Notes

1. John Lewis, “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” X, June 27, 2018, https://x.com/repjohnlewis/status/1011991303599607808.

2. This point echoes a long-standing argument most clearly articulated by Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi (2001) in his seminal work The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, in which he argues that all economies are embedded in social relations and institutions. Critically examining the emergence of the modern market economy and modern nation-state, he points to the tension inherent in modern market economic logics that assume it is possible to dis-embed economic activity from social relations, through narratives such as “free trade.” Polanyi’s argument, as relevant today as ever, was as much theoretical as it was methodological, calling for a more grounded understanding of economic systems as inherently entangled with social structures and relations. For a complementary perspective, see William Davies’s article “Antimarket,” London Review of Books, April 4, 2024. Davies opens the piece by drawing on the work of French economic historian Fernand Braudel (1992), who differentiated “markets” from “capitalism.” The former, he argued, is integral to “economic life,” where relations of exchange and competition are transparent and where profits are minimal. In contrast, capitalism is the sphere of monopolies and concentrations of wealth and power.

3. I’m drawing here on Kenna Lang Archer’s book Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River (2015), which examines the various attempts by developers and engineers to tame the Brazos River, which runs more than 1,200 miles from eastern New Mexico through the middle of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. Waste in the densely populated neighborhoods of Nairobi is also “unruly” insofar as there have been various attempts to manage solid waste over the years (see chapter 3), but ultimately much of the city’s residential waste is informally managed, and attempts to control waste flows, let alone those who collect, resell, and repurpose waste, have continued to remain fragmented and locally organized. Though Mathare is often left behind when it comes to service provision, it is appropriate to borrow Archer’s notion of “unruliness” to refer to the material flows (and visual, olfactic disturbance) of waste as beyond technocratic capture. Also, on the relationship between dense urban life and the effects of waste, see Tripathy and McFarlane 2022.

4. Mboga means vegetables in Swahili. Most often, the street vendors selling vegetables (and other fresh produce) have tended to be women, hence the popular name mama mboga, which literally means “mother of vegetables.” As Kinyanjui (2014, 1) writes in her work on women and the informal economy in urban Africa, “one cannot speak of the informal economy in Africa without thinking about women” who dominate urban markets and “are responsible for a massive trade in food and clothes.”

5. Part of the frustration with archival research related to popular neighborhoods has often been the relative absence of material. Robert Neuwirth makes this point in Shadow Cities (2005) explaining that there is often a dearth of archival information about residents who live in cities as squatters, where their material possessions—including letters, birth certificates, school diplomas, and the like—too often get lost or burnt, or stolen. Trying to understand what lies in the absence of information is part of the archaeological exercise, as Saidiya Hartman illustrates in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2021).

6. Anthropologists Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe, in an essay written during the Covid-19 pandemic, propose the concept of “patchwork ethnography” to acknowledge the ways in which our personal and working lives impact ethnographic practice. This is a methodological and theoretical intervention, arguing that shorter, regular trips over time have validity and rigor, and must be taken seriously in an era where long-term sustained fieldwork is often increasingly difficult, especially for scholars with caretaking responsibilities and heavy teaching loads. Of course this “patchwork” approach will inevitably inform the quality and form of knowledge production and demands an honest conversation about what can be discerned over short, regular trips rather than longer one-off stays. I would argue that patchwork ethnography can work if it builds on a foundation of longer-term immersive ethnography.

7. For more on writing about and with fragments, see Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2009), about the seemingly small, ordinary moments in everyday life that shape all kinds of politics; Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (2023), which compiles brief personal and public notes that together present an immersive portrait of Black life; and Colin McFarlane’s Fragments of the City (2021), which advocates for scholarship that embraces the incomplete, provisional, and emergent pieces of urban life that make their way into our writing and thinking.

8. See Robin Nagle’s Picking Up (2013), in which she writes about her time as an ethnographer in residence with the New York City sanitation department, which included driving a garbage truck; and Kathleen Millar’s ethnographic Reclaiming the Discarded (2018), where she often refers to conversations and encounters that took place while she was working on the municipal dump with her interlocutors.

9. The term ghetto refers to a particular place that can evoke a shared intergenerational condition of exclusion and marginality and can be vocalized to allude to one’s specific historical ties to racialized segregation and spatial exclusion. In its everyday use, it highlights the relational position of marginality vis-à-vis the rest of the city but can also be reappropriated to connote a sense of place and belonging, at times even pride. Mitchell Duneier (2017) offers a sociological and historical analysis of ghetto as both a place and an enduring concept connected to Jewish and African American experience. I refer to the term only sparingly throughout the book, mostly when quoting my interlocutors. It is not my term to use to describe and name the parts of the city where my interlocutors stay and work.

10. I also stay away from seemingly more neutral but equally inappropriate terms such as low-income or working-class, simply because these neighborhoods are not necessarily linked to class-based ties or income-based wage economies. The term popular connotes several dimensions that are relevant to the parts of Nairobi that are discussed in these chapters and to the wider framing of hustle that takes place in neighborhoods that have elicited negative stereotypes and stigma in mainstream representation. They have also always been part of the city but cut off from its mainstream services; and in spite of (or because of) this, these neighborhoods have forged a strong sense of belonging, associational life, and off-grid economic activity that may take on social forms and appearances that differ from formal market, waged economies, while often being vital to the functioning of the city.

11. By using Majority World, we pay attention to the areas where the majority of the world’s population live, where the majority of natural resources are located, and where both people and resources have been historically exploited and marginalized. The term Majority World recenters these oft peripheralized parts of the world.

12. This is a nod to Eric Klinenberg’s 2018 book Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, in which Klinenberg develops an argument about the importance of “social infrastructures” that provide physical spaces in urban public areas that facilitate and strengthen social ties.

1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “hustle (v.), Etymology,” accessed August 14, 2023, https://www.oed.com.

2. Racial capitalism is a concept originally mobilized by scholars of the “Black radical tradition”—associated with the social activism and intellectual work of Cedric Robinson (1983). Racial capitalism can be defined as an economic system of accumulation perpetuating racialized relations of inequality and hierarchy, and these span the globe through the history of colonization and other forms of domination, extraction, and exploitation.

3. In Ned Polsky’s book Hustler, Beats and Others (1967), the chapter titled “The Hustler” draws on participant observation in the kinds of poolrooms depicted in Tevis’s novel. Polsky’s analysis is informed by his training in criminology, so it is perhaps unsurprising that his observations of the men engaging with pool and billiard games place particular emphasis on the “deceitful practices” of the players, who seek to hide their skills from their opponents. In this study, hustling is framed as “morally deviant,” not necessarily because of the deceitful practices as such but rather because this is how “the hustler” chooses to make a living—deviating from socially accepted conventions associated with “proper work” and certain norms of propriety. Although I refrain from engaging in any depth with criminological theories, I mention this book to highlight the ways in which “the hustler” has under certain light been described as “deviant” or “deceitful.”

4. “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement of transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. . . . But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction. Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity” (Glissant 1997).

5. This book was never translated in English or other languages. It wasn’t until his later work in the 1990s that his conceptualization of précarité (precarity) in relation to labor practices became more widely recognized and borrowed. At the end of the twentieth century, Bourdieu’s focus had shifted away from the precarity of laborers in colonial (soon to be postcolonial) contexts where industrial capitalism had destroyed Indigenous economies and modes of working, to postindustrial economies of the Global North where the shifts in industrial capitalism meant off-shoring of manufacturing and growing forms of labor casualization.

6. Millar (2017, 2) emphasizes the distinction between three readings of precarity that are relevant to the analysis of the different registers of hustling: precarity as a labor condition, as a class category, and as a lived experience more broadly.

7. The NYC Studios La Brega podcast, episode 1 of season 1, is available (to listen, download, or read transcript) online at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/la-brega/articles/what-la-brega?tab=transcript.

8. During the 2018 World Cup, my Kenyan friends were rooting for France, joking that France’s team was part African. They were not alone in this sentiment. On a segment for The Daily Show, South African comedian Trevor Noah defended a joke he had made soon after the 2018 World Cup final, when he declared that “Africa won the World Cup.” Facing backlash, he felt it important to explain the nuance of that statement: on July 19, 2018, he explained, “basically if you don’t understand, France is Africa’s backup team. Once Senegal and Nigeria got knocked out, that’s who we root for. . . . Black people all over the world were celebrating the Africanness of the French players.”

9. See, for example, the collection Nairobi Becoming (Fontein et al. 2024), which deliberately refrains from presenting a coherent narrative about the city of Nairobi but instead intimates its constellation of uncertainties, provisionality, contingencies, and constant rapid change.

10. As William Julius Wilson (2009) explains in his work on race and poverty in the United States, American cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York experienced a confluence of de-investment, punitive housing policies toward Black residents, deindustrialization, and a global drug trade that made inner-city neighborhoods the perfect zone for both selling and consuming. This combined with persistent liberalization of gun laws and the highest rates of incarceration in the world, particularly targeting young men of color. In this context, affirmations of hustling recognize the constant risk to be killed by your peer group belonging to another gang or by police harboring institutional racialized prejudices against young Black men.

11. I borrow the term conspicuous margins from James Esson, who articulates the concepts in a GeogPod podcast interview with John Lyon, produced by the Geographical Association (episode 76, January 26, 2024, https://geography.org.uk/geogpod-the-gas-podcast/). Esson draws attention to people and places that have been historically and systematically peripheralized institutionally and discursively, despite providing vital knowledge, experience, and perspectives. His scholarship exemplifies the importance of a critical geography that engages directly with “conspicuous margins” to better understand the world, while building a more just scholarship.

1. I allude to Kenyan presidential politics that dominate mainstream media and political discourse, drawing from the contested 2007 elections and postelection violence that ensued, and the presidential elections that followed in 2013, mired in controversy first due to allegations of fraud and second because the in-coming president, Uhuru Kenyatta (son of the first Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta), was finally declared the winner despite facing ongoing investigation by the International Criminal Court concerning his possible involvement in the 2008 postelection violence. William Ruto’s 2022 election is equally controversial given his role in the same.

2. In Kenya, people refer to where they live as “where I stay.” In Swahili, you say “unakaa wapi?” to ask “where do you stay?” This is interesting because it carries a subtle connotation about the realities of precarious urban residents who never really “live” in a particular home. They may live or be from a certain neighborhood, but when it comes to their residence, they refer to the place they “stay,” assuming implicitly that they may at any moment have to stay elsewhere for one reason or another.

3. This point is based on a triangulation of responses from interviewees, who would mention moving around the same popular neighborhood multiple times since their arrival (elders) or birth (youth), depending on income stream. It is worth noting that Mathare did not neatly reflect an arrival city as a place of transience for most of my informants. Most were second- or third-generation urban residents, sons and daughters of parents who “arrived” in the years following independence and who have made the popular neighborhood their place of permanent, albeit tenuous residence. But even these sub-neighborhoods or subcommunities that “arrived” decades ago reflected both the tenuous nature of their settlement and the multifaceted reality of the everyday that goes far beyond matters of tenureship.

4. In Kwani?, a publication featuring Kenyan writers and poets to shape “a society that uses its stories to see itself more coherently,” the 2008 part 2 edition included poignant stories of postelection violence in different areas of Mathare, Kibera, and Korogocho to illustrate how “diluted milk in clear plastic bags, open sewers, shit in plastic bags (flying toilets), all these give rise to people’s will” (Kahora 2008, 11). The scarcity of resources coupled with the “political games” of elites during times of disputed elections sparked ethnic violence in areas otherwise characterized by peaceful interethnic coexistence.

5. This figure comes from a former Mathare resident, political activist, and founder of Mathare Association, now seeking to rehabilitate the Mathare City Council toilets (interview, Nairobi, March 2010).

6. According to Peter Maangi Mitiambo (2011), the CDF is a community-oriented funding mechanism that was established in 2003, with the intention to allocate funds from the central government to target constituency-level projects and needs. As Mitiambo explains, the funding was meant to be controlled by a local politician, which also gave that politician power to determine funding priorities.

7. Ann Varley’s piece “Postcolonialising Informality” (2013) cautions against both the formal/informal dualism that presents “slum” urbanism as the epitome of twenty-first-century anomie and the celebratory accounts of “impermanence” that point to the possibilities of informality. She calls for a nuanced ethnographic inquiry that makes more room for listening to residents themselves to understand their own situated articulations and aspirations (to account for the variation of perceptions of informality as a lived experience) before either dismissing or romanticizing what it does conceptually.

8. In casual conversations with friends across Mathare, anecdotes about Moi frequently included nostalgic recollections of the distribution of free milk in schools across the country, presidential visits in the most remote and poor areas, and a populist rhetoric through song featured on a daily basis on the local radio.

9. Population Reference Bureau, accessed September 15, 2024, https://www.prb.org.

10. Though her study does not focus in depth on the issue of sanitation and waste, Huchzermeyer (2011, 205) stresses the problem of inadequate infrastructure and services in one of her chapters on “the uncontrolled legitimacy of tenements in Nairobi,” drawing on interview respondents to illustrate the point that “refuse disposal is a growing challenge with the densification of Huruma.” This section includes a passing mention of one household interviewee who happened to be the leader of a youth-led garbage collection business.

11. Here I use the term auto-gestion (French for “self-management”), drawing on Lefebvre’s writing, which first introduced the term in 1966 in his essay “La problématique de l’autogestion,” later translated as “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion” (2009, 138–52). At first the concept was articulated in relation to spaces of industrial labor, pointing to the mobilization of (factory) workers in their struggles to render the workplace less hierarchical, less unequal, calling for the democratization of institutions and decision-making. But the concept was extended to the idea of “self-management” in the city more widely as part of his “right to the city” argument. For Lefebvre, auto-gestion was a collective endeavor, a “system” directed toward the continuous labor of collective action, so that people might be in greater control of their everyday lives, and in this sense, especially in the French context where the state was so present, the notion of auto-gestion was set in tension with the state. In the context of Nairobi, I argue that auto-gestion emerges in response to an absentee state, not in opposition to an oppressive state.

12. In February 2011, two elders in Mathare 10 were killed over disputes concerning the local public toilets.

1. See, for example, the vital work of the Mathare Social Justice Centre, which is continuously advocating for social and ecological rights on behalf of Mathare residents and building pan-African networks of people-led solidarity movements to combat shared struggles. Ongoing updates on its efforts can be found at https://www.matharesocialjustice.org.

2. Lynsey Farrell first spoke about the notion of “protracted liminality” in her talk at a British Institute of Eastern Africa seminar among PhD researchers in March 2010, drawing on Victor Turner’s (1969) notion of liminality in relation to rites of passage. Farrell drew on Turner to argue that Kenyan youth in popular neighborhoods experienced continued and suspended liminality because they had a difficult time reaching the “other side” of the “in between.” She developed this idea in her PhD dissertation, “Hustling NGOs” (completed in 2015).

3. CBOs vary in terms of size and structure, but they often share these common characteristics: they are nongovernmental, nonprofit, and nonpolitical organizations that are usually registered by the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection. Often associated with a particular neighborhood collective, CBOs are usually formed to address place-specific concerns shared by the group’s members, who all live in relative proximity to one another. The top positions of the CBO are the chairperson, the secretary, and the treasurer. For youth groups, the CBO’s chairman is often the appointed leader of the group. Although the roles of secretary and treasurer may rotate, the role of chairperson often remains the same for longer periods of time.

4. Methodologically, it was also always more feasible to get an answer to questions concerning income during a walkabout with one person rather than pose the question in a focus group discussion.

5. See, for example, Sarah Moore’s (2009) work on the politics of garbage in Mexico; Kaveri Gill’s (2010) work on the plastic economy in India’s informal sector; Jeremia Njeru’s (2006) work on the political ecology of plastic waste in Nairobi; Wilma Nchito and Garth Andrew Myers (2004) on the outcomes of community participation in “sustainable” waste management in Zambia; Mary Lawhon’s (2012) work on e-waste governance in South Africa; Rosalind Fredericks (2019) on the political economy of garbage management and “garbage citizenship” in Dakar, Senegal; Kathleen Millar’s (2018) work on waste pickers’ relationship to life and labor on the dump in Rio, Brazil; Jacob Doherty’s (2022) work on the “waste worlds” of Kampala; and Karen Hansen’s (2000) work on the secondhand clothing economy in Zambia. Scholars also emphasize that the laborers who handle household and municipal refuse may be routinely stigmatized and yet also deemed vital to the functioning of cities, as Gill (2010) analyzes in her ethnography of waste workers in Delhi, and Nagle (2013) explains in her ethnography of New York sanitation workers.

6. James Baldwin made this statement during a filmed interview with Kenneth Clark in 1963, soon after a meeting Baldwin had with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

7. Interview, Peter Ngau, April 2010; discussion based on his research and collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on municipal solid waste management.

8. See “Inclusive Waste Management in Cities,” C40, accessed September 13, 2024, https://www.c40knowledgehub.org.

9. Ulrick Beck’s (1992) risk-society thesis suggests that political struggles have not been about the distribution of goods but rather of “bads,” including environmental and health risks.

10. For a short article explaining the story of the Zabbaleen, see Soth (2022).

11. How these boundaries are contested is something that is discussed in chapter 6, “Stayers and Leavers.” Also, on the micropolitics of “permission” to access the resource of waste among waste workers, see Makina and Lawhon (2022).

12. See MYSA’s website, https://www.mysakenya.org/index.php/programs. For more on the connection between African youth and football in development, see P. Darby, Esson, and Ungruhe (2022).

13. The Kasarani Youth Congress was founded in 2007 as “a vibrant youth initiative with a mission to provide a shared platform for youth to ensure the improvement of their position and condition and address the socioeconomic political disorders that continue to subject them to desperation, injustices and inhuman living conditions” (email invitation sent on December 11, 2009, by KYC convenor for the launch of the audit report on Kazi kwa Vijana).

14. Typically, “vertical” housing in popular neighborhoods are four- to eight-story buildings with about ten single-room apartments and one shared toilet and shower stall per floor.

15. Field notes during informal discussions with youth groups in Mlango Kubwa, Mathare Number 10, and Huruma, October 2009–March 2010.

16. Field notes triangulating interviews and informal conversations with three NCC staff and various Mathare youth residents and activists, April 2010.

17. Huruma is one of the six Mathare wards (Nairobi has eighty-five wards in total), and it produces the most household waste as the most highly dense low-income estate.

18. I draw on Bayat (2013), who examines how ordinary people assert their presence and resistance through “quiet encroachments,” which he calls “non-movements.” These encroachments reflect the risks associated with “louder” politics of dissent, but they also point to the alternative modalities of resistance that operate in unlikely spaces across the city and in unlikely ways.

19. Interview with Raphael Obonyo, youth activist and manager of Kasarani Youth Congress, for documentary Story Yetu, May 2010. Obonyo has continued his public policy and youth advocacy work ever since, engaging at national, regional, and international levels.

20. Informal conversation with cofounder of Community Cleaning Services, June 2010.

1. The term sanitation ladder was coined by the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation of UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002 as a way to monitor the progress toward Goal Number 7 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It is a term that has since been adopted by many sanitation practitioners when they refer to adequate sanitation monitoring.

2. See Tania Li’s (2007) discussion of the discourses of “improvement” in development projects.

3. See, for example, https://businessfightspoverty.org, the website of Business Fights Poverty, the network of individuals and organizations applying business approaches to building more “equitable and resilient futures.”

4. The definition of “adequate sanitation” from WHO is sanitation facilities that hygienically separate human waste from human contact and safely dispose of or treat human waste. This differs slightly from “improved sanitation,” which has to do with separating human waste from human contact but can include different types of sanitation facilities ranging from flush to piped sewer systems, septic tank pit latrines, or pit latrines with slab or composting toilets. Notably, toilets that are shared or public use are not considered “improved” so one of the key criteria for “improved” (and certainly adequate) sanitation is that facilities be unshared. See “Sanitation,” World Health Organization, accessed September 14, 2024, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sanitation.

5. There are four types of toilet facilities in Nairobi: (1) “Public convenience” toilets (found in town, marketplaces, in other words away from home); (2) “Community-based public” toilets provide the only source of public convenience for most people living in low-income settlements. The cost of these two types of “pay-per-use facilities” was usually 5 Kenyan shillings (KES) or 0.07 U.S. dollars (hence open defecation especially among children); (3) “Residential semi-private shared” toilets limit access to those living in a particular compound, building, or on a specific floor. The cost tends to be reflected in a higher monthly rent. (4) “Self-contained” toilets are enclosed within the apartments of the few wealthier residents living within and on the periphery of Mathare.

6. In 2009, an impact and advocacy organization called Map Kibera started working in Kibera, using citizen mapping to help train local communities in mapping key resources in their neighborhoods. In spring 2010, one of the founders of Map Kibera presented at a British Institute of Eastern Africa seminar, where they shared these numbers following a sanitation mapping project with Kibera residents.

7. Interview conducted and recorded at corporate headquarters, May 2010.

8. Here I allude to the challenge posed starting in 2011 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which called for a major cross-sector investment to reimagine toilet options to address sanitation poverty. See “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge: A Brief History,” accessed September 14, 2024, https://www.gatesfoundation.org. Also, on the significance of the toilet as a humanitarian object and development project, see Thieme and DeKoszmovszky (2021).

9. Here I’m thinking with scholars who advocate for “situated” approaches to the study of development or urban political ecology (see, for example, the situated UPE collective, https://www.situatedupe.net/authors/), drawing on Haraway’s (1988) influential notion of “situated knowledges.” A “situated” approach privileges grounded research that stays close to people’s lived realities, agency, and own articulations.

1. There are forty-two ethnic groups in Kenya. Luo people are the fourth-largest ethnic group in Kenya (after the Kikuyu, the Luhya, and the Kalenjin). During my years of fieldwork, I sat in on numerous occasions of friendly banter among neighborhood friends who poke fun at each other’s ethnic identity. A common stereotype that was often core to this banter was that Kikuyu are the most entrepreneurial, while the Luo are the most learned. This was expressed in a telling example one day during the dry season in a discussion about how differently Kikuyu and Luo youth deal with periods of water shortage. Eliza (who is Luo) and Kennedy (who is Kikuyu), both close friends, joked that the Kikuyu will find a way to sell water, while the Luo will talk about their right to water and they’ll go protest. Of course the friendly banter among good friends from different ethnic groups living in shared densely populated neighborhoods can contrast with very real intertribal violent conflict during moments of tension, historically incited by political elites. The 2007/8 postelection violence sticks in the popular imagination as a key example of this.

2. This is something that Craig Jeffrey (2010) has explored in his research with Indian middle-class university graduates caught in a state of “timepass” who engage in a range of “political entrepreneurship” as they strive to find jobs that meet their expectations. Similarly, Harry Pettit’s (2023) work on the “labour of hope” outlines the drama of middle-class youth in Cairo, Egypt, who are caught in call center work while hoping to get a “proper” white-collar job they feel entitled to. And yet, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, this seems like a distant and false promise, perhaps reflective of what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism.” In Nairobi, it remains to be seen whether middle-class youth will be forced to hustle alongside their working-class peers (albeit in different sectors and ways) or whether some will refuse to do so and be more prone to staying stuck in waithood. In a way, Eliza’s son, Kevo, will be treading this fine line in these next few years.

1. These remarks are based on experience as a participant observer during numerous Pamoja Trust staff and community meetings between September 2009 and January 2010.

2. See Ference (2021) for a similar situation related to the matatu sector.

3. See Opondo and Kiprop (2018); and “Boda Bodas Are Critical to Kenya’s Transport System. But They’ve Gone Rogue,” The Conversation, March 17, 2022, https://theconversation.com.

4. Chapo is slang for chapati, a popular pan-fried flatbread that takes its name from the cuisine brought by Kenyans of South Asian descent during the colonial era.

5. These next three paragraphs reflect a conversation Kahos and I had in 2021, which we then turned into a coauthored short piece for Rise Africa (Murimi and Thieme 2021).

6. The Gulf countries are a common destination that provides an array of short- and medium-term work opportunities and much looser bordering regimes as compared to Europe or the United States.

7. See Access to Government Procurement Opportunities (AGPO) program, https://agpo.go.ke/pages/about-agpo.

1. The documentary Story Yetu (Our Story), featuring these music tracks, is available at https://vimeo.com/25020458. It has been shown in local Nairobi venues, screened at the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2012, and used as a teaching tool since 2013.

2. One of the books on the syllabus for that class was Translated Woman by Ruth Behar (1993), about Behar’s longtime friendship and ethnographic portraiture of Esperanza, a Mexican street hawker.

3. The concept of the “tall tale” is often discussed in early anthropology courses, especially when focusing on the power of myths across cultures and the ways in which every culture creates a variety of tall tales, myths, and plays on words to make sense of the world around them. Tall tales may carry exaggerated elements, but they also carry lessons and instruction and are often part of oral traditions of storytelling. See, for example, C. Myers and Hurston (2005).

4. See the New Yorker piece by Clare Malone (2023) that reflects on the recent controversy around Hasan Minhaj’s “emotional truths” and the degree to which these are valid even if fabricated stories or whether they actually reproduce harmful stereotypes of ethnic minority groups that are poorly understood in mainstream media.

5. I’m thinking with Jason Farago’s New York Times piece “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill” (2023), which argues (without judgment) that the twenty-first century is the least innovative time for the arts in five hundred years.

6. George the Poet, “Songs Make Jobs,” September 16, 2021, in Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, podcast, 32 minutes, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09w1xd4.

7. I thank Gautam Bhan for his inspiring talk on November 16, 2023, at the Youth on the Move virtual seminar series, where he made a distinction between the spatial (residence) and the material (jobs) aspect of inequality in cities of the South and then explained that youth are increasingly making claims along social lines (matters of identity politics, belonging) rather than dwelling on housing or employment claims. I argue that hustling reflects the intersectionality of these.

8. Grime emerged before the advent of social media, and while it did rely on new internet platforms like Myspace and peer-to-peer downloads, in its early days it was primarily anchored to pirate radio and satellite TV and bootleg CDs. Malcolm James’s Sonic Intimacy (2020) provides a useful discussion of what social media (namely YouTube) changed for the grime genre in London—and the politics of youth culture more generally. I thank my colleague and friend Fabien Cante for raising this helpful point during one of our exchanges.

9. Lyrics from “Everyday,” track composed by Mashanti for Story Yetu documentary, 2010.

10. I echo here Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 essay (first delivered as a TED talk), “The Danger of a Single Story,” referring to the “single story of Africa” that too often perpetuates particular narratives about the continent in mainstream, largely Western media. This also connects to Binyavanga Wainaina’s (2022) satirical essay “How to Write about Africa,” originally published in 2005.

11. This is a topic that George Mpanga, also known as George the Poet, explores in his podcast series, Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, and in his current doctoral research at University College London based out of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Using podcasting as method, his action research and spoken word focus on “the value of Black art” and how rap music in particular could be a potential catalyst for social power and economic progress.

1. Since 2014 Kenya has been an LMIC, according to the World Bank. See World Bank Group, “Kenya: A Bigger, Better Economy,” September 30, 2014, https://www.worldbank.org.

2. According to the Coronavirus Pandemic Country Profile from the “Our World in Data” database (accessed May 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus), in April 2020, there was an average of 10 new Covid-19 cases a day in Kenya, compared to 28,021 a day in the United States or 4,424 in the United Kingdom (the two countries with the highest number of daily Covid cases worldwide). As of July 2022, Kenya had more than 334,500 cumulative confirmed cases of Covid-19, with 5,650 deaths associated with Covid-19 and 325,400 recoveries. As would be expected, Nairobi registered the highest number of cases. Of course, it is important to note that confirmed cases may be lower than the actual number of infections.

3. For more on middle-class youth coping with labor uncertainty and developing their own strategies and forms of planning, see Jeffrey (2010), focused on the active modes of waiting among educated unemployed youth in India that involve “improvisational skill” and “political entrepreneurship”; and Pettit (2023) on the rising labor precarity of middle-class youth in Cairo, who go from professional training events to accepting prolonged periods of call center work in the hopes of getting “white-collar work” and acquiring a certain lifestyle they imagine as emblematic of “modernity.” There is a distinction between the kinds of hustling that these middle-class youth across geographies take on (and what they accept to take on) and the hustle economies amid the popular classes.

4. Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson (2023) discuss the urgency of radically rethinking how people work when the space and time of the “office” and other physical locations of work are reconfigured and blurred. Their book considers white-collar work but raises relevant questions about wider globalized trends to requestion the future of work across sectors.

5. Mary Lawhon and Tyler McCreary (2023) rethink the politics, economics, and approaches to livelihoods across geographies. Their book includes a great chapter on UBI. For a summary of the 2023 Deloitte survey results, see “Deloitte’s 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey Reveals Workplace Progress despite New Setbacks,” May 17, 2023, https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/press-room/2023-gen-z-and-millenial-survey.html.

6. The actors’ and writers’ guilds strikes in Hollywood made global headlines and exemplified this panic and ensuing struggles to resist the potential obsolescence of certain kinds of labor in the face of AI.

7. Peter Lockwood’s (2023) piece on “hustler populism” provides an apt analysis of Kenyan politics in the run-up to the elections.

8. According to certain practitioners, when discussing the topic of devolution, the lack of central control can add layers of bureaucracy that are challenging for certain sectors (like health care, for instance).

9. There is also no doubt that these mobile banking loans reflect a wider globalized system of predatory loans that systematically harm the most vulnerable and economically precarious groups. See, for example, Fraser (2018).

10. For a multisited ethnography of the flip-flop and its journey through the “backroads of globalisation,” see Knowles (2015).

11. Sanitation and period poverty along with early marriage are the most common gendered adversities, and these are aggravated in times of crises. Dramatically, teen pregnancies rose sharply during the Covid pandemic, as did school dropout rates. See Gettleman and Raj (2020).