Creolizing the Hustle

Learning with the Hustle

In Kenya, the incorporation of the English word hustle into local vernacular does something to the meaning of the term through its situated practices. Here I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what this incorporation means for how we theorize hustle and how it has traversed time and space. In the 2010s, when I was in the midst of my PhD fieldwork and writing, a strand of critical postcolonial scholarship promoted “theorising from the south” and adopting “alternative visions” for understanding how cities work (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; G. Myers 2011; Parnell and Robinson 2012). The idea was to interrogate the long-standing dominant assumptions that ideas from the West should not only be applied to non-Western contexts but also that these ideas were de facto points of reference. So critical urban studies scholars argued that we could learn from different contexts, notably the historically peripheralized and marginalized “South.”

To clarify, what has become known as the “southern urban critique” does not refute all Western ideas, but it does suggest that “the global south is empirically different” (Lawhon and Truelove 2020, 4) and calls for a “north-south co-production” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) through different modes of theorization. In conversation with southern urban critiques, Gautam Bhan (2019) proposed a different orientation by suggesting that we focus on “southern urban practices.” To ground this provocation, he analyzed certain kinds of urban practice in Indian cities that are usually not considered part of “modern” or aspirational city planning. He argued that these practices, and the terms to describe them, are rife with analytical purchase and could be important starting points for urbanists. For example, instead of framing a project around construction, Bhan asks how we might work with the existing everyday practice of repair to think about what goes into city making. This was premised on the idea that of course repair goes on everywhere to a degree, but in southern cities, repairing practices are the norm rather than “new” construction—repair of things and structures that constantly undergo forms of breakdown in under-resourced areas in particular, such that the real innovation is actually in the ingenuity of repair and maintenance rather than in discarding old things and making new ones.

My writing journey over these past few years has in various ways been inspired by this last decade’s call to “theorise from the south” and the push to consider “southern urban practices.” But the topic of this book and its ethnographic detail actually complicate both propositions: Writing about hustles in Nairobi might at first seem to suggest that hustling is a “southern urban practice” and that this book joins the collective project of “theorising from the south.” But in actuality, studying hustle as it manifests in Nairobi requires a detachment from the pretense that we can ever really know what hustle entails in its multifaceted forms. It productively complicates the idea that we could theorize from somewhere and the idea that practices of hustling might in some way be southern, or at least especially concentrated in the South. Put bluntly, what is southern or “African” about hustling? Actually, not being able to answer that question is precisely the point. So what does this mean for how (and from where) to theorize?

While Hustle Urbanism takes significant inspiration from the diverse body of postcolonial scholarship that has challenged Eurocentric perspectives and argues that studying hustle requires a decentering of Eurocentric readings of the cityscape and of the economy, I cannot propose that we actually theorize from Nairobi or that we frame hustling as a spatially bound southern/African practice. Instead, the book makes a different kind of claim: it redescribes how situations in particular places can generate certain ideas and practices and that the narrations of these practices echo ideas that have in themselves traveled from elsewhere or could potentially be translated and applied elsewhere. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory” (1983), I suggest that we learn with Nairobi’s creolized vernacular emanating from the city’s popular neighborhoods—as a concept, an analytical frame, and an urban practice that has “traveled.” By learning with rather than theorizing from, we might recognize the inherent multisituated positioning of geographically diverse concepts that land in a city, with echoes of elsewhere and else-times. This approach reorients our attention to what people do, how they describe it, how it feels, and how it is projected and performed, and why hustlescapes have become increasingly widespread.

Hustle Travels

To learn with Nairobi hustles means first recognizing the global salience of the term and the practice, and wondering why and how the concept traveled to Nairobi in the first place. As Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2011, 3) explain in their introduction to The Creolization of Theory, it is important to consider how particular historical events “provide the primary ground for the interrelated global disciplinary questions that concern us now.” This section argues for a kind of archaeological dig of ideas. It explores how hustling reflects particular historical geographies, how it has been portrayed in various genres—literary, artistic, and scholarly—and how it has taken on myriad forms across time and space. The section investigates selected works and representations of hustle that differ in form and connotation but share an underlying premise: combined dispossession, risk taking, ingenuity, and sometimes a subversive edge, leading to simultaneously always fragile but surprising potential rewards.

Most dictionary definitions (e.g., Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary) show that the etymological root of the term “hustle” is connected to the Dutch word husselen, meaning to shake, push, or jostle. Between the early eighteenth and late nineteenth century, hustling was associated with acts of pushing “roughly,” and by the early twentieth century, hustle became a slang term associated with forms of work that might involve selling “energetically,” and could include a “swindle.”1 By the 1960s, hustling became equated with a particular kind of “hard work” ethic, one that was deeply entangled with wider experiences of racialized, classed, and gendered inequality. But of course, the phenomenon by other names predates this use; as but one example, Mark Twain’s autobiographical account of his early years of “variegated vagabondizing” in Roughing It ([1872] 1962) recounts how he experimented with several ad hoc ways of making a living during an époque that was often described as that of the American “frontier.”

There are several Black intellectuals, activists, and artists who have written about hustling to explain what was happening in North American cities in the twentieth century. In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1965) describes the lifeworld of hustling that he and many of his peers inhabited. At the start of his chapter titled “Hustler,” he writes, “I can’t remember all the hustles I had during the next two years in Harlem, after the abrupt end of my riding the trains and peddling reefers to the touring bands” (X and Haley 1965, 111). Hustles. In the plural. To hustle is often in the plural; there is rarely just one hustle because at some point one or two might fall through. Further on in the chapter, he describes (and recalls having been at the time) a “true hustler—uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything” (111). This was an autobiographical reflection, but he follows this statement with a wider social commentary: “right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.” He explains that the creative means to make ends meet (and maybe even make it big) could include illicit activities such as gambling, prostitution, drug selling, and petty theft. But notably, hustling, in its combination of labors (whether read as licit or illicit), could also accompany, precede, and even be part of various forms of resistance, intellectual endeavors, activism, artistic and musical practice, and community organizing against regimes of oppression. Implicit in Malcolm X’s account is a sociological reflection on why hustling was taking place and on its form: hustling reflected the African American experience in cities under Jim Crow, the racial caste system operating in the United States between 1877 and the mid-1960s, up to the Civil Rights Act, where accessing work, education, housing, and mainstream public space was constantly up against the continuities of white supremacy and racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018).2

Finding means of making a living under Jim Crow that would build some form of autonomy might involve a precarious existence but one that involved conscious detachment from a variety of hegemonic structures associated with racial capitalism. Hustling had in many ways become integral to what dramatist Lorraine Hansberry called “the scars of the ghetto” (1965, 34), the multiple ways in which “the ghetto itself was and is maintained . . . to withhold as much as possible.” In her essay published the same year as her tragic young death, and the same year that Malcolm X’s autobiography was published, Hansberry was writing about education, housing, and the enduring effects of Jim Crow segregation. Her analysis also applied to the context of labor, insofar as the “ghettos” she described were maintained to withhold as many decent modes of work as possible, for both men and women. As Saidiya Hartman writes in Wayward Lives (2021), some of the only forms of employment available under Jim Crow were demeaning extensions of “servitude.” Hustling was therefore not just about survival and struggle. As Peniel Joseph’s (2020, 30, emphasis added) writing on Malcolm X explains, this was “a generation of young black men who refused to work dead-end jobs and resisted military induction,” such that hustling was informed by a search for self-determination, “autonomy, freedom and pleasure in urban cities against the backdrop of war, violence, and racial segregation” (30) that underpinned Black life under the racist Jim Crow regime.

The relationship between hustling and employment is important to examine here, rather than presume its distinction or even opposition. In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), historian Blair Kelley centers the roles and realities of Black working people whose lives and labors have often been invisibilized in dominant historical and contemporary accounts of the North American “working class.” Kelley’s detailed historical account, spanning two centuries, emphasizes the economic contribution of countless Black workers across diverse “essential” but often low-paid services. Additionally, Kelley highlights how these jobs were both precarious and spaces of Black solidarity, activism, and joy. So where might hustling come in amid “working-class” life?

If Malcolm X offered an autobiographical account of hustling from his own perspective and experiential knowledge (among many other themes), one of the first in-depth sociological studies of hustling drew on ethnographic research conducted by Bettylou Valentine between the mid-1960s and early 1970s. In Hustling and Other Hard Work: Life Styles in the Ghetto, Valentine (1978) outlines the structural and institutional failings that led communities of color to face systemic employment, education, health-care, housing, and welfare poverty in the American inner city. A key argument in her work was to dispel the stigmas associated with urban poverty in the United States that had (and continue to) persistently individualize blame (as well as individualize the successful pathways out of poverty). In her ethnographic account, Valentine describes the ways that the individuals living in the neighborhood she and her husband embedded themselves in for five years combined multiple survival and livelihood strategies: including “hustling” (which she defined as “a wide variety of unconventional, sometimes extralegal or illegal activities” [1978, 23]), “welfare” (different forms of public assistance), and other forms of “hard work” (including care work at home and other low-paying jobs like factory jobs or truck driving).

Hustling was never an isolated practice operating in some kind of illicit sphere. By setting Kelley’s recent historical work in conversation with Valentine’s earlier urban ethnographic study conducted in the 1960s, alongside Malcolm X’s description of hustling on the streets of Harlem, and Hansberry’s essay on the “scars of the ghetto,” we can see hustling as a collective and relational practice. As Valentine demonstrated, the point should not be to exoticize the hardship of communities who are struggling, or deem morally deviant those who have resorted to “hustling.” The point is rather to illuminate the diverse and often creative strategies (what Valentine called “life styles”) that people built in order to cope with systemic bureaucratic, state, legal, material, and social discrimination. In the North American inner-city context, therefore, hustling was relationally connected to the jobs and whatever welfare provision there was, opening up a kind of third space for autonomous work and provisioning. As such, hustling could be actioned on an individual basis (e.g., sex work or gambling) or within group formations (e.g., underground drug economy), and could even at times reflect the movements and porosity between spaces of incarceration and street life (see Williamson 1965). But it was also deeply connected to community-oriented shared solidarities, collective self-provisioning, and self-determination in the face of social, economic, and political injustice.

Hustling in U.S. Popular Culture

Depictions of hustling eventually made their way into popular cultural genres portraying underground economies as well as radical urban resistance. These representations were often gendered, and particular imaginaries of masculinity influenced the popular portrayal of “hustling” personae. For example, the book The Hustler by Walter Tevis (1959), adapted into a film in 1961 featuring Paul Newman, was a dramatized portrayal of working-class men in a small U.S. town who spent hours “after work” in pool halls. In this book and the film adaptation, the hustler was depicted as a clever, unapologetic, charming trickster, and hustling represented the sorts of shrewd acts of moonlighting and gambling that took place among working-class men to supplement their otherwise meagre wages and offer an alternative to the monotony of industrial, repetitive work. The practice of hustling was, in this story, connected to white working-class life, showing perhaps that hustling is a condition that is rooted in contextually contingent experiences of relational marginality, which can be racialized as well as classed and gendered. These can also form an ambiguous relationship to morality, and indeed representations of hustling can impose certain readings of the moral register connected to particular hustles.3

In the following decade, the dance style originating in the South Bronx known as “the Hustle” gained particular popularity when Van McCoy’s 1975 hit song, “The Hustle,” came to epitomize the disco era and captured the dance floors and radio airwaves of that summer. New York Times journalist William Safire (1975) took notice of the choreographic particulars of the Hustle in an article that came out that same summer. He remarked on the shift in attitude and disposition on the dance floor: dance styles in the late 1960s and early 1970s were highly individualistic, “a grimly inward-turning philosophy of doing one’s own thing.” But with the Hustle, explains Safire, it was important to understand the steps, and to “signal your intentions so that the ‘team’ of which you are a part can stay in step, then you have embraced not only a dance partner, but responsibility.” Safire goes on to relay the geopolitical significance of what he calls “this social phenomenon,” a dance that “requires instruction” and “negotiation” (rather than random jerks and confrontation). Listening to Van McCoy’s track, and (re)watching available film footage of dancers doing the Hustle, I sit with the following: that 1975 conception of the Hustle as a danced form was about dancing together, after a period of time where dancers had been doing their own thing with little regard to those around them. It was also a diasporic dance that was started by Puerto Rican teenagers in the South Bronx and then spread in its popularity to the disco dance floors of New York City in the 1970s and beyond. So the Hustle as a dance may have been situated within a particular time, place, and genre of musical, choreographic, and stylistic inflection. It may seem quite removed from any discussion concerning contemporary labor precarity, social struggles, and subversive edge economies. But what is key here are the ways in which echoes of a dance style like the Hustle resonate with logics of other choreographies and styles of hustle that took place after the 1970s and beyond New York City. In particular, the Hustle sound and dance of the 1970s involved a degree of improvisation but demanded skill, attentiveness to the other, a learning of steps, and a style with diasporic resonances.

The rise of hip-hop, from the 1980s onward, enhanced the popularity of hustle even further: as a phrase, a disposition, and a multifaceted and multivocal concept/experience. One of the earliest hip-hop artists, Grandmaster Flash, once explained that “hip hop is the only genre of music that allows us to talk about almost anything. . . . It’s highly controversial but that’s the way the game is” (Light 1999, vii). As hip-hop scholars Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby (2005, xv) argue, this is why hip-hop artists can be regarded as popular philosophers, whose “rhyme and reason” and word battles are akin to the Socratic forms of debate and “pursuit of wisdom.” Inherent in the pursuit of wisdom is a confrontation with matters concerning truth, justice, moral codes, and power. So in the 1990s and early 2000s especially, hip-hop became not only a globalized popular genre of music and entertainment; it was also a vital form of social commentary. Notably, the concept of “hustling” was heavily encoded across countless hip-hop tracks during that time, integral to the constellation of stories being narrated.

As hip-hop scholars have noted, hip-hop lyrics described the rich spectrum of urban life in all its vicissitudes. Hip-hop became a kind of self-narration and political refrain describing inner-city struggles in the face of continued racialized inequality in the United States, exposing the harms of street gun violence, income poverty, drugs, and the absence of welfare support. But it was more than just that. As Imani Perry (2004) writes with regard to Biggie Smalls, hip-hop could at one moment include lyrics about hustling and marginalization and at another moment include lyrics evoking endurance. As Perry (2004, 1) writes, “to listen to hip hop is to enter a world of complexity and contradiction.” It is deeply connected to “black style and black youth culture” in the United States, but as one of the most popular and lucrative musical genres today, the “soul of the music resonates with marginalized people of various nationalities and ethnicities” (2). Hip-hop served as a form of storytelling shedding light on what Jay-Z (2010) has described as the “struggle and insurgency” among Black communities facing the continuities of urban underinvestment and racial discrimination in the postindustrial American cities of Baltimore, New York, Philly, Los Angeles, and many others.

When “hustling” appeared in hip-hop lyrics, it carried different meanings and connotations that echoed some of the earlier diverse representations of hustling. Hustling was understood to take place when employment and resources were scarce but where “work” could be made everywhere and anywhere, beyond modes of labor production in the industrial economic sense. It could evoke the creative strategies to get by and mobilize for resources in underserved neighborhoods. This meant that earning a living and navigating street life could engage with underground economies and be regarded as “illicit” or “risky business,” which required skill and an ability to cope with risk (Hart 1973; Malcolm X and Haley [1965] 2015; Valentine 1978; Wacquant 1998). The representation of the hustler continued to be dramatized and explained in different ways—in popular culture as well as in sociological studies. In the late 1990s, Loïc Wacquant’s (1998) long-term study of Chicago’s South Side included a focus on what he called the “social art” of hustling, which he described as a form of necessary survivalism but involving potentially deceitful and manipulative practices. So to be a “hustla” became associated with the ability to make money against the odds, and the moral ambiguities around hustling were combined with an unapologetic admission of doing whatever it took to make money and having no issues with making lots of it. In Wacquant’s depiction, the hustler could be a “trickster” or a “gangster.”

In other words, in different genres of representation, from sociological studies to popular cultural realms including fiction, film, and hip-hop lyrics/videos, hustling came to carry a certain stigma on the one hand but also a particular romanticism on the other. All the while, the “hustla” persona tended to project a particular performance of masculinity. Beyoncé played with this in her 2008 track “Diva,” with the refrain “I’m a diva . . . a diva is a female version of a hustla.” Notably, hustling in all its performative, economic, political, and cultural dimensions became especially folded into the storied mosaic of hip-hop, presenting stories, biographies, feats, and antiestablishment commentary that challenged mainstream accounts of American history (Jay-Z 2010), while also enabling “syncretic expressions that are at once wholly local and definitely global” (Rollefson 2017, 2).

Eventually, as with many aspects of hip-hop culture, the term hustle experienced various forms of glamorization and corporate appropriation, especially in the second decade of the 2000s when both widespread casualization of wage labor and the rise of the internet became globalized. For example, in 2016 Uber came out with an advertisement that asked the rhetorical question, “What if your car could make you money?” pitching the vehicle as a “money-making machine” and ending the thirty-second ad with the punch line “so get your side hustle on.” I’ll return to the implications of this in a later section of this chapter, “Hustling Debated.”

While the term has carried racialized and urban connotations, as Barbara Kingsolver (2023, 512–17) reminds us, hustling is not just a city thing; it’s a “land economy” thing too. Kingsolver’s recent novel Demon Copperhead (2022) takes inspiration from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield to tell stories about the plural forms of violence against the people of Appalachia in the United States and how they cope from these margins. Grounded in the author’s own lived experience and intimate contact with Appalachian communities, the novel relays the harms experienced by communities hit hard by decades of corporate extraction (timber, tobacco, coal) and the recent opioid epidemic. But it also dwells on people’s countless forms of mutuality, resourcefulness, and self-sufficiency in the face of these intersectional injustices. When Demon and his friend Tommy are discussing the difference between the city economy and the land economy, they realize that the very things that people do in their part of the world to get by—like farming, fishing, hunting, making their own liquor—are “the exact things that get turned into hateful jokes on us.” They’re referring to the “straw hat, fishing pole, XXX jug” (Kingsolver 2022, 517) that have stigmatized rural Appalachian people for decades. Both friends then realize that folks on the “edge of society” (Watkins 2019, 12), whether based in the city economy or the land economy, may live in vastly different lifeworlds, and the currencies of their economies may be different. But, as Demon says at the end of that chapter, “in the long run it’s all just hustle” (Kingsolver 2022, 517).

Hustle Urbanism therefore conceptualizes a creolized theory of hustle (Lionnet ad Shih 2011), reflecting in this chapter on the historical, intellectual, and popular entanglements of hustle as a concept, practice, and performance. Hustle is read here as radical in its ordinary subversions of dominant hegemonic norms: it is not depicted as a pathology (informal, nonstandard, illegal) but rather as a narrative and an urban practice rooted in legacies and continuations of injustice, making a claim to different and opaque modalities of social and economic organization. Glissant’s (1997) notion of opacity offers a way of recognizing that, in addition to our own ethnographic limits to knowing (accepting that we cannot always see what lies behind and sometimes even within our ethnographic encounters), even neighbors and friends in Nairobi’s mtaa often do not always know about each other’s hustles.4 Even if youth would say that they hustle in the “we,” together, the collective spirit of hustling is distinctive from the enigmatic form individual hustles take in their precise form. And as the next chapters will illustrate, the line between the local service provider, the activist, and the gangster is never obvious to draw.

Cognates in Scholarship and Other Languages

What are alternative ways of interpreting the kinds of work that are taking place in cities outside waged employment, without resorting to vocabularies that suggest absence or deficiency or recall a supposed norm that once was and is no longer? Informality and precarity fall into this category. They point to either what is lost or what should be. In her writing on “a critical politics of precarity,” Kathleen Millar (2017) reviews key literatures on precarity in order to assess the value and limitations of precarity as a theoretical and political concept, at a time when “precarity seems to be everywhere.”

As Millar points out, one of the earliest studies of “precarity” came from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s 1960s sociological study of work in Algeria, which provided an articulation of precarity in relation to labor and forms of colonial domination. In his book Travail et Travailleurs en Algérie (Work and workers in Algeria, 1963), Bourdieu drew on in-depth fieldwork to illustrate the experiences of unemployed and underemployed workers in Algeria in the transitional years of decolonization. Through a catalog of household income streams and personal accounts, Bourdieu argued that the French colonial economic systems of industrialization and agricultural development disrupted Indigenous economic practices. With the imposition of a cash-based economy and principles of industrial capitalism, it would become difficult to sustain a living without migrating to nearby towns or bigger cities to engage in waged employment or be a commerçant (small business owner). Those who could not find waged employment or own a business were therefore rendered either formally unemployed or in modes of underemployment: précarité. In other words, the normative way of doing the economy would be through particular forms of economic production, consumption, and exchange, at the expense of economic practices that might fall outside these cash-based, waged, and industrial parameters.5

Moving beyond a labor-centric reading of precarity, Millar argues that the use of the term precarity can perform political work and is analytically relevant in several ways but also potentially problematic in others.6 Her argument is indirectly relevant to the social history of hustle. Millar contends that there are several ways of interpreting the growing use of the term precarity. In one sense, a focus on precarity can perhaps “smuggle in a conservative politics . . . in the broad sense of seeking to preserve the status quo” and hold on to certain “normative modes of life” and work (2017, 2). For example, Guy Standing’s (2011) work on “the precariat” in the Global North expresses an alarm with the erosion of waged employment in contemporary postindustrial economies, arguing that a twenty-first-century socioeconomic class of precariats leads to inevitable social, economic, and political disorder. In that conceptualization of precarity, there is a nostalgia for twentieth-century forms of waged labor.

To call out precarity as a problem is, in part, to lament the changes in formal, industrialized labor markets. This includes opposing the idea that postindustrial economies might increasingly resemble the conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability that have characterized popular economies (often called “informal” in mainstream parlance) in the Majority World. As such, there can be a resistance to imagining an “otherwise” that doesn’t merely propose a return to the “proper job” imaginary of the twentieth century (Ferguson and Li 2018), idealized for the predictable working trajectories across labor sectors. These were to different degrees of remuneration and working conditions accompanied with the security of a wage and the assurance of gradual, linear, economic mobility over time if one stuck with the “proper job.” But as Will Monteith, Dora-Olivia Vicol, and Philippa Williams (2021) remind us, across all sectors, labor was highly gendered, racialized, classed, and bound by certain temporal and spatial parameters defining where and when work could happen. We might then consider what is implied by the lamentations concerning the rise of “precarity.” As Millar (2017, 2) puts it, “to be concerned about precarity is necessarily to hold onto things”—that is, “to hold onto” certain “a priori moral assumptions about what is good, normal, modern, and what is not,” to go back to the opening quote of this chapter (Pieterse 2011, 14).

Hustling resonates with other related articulations that simultaneously express relational marginality, insecurity, and rearticulations of life at the margins. In academic literature, a series of cognate expressions describe the ways in which individuals and communities make life possible and even worthwhile when faced with overlapping structural and everyday hurdles. These include “getting by,” which refers to the creative calculations and strategies of survival and getting things done on a Nottingham social housing estate in austerity Britain (McKensie 2015). Youth in Freetown, Sierra Leone, refer to “straining” to describe their relationship to precarious life and work in a city where finding livelihood opportunities is constantly met with the risks of being criminalized or chased from your trading spot (Finn and Oldsfield 2015). Hustling also finds conceptual affinities with Ravi Sundaram’s (2010) notion of “pirate modernity,” or the ways in which marginalized urban residents living in the “illegal city” (Datta 2012) negotiate space from their gendered subjectivities, including accessing basic amenities like power and water in Delhi’s squatter settlements. And given the stigma associated with certain forms of hustling and the conditions surrounding hustle economies, Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips (2015) remind us that those who are living and working at the margins of various kinds across the Majority and Minority World may be subject to stigma, regarded as “misfits.” Clay and Phillips collate narratives from different contexts (they speak to prisoners, hackers, and self-styled entrepreneurs, among others) to argue that the “misfit economy” is one that harbors an undervalued repository of local knowledge, creativity, and craft.

There are also several equivalents in other languages, though the meaning is slightly different in each because ultimately hustling conjures metaphorical and experiential thinking (Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003), which means the concepts and the practices associated with hustling are deeply, culturally, and contextually contingent. To name a few in particular: There is the Hindi/Punjabi notion of jugaad, defined as “shrewd improvisation” (Jeffrey and Young 2014, 188), “provisional agency” (Jauregui 2014), and “hacks” (Rai 2019) that form under conditions of scarcity. Describing the contrasting connotations and valuations of jugaad, Amit S. Rai (2019, 2) calls it “a sometimes elegant, but always makeshift way of getting around obstacles.” Jeremy Jones (2010) has written about the kukiya-kiya economy in Zimbabwe to describe how the local expression kukiya kiya came to epitomize the combination of seizing the moment and making do in response to the economic hardship of the early 2000s. Another concept that similarly evokes frugal innovation or finding ways around times of crisis is System D, shorthand for the French expression système de débrouillardise, a common expression in Francophone parts of the world that refers to systems of frugality, resourcefulness, and creativity that develop in response to punctual or long-term resource scarcity (Neurwirth 2012). And finally, there is the concept of la brega used in Puerto Rico.

In 2003, Arcadio Diaz-Quiñones wrote El Arte de Bregar (2003), in which he explained the multifaceted meaning of bregar in Puerto Rico. This book carries more relevance than ever today, as New York–born Puerto Rican journalist Alana Casanova-Burgess demonstrated in the beautiful National Public Radio (NPR) podcast series La Brega produced between 2022 and 2023. As each episode illuminates, la brega is not a concept that one can easily translate, for it can mean to struggle, to hustle, to “find a way to get by and get around an imbalance of power.”7 When I sent a link to the podcast to a friend from Puerto Rico, he texted back, “Yes! In Puerto Rico, la brega is EVERYWHERE!” And as Casanova-Burgess explains in that first episode, la brega is a way of life for everyday people in Puerto Rico and the diaspora, a way of coping with the overlapping challenges of system breakdown—politics and potholes alike. These are not the only examples, but they provide a glimpse at the wide resonance of the concept and the connections between these resonances and Nairobi hustles.

Nairobi Hustles

The diverse representations of hustle discussed in this chapter illustrate how the concept carries global resonances. And yet, as the book will go on to show, these representations do not fully capture how hustle manifests in Nairobi. Its expressive articulation resonates with elsewheres, but it takes on situated, creolized forms and practices.

Homi K. Bhabha’s questions around identity and social agency offer a useful avenue for thinking through the kind of creolization taking place. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha (1994) uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to analyze different forms of cultural production. Bhabha’s work explores forms of colonial and decolonial influences in contemporary cultural production and thus provides a useful frame for investigating the interplay of colonial and decolonial connotations in the narratives and practices of hustling and their hybrid manifestations in Nairobi. Paul Gilroy’s (1993, xi) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness also mobilizes the notion of hybridity by arguing that Black Atlantic culture transcends national or ethnic identities, as it is “always unfinished, always being remade” (1993, xi). The hybridity in the expressions of hustling among Kenyan youth relay stories that are rooted in the realities of their mtaa but reflect “diasporic intimacies” (Gilroy 1993, 16) with the globalized Afro-diasporic music narrating the “life styles” (Valentine 1978) of other urban neighborhoods and housing estates whose youth facing racial and class discrimination find ways to subvert their position of marginality.

There are ever-changing and layered possibilities, tensions, and predicaments where youth in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods are coping with the legacies of colonialism, uneven development, and neoliberalism, while also reappropriating “global” imaginaries, brands, and discourses on their own terms. For example, youth hone their local knowledge of UK and European football clubs and debate with humorous repartee about which European team is the most Africanized.8 Their self-styled fashion redefines which brands are cool amid the secondhand clothing sold in local markets, such that U.S. brands such as Timberland shoes become referred to as Timbas in Sheng. Timbas have acquired special status among many youth because they represent the enduring fashion of the quintessential work boot and hip-hop aesthetic. Gen X hip-hop fans might recall that classic hit by A Tribe Called Quest, “Oh My God,” from their 1993 Midnight Marauders album. Near the end of the track (2.52–2.56), we hear the rhymes “Timbo hoofs with the prints on the ground / Timbos on the toes, I like the way it’s going down.” Some youth style their hair in dreadlocks and proudly evoke Rastafarian culture and expressions, signing off text messages with “One Love.” Many of my Mathare friends humorously reappropriate Facebook’s “education” tab when they curate their profile, specifying that they graduated from “Ghetto University.” The use of hustle should be read as part of this intentional connection to the diaspora, but as detailed later in this chapter, we cannot simply apply scholarship on the hustle in North America to Nairobi. 

In other words, youth in popular neighborhoods might be unimaginatively classified as unemployed, at risk, marginalized, idle—and many other pejorative descriptors—under certain narrow measures. But their modes of “inhabitation” (Lancione 2023; Simone 2018)—of dwelling, navigating, belonging, and making life work in the city—are plural and cannot be reduced to some kind of explanatory framework. To even begin deciphering their repertoires of knowledge, practices, and ideas starts with paying close attention to their own popular cultural references and cosmopolitan shared attachments to the lived experiences and histories of struggle, solidarity, and joy of Afro-diasporic youth elsewhere. In Afrotopia, Felwine Sarr (2019, 80) calls for “a project of epistemic decentering,” which involves both different ways of reading the cityscape and moving away from “dominant epistemes” and concepts (xiii) such as “development, economic emergence, growth and struggles against poverty.” As anyone who knows Nairobi a little or a lot, we might ask ourselves how to (re)read a cityscape like Nairobi, beyond the familiar tropes.9

Hustling Debated

As this chapter has argued, hustling is an important part of Nairobi’s story, but as a concept and experience it has traveled and reflects shared concerns across geographies of the Majority and Minority Worlds, related to changing relationships to work, rooted in different though intersecting histories and experiences of marginalization and restricted economic opportunity, including strong ties to Black diasporic experiences of labor and racial capitalism.

Part of making space for an affirmative reading of hustling includes engaging with scholars who have been critical of the concept for what it says (or doesn’t say) about racial capitalism and the persistence of labor precarity and marginalization. In particular, the works of sociologists Lester Spence (2015) and Tressie McMillan Cottom (2020) offer important critical readings of hustling and caution against celebratory and ahistorical accounts. Focusing on the North American context, their works show the importance of contextualizing any study of contemporary hustle within wider patterns of historical and continued racialized inequality, state welfare erosion, and individualization of success (and failure), which have continued to disadvantage people of color across labor sectors.

In his book Knocking the Hustle (2015), Spence argues that from the 1980s onward, the concept of hustle reflected the effects of the neoliberal turn on African American communities. As the term hustle became an increasingly normalized expression in popular vernacular, it came to signify and call out several facets of late twentieth-century urban life: it became an expression of everyday street life in the post-Fordist American rust-belt cities, where deindustrialization had a severe impact on the working classes, with Black communities often most affected by inner-city disinvestment, insecure employment opportunities, underfunded school districts, and overpolicing on the streets. And as industrial, unionized jobs were progressively shut down, automated, or off-shored, after-school and welfare programs were also closing down (Wilson 2009).10

What Spence (2015) decries is the implications of calls to “hustle harder” among Black communities—as though the only way to get ahead and get around racialized inequality is to constantly harness your own human capital, be creative, chase the gig, or create opportunities for yourself. The hustle could therefore be argued to reflect a product of the postindustrial, neoliberal, racial capitalism where everything and everyone must be rationalized and mobilized along market-based logics of incessant individualized productivity, “self-made” entrepreneurialism, while holding no expectation of welfare support or safety nets of any kind. Spence argues that hustling has become an expression of the American economy in the twenty-first century (nonstop work with stagnant or declining wages, if there is one at all), and he deplores the way hustling is increasingly narrated as the de facto mode of life in today’s economy. Ultimately, to “hustle harder” also presumes that if you don’t hustle hard enough, you will not only not “make it” but you are also likely to fail—and that failure and blame is individualized and decontextualized, dehistoricized.

McMillan Cottom’s (2020) recent writing has also focused on hustling as a reflection of long-standing and persistent forms of racial inequality in the United States and as a phenomenon that may increasingly be popularized as a narrative of work and struggle but is experienced very differently along intersectional lines of difference—class, gender, and race. Writing about these intersectionalities in relation to labor, focusing in particular on the tech industry, McMillan Cottom (2020) writes, “What hustling looks like in 2020 depends on who you are. To hustle, if you are working class, is to piece together multiple jobs. If you are middle class or upper class, it is discussed as ‘multiple revenue streams.’ But the goal is the same: pull together a patchwork of income in order to get ahead.” McMillan Cottom not only calls out the push to constantly diversify one’s income opportunities (with all the stresses that this assumes); she also describes how the pervasiveness of racism in the U.S. context infiltrates social networking. Concerned with the tech industry she knows well, she explains that Black tech workers “hustle harder” than their white counterparts to advance in these environments. McMillan Cottom’s argument therefore cautions against any celebratory account of “hustling,” by emphasizing the multiple ways in which racial capitalism in the United States underpins the career trajectories and lives of Black workers in particular industries. So to evoke that 2016 Uber advertisement mentioned earlier in this chapter, it is vital to unpack what is at stake when we ask people to “get their hustle on” and to recognize that even seemingly novel forms of (digitally mediated) “gigging” or seemingly licit forms of “hustling” are always in some ways entangled with local and global continuities of racialized and gendered labor extraction that deny or progressively erode the protections for the most vulnerable workers (Meagher 2022; Stanford 2017).

Another perspective on hustle that has emerged in recent U.S. literature converses in useful ways with the arguments made by Spence and Cottom but takes a different direction. In Craig Watkins’s book Don’t Knock the Hustle (2019), the focus is on the “new innovative economy” that has emerged and been shaped by young creatives, entrepreneurs, and grassroots activists from minoritized communities. Watkins starts the book writing about how the “side gig” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got her into U.S. politics from below, and he goes on to mention the ingenuity of unlikely tech start-ups, hip-hop entrepreneurs, and those who talk about their “side hustles.” As Watkins (2019, 12) writes in his introduction, “While hustling may not be new, the sheer number of people pursuing a side hustle suggests a climate of urgency, especially for the youngest employees in the economy.” Watkins is not suggesting that everyone should now go out and hustle or have a side hustle if the day job pays poorly and does not take you seriously. He is simply saying that there are a growing number of people out there hustling in one form or another, from the realms of grassroots politics, to the off-beat creative industry, to the indie game developers. Watkins is not overlooking the ways in which race, racism, and racialization have played a part in contemporary labor regimes that have pushed people to hustle. His introduction actually emphasizes the importance of “a historical perspective on the hustle as a way of life for those on the edge of society” (12). Focusing on the creative industry as an example (especially given his media studies expertise), he reflects on the 1970s “blaxploitation” taking place in the Black American film industry where “hustler creatives” who were experiencing racial exclusion from mainstream film and production studios found ways to produce their own films using creative means to show and distribute their films, circumventing Hollywood (12). So without romanticizing the hustle, Watkins chooses an affirmative reading of hustling itself, arguing that these historical and contemporary diverse and creative practices, often undertaken by young communities of color, need to be valorized, taken seriously, and supported.

These writings on the hustle economy focused on North America raise a number of important considerations for the study of hustle in other geographies. A key question I pose here is: how might we understand hustle economies that form in urban lifeworlds where residents who say they hustle do not seek (or imagine) inclusion in dominant spheres of labor? In the Kenyan colonial economy, a salary was a form of disciplining, and despite the stigma associated with illicit labor outside wage relations, as described by Luise White (1990) in her historical work on prostitution in colonial Nairobi, work made through what Andrew Hake (1977) calls “self-help jobs” were a form of resistance to unequal labor relationships. Indeed, it has been argued that the wage has long presumed the fiction of “equitable labour relationships” (Monteith, Vicol, and Williams 2021), often intimately connected to oppressive systems of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

Hustle Urbanism therefore situates itself within current scholarly debates concerning the struggles to find a “proper job” (Ferguson and Li 2018) and to navigate precarity, but it also speaks to the ways in which youth “living on the edge of society” (Watkins 2019, 12) subvert hegemonic expectations. What if they refuse certain kinds of work and actually choose forms of work that operate outside the norms of the wage? Some scholars have been writing about such refusal: Millar (2018) writes about the catadores in Brazil who return to the dump as waste pickers and deliberately leave the nine-to-five job that was too constraining. AbdouMaliq Simone (2016) writes about the forms of “precarious detachment” of youth in Jakarta and Hyderabad who reject normative expectations. And Marco Di Nunzio’s (2022) ethnographic research in Addis tells the story of a young man, Tamrat, whose acts of “refusal” occurred during Ethiopia’s construction boom, when construction jobs appeared to offer economic empowerment opportunities for youth. But continued disappointment with a series of jobs in the construction sector that underdelivered on this promise (and continued to further marginalize poor workers) pushed Tamrat to refuse this kind of work and return to street-oriented hustles.

In conversation with the diverse repertoire of hustle stories, some of which I have discussed in this chapter, Hustle Urbanism argues that in the Kenyan context, the self-narration and urban practice of hustling connect to long-standing histories of creative resistance in the face of marginalization, such that hustling does not reflect ambitions of assimilation into a particular economic order but instead presents alternative economic logics, forms of ordinary resistance, and sometimes refusal. But the book also seeks to extend the argument further, by illustrating that while hustling reflects young people’s relationship to work, it also reveals logics and practices that go beyond labor. Each chapter that follows describes and analyzes the multifarious ways in which hustling shapes Nairobi’s self-help urbanism from popular neighborhoods and economies and how the logics, narrations, and practices of hustling stretch across the rest of the city and beyond the struggling class. Hustling becomes a form of placemaking and shared provisioning (chapter 3), a form of networking and collaborating with external sources of support (chapter 4), a form of adaptation to the gendered vicissitudes of volatile urban life circumstances (chapter 5), a form of traversing different stages of life and ensuring that shared provisioning becomes intergenerational within a mixed-age youth peer group (chapter 6), a form of storytelling and performance (chapter 7), and a form of political positioning and citywide branding (conclusion).

In his recent book The Surrounds (2022), Simone refers to the constellation of possibilities that lie in the actual spaces where things are happening, that lie in the propositional experiments that imagine alternatives (the otherwise), and that lie in the practices that are conditional, that are subversive because they are nonconforming. The surrounds, as Simone describes, offer openings and possibilities that do not carry judgment, measurement, or assessment. These are perhaps deliberately or conveniently outside the bounds of legibility. In many ways the chapters that follow describe, analyze, and theorize hustling in the surrounds of Nairobi, as everyday, ordinary, and unspectacular confrontations with injustice and the continuous expressions of struggle, solidarity, and soul that emerge out of that confrontation.

To hustle can be read as a precarious livelihood strategy outside wage work and is endemic to racial capitalism and neoliberal regimes of labor casualization. But it does not merely fit within classifications of “informal” economy because it is more than labor operating outside waged arrangements, and it does not necessarily adhere to narratives of transition from one state to another in the way that, for example, the dualism of informal/formal implies. It sometimes includes temporary waged work or even attempts to engage with government employment programs. It engages with capitalist relations while also revealing other kinds of economic logics (Gibson-Graham 2008), as it involves plural forms of work and diverse kinds of labor, some of which are paid, others not. In the Kenyan context, it can also be read as a form of anti-colonial resistance and a creative practice. In sum, hustling reflects multiple forms of values—economic, social, cultural, political—and those who hustle become versed in “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016), while experimenting with plural and often hopeful imaginaries, stories, and plans (Pettit 2023).

Letting Go

Being attentive to the “self-narrations” (Kimari 2022b) of individuals who describe and understand their own practices in certain ways that deviate from hegemonic definitions of work and urban “inhabitation” (Lancione 2023) offers scholars and practitioners who have held on to certain normative conceptions of what counts as work and urban life to perhaps not “hold onto things,” perhaps even to let go. The focus could then consider modalities that surpass mere endurance and getting by, and it would make room for other kinds of deliberations, turning to how popular neighborhoods imagine, rearticulate, and craft their own social, working, and political lives in the face of intersectional insecurities.

It has been easier and more obvious, in the liberal arts and critical social sciences, to call out the moral assumptions of conservative views, especially when these carry strong resonances with past and present regimes of power, oppression, coloniality, bordering, and policing. But it is perhaps less obvious, and less comfortable, to push against the moral assumptions of presumably liberal views, which can include, for example, calling for more salaried jobs in a world with growing casualization, demanding more public funding for certain resources, or arguing for centralized infrastructure rather than off-grid solutions (Lawhon and McCreary 2023). There are of course also right-wing populist demands for all these things, so the demands for more secure jobs and more reliable infrastructures are not necessarily a partisan issue or claims made by left-wing activists and academics alone. But there has been a tendency in leftist academic writing and industrial labor activism to lament the erosion of the state and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. In considering how work and lives are made in the Majority World, I am not sure that these lamentations necessarily apply or always provide useful starting points for meaningful analysis and critique, let alone transformative change, when the history of the state and people’s relationship to work in popular economies present different challenges and levers for mobilization. “Holding onto things” can foreclose the consideration of possibilities grounded in existing skills, knowledges, and coping strategies.

“Letting go” might open up space for the perspectives and diverse strategies of individuals who refer to their hustles in order to make lives and livelihoods more “viable” (Dyson and Jeffrey 2023). Their multiple labors and tactics are formed at the margins where waiting for certain typologies of (in some places, long promised but never delivered) modernities to arrive is neither realistic nor part of the collective imaginary of what could be. In addition, the “modernities” of so-called advanced capitalism (of employment, state provision, infrastructure) have not only had drastically uneven and unequal effects; they have also clearly failed to deliver on fundamental social, political, ecological, and economic levels (Lancione 2023; Latour 2019; Mbembe 2021). Thus, what might deliver more equitable and just outcomes requires quite a radical rethink in any case (Lawhon and McCreary 2023).

While the book intends to be ethnographic in its empirics and writing style, it also seeks to make an intervention that reaches beyond African studies: it argues that hustle economies serve as starting points for rethinking urban struggles and aspirations in uncertain economic times, for seeing anew the diverse strategies that make up lives and connect livelihoods to justice claims, and for valuing the forms of city making that hang at what James Esson calls the “conspicuous margins.”11 Many residents of Nairobi’s conspicuous margins never really “held onto” Eurocentric hegemonic ideas related to work and how things ought to work. Yet, as with many other contexts in the world that have experienced an amalgam of Indigenous, colonial, and anti-colonial histories, the narrations and experiences of economic, social, and political life in Nairobi reflect a kind of creolized and diasporic modernity (Gilroy 1993; Lionnet and Shih 2011; Parvulescu and Boatca 2022). This is especially the case with hustle economies in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, which are contextualized and historicized in the next chapter.