Introduction

Hustle Matters

In Nairobi, the hustle economy has formed and is most concentrated at the urban margins of main(stream) city spaces, economics, and political life. And at the same time, as the three opening vignettes illustrate, references to hustling travel across the city, from the popular neighborhoods to the Central Business District, to the populist discourse of contemporary Kenyan politics. Hustling has become integral to the everyday “webs of significance” for young people in Nairobi whose childhood, education, and working lives may be “spun” (Geertz 1977, 5) at the urban margins, while their popular cultural performances are entangled with hyperglobal references (Katz 2004). In each context across scenarios and spaces of the city, the situated practices of hustling thus echo wider cultural, economic, and political geographies, so as the modalities of hustling traverse the cityscape, they also find resonances beyond Nairobi.

These resonances connect to a number of profound reckonings that concern how life and livelihoods in cities are made when people across the globe, to different degrees, face growing volatilities and uncertain prospects. It is perhaps what Astra Taylor (2023) calls collective “existential insecurity,” which facilitates, more than ever, an opportunity to acknowledge shared vulnerabilities with “anonymous others” (Butler 2004, xii). This acknowledgment, in itself an asymptotic as yet unrealized project, is one that would embrace rather than deny the “inevitable interdependency” (Butler 2004, xii) of all humans and nonhumans in cities globally (Barua 2023). This acknowledgment is foundational to forging collective coping strategies in the face of what Bruno Latour (2019, 9) calls a ground that is “in the process of giving way.” So where do we (all of us) orient our attention to make sense of what is going on when the ground is giving way?

The book seeks to understand the meanings and situated practices of hustling, recognizing that the very idea of hustling may have landed in Nairobi but has traveled across time and space. The first significance of an idea/practice that has found popular circulation in this African city is that it reflects particular dispositions toward life, labor, and belonging in this city. Second, the Nairobi stories and hustlescapes relayed in these chapters open up ways of examining how cities elsewhere might be giving way, especially when considering the globalized unwaging of cities where making work and making things work is increasingly decoupled from finding a salaried job and from public provision. Third, in scenarios of hustle urbanism, the particular dispositions that residents adopt—particularly young people born into a century of rising uncertainty, precarity, and insecurity but also hyperconnectivity—combine a unique ability to both “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and, as the late civil rights activist John Lewis put it, not be afraid of getting into “good trouble.”1 Therefore, this book argues that paying attention to hustling and its plural registers offers a way of seeing different expressions of provisioning, aspiration, endurance, and solidarity, while at the same time refusing to lose sight of the vulnerabilities and dispossessions that can underpin (and even enable) hustle economies.

For youth living and working in marginalized neighborhoods of Nairobi, hustling is an expressive articulation and an urban practice. As an expressive articulation, hustling has become part of Nairobi’s urban vernacular and folded into the palimpsests of everyday lived experiences across diverse contexts throughout the city, with evocations of urban hustles displayed on the canvases of moving matatu or narrated through the homegrown hip-hop tracks of Nairobi youth artists. As an urban practice, hustling shapes modes of provisioning, placemaking, and resistance, all of which challenge the hegemonic norms of the modern work ideal (Ferguson and Li 2018; Monteith, Vicol, and Williams 2021). These urban hustles reflect the “unique, hybrid, informalised modernities of cities in the South” (Pieterse 2011, 13), while also echoing the plural, situated, diasporic practices of cities in the North.

Hustling reflects the dynamic and innovative dimensions of youth livelihoods in contrast to more well-established narratives. These include “informality,” describing the activities and formations that take place outside state purview and regulation (Hart 1973, 2009; G. Myers 2005); “precarity,” describing the uncertainty and insecurity associated with rising rates of casualized labor, often associated with postindustrial contexts (Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Vosko 2000); and the “gig economy,” describing on-demand work mediated through digital platforms (Woodcock and Graham 2019), which appears to be an “inevitable” effect of tech-driven futures, but as Jim Stanford (2017, 383) reminds us, “the creation of more precarious jobs, including those associated with digital platforms, reflects the evolution of broad social relationships and power balances, as much as technological innovation in its own right.” Informality and precarity have primarily defined urban conditions and economies in under-resourced urbanscapes in terms of what they lack (Roitman 1990) or what has been eroded (Standing 2011), while the gig economy has come to connote the more recent patchwork mode of work facilitated and performed by the platform economy (L. Richardson 2020). In addition to these three concepts describing labor arrangements outside the wage, there is also “entrepreneurship,” which has become what historian Moses Ochonu (2018, 2020) calls the “discursive referent” of twenty-first-century studies and policies of African economic development.

Hustling can reflect aspects of informality, precarity, the gig economy, and entrepreneurship, but it also reveals a more complicated story that does not fit into discourses of survivalism and poverty traps or those of uplift and poverty reduction. As the ethnography in the following chapters shows, the narratives and urban practices of hustling are an emic expression of the affirmative and generative, but also exploitative and insecure, ambivalent dimensions of social and economic life for youth living at the urban margins. 

While many people across the world today might describe themselves as entrepreneurs, there is a notable contrast in scholarly evaluations of entrepreneurship particularly focused on the Majority World: one reading has tended to celebrate individual pursuits of profit and responsibility and argues that formalizing property rights is key to enabling entrepreneurs to “unlock” capital from their informally secured assets (e.g., De Soto 2000); another reading adopts a neo-Marxist view focused on the structural dispossession of workers, arguing that any celebration of entrepreneurship is a form of petite bourgeoisie that undermines the possibilities of organized labor struggles (Rizzo 2017).

In a way, both the celebration and derision of entrepreneurship argue that operating within informally organized systems of labor and urban provisioning is a problem insofar as it can lead to continued insecurity, exploitation, and poverty traps. There is validity to this. But both perspectives also miss something important. First, market relationships are not purely transactional. They are highly relational, spatial, and “embedded” in social ties (Polanyi 2001).2 Second, because business in the nonofficial economy cannot be divorced from the personal and the political, there are a multitude of obligations and pressures entangled with everyday dealings. In turn, these form possibilities for accessing and distributing resources, and avenues for collective resistance and organizing. The book therefore complicates dominant representations of entrepreneurial activities, which have tended to depict (and celebrate) self-interested pursuits seeking out innovation and demarcation from one’s peer group.

Hustling emphasizes what and how things get done (what is there rather than what is absent), how doing so is profoundly relational (rather than individualistic), and how hustling operates because of and in spite of structural inequalities (rather than assuming that any form of business can operate outside of these). As Ochonu (2020) argues with reference to entrepreneurship in Africa, there is a need to develop new analytical frames for examining the “complex economic lives” of African entrepreneurs who complicate some of the “neat dichotomies” often evoked in scholarship on African economic history or development policy, between formal/informal, worker/merchant, bourgeoisie/peasant. To do so, the book is deeply informed by the perspectives and analytical registers of interlocutors who self-identify as hustling and whose moral economy defies singular narratives of either survivalism or “boot-strapping success” (Ochonu 2020). So let us consider how Nairobi itself facilitates particular hustle terrains.

Nairobi: Palimpsest City

Nairobi reflects histories and “continuities” (Kothari 2019) of uneven development and systemic social, economic, political, and material inequality, in terms of access to housing, education, employment, and health care. But it is neither enough nor helpful to regard life, labor, and modes of provisioning in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods in terms of abjection, lack, or failure. Prince Guma’s (2020, 729) articulation of “incompleteness” offers a generative lens through which to investigate and appreciate the “processes of infrastructural heterogeneity and diversity” in Nairobi. Guma’s empirical focus on mobile service infrastructures in Nairobi and their mode of incompleteness advances a rereading of Nairobi and incompleteness more broadly, in a way that can be applied to several realities across the city. Incompleteness can express a literal material manifestation of being in construction or missing parts or in disrepair. But it can also reflect a figurative and symbolic mode of being “always in the making” (Guma 2020, 729). Francis Nyamnjoh (2017, 262) argues that with affirmative recognition of incompleteness comes a particular kind of conviviality, where “accommodation is the order of the day” and where incompleteness in oneself and in others is not seen as “something negative but as a source of potency.” This offers an important way of re-seeing a city that started out in 1899 as a settler colonial metropole excluding Black Africans other than through modes of exploited labor and servitude. Nairobi’s colonial urban imaginary was therefore literally made up for the British and later was unmade and remade by African Kenyans following independence (Smith 2019). All the while, Nairobi was always relationally entangled with diverse and sometimes competing influences, investments, and interests. To see Nairobi as a city of incompleteness, unfinished, is to affirm its ongoing modalities of (un)(re)making and “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017), to read the cityscape beyond deprivation or lack and instead pay attention to what is, in all its complexities, contradictions, and contingencies (Fontein et al. 2024).

Nairobi’s profound contradictions date back to its colonial past, and inequalities across all domains of urban life have persisted despite the transition between British colonial rule (1899–1963) and Kenyan independence. Since 1899, when Nairobi was known as a “white garden city” and off-limits to Africans outside of Kibera, the city has continuously contended with the legacies of exclusionary master plans, segregation, unregulated real estate markets, and makeshift infrastructures (Hake 1977; Huchzermeyer 2011; Wrong 2009). During the colonial era, Kenya’s primary wealth was based on its agricultural production. Nairobi itself did not have an industrial economy, so the majority of economic activity in the city was based on migrant service-sector work (L. White 1990). Some of the only livelihood opportunities in the city were informal and unwaged service jobs, albeit intimately tied to the formal and regulated economy, either filling a gap or complementing existing economic activity. As Luise White (1990, 1) argues in her study of sex work and casual labor during the colonial era, “the illicit often supported the respectable.”

Today, Nairobi exemplifies urban extremes at work. Since Mwai Kibaki’s presidency (2002–13), the past two decades have seen an acceleration of speculative urban development, with a confluence of foreign investment, deregulation of housing and land markets, and a growing international development sector using Nairobi as its East African hub. Special Economic Zones and “fantasy plans” like Tatu City (Watson 2013) and large technology hubs like Konza Technopolis (Van Den Broeck 2017) have projected futuristic visions of African “smart” high-tech urban development. Nairobi has been heavily marked by (and in many ways helped to shape) twenty-first-century digital revolution and information communication technology (ICT) innovations. Parts of the city contain all the familiar trappings of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, serving Kenyan elites and a well-resourced expatriate class of development and social innovation professionals who benefit from the city’s fancy shopping malls and restaurants, private international schools, manicured lawns, and cheap domestic labor. After years of political deliberation and complicated financial maneuvers, the city now boasts an elevated toll expressway used mostly by private vehicles going to and from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and the most affluent western part of the city; a journey that used to take two hours now takes under twenty minutes (Pollio 2021). But alongside these expressions of modernization and development, the postcolonial governments never actually decolonized the colonial state apparatus (Shihalo 2018)—as the political elites have continued to concentrate wealth and resources at the expense of the wananchi (common people).

Nairobi’s “smart” urban dreamscapes contrast sharply with the everyday realities of Nairobi’s majority residents, the economically active poor who “live on little” (Zollman 2020) and lower-middle classes. According to the most recent 2019 census, more than 60 percent of the city’s residents live in underserved densely populated neighborhoods that occupy “five percent of the total residential land area of the city” (UN-Habitat 2006, 7), cut off from reliable basic services, experiencing frequent power and water shortages and inadequate sanitation facilities. Yet the wananchi are the tech-literate frugal customers, retailers, and repair technicians of the various ICT products and services being marketed and sold all over the city. So, alongside corporate “platform urbanism” (Pollio 2021) and “speculative urbanism” (Goldman 2011), the majority of Nairobians have long developed a constellation of “real” economic practices (MacGaffey 1991) and micro-level financial decisions (Zollman 2020) that may appear makeshift and peripheral to state purview (King 1996; G. Myers 2005) but are also deeply entangled with mainstream East African “success stories” of the mobile banking sector and other tech innovations. Youth living in popular neighborhoods in particular reflect this paradox the most: they are marginalized by the formal labor and housing market yet superconnected to the global digital economy and shaping their own dynamic modalities of urban life, work, and play.

How then can we understand contemporary youth livelihoods and dispositions in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods? Mary Kinyanjui’s (2019, 8) work on utu-ubuntu business models examines the “global and local spatial and cultural forms as well as different business logics, values and norms” of informal markets in Nairobi, emphasizing practices of mutuality and reciprocity in everyday transactions and economic relations. Though she focuses on the informal markets around the city, her analysis of these practices reflect the socially contingent logics and economic rationalities that mark the rich diversity of everyday dealings and business in Nairobi.

This calls for what Felwine Sarr’s (2019) Afrotopia refers to as the possibilities of reading cityscapes anew—not only recentering an Afro-centric perspective but also suggesting that African cities are best positioned to “rethink our conceptions of progress” (118) to avoid the (Western) “mistakes of the industrial adventures of the past several centuries” (117). This reading includes moving away from notions of informality and a focus on lacks, instead conceptualizing African cities as “palimpsest cities” (105), with several layers and entanglements of form—from the superimpositions of different architectural forms evoking different precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial temporalities and influences, to intersecting economic forms and logics that defy formal/informal and capitalist/community dualisms, to diverse choreographic ways of inhabiting public spaces. Drawing on both Kinyanjui and Sarr’s reading of urban life, let us turn to Mathare, one of the oldest and most densely populated neighborhoods in Nairobi that epitomizes palimpsest urbanism, situated approximately seven kilometers from Nairobi’s Central Business District. The focus in this next section is not simply on describing Mathare as a place but also on considering how things get done, and by whom.

Mathare Modalities

Mathare Valley has a long history of being regarded as “beyond the city’s responsibility” (Hake 1977, 147). There are several reasons for this. Waves of displaced people settled in the 1930s during the height of British colonial rule, before later being evicted. It was also where anti-colonial freedom fighters came and went during the 1940s and 1950s, and where squatters came back to settle by the time of colonial independence in 1963. As chapter 2 explains in more detail, in this peripheralized part of the city, the state has either been largely absent or manifested its presence in inconsistent ways, which has meant that residents making life and livelihoods in Mathare have faced extreme infrastructural neglect but also formed a multitude of self-organized, autonomous zones and practices.

In a historical account of Mathare published in the decade after independence, Andrew Hake (1977) picked up on the rhetoric of “self-help” that was informing popular descriptions of local social, economic, and political organization in this part of the city that had been left to its own devices. Referring to the kinds of work that took place across Mathare Valley, Hake differentiated between what Barbara Ward called “odd job men” (quoted in Hake 1977, 9), referring to the urban migrants scrambling for any work to make ends meet in any corner of the city, and the “self-help jobs” that were made and undertaken in Mathare Valley itself. As a palimpsest of urban space accommodating different modalities of refuge, resistance, and resettlement, Mathare had acquired a reputation for operating “outside the law and conventions of the colonial regime” (Hake 1977, 147) and became a place where men and women “without jobs or houses set about building a new suburb of the self-help city” (148).

Hustle Urbanism picks up on, and elaborates, the description of Mathare as a “self-help city,” conceptualized here as a part of the city that contends with long-standing adversities that reflect legacies of colonial violence, continued underinvestment, and inequalities of global capitalism. And yet the popular neighborhoods that become self-help cities also forge repertoires of resourceful strategies for learning, making, working, fixing, doing, moving, staying, leaving, earning, paying, playing, taking, sharing, and waiting. These layered repertoires often strategically subvert certain norms in order to get things done against the odds.

Mathare was segmented into different “villages” and despite having grown significantly in population over the past fifty years (from circa 30,000 to 300,000), many residents still refer to their “village,” each with its own social and economic organization. Against the backdrop of profound inequality that persists as the “future city” and the “real city” continue to operate in tandem, Mathare contends with a vulnerable youth demographic with limited access to formal employment and education opportunities (including secondary school and vocational training). Yet, given its densely populated settlement with a high concentration of households whose infrastructural needs are not met by the state, groups of Mathare youth have asserted their place as local providers of homegrown basic services.

In Nairobi, there is a deep history of youth-led associational life, which has played out in the popular neighborhoods that have formed and grown on the edges of the main city. Youth groups have served as vital community-based organizations with diverse social, economic, environmental, and activist pursuits. Most notably, these youth groups have provided crucial support systems particularly for school leavers unable to afford further formal educational or professional training, and often unable to reach milestones associated with adulthood. Within this window of time and space of collective vulnerability, uncertainty, and imagination, youth groups have tended to form portfolios of collective entrepreneurial practices.

These have varied across groups, but a foundational entrée into the popular economy for youth across the city has been residential garbage collection, which requires minimal financial start-up capital and enables various scales of resource recovery and repair. This may seem, to some, like last-resort work, but to those with little to lose and an imagination, working with the capaciousness of waste and the possibilities of turning discards into some form of value has given many youth across the city ways to build diverse livelihood opportunities, secure vital social ties and forms of belonging in their neighborhoods, and connect to external actors and support structures outside their neighborhoods.

In Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, garbage poses a visual, olfactic, and material disturbance (Hawkins and Muecke 2002) that reflects the “unruly” effects of growing urban density (Archer 2015), especially when there is no reliable public-service provision (Tripathy and McFarlane 2022).3 Youth without jobs and nothing to lose recognized the value of tako (colloquial term for garbage) in material terms (for resale and recycling), and its value in terms of neighborhood claims and placemaking. Garbage became for many youth raised in popular neighborhoods a material, social, and spatial currency of the hustle economy, and the waste hustle became widespread though hyperlocal, fragmented, and territorially zoned.

Through and alongside waste work, perhaps one of the most reliable sources of revenue for youth groups in popular neighborhoods, a constellation of other “real” labors formed across the licit/illicit spectrum. This included illegal alcohol brewing, petty theft, or providing “muscle” to protect a neighborhood business or residential compound. But it also included, and sometimes by the same youth groups, sanitation and cleaning services, urban farming, grassroots humanitarianism, social work, environmental activism, peer-to-peer mentorship, community organizing, development workshop hopping, and various genres of performance and creative art. All these labors have been predominantly youth-led and have reinvented the terms of “work” and what occupations could be valued in the unofficial, wageless economy.

Youth who hustle in Mathare therefore occupy and shape a particular kind of terrain, with various facets of their local economies operating in a form of “legal twilight” (Hake 1977, 159). Inevitably, certain activities within these diverse livelihoods at some point circumvent the law or come up against local authorities. Here I am not only referring to the activities that are systematically criminalized or policed, such as petty theft or illegal alcohol brewing. I am also referring to the labors involved in forging relationships with the “right” actors who might have some leverage and could ensure that municipal lorries actually come, or finding alternative ways to get a lorry to come to your part of the city, the “no-go zones,” so that the trash collected by local youth groups might be taken to the municipal dump. I am referring to the creative hacks that youth engaged in water vending undertake to reroute water connections during the dry season when there are shortages.

This hustle terrain is laced with local codes and shared street knowledge often rooted in entangled biographies that combine tragic and comedic moments alike, where comic relief is often a coping mechanism for all-too-frequent loss, violence, and drama. It is precisely the tragicomedy of what youth in Nairobi refer to as the mtaa (Swahili term for the street or “the hood”) that can simultaneously leave youth feeling “stuck” if they want to get out but can’t (Sommers 2012) but also continuously drawn back (and proud) if they do leave. Folded into the Swahili vernacular known as Sheng (Githiora 2018), the term hustle refers to a condition, a way of life, a persistent struggle, a logic, and an interpretation of the multiple labors involved in making life work in Nairobi. As a constantly changing pattern of advancement, loss, banter, social connection, and individual experimentation that is always met with obligations, hustling has become a kaleidoscopic performance of everyday efforts to get by and get things done—with soul and style.

In Mathare, the key objective is simultaneously to keep moving and find one’s place, even when there is no clear sense of direction. Youth are often busy being “somewhere,” as a popular exchange between two friends illustrates: The retort to the humorous accusation umepotea! (“you’ve been lost!,” insinuating that you haven’t been seen) is niko tu (“I’m just here,” insinuating that you’ve been around), often followed by ninahustle tu (“I’m just hustling”). Fist bumps are then usually exchanged, as both parties understand that ninahustle infers simultaneously to being on the move and stuck in place. By extension, the oft-used plural expression tunahustle (we hustle) has become a euphemism for the shared struggle to get by but also an affirmative phrase recognizing the “hard work” involved in constantly contending with uncertain returns. There is a kind of dance in the mtaa where being stuck and being on the move involves a constant oscillation between individual and collective endeavors. This choreography includes making the in-between moments and spaces matter—when there might not be any work at present, something could come up at any moment. That something can invite solo effort, but a lot of the time it calls for ensemble work.

While many across Nairobi refer to their life and work as hustling, youth who have engaged in the local waste economy, in particular, demonstrate the parallels between waste work and the logics of hustling more broadly: the ability to make a living against the odds by building an opening of opportunity that both takes advantage of and calls out systems that perpetuate urban inequality. According to the oral histories I have heard over the years, youth-led residential garbage collection started in Mathare in the 1990s, responding to a confluence of factors. These included continuous rural to urban migration in response to the structural adjustment programs of that era, with popular neighborhoods (pejoratively called urban “slums”) serving as sites of urban “arrival” (Saunders 2010) for new Nairobians looking for housing and work but unable to find either in the formal economy. And at the same time, there was a rise of nonbiodegradable waste across the city when fast-moving consumer goods were being packaged and sold at the right price point for low-income areas (think of the Unilever sachets and the like that entered these markets in the early 2000s), and the municipality was ever-more stretched and unable to service households across the city. This was especially the case for densely populated neighborhoods where concentrations of uncollected solid waste accumulated on the roadsides and became literally enmeshed in the fabric of every pedestrian footpath.

Combining time on their hands and collective audacity, underemployed youth across Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods turned the “unruly” (Archer 2015) uncollected household garbage into a resource: turning the discards of their densely populated neighborhoods into a livelihood opportunity and a homegrown waste collection service. It is telling that many older youth claim to have been “one of the founders” of the original youth-led garbage collection and recycling initiative in Nairobi. But this is part of the point: the story of garbage collection in the mtaa (explored further in chapter 3) has become a source of place and pride among the majority of youth who have grown up in popular neighborhoods and who have become over time the key providers of numerous basic services. As Kimberley Kinder (2016, 11) describes in her study of Detroit communities “making do in a city without services,” there are forms of “shared self-provisioning” that emerge among neighborhood residents realizing that they have to self-organize when public provisioning either no longer reaches them or has never done so in the first place. As activist scholar Robert Bullard (1994) reminds us through his enduring work Dumping in Dixie, the environmental injustice facing vulnerable communities forced to live alongside (or literally with) untreated waste and associated toxins cannot be overstated, a reality that has played out across geographies and is consistently enmeshed in racialized, classed, and gendered violence. In the face of such harms, the ethic of “shared self-provisioning” and the formation of grassroots activisms are integral to everyday collective life, and experienced in particular ways amongst youth.

In Nairobi, many youth are caught in a sense of suspension and “waithood” (Honwana 2012), which is individually felt but collectively experienced. Comprising over half of the residential population in Mathare, the majority of youth growing up there face limited prospects of getting a formal job and are often unable to reach the culturally recognized milestones and life stages for a young person moving into adulthood (e.g., a stable job, affording property, being able to pay for dowry). Therefore, friendship-based youth groups have become crucial foundations for social and economic organization in different Mathare villages. Importantly, young men and women who self-identify as mahustla (hustlers in Sheng) have never been passive in the face of threats to livelihoods, health, and justice. They have found ways to articulate and practice their everyday “social navigations” (Vigh 2006) to cope with the uncertainties, unpredictabilities, and risks associated with life (Waage 2006) in the self-help city. This has included experimenting with different sorts of aspirations, dealings, and plans to reconfigure the world around them and render their lives more viable (Dyson and Jeffrey 2023; Honwana and De Boeck 2005; Katz 2004; Kimari 2018; Simone and Pieterse 2017; Thieme 2018).

The social navigation of hustling has shaped particular youth subjectivities and rhythms starting from the neighborhood because youth do not stand still for long, even if they are in some way caught in waithood. They find a constellation of ways to assert their place, build networks, and form modalities of work, however tenuous. These are situated within the mtaa but also extend beyond it and inform youth culture across the city. Youth at the margins continuously remake the everyday city, by shaping their own mtaa strategies and dispositions founded on shared practices and lived experiences—a kind of learned way of being in the city—what Pierre Bourdieu (1997) referred to as “habitus”—that involves adapting to expected and spontaneous emergencies of all kinds. This learned way of being forms what Chris Richardson and Hans Skott-Myhre (2012) have called a “habitus of the hood,” a modality of dwelling and belonging in marginalized urban spaces that are—despite their status, stigma, and positioning in relation to the mainstream city and economy—a place where the majority residents in the city live, work, and pass the time.

The mtaa is where people wanakaa (stay) and make ties, where they weave webs of social, ecological, and political labors that operate outside of, or sometimes alongside, hegemonic frames of waged and linear economies, and formal institutional politics. The mtaa is not necessarily where people call “home,” as this is often a concept reserved for the place “up-country” that is close to ancestral lands and where elders live. The mtaa is composed of what Suzi Hall (2021) calls “edge” spaces that are simultaneously marginalized and transgressive. In Nairobi, the habitus of the hustle makes work outside the wage and finds ways to make things work even when systems and materials break down. It organizes life, labor, and learning on and for the street, through various registers and acts of rejigging, repositioning, reuse, repurposing, and repair. To study and begin to grasp what the habitus of the hustle might be poses all kinds of methodological dilemmas and journeys, which is the focus of the next section.

Ethnography and the Ways In

7:30 a.m. Check my bag one more time: Notebook, small pen, pocket knife, recorder, batteries, passport copy, phone, bandana, 1,000 KES note in a hard-to-reach pocket, 200 KES for transport and food for the day, a couple of plastic bags to use for trash, water bottle, hand sanitizer . . . Put exact change for matatu in pocket, slip on boots. Walk for thirty minutes to town. Queue up at public toilet next to Kenyan National Archives, likely the last easy-to-access toilet for the rest of the day. Give the lady at the entrance 10 KES; she gives me a bit of toilet paper. If there is water and soap that is a good day. Get to the matatu stage nearby and wait for number 46 to fill up. Can take up to twenty minutes, maybe more. Can’t be picky, but if possible I love the window seat, in the second row. Once we get moving, I’m about thirty minutes from Mathare, depending on traffic. Text my friend to say I’m on my way . . .

To get to Mathare, I take a bumpy matatu ride from the CBD, route 46. Each time I come to Nairobi, it takes me an hour on the first day to meander around the CBD asking different matatu conductors hanging outside their parked vehicles where the stage for matatu going to Mathare is now situated. It seems to change every few months, depending on several factors, including the continuous disciplining of matatu mobility and presence in the city center, especially since 2005 when the Transport Licensing Board started to demand that all matatu have a permit in order to access the CBD (see chapter 4 in Ference 2024). Once the matatu has departed from town, it defies traffic rules and any sense of straightness, and eventually arrives onto Juja Road, which connects one point of Mathare to other parts of Eastlands. We ride past “Little Mogadishu,” and I usually get off before the matatu starts getting close to Kariobangi, or “Light industries.” The transition from the CBD to Juja Road bombards the senses, as do the soundscapes. Like countless streetscapes in the Majority World, Juja Road is a kaleidoscopic street theater where the lines between commercial, residential, social, pedestrian, and motorized space and sound are constantly embroiled. Like the corrugated metal sheet that covers most homes and stalls, everything seems jagged and in motion, and the matatu seems to swerve even when it presumes to stop to let people off—in fact, it never completely stops, and getting off requires a jump and a certain satisfaction in finding one’s balance before walking away from the squeezed vehicle, into the busy streets.

The spaces between built structures, pedestrians, and popular economies lining the streets are liminal and always full of possibility—a greeting, a curious glance at the stalls to one’s left and right, a quick calculation of the price of tomatoes this time compared to last, the chance of running into a friend. All spaces feel modular, particularly pavements, the spaces to sell and display fresh produce, spaces to repair thirdhand goods, space to meet and greet neighbors (and to greet strangers so they find you a little bit less strange), and space to zigzag one’s way through a constant countercurrent of bodies heading in the opposite direction. Moments of some pushing and shoving in the interest of just being able to get to where you’re heading are interspersed with moments of humor and civility, and in my case, probably excessive utterances of sama hani (excuse me), as though I am constantly asking for some kind of permission to walk these streets where I am not from but keep returning to. Eventually, sama hani is replaced with various iterations of “hello,” from the formal Habari yako? greeting directed to elders, to the slang greetings like niaje? directed to youth, once I start slowing down my pace and intend to stay a while.

The roadside includes a lively social infrastructure of commerce and banter, often occupied by street vendors who have been selling their fresh produce of the day for years, some decades. Some of the women who are known affectionately as mama mboga (greengrocer) can often be found cutting kale, called Sukuma wiki (push the week), the most nutritious and affordable staple vegetable.4 Mama mboga cuts with agility and nonchalance, looking up at her friend to share the daily gossip. Her knife may be blunt and missing a handle, but imperfect instruments do not get in the way of getting a job done. The shoe shiner on the street corner sits on a small stool that bring his knees to his shoulders as he curves his back over his customer’s shoes. A well-cared-for tattered leather briefcase is opened with three colors of shoe polish, a brush, and a cloth. The customer is made to feel comfortable perched on a chair placed carefully under a small parasol—get your shoes shined under the shade, first-class service. As a single man reads his Daily Nation paper while sitting on another stool on the roadside, two other men (perhaps longtime friends, perhaps just fellow roadside time killers) stare over the shoulder of the one who had money to pay for the newspaper that day—or found a copy of yesterday’s somewhere. The three men occasionally comment on the headlines, and an animated discussion ensues about the politics of the day. It is worth talking about age-old issues that seem to rarely change, just because it is important to make one’s opinion known. Debate makes the morning move, after all, and helps pass the time both for those who have no time to lose and for those who have too much time to spare.

Some street vendors claimed their corner ages ago. Mama Kahos sold a modest quantity of fruits and vegetables on the corner of Mlango Kubwa bar every day for forty-six years (1974–2020), until she recently retired. The same goes for Geoffrey with his mandazi (fried dough) stand in Huruma. Amid these peopled fixtures that became “landmarks” of popular street life and precious sources of local knowledge, the daily rhythm and generalized uncertainty associated with how much each person might earn that day created an atmosphere of contingency, provisionality, and impermanence. At the same time, care and precision characterized the presentation of street businesses, pedestrians, and homes. The fruits and vegetables, thirdhand shoes, and pieces of coal were neatly displayed on the kanga fabrics carefully set out by daily street vendors. Every person’s shoes were meticulously polished, every man’s shirt and children’s school uniforms were carefully ironed. Though every street combined a mixed typology of homes—from the flats in the four- to eight-story concrete buildings to the mabati (shack) structures, outside each home, laundry lines bowed with brightly colored sheets and clothes hanging to dry in the sun.

There was a constant choreography of embodied labor involved in the most minute of tasks, performed with precision and dexterity, and animated with constant sociality. Underpinning most homegrown businesses was a craft for resource recovery and maintenance. To conserve, repair, and repurpose was as important as earning, producing, and selling. And in the background, various genres of music, banter, some shouting, and much laughter punctuated the nearby drones of traffic sounds, with matatu horn percussions and their engine throttles being the loudest instruments of all. Juja Road and its vivacious soundscape was simultaneously thrilling and exhausting, for years appearing increasingly familiar in its daily pace and general patterns of movement and activity but seeming different in the particulars of each visit. Riding along Juja Road on matatu 46 could let the unfazed commuter daydream and pay no attention or serve as an electrifying mosaic of partially rendered stories of popular urban life.

Book Overview

Following this introduction, the next two chapters (1 and 2) provide theoretical and historical context, while the core ethnographic chapters that follow (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) adopt a narrative style, each focusing on a set of individuals whose portraits are threaded throughout the book. Each chapter builds on the former and introduces a particular aspect of hustle urbanism, in its relational, spatial, temporal, and political sense. While an underlying theme running across the chapters is the nonlinear and unpredictable temporalities and terrains of the hustle economy in the self-help city, the presentation of each chapter does largely follow a chronological order in terms of the sequencing of events.

“Creolizing the Hustle” (chapter 1) explores the social history of hustle, contextualizing the evolution of the term and its use. Doing so involves discussing its relationship to racialized struggles in U.S. cities under Jim Crow; the representation of hustle and the “hustler” figure in popular culture from the 1960s, including during the rise and globalization of hip-hop from the 1980s onward; its twenty-first-century entanglements with Afro-diasporic vernaculars; and its recent appropriation by corporate and political entities. Providing a conceptual grounding for the following chapters, this first chapter illuminates why hustle as a concept and a practice merits further theoretical and empirical attention. The chapter argues that hustle has circulated as an idea across time and space, and its situated practices have diasporic resonances far beyond Nairobi. It thus opens up timely lessons for rethinking urban practices in times of globalized, accentuated uncertainty.

“Self-Help City” (chapter 2) historicizes Nairobi hustles by considering the paradox of Nairobi’s urban development. Written for both Kenyanists and for those less familiar with Kenya’s political economy, the chapter reflects on how Nairobi’s contemporary modernity is shaped by the legacies of settler colonialism and its multifarious postcolonial identity—including the fact that Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods house more than half of the city’s residents on less than 5 percent of the city’s land. Drawing on a combination of archival sources, older ethnographic studies, and recent work on Nairobi, the chapter foregrounds the ethnographic chapters that follow with a reflection on Mathare’s history of “self-help” urbanism, homegrown economies, and grassroots activism.

“Straight Outta Dumpsite” (chapter 3) focuses on the relationship between youth, hustling, and waste labor in Mathare. The chapter traces the rise of the homegrown youth-led waste economy that formed at a time of major changes in Kenya, including the transition to multiparty politics in 2002 and reforms that included granting more power and recognition to grassroots organizations. Youth groups in popular neighborhoods who had little to lose and zero seed capital turned to residential waste collection as an opportunity space. The chapter illustrates how these youth have strategically modulated between survivalist strategies, livelihood diversification using waste as a resource, and transgressions against various forms of authority. As such, hustling through waste work enabled at-risk youth to assert their place and position in the city, and highlights the contributions of these hustles to urban political ecologies and economies.

“The Business and Politics of Shit” (chapter 4) focuses on a “partnership” between a social business seeking to commercially engage “entrepreneurial” youth from Mathare to co-develop a community-based sanitation service. The social business aimed to build on existing youth-led income activities—including the residential waste management business. The chapter traces the different stages and dilemmas of this partnership between unlikely bedfellows—a multinational company bound by particular parameters of for-profit business success and youth groups bound by particular parameters of the hustle economy and mtaa way. This case study reframes the critiques of business-led development by focusing not just on the ethical concerns of commercializing “basic” services and turning social needs into market demands but also on the diverse effects of a corporate/community encounter navigating different motivations and contrasting economic and organizational logics.

“Ghetto Gal” (chapter 5) focuses on the gendered dynamics of hustling in Mathare, a neighborhood where women have historically both been subject to extreme gendered insecurity and asserted their agency through various forms of female-led enterprise and solidarity. The chapter illuminates what it means for women (working single mothers in particular) to navigate intersectional forms of hardship and obligations. Following the previous chapters, which focused on youth group entities, the focus here is on Eliza, whose own life trajectory illustrates how women in the mtaa often assume shifting gendered roles as “provider,” “carer,” “leader,” “mentor,” and, as Eliza would say, “ghetto gals who hustle too.” The chapter draws on life history interviews, informal conversations, homestays, and walkabouts with Eliza to illustrate how she describes and analyzes her situation, particularly how she has navigated male-dominated lifeworlds, coped with the vicissitudes of temporary employment and experimental entrepreneurship, adjusted to the setbacks, and taken advantage of the gains, all the while making calculated investments in her children’s education and a little bit of land.

“Stayers and Leavers” (chapter 6) focuses on the terrains and temporalities of hustling by reflecting on the effects of passing time on the nonlinear and unpredictable vicissitudes of life for the cohort of youth who featured in chapters 3, 4, and 5. The chapter does this by considering the dynamics at play when certain individuals leave, while others stay, and by analyzing the tensions and solidarities between older and younger youth. The chapter explores what it might mean to make room for younger youth to step up to leadership roles and how the form of hustling shifts with age and particular life stages. The chapter thus explores how hustling evolves over time for certain individuals (including the new sorts of investments made) but also how hustling cultures and aspirations themselves evolve from one youth cohort to another.

“Storytellers Performing the Hustle” (chapter 7) focuses on the performative dimension of hustling, drawing attention to the hustles of youth who identify as activists, social warriors, tour guides, and hip-hop artists. These youth speak from the mtaa for the mtaa but also have taken advantage of digital platforms and social media to spread their rhythms and build up their brand beyond their hood. The chapter emphasizes the importance of hustling through storytelling—a form of artistry, counternarrative, and creative entrepreneurship that contributes to wider popular efforts to reclaim and decolonize the city. This coincides yet also contrasts with recent efforts to transform former colonial spaces in the historical city center, such as the recently refurbished McMillan Memorial Library built in 1931 at the height of British colonialism, now advertised as a reclaimed “palace for the people.”12 The rise of Nairobi popular artists speaks to themes that not only reflect the realities at the urban margins but also provide what Felix Mutunga Ndaka (2023) calls “alternative archives” for theorizing social, economic, and political lives that counter mainstream discourses. Thanks to digital platforms, the stories of hustling are told both to sell the story and to make a living. The mtaa then becomes a stage and a commodity.

The conclusion reflects on current-day, postpandemic Nairobi as a cityscape where hustling has traveled from the street vernaculars of the “hood” to more mainstream parlance across the city, including the president as of August 2022, William Ruto, who has proudly spoken of his boot-strapping beginnings and has affirmed his own claim to hustling. The chapter takes a reflective tone, gesturing to future-oriented uncertainty but also cautious optimism, pointing to the plural meanings, modalities, and contributions of hustling in Nairobi and beyond. In Nairobi and across other cities in the Anglophone world, people of various income and social classes speak of their “side hustles.” In Nairobi, these popularized discourses of hustling traveling across the city have in some ways elevated the resourcefulness and skills of the “hustling classes” and recognized the structural hardships that have pushed the marginalized majority to hustle in the first place, while political and business elites have appropriated and co-opted the language of hustling as campaign and marketing slogans. The wider implication of this is that the globalized use of the term, within Nairobi and beyond, also signifies a broader shift in the possibilities and demands of work, including the growing impossibilities of wage labor that exist now across the “classes” in the Majority and Minority World. The book ends with an invitation to take seriously the diverse narrations, practices, and dispositions of hustling in times of constant uncertainty in our moral and material economy.