Ghetto Gal

Ethnographic Portraiture

Eliza is the person whose life I have gotten to know best out of all my interlocutors in Nairobi, in part because she has often been the person with whom I have done homestays. Although in many ways my research has focused on male youth, as a female researcher, it was more appropriate for me to stay in a female-headed household whenever I stayed overnight. Spending time with Eliza included sharing mundane tasks like walking through the streets together running errands, cooking dinner together and her teaching me how to make chapati or ugali the Luo way, and chatting in the darkness of the night before falling asleep. These hours spent together anchored my understanding of the gendered dynamics at play in Mathare and its surrounds. Eliza invited me into her lifeworld and shared her perspective on what she saw. She was eager to talk things out, as much as I was eager to listen and ask questions.

Eliza can come off as shy at first, but once a good conversation has formed, she is always keen to offer her analysis on a matter. In the midst of the conversation, Eliza often would take a pause, turn to me, and ask, “T, what do you think?” As much as Eliza has given me the gift of time and stories, it also felt that our conversations and time together offered Eliza time and space to reflect on her own surroundings and test out her own ideas, in a way that was perhaps not available to her in her everyday life. When Eliza let me into her lifeworld, she let me ask her to articulate things that she had never been asked to reflect on before. In this way, the chapter reflects the inevitably partial but also reciprocal nature of ethnographic encounters, emphasizing the interpersonal dimension of fieldwork where friendships form through and around the interviews, the “deep hanging out” (Geertz 1977). In this way, there was a shared understanding that we offered one another something valuable. Eliza has long called me “dada” (sister) in her texts and correspondence, as have I. Our sisterhood is grounded in the shared acknowledgment that we may come from vastly different lifeworlds, but we are friends who never run out of conversation and have a shared curiosity for what the other thinks and sees.

This chapter pieces together key segments of our conversations that have taken place over the years, drawing on recorded life history interviews, field notes following our countless walkabouts, and moments of group bantering between Eliza and her male childhood friends with whom she had grown up, played football and boxed, worked as a garbage collector, mentored, and eventually bossed around as a sanitation entrepreneur and team leader. Though the chapter is written through my narrative voice, I try to center Eliza’s own reflections and analysis, her wisdom and good humor, to show how Eliza has simultaneously navigated the gendered harms of precarious urban life over the years, while rendering “the ghetto” a place of feminist, activist, and entrepreneurial possibility.

In the previous chapters, I have argued that the epistemologies of hustling are situated within everyday banter, accounts of life on the streets, and articulations of struggle, work, and aspirations. These accounts emphasize the interpersonal dynamics and social ties that are integral to the hustle in the hood, which paradoxically are consistently anchored in the collective unit of the “group” but sometimes erode solidarity and possibilities to do well. While the hustle economy engages with capitalist relations and entrepreneurial urbanism, it does not necessarily reflect individualistic, self-interested pursuits of continuous and limitless economic gain or desires for differentiation. The hustlers’ skill is instead to strategically modulate between survivalism, livelihood strategy through diversifying sources of opportunity to mitigate risk, and contestations of authority. The tenuous balance between feeding themselves and renegotiating their place within the city is at the core of urban hustlers’ subjectivity.

Eliza was never really involved in youth group culture per se or even in a women’s group. Her sociality, sense of place, and allegiances were multisited, as she tended to move between different peer groups and social situations. She even admitted preferring not to be part of any group saving schemes because she valued discretion and her privacy, and part of her own approach to mtaa living was to avoid having others know too much about the vicissitudes of her earnings.

This chapter does two key things: First, it focuses on a gendered perspective, particularly girls and women. It shows that it matters who is hustling. Hustling is often evoked, imagined, and performed as a hypermasculine urban practice, but as Eliza once remarked, “ghetto gals hustle too!” They do so with a different set of repertoires, pressures, and projections. Though much of the book focuses on youth and young men, the role of women is paramount, including the ways it challenges and complicates understandings of waithood, how young women experience and make sense of their own liminalities, and the different pressures and urgencies that underpin their own hustles. Women who hustle show how so very active and busy hustling is. Second, this chapter seeks to provide a more intimate sense of a single person’s life trajectories—to consider their family ties, their biographical vicissitudes, and how hustling hinders or enables these trajectories.

By focusing on Eliza as the central female figure, I do not mean to suggest that Eliza is somehow extraordinary. As you will see, in countless ways Eliza is remarkable, brave, exceedingly clever, funny, and generous. She is of course extraordinary to me, and my admiration for her will undoubtably come through here. But I argue that there are countless women like Eliza in the mtaa. It just so happens that I know Eliza and it is valuable to focus on a single person so that we might better ground our attention in the life trajectory of a single life and its effects on others and to understand the wider context. Focusing on Eliza enables us to see that women in the mtaa hustle in particular ways. Perhaps it is ordinary to be this tough, this creative, this generous. And through this life history, we might better grasp what it means for women to hustle, why it matters that a woman is hustling, and what we can understand from a single woman’s lived experience and point of view. Eliza’s story and her own analysis of “ghetto life” point to the gendered hardships women and girls face in Nairobi’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. She has always been acutely aware of teenage pregnancies, domestic violence, stunted schooling for girls, last-resort strategies taken up by young teens in order to just access phone credit or sanitary pads, let alone money to contribute to household income for basic expenses. But she is also one of many women who found nonconforming ways to confidently subvert social and gendered inequalities, patriarchal norms, and urban injustices.

Introducing Eliza

Eliza’s parents were from Eastern Province, near Kisumu, and came to Nairobi in the 1980s. Eliza was born in 1987 and felt most at home in Huruma, one of the six Mathare wards and popular Nairobi neighborhood, where she was born and raised. Yet she felt from Kisumu. She allowed her Luo identity (and pride) to shine when she was in the company of other Luos—something I witnessed whenever we went to have samaki (fish) lunch or bought fish from a street vendor. “You can only buy fish from Luo people,” she joked, sharing this common knowledge with me.1 Kisumu’s location on the shores of Lake Victoria explains why Kenyans from Kisumu living in Nairobi at some point remind others that their province is well known for its fish, especially tilapia. But at the same time as humorous banter was used to emphasize difference and pride associated with one’s own “native place,” Eliza was also a conscious polyglot and chameleon—able to code-switch into Kikuyu and deep Sheng depending on those she would greet or with whom she would keep company. Eliza was also able to code-switch across different social groups. She was a self-proclaimed tomboy who had always felt more comfortable around the boys. But as a young single mother, she also related to her female peers who had gone through similar life experiences. When she spent hours at the hair salon getting her braids done every few weeks, she was one of the girls and had credibility as a mentor to younger girls going through their own hardships. In the streets, she could be found exchanging friendly banter with her male friends but also greeting and making time for the elders. Eliza retained a foothold across different social groups in her neighborhood. It was this plural position that accorded her a unique street credibility—as a single mother who understood what it was like to grow up and raise a child in “the ghetto,” as a youth female activist and hustler finding creative ways to make a life and a living, as a young person who showed respect toward her elders and was known as “hard working” and loyal to her local church, and as Mama Kevo, who was seen as the tough mother who wouldn’t hesitate to reprimand her son’s friends in the streets if they were being mischievous.

Eliza embodied the paradox of youth growing up in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods. Her story as a single mother who got pregnant before finishing secondary school was familiar in these neighborhoods, where countless teenage girls ended up having their youth prematurely truncated by unintended pregnancy and the social stigma that followed the experience of being a young single mother. These two factors, single motherhood and the inability to afford living on her own, exemplified the protracted liminality of many youth living in urban poverty in Nairobi. On the one hand, youth were forced to “grow up” quickly and assume adult responsibilities; on the other hand, youth were unable to attain presumed markers of adulthood, such as a secure source of income and being able to afford “your own place.” This was all the more significant for young women who were the de facto primary carers of their children as well as often dutifully tending to their elders.

And yet Eliza had defied the stereotypical ripple effects of single motherhood and youth unemployment. She had not dropped out of school when she got pregnant at seventeen, instead finishing her secondary school against the odds. She challenged gendered norms of her local entourage by inserting herself in the male-dominated homegrown economy of garbage collection that had become one of the main sources of revenue for young men in the mtaa. Eliza admitted feeling more comfortable hanging out with the guys. She boxed, she played football, she pulled the mkokoteni (handcart) during garbage collection, and she participated in the macho banter with her male peers in a way that playfully mocked their sexist ways while finding it humorous. It helped perhaps that Eliza quietly refused to be one of those women that her male friends referred to as mpango wa kando (the spare part, meaning the mistress or “girl on the side”). But she was not the girl that the guys courted either. She was their friend, their sister, in some instances their boss. Her story shows that the mtaa is a context where traditional cultural norms and roles can be challenged and where the regulatory and legalistic parameters of urban provisioning can be creatively circumvented (Hartman 2021; Mabala 2011; Sundaram 2010).

When I first met Eliza in 2009, she was a twenty-four-year-old working single mother navigating the largely male-dominated informal waste economy, and this included working with Community Cleaning Services as a sanitation entrepreneur and field training officer (see chapter 4). Garbage collection was for many years her primary source of income, and during the early 2000s, development actors seeking to engage the growing youth demographic in popular neighborhoods noticed that neighborhood-based waste collectors operated in groups and occupied particular territorial zones. Like many of her generation who grew up during the rise of “NGOization” in Nairobi, Eliza became a savvy navigator of the development and social business sectors that were seeking to harness the entrepreneurial skills of youth groups who could help outside organizations navigate and find ways of working in these urban neighborhoods. But through my conversations with Eliza over the years, I understood that her working identity was not tied to her “day job.” Instead, she continued to self-identify as a hustler, where survival and recognition were understood to be contingent on a combination of improvised income-generating activities, unpaid social activism work, and an active presence on social media (mostly Facebook), where she would often proudly sign off with the hashtag #ghettoGal. Eliza’s everyday “social navigation” (Vigh 2006) involved several maneuvers to “act, adjust and attune” (Vigh 2009, 420) her strategies in relation to anticipated shifts in the various forces at play in her own lifeworld and at various scales of city life. These maneuvers included a concerted effort to “be seen” in her neighborhood when it mattered but retain a discrete degree of personal autonomy and space. Eliza’s hustle at times combined some form of wage employment with organizations seeking a foothold in the mtaa economy, ad hoc self-provisioning in the neighborhood economy, and various forms of social activism and reciprocation that helped build up and benefited from her street credibility. Undertaking an assemblage of personal, social, political, and commercial labors that each tapped into her street-oriented knowledge and skills meant that Eliza’s hustles ensured modest daily gains alongside incremental, experimental investments. In the absence of safety nets, and as a single mother in a world designed to benefit men, trying different things out ensured at least a few immediate returns to cover key costs, while cultivating a repertoire of back-up plans for the future, knowing that all manner of uncertainty and breakdown was always around the corner.

Land for My Son

Huruma is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world (Huchzermeyer 2011) and sits at the nexus of Nairobi’s historical anti-colonial activism (as one of the six Mathare wards) and Nairobi’s light industries and largest municipal dumpsite (with Kariobangi and Dandora to its east). Eliza grew up with four brothers and one sister, all born in Nairobi. When I met Eliza in 2009, she lived with her parents, two brothers, and her son in a two-room flat on the bottom floor of a four-story tenement walk-up in the middle of Huruma. The main space where the family spent time contained a double bed for her parents, surrounded by a mosquito net, which served as a kind of spatial divider with the rest of the space. A small coffee table was sandwiched between the bed and a two-seater sofa. The sofa turned into a makeshift bed for Eliza’s seven-year-old son, Kevo, but during the day and evening hours, it served as the main seating for other members of the family. A twelve-inch television screen was perched on a tired-looking pine wall unit that (along with the mosquito net) also marked the spatial separation between the “bedroom” space and the “living room” space. There was a second room that had a single bed for Eliza’s older brother, and a mattress on the floor against the iron sheet wall for Eliza. Between these two rooms, there was a small separate utility space used for cooking and storage, with a single stool near the ceramic jiko stove and a stack of sufuria aluminium cooking pots. The toilet, bathing stall, and water tap were all down the hall and shared across all the families living on that floor, typically ten to twelve flats per floor. Although most of Huruma was electrified, blackouts were a daily occurrence, and there was no lighting in the hallways of these tenement-style buildings anyway, so little pieces of waxed candlesticks were always around the common washing area, serving as makeshift lights, especially after sundown.

As was common for most children born in Nairobi’s low-income settlements in the 1980s, Eliza’s parents had come from one of the rural provinces in Kenya, migrating to the city for the father’s work. As Eliza explained during one of our first recorded life history interviews,

He was employed by the government. I think he was an accountant for the NSSF [National Security Social Fund]. Mom was a businesswoman. She was selling secondhand clothes. Eventually the business collapsed. My childhood was not bad because at the time I was being brought up, my dad was still working. But by the time I was thirteen, my dad stopped working. I don’t know what happened to the job. That is where life became difficult.

Although Eliza’s father had been out of work for years, her father’s former status as a government employee was an important part of the family folklore and pride. The secondhand clothing market, in which Eliza’s mother was a “businesswoman,” was a large but saturated share of the street vending economy in Nairobi, and it was common for individual entrepreneurs in the secondhand market to give up their business at one stage or another, due to the significant logistical and economic challenges associated with inventory space, vending stall rental cost, and keeping up with local competition. When both her parents were out of work, Eliza’s oldest brother, who had just finished secondary school, “took care of the family.” When she spoke about this period in her childhood, she evoked a sense of gratitude toward both her brother and the benevolence of her primary school, as though inferring that this was unusual fortune within the mtaa. Referring to her brother, she explained,

He was just doing some casual jobs. He was able to take care of the whole family because the little he could get he could pay for food. I went to St. Benedict’s school, and it was a church school so they were understanding if you couldn’t pay for school fees. You would still have to pay, but you could pay in installments. My favorite subjects in school were English, math, and science. In 2002, I took my KCP exams, the first national examination at the primary level. At that time my brother was still taking care of us because my dad still wasn’t working. I did the exam without paying because they understood my situation. I did my class eight for free; I never paid. They were understanding. I liked school.

Eliza’s brother had become the sole breadwinner of the family by the time he completed school. It was not uncommon for a young member of the household to take care of the whole family in these neighborhoods. What was less common at that time was young people finishing secondary school, partly because this part of Nairobi had very few secondary school options and unlike certain benevolent primary schools, most secondary schools were fee paying and did not accommodate for financial aid. Eliza had spent her early teenage years with her brother’s example, hustling to generate income wherever an opportunity arose. As long as his parents were out of work and younger siblings were in school, it was a given that the eldest child’s obligation was to provide for the rest of the family. Eliza was influenced by her brothers and older boys around her neighborhood in other ways as well. By the age of fifteen, her social and recreational activities were often spent hanging about with an array of “big brother” figures who taught her how to train, how to be tough, how to defend herself.

My best childhood memories were playing football and boxing. I was usually training mostly with boys. My brothers were all boxers. So I was just going with them to see them train, and then I started training with them too. The women didn’t think it was strange because they knew I grew up with only brothers, so they thought I was just more comfortable with the boys. But the boys, they were cool with me because they saw that I was not like the other girls.

In 2003, Eliza joined a nearby secondary school. But within a few months, Eliza realized she was pregnant and dropped out of school. The tone of her voice and her facial expression changed when she recounted this time in her life. She recalled,

After that, life became difficult. My parents weren’t very happy with me. My older sister was not really around because she is married. You know, the situation was such that I was the last born, and now pregnant, so it was a situation whereby everyone is against you. At that point, I was really scared. So I went to stay with my friend for some months. Then I met with my brother, who told me to come back home. When my family finally accepted the situation, they said, “The fact remains that you are our daughter and our sister.” On November 13, I gave birth to Kevo. I was seventeen.

Despite the ordinariness of teenage pregnancies in popular neighborhoods, the social stigma associated with teenage pregnancy was, as Eliza described, a kind of “curse.” Her father and brothers had stopped speaking to her for a time, and the mothers of her friends forbade them to socialize with Eliza for fear that she was a bad influence. Eliza reflected on this period as both a time of social exclusion but also an affirmation of her independence. With modest pride and a slight smirk, she recounted,

Even those same girls whose mothers were saying, “Don’t play with her,” many of them fell in the same trap. They got pregnant and they are worse off than I am because they went for early marriage, which they could not cope with. At least me, I’m just there.

What Eliza meant by “I’m just there” was that she was not forced to go into early marriage. She recollected her eldest brother being the central source of encouragement in this regard when he insisted, “We’ll support you. Just give birth and have the baby. We’ll help you take care of the baby. Then you’ll go back to school.” After Kevo was born, Eliza took a hairdressing course. Hair salons were one of the most common local businesses in the mtaa and most women paid up to 1,000 KES (approximately US10) to get their hair braided, equivalent to nearly a third of one month’s rent in Huruma. Eliza spoke about the course as a transient phase.

The training took nine months. I would go with Kevo to the daycare, and then to the college for my course. After that I did salon work for two to three months but it wasn’t good because my boss saw me as someone who just got out of school without much experience, so he would give the other ladies the work since they were more expert. Since it was a commission-based job, I wasn’t earning much so I decided to leave. My brother was not very happy because he had paid for the course. I told him I would try my best and look for another place.

Eliza admitted that she did not like hairdressing, and even less being bossed around with little prospect for advancement. She also intimated that she preferred to work independently, and following her hairdressing course started experimenting with various modes of self-employment. Working in one place for two to three months, she would use her saved earnings as seed capital for a small business idea, such as selling rice in her neighborhood. Eliza traveled long distances once every two weeks to purchase rice at wholesale prices and then sell a kilogram of rice through door-to-door sales to people she knew. She made a small profit on sales and saved on overhead costs, and her customers saved money by paying less than the local retail price. But as with any business in the hustle economy, there were inevitable blockades even in seemingly lucrative and well-oiled business plans, which required quick adaptation and improvisation. When the price of rice went up, Eliza gave up the rice distribution business and turned to her male peers and childhood friends, who by then had all finished or dropped out of secondary school. Most of them were engaged in the residential garbage collection business, which had become a common “first rung” income-earning opportunity for youth living in popular neighborhoods with few prospects for finding secure employment and in neighborhoods that were dealing with a growing garbage problem—ever growing density and an ill-equipped municipality to service these low-income densely populated areas. As discussed in chapter 3, “trash became cash.” Eliza’s eyes lit up when she started to explain the early days of her work with tako (garbage), acknowledging that what seemed at first like dirty work had in fact permitted her to adapt her skills. She explained,

I started garbage collection. I just approached some of the boys and asked them, “Please can you call me? Even if it’s commission I’ll take the job.” No matter what the job, I’ll do it so that my child can eat and be dressed. I didn’t mind what the job was. I had gone to these workshops and I was well informed and was determined to earn a living for my son.

This was in 2005, and no other women were doing garbage collection at the time. Eliza spoke about being the only woman “doing this kind of job” in a way that highlighted the physical demands of the work and the pejorative associations with handling garbage. But her recollection of this work also emphasized the pride of being part of a largely youth-based entrepreneurial activity and doing something that the local government had failed to provide: deliver basic waste management to a residential community.

On the one hand, Eliza admitted to being desperate enough to do almost any kind of work if it would support her son and the rest of her family; on the other hand, like many other youth who had grown up in the “ghetto,” there was a deliberate choice in doing “dirty work” on their own terms over “donkey’s work” for an exploitative or abusive boss in the industrial area of the city. Indeed, working for someone else, for this generation of Kenyan youth, recalled highly uneven power relations and exploitative practices between employer and employee. Working for yourself and among fellow peers, anchored in friendship-based youth groups, was integral to the collective identity of many young people for whom these groups served as crucial social infrastructures of care—circumventing both formal state and formal market channels of service provision, employment, and control.

In addition to her income-generating work, Eliza was also a peer educator for young girls in her neighborhood, something she had become involved with following Kevo’s birth in pursuit of a support network for “young mothers in the ghetto.” It was this network, she claimed, that helped her finish her Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams in 2006, finally completing secondary school.

When I got that training, I learned that even if you are pregnant, even if you have given birth [as a young girl] that does not mean that it is the end of everything. When I finished my Form Four exams, after that, people were proud of me. I started seeing some of the girls who were stressed with life saying, “After all, I’ve become pregnant. I have a child. Look at my family situation. What will I do? My only option is to go for early marriage.” That’s where I would chip in and say, “No, you have other options. You are now eighteen years old. If you get married now, where do you think you will be in five years? Why can’t you change your life and change your community?”

Eliza informally mentored other young women who experienced teenage pregnancy, urging them to think about their options beyond early marriage. As she put it, “For young women in the ghetto, marriage is often an issue of peer pressure. You feel as if you are pushed against the wall.” Eliza’s motto was that being single enabled a woman in the ghetto to think about her future. For her, that meant thinking about what it would take for her son to realize his potential and to eventually attain the status of manhood according to her cultural tradition.

For me personally, getting married is not an issue but what’s an issue is having my little boy ask me, “Where is my father?” You see, the other thing is in the ghetto, if you get married and you already have a child, that family won’t see your child as part of the family. If I got married, my son wouldn’t feel accepted into the family. And you know Kenyan men—even if you have a boyfriend, he’ll not take care of your baby. So it’s up to you as a mother to do it. First and foremost, the single mothers will think about their child. The relationship with men comes second. But the bigger issue for me is one day having my son be able to say, “There is my land.” Having some property for him. If I can provide him with a good situation, having some land where he can go, he will never ask you, “Where is my dad” or things like that because I will have given him something of his own.

Here is where Eliza’s story underscored the dialectics of identity for female youth living in the city. For her it would be paramount for Kevo to one day have land of his own. As a Luo, this was only possible through patrilineal heritage, where land was traditionally passed on from father to son. But without a father, a “bastard son” would never be given land by a father figure. Any new man Eliza would let into her life, she explained, would never accept, let alone adopt, Kevo as his own son. Eliza’s goal, what drove her everyday ambitions, was the notion that she could one day afford to buy a plot of land for her son, preferably somewhere that fit the rural imaginary, away from the city (the countryside was colloquially referred to as shags). To have a claim to some land in shags was an important part of one’s narrative because even for youth who were born and raised in the city, they were (their kin, their tribe, their family farm) nevertheless from somewhere up-country. In this, she abided to traditions around gender and land inheritance. The means to this end would, however, be achieved by defying gendered norms of behavior and practice.

In 2008, Eliza was one of the few dozen waste workers in Nairobi popular neighborhoods who became involved with the social enterprise Community Cleaning Services (CCS), discussed in chapter 4. Eliza quickly went from being a team member of one of the CCS mobile cleaning teams (MCTs), to a team lead and mentor, to a salaried CCS professional responsible for training and following up with different CCS teams across Nairobi and reporting back to the Central CCS management team. By the time I met Eliza in 2009, she had become the sole breadwinner for her family, with her parents and siblings each out of work, and her six-year-old son in primary school.

The Cost of Doing Too Well

In each area within Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, the informally marked territories known to youth groups as the baze (discussed in chapter 3) provided a public space for domestic, social, and business matters to converge. As described in chapter 3, the baze of youth groups served an important spatial and social function, enabling peer groups to combine moments of banter-filled loitering with a constant low-level flow of income generation that served as a notable form of shared provisioning for otherwise “unemployed” youth—in turn giving these youth a sense of place and legitimacy in the public space of the neighborhood. Eliza’s street credibility involved having the license to drop in on these youth groups whose everyday practices blurred the lines between work, leisure, and idleness. She could partake in their banter, versed in the macho street humor, and laughed even when comments were misogynistic because she was always able to add witty comebacks and made it clear that she refused to be the subject of chauvinistic teasing.

Contrary to mainstream depictions of “successful” entrepreneurship informed by Western neoclassical economic theories, Eliza’s aspirations did not include overtly maximizing growth (Ochonu 2020). Eliza frequently evoked the potential negative effects of doing “too well,” just as other youth in Mathare had done during my conversations with them. Eliza and I discussed the reasons why youth in the mtaa were deliberately elusive about the details of their livelihoods. As discussed in chapter 3, youth’s individual strategic discretion regarding income was tied to the mtaa logic of solidarity inherent in everyday collective struggle. From the hustler’s perspective, being part of a collective offered the benefit of risk reduction by diversifying ownership and reducing the traceability of any individual’s gain from the entity. The difficulty of group membership, however, transpired for those who set themselves apart from group activities to pursue their individual ambitions while retaining a sense of belonging to the mtaa, their base, and their cohort. For Eliza, part of maintaining her hustler persona vis-à-vis her peers within the mtaa required concealing the extent to which she was “doing well” (or at other points over the years, the extent to which she incurred losses).

Eliza had spent years struggling as a single mother pursuing various kinds of informal work while trying to finish school and manage her family obligations. When she started garbage collection work in 2005–6, her entrepreneurial and resourceful capabilities coupled with ambitions to provide for her son as a single mother accelerated her productivity compared to her peers. It was this motivation that also fast-tracked her trajectory from member of a CCS team to lead entrepreneur with multiple teams in Huruma, until she was finally hired by CCS as a full-time employee.

Her drive to prove herself within a male-dominated work culture pushed her to work harder than her male peers and defied commonplace outcomes of so many young single mothers in the hood. By her mid-twenties, she was able to not only afford her son’s school fees but also provide for her entire family with whom she lived. But her place within the traditional youth-elder hierarchy also meant that there would be no foreseeable end to the obligation to provide for her parents and two older unemployed brothers. Once the pride of being the main breadwinner subsided, she realized that her “doing well” gave her brothers little incentive to actually find work and perpetuated a cycle of deference to her parents, who expected her to share her earnings with the whole family as part of the reciprocal exchange involved following years of child-care support and to adhering to the domestic duties of a daughter. As Daryl Collins et al. (2009, 2) state in their reflection on the vicissitudes of the informal economy, “You make more on some days, less on others, and often get no income at all. Moreover, the state offers limited help, and, when it does, the quality of assistance is apt to be low. Your greatest source of support is your family and community, though you’ll most often have to rely on your own devices.”

By early 2010, Eliza had saved up enough money to move out of her childhood home in Huruma, encouraged by a family friend to move far from the Mathare area to assert and protect her financial and personal space. Six months later, she sent her seven-year-old son to boarding school, which was considered in Kenya as a tremendous educational opportunity for any child; for anyone living in the “ghetto,” sending one’s child to boarding school was a way to avoid the substandard quality of education and available resources in the mtaa but also a way to move your kid away from the temptations of drugs, street crime, and other kinds of trouble perceived as endemic risks facing youth growing up in these underresourced neighborhoods.

In theory, Eliza had “made it.” But when she moved away to that neighboring low-income estate (Umoja) near Dandora, far away from her familiar baze and everyone she knew, she admitted to feeling lonely and detached. In 2012, two years after she made the decision to move, as we walked to her place one evening, I asked her if this neighborhood was starting to feel like home. To respond, she put it metaphorically: “This estate is my bedroom. But the mtaa in Huruma is still my sitting room.” Her work and social ties remained in Huruma. It was where she spent her Sundays, where she went to get her hair braided, where she hung about with the guys at their respective bazes in-between jobs. Eliza’s response to my question explained the social exclusion she felt from “doing too well,” conflicting with the strong sense of belonging that resided in youth who hustled within their baze for the majority of their formative years. As Eliza defiantly claimed during that conversation, “It’s important to leave the mtaa and your baze at some point because it’s not everyone who will be happy with your progress.”

Despite residing elsewhere, affording higher rent, and upgrading her living standards, Eliza continued her ties to the mtaa, and her hustles continued to operate from, across, and alongside the mtaa. It was where she went to socialize. And for those who grew up in the mtaa, who worked (at least in part) where they lived, the refrain “in the ghetto, business is social” meant that accommodations could always be made to ensure everyone was provided for in some way, but at the same time there was a perceived success penalty. As long as everyone in your entourage was known to hustle in some form, the social economy ensured that no one would fall through the cracks, but that also meant that those who might do too well would become objects of excessive attention.

As this book has by now made clear, the mtaa is not merely a temporary “stop gap” for the emerging lower-middle classes of twenty-first-century postcolonial Nairobi. It is much more than a place of suffering, abjection, and harm. The mtaa is an urban form in its own right, where social, economic, and affective spaces are constantly being made and remade by residents’ ordinary achievements and life-affirming ways. And yet this urban form is also constantly up against the fragility of gains, with constant reminders of vulnerability, loss, and setbacks.

After 2011, a series of unfortunate circumstances interrupted what had felt like a seemingly upward trajectory of the past three years. In 2012, Eliza’s family’s farm up-country tragically burned down one night. The following day, her entire savings (almost US2000) went toward emergency expenditures. She had been US200 away from buying Kevo a plot of land she had had her eye on since 2008. Furthermore, in 2013 (as explained in chapter 4), CCS had to close, and Eliza lost what had become a secure job with a salary and support network. Both events could have understandably completely destabilized Eliza. But this was not the case. Eliza immediately started another business, selling nonperishables in the now growing neighborhood where she lived, and she continued to work on sanitation-related projects across Nairobi, trying to keep the work of CCS going in some form. In 2014, she gave birth to her second child, Nicole. At the time, there was no explicit mention of the father in her correspondence. Instead, with a mischievous giggle over the phone, Eliza simply exclaimed, “Kevo needed a baby sister.”

Eliza epitomized the following paradox: She recognized the risks and urban injustices of mtaa life, reflected in her instinct to leave for a time and do everything to send her son to boarding school so he would avoid growing up in the “ghetto.” But ultimately she was committed to returning and staying within the very neighborhood from which risks and harms emanated because alongside the risks and harms, a repository of resourcefulness, reciprocities, and recoveries made urban living possible despite it all. Eliza eventually moved back to Huruma in 2016. She continued to pay for her son’s boarding school education, wishing him away from mtaa life, and yet in the meantime Eliza was raising her young daughter, Nicole, in the thick of it, in part because she could count on her support networks for ad hoc child-care support. But there was also another reason: “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, recognizing and taking advantage of the affirmative possibilities and skills associated with knowing how to hustle in the mtaa, something she wished her daughter to learn, but also knowing when it was time to get out, with the proviso that you could always return if need be. Notably, she started not telling most people where she “stayed” exactly. Whereas for some youth and even some women, taking part in collective sociality served as a vital support system, for Eliza, retaining a degree of discretion about certain matters, including her place of residence and livelihood specifics, became a vital source of self-preservation. Around this time, Eliza also took in a young teen named Stacey. Stacey’s parents, who lived near Kisumu, had asked Eliza to “just take her as a house girl” because they were financially strained. Eliza told them that she could use Stacey’s help with Nicole, but she assured them that she would not treat Stacey as “house help.” Instead, she would raise Stacey as a second daughter, pay for her school fees, and ensure she had a future beyond domestic service.

Somehow, losing her savings and her stable CCS job did not pose catastrophic results for Eliza. She managed, in the face of “oncoming change,” to navigate through it, to “adjust and attune” her “strategies and tactics” (Vigh 2009, 420) and hustle her way to the next opportunity. This included not only experimenting with different income opportunities but also knowing when to cut costs and move back to the mtaa. In some way, what seemed more difficult for Eliza was balancing her époques of sustained financial success and her place as a fellow “hustla” in the hood. Caring to maintain that balance kept Eliza in a kind of middle zone, where hustling was partly aspirational and filled with hopes to fight the gendered poverty traps but where losing one’s identity as a hustler came at a social cost, including loneliness and isolation. Furthermore, it had become clear that even if things were going well, it would not necessarily last, so it was smarter to keep several hustles on the go rather than assume that hustling was a thing of the past. It’s harder to start the hustle engine again.

Eliza had become versed in the social enterprise hustle after her time with CCS and had acquired a good reputation among sanitation practitioners as someone who had in-depth experiential and local knowledge of the sanitation business and its challenges at neighborhood levels. By 2016, Eliza’s mixed livelihoods included a “day job” with the eco-sanitation social enterprise Sanergy, where she worked as a “field officer” with a strong reputation for understanding “community issues” related to urban environmental management. Here she was paid a wage and given a uniform, two markers of professionalism and formal employment in Nairobi. But despite periodic accolades and pay raises, Eliza expressed feeling like a foot soldier within the organization, and she expressed a dislike for the lack of input she had in certain operational decisions. As we sat together on a matatu one April afternoon in 2017, she explained,

You see, I used to be field officer around my baze in Huruma and Mathare, where I know people and they know me. Then they said, Eliza, you go to Mukuru. But you see that is a place where I am not known and it is more difficult to feel safe and get people to listen to you, you get? But me, I know as long as I’m a field officer, I have to go where they say I need to go, and I have targets I need to make. I have ideas, but the decisions—they’re made by the sonko [boss].

Work that takes place outside formal professional categories and qualifications is often characterized as “low-skilled.” However, the work of hustling in Nairobi requires a broad range of skills and forms of tacit knowledge. Hustlers create their own cartographies of the city, translating between different vernaculars and institutional spaces; calling themselves “entrepreneurs” when it resonates with social enterprise investors, while self-identifying as mahustla back at the baze in order to foster a solidarity grounded in the shared experience of mtaa life. In a context where opportunities are contingent on being in the right place at the right time, hustlers are at once always on the move and yet can be found standing in place at particular times of the day, when it makes sense to be found and be seen at the baze. The ability to read the streets and know the local codes is a vital form of knowledge that can be taken for granted or undervalued by external actors who think it is possible to operate in any popular neighborhood as long as you have the right (business) model.

“When the Day Hustle Goes Down, the Night Hustle Goes Up”

Eliza took her job and her perception of the organizational hierarchy very seriously. She also knew having a wage was unique for people living in her neighborhood. But she increasingly expressed cynicism for the stalled and perhaps overly predictable trajectory of this job, where she would at best remain a foot soldier within the organization—that is, as long as she met the “targets.” At the same time, Eliza’s skepticism about her day job enabled her to hold on to a narrative of hustling, which meant finding a way to make a living but also being sly about your politics and your moral modes. As a woman, she also knew that talking about your hustle could be usefully ambiguous, and even a form of security, as she explained at her flat in Huruma one evening in 2017:

You see, when I see those boys who snatch [steal belongings] at night, I walk alongside them and I say, “Hey maboyz, mnafanya hustle? Mimi pia ninafanya hustle” [Hey my boys, are you guys hustling tonight? Me too, I’m hustling].

In this moment, the “boyz” thought she meant that her hustle was sex work, a common form of “night hustle” among some women who are still out after dark. In order to stay safe after dark, a challenge for women in Kenyan cities and beyond (Datta 2012), identifying as a fellow “night hustler” was a form of “bluffing” (Newell 2012) that afforded her an ephemeral sense of safety through performed camaraderie and shared struggle. I sensed in Eliza’s storytelling that this bluff was more than mere deceit: it was a way of forging a connection and affinity with the “bag-snatching boys” in the after-hours because, as she put it, “you know it’s a real struggle right now, and when the day hustle goes down, the night hustle goes up.”

In a piece titled “Domaines de la nuit et autorité onirique dans les maquis du Sud-Cameroon (1955–1958),” Achille Mbembe (1991) describes the importance of the “world of the night” and its associated invisibility (jiibè, lièmb) for the modalities of insurgency during the anti-colonial struggle for independence in Cameroon (1991). Mbembe explains that this world of the night and of invisibility structured the actions of numerous African insurgencies. There is, we could argue, also a “world of the night and invisibility” associated with certain practices that are, “by day,” stigmatized or criminalized (as were anti-colonial struggles in the 1950s in Cameroon, in Kenya, and elsewhere). Here, I am referring to the “world of the night” of sex workers and bag snatchers, who are in their own way struggling for economic self-determination and find an opening during the nighttime hours, in the world of the night.

Although Eliza was not a sex worker, letting other night hustlers think she was in that instance ensured mutual empathy with the young men who might have otherwise 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 judgment 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, and the mutual respect among night mahustla was partly due to the lack of competition (though they sometimes targeted the same “clients”). Eliza underlined the fluid moral codes of the nighttime economy, where nocturnal hustlers operate side by side, respecting each other’s craft. As Eliza explained, “even matatu let sex workers take a ride for free because they know she is at work so they give her a break.” In other words, there is a profound solidarity in the “domain of the night” (Mbembe 1991), a shared understanding that the “night hustle” sometimes involved activities legally categorized as illegal or socially stigmatized as illicit, and the knowledge that you have a few hours of darkness before you can “feed your stomach” (and your children’s) by morning, let alone pay your rent by the end of the month. The choice to engage in these nighttime hustles also reflects a shared intergenerational and multisituated understanding in underserved neighborhoods that hustling takes on myriad forms in part because nothing is ever fixed, so part of everyday navigation and endurance involves the ability to constantly adjust one’s tactics and positionings (Simone 2018; Vigh 2009). Navigation and endurance also mean adjusting one’s moral compass; the scenario Eliza described disrupted the presumption that certain hustle economies were de facto deemed more noble than others.

By day, Eliza straddled these different lifeworlds, her uniformed self hopping on a matatu to “go to work” but knowing that the duration of the job was uncertain. But Eliza also recognized the “social thickness” (Ferguson 2006, 198) of the hustle as a double-edged sword. Place-based recognition—or street credibility—was key to being able to “make things happen” through hustling. On the other hand, Eliza’s own experience with the success penalty highlights the mtaa logics of hustling that suppose a certain expectation of redistribution from those who make something toward others whose hustle “is down.” Eliza managed her income very carefully, including figuring out how to recover from her losses. She paid for her children’s school fees, started small businesses on the side, and upgraded her living situation when possible but was ready to downgrade as soon as money was tight. And as she put it in 2017, “It is best that people don’t know where I stay exactly.” At that time, Eliza was staying on the top floor of an eight-story tenement walk-up in Huruma. Kennedy, one of Eliza’s closest male friends in the neighborhood, also lived on the top floor of a nearby building at one point. 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 during shortages. But that was a small price to pay for the perks of anonymity and a little privacy, two of the rarest commodities in the mtaa.

Though Eliza did not discount the value of a wage, her working identity was not tied to her day job with Sanergy. She still self-identified as a hustla among others in Nairobi whose everyday labors combined forms of remuneration and accumulation, unpaid social activism, an actively curated Facebook presence, and concerted efforts to “be seen” in her own neighborhood when it mattered and disappear when it suited. As time went one, Eliza’s hustle continued in different forms. But in June 2019, she lost the “secure waged job” with Sanergy, unable to “meet the sales targets” of this social enterprise that had started to tighten its criteria for staying on the payroll. Eliza knew that these social enterprise gigs come and go in Nairobi, a city that has rapidly become the hub of sanitation entrepreneurship and business-led development. Something happens to the funding or there is staff turnover. 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.” Through the connections she had made with various NGOs and social enterprises in the past few years, she would go on to get contract work for shorter periods.

As if able to foresee what was to come, three months before losing her job, Eliza had decided to move out of the “penthouse” and back into the building where she grew up, where rent was cheaper, and where she knew the landlord well. This was not as much downgrading her living situation as it was a strategic move to manage the impending risk of her day hustle going down. This time she pointed out the perks of living “near the action” of the street. All the while, on Facebook, Eliza kept uploading selfies of prosaic moments “at work” in all its different iterations—from the office to the street—sometimes appearing to be inputting sales data on a spreadsheet wearing some kind of branded T-shirt, as if to signal a work uniform, while other photos performed an appearance of more ambiguous street-based activity that might be part of underground political reportage or just an ordinary Saturday morning getting ready to attend a local football match at the nearby stadium. The truth was often somewhere in between. Eventually one of Eliza’s hustles included selling refreshments at local football matches. Negotiating access to the stadium as a mobile vendor of refreshments took political connections, savvy maneuvering, and skills in sales. Eliza continued to sign off on social media with the hashtag “Ghetto Gal Hustle.”

Investing in Shags

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 postelection 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 could be a disadvantage. Eliza explained that “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 she had paid for her children’s school fees, started other businesses on the side, and upgraded her living situation multiple times.

For Eliza, hustling was about knowing how to read social situations to adapt the barometer of one’s battle. Eliza’s hustle had included the careful coordination of “day jobs” (dealing with expat NGOs and social businesses on the one hand, and community customers on the other) and ad hoc labor (classified as casual, informal work), combined with various forms of social activism that fed into her street credibility and sometimes included slightly shady dealings in order to get things done or people out of trouble. As a longtime community activist, Eliza got called as a lead facilitator for human rights meetings, and during the contested elections in 2017 she started engaging in street-level photo journalism. She also knew when to march against the injustice of extrajudicial police brutality but also admitted 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 got 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.

By 2018, Eliza’s livelihood diversification started to include a series of investments and side hustles, including small property investment in shags where she had built and rented out three small single-room units made of iron sheet and cement floor (with toilet blocks and shower units attached) on the family property of her new partner, David. David’s parents allowed Eliza 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 200,000 KES (US1,946), and as Eliza explained, “we hustled for the rest” as the upfront cost of 320,000 KES (US3,114) was needed to build the units and the toilets. At that time, she had 60,000 KES (US584) left to pay her brother back, confident that “once I can earn a profit, I’ll expand and build more units.” In a text sent in January 2022, Eliza exclaimed, “T! the house in shago, it’s finally constructed!”

Eliza’s investment in shags, in part, reflects the wider aspiration that most Nairobians have to have a plot of land somewhere outside the city. To have a foothold in shags was a marker of prestige, of smart investment, and a way of sustaining a connection to ancestral lands and Indigenous ecological knowledge, even if she identified as wazaliwa (those born here, in the city). Ben Page’s (2021) long-term ethnographic work exploring the significance of migrants’ investments in building a home in rural Cameroon is instructive here. He argues that these homes can reflect particular emotional ties to one’s ancestral land, but perhaps more importantly, they also perform a particular commitment to continual return and a material (re)connection between those who have stayed back in the village and those who have gone to the city or abroad. These homes therefore can encapsulate a kind of emotional and material connection between rural and urban residents, whose practices of homemaking and sense of belonging are deeply entangled with intergenerational migration patterns and ancestral ties. But beyond the emotional and the material, Eliza’s relationship to shags also reflects another aspect of the hustle economy: the way in which shags becomes enrolled in the strategies of livelihood diversification among young Kenyans. In her piece on the “side-hustle,” Grace Mwaura (2017) tells the stories of several young Kenyans who are formally educated yet unable to access formal-sector jobs. They each pursue various temporary freelance jobs alongside volunteer gigs with development organizations, while continuously finding new training opportunities (usually connected to ICT) to add to the list of “skills” on their CV. For example, one of Mwaura’s interlocutors, Wambaya, eventually invests in a greenhouse that was managed by his mother and a farmworker in Migori, Western Kenya, and with the money he has made and saved from his various temporary jobs, he buys two dairy cattle, which help generate enough revenue through milk sales to cover the farmworker’s wages. Mwaura’s argument is that stories like Wambaya’s abound in Kenya, reflect the growing number of young people who “transition from one activity to another,” seizing “contingent labour market opportunities while keeping an eye on possible future opportunities. Their strategies to remain employable yet entrepreneurially active are similar to the description of a side-hustle” (Mwaura 2017, 59). And for each of the participants in Mwaura’s study, shags plays a key role in the portfolio of entrepreneurial investments, including the maintenance of ties between urban and rural belonging, between hustling in the city that includes digital and financial literacy, and finding what Mwaura calls an “opportunity space” in shags, affirming the value of staying connected to agricultural and rural economies, which continue to be the cornerstone of the Kenyan economy.

As Eliza’s own investment in shags and as Mwaura’s research illuminates, hustling is not a separate activity operating completely outside the wage, the institutional, or the acceptable. It includes the management of diverse livelihoods and a host of other commitments, including volunteer work and care obligations of various kinds (kin and nonkin relations). It is the alongside, the diversification, the endurance to constantly keep trying to find an “opportunity space.”

This chapter weaves together stories about a woman in the relatively male world I have depicted so far. I center the story of Eliza, one of my oldest and dearest female friends in Nairobi, who in many ways epitomizes and defies the logics of the hustle economy. Her journey included the impasses she faced as she aspired to do well—slowly accumulating some wealth so she could pay for her children’s school fees and invest in a bit of property in shags, while remaining anchored within the collective mtaa lifeworld where she continues to “stay.” In a way, Eliza’s hustle has always incorporated a combination of waged and unwaged work, care and community work, with investments in the mtaa and others in shags. This amalgam of hustles has afforded Eliza a kind of local street credibility, which is in part rooted in the very ambiguity about how well she is doing at any given time and in her confidence that she will always find an “opportunity space” (Mwaura 2017). Although she has zigzagged in and out of sometimes waged but more often unwaged work, sometimes a combination of both, it was perhaps during the moments when she appeared to be working mostly outside the wage that the surreptitious dimension of her activities accommodated a kind of useful invisibility and flexibility that the waged jobs did not.

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 was able to resist the path of early marriage or dropping out of school and staying at home. “In the ghetto,” as she always referred to her neighborhood, Eliza was able to challenge the cultural norms that were perhaps less negotiable in rural areas, where “feminine futures” and young women’s options tend to be more restricted and tied to heteronormative understandings of adulthood (Johnson 2018). But this was not just about the “city” being a more progressive place where women could challenge gendered norms. It is also important to recognize that Eliza had support from her family and her peer group during these critical points in her emerging adult life. This is not to reduce her agency but rather to reaffirm the role of relational ties, be they the kin relations that supported her through teen pregnancy and finishing school or her male friendship group that made space for her to participate (and thrive) in the otherwise male-dominated spheres of the eco-hustle. As a single teen mother, Eliza finished school against the odds, and soon after she started to navigate the male-dominated waste business, recognizing that this was a good first-rung “opportunity space” for a young person who had just finished school in the mtaa. She was one of the few women who became a garbage collector, soon rising through the ranks, starting to manage plots, and hiring other youth under her, and she did this alongside various forms of gender-based community activism. She became a well-respected hustla, one of the guys, but also committed to helping teenage girls overcome the challenges and stigma associated with early pregnancy. She could be found both hanging out at the baze with the guys and spending hours of her Saturday afternoon getting her hair braided with the girls.

Eliza’s story relays the complicated dynamic of a single mother navigating the self-help “real” city, where the contradictions of modernity, makeshift urbanism, and the situated politics of struggle redefine the terms of urban dwelling on the “conspicuous margins” of the postcolonial city. In 2023, Eliza updated me on Kevo. He was now studying at the university. It is difficult to say whether Kevo will get a secure job after he graduates, given that there are so many Kenyan university graduates struggling to find secure employment, as Mwaura (2017) shows. It is now as common to hear of “white-collar hustles” as it is to see street-based hustlers jumping onto the digitized gig economy. In a way, the emerging middle-class youth are the ones that seem to be struggling the most, as they have come to expect “good jobs” and a return on their (and their parents’) investment in higher education.2 But what is clear about Eliza’s story is that she will likely stay in the mtaa—it is where she feels at home. But she has done everything possible for her son, Kevo, to have the option to leave the mtaa and find alternative pathways. This is the thing about the mtaa: there are some who stay and some who leave. It is as though Eliza’s endurance in staying and making the mtaa work allowed for her to sustain investment in Kevo’s chances to get out. This does not mean that life is automatically better outside the hood; sometimes it’s the opposite. But Eliza, and many mothers like her, hope that it might be a little bit easier, or at least that it might provide a few more obvious stepping stones.