Stapele for their generous feedback on several draft versions, and for their collaboration on this special issue. Earlier versions of this article were presented at three research seminars between 2018 and 2019, at UCL, LSE and University of Oxford, and I thank attendees for their comments and encouragement. Most importantly, I thank my friends and collaborators in Nairobi for their time, friendship and stories over the years. Asanteni wote.
