Afterword

I was born and bred in Mlango Kubwa, one of the villages or what are now called wards in Mathare. Throughout those formative years, I always had a “theory” or suspicion if you like. Whenever I saw a white person visit our ghetto and try to “embed” themselves among us, learn our language (including Sheng), I wholeheartedly believed they worked undercover for the CIA or MI6! This was because I wondered what interest a foreigner would have in the granular details of where and how we lived. So on that random afternoon when I first met Tatiana outside our baze (as we popularly called the social hall for the Pequeninos youth group), these are the kinds of suspicions I harbored. We did not say much at our first encounter, but I recall that someone next to me mentioned to her that I was a lawyer and a member of Pequeninos. I realized that Tatiana had noted that interesting piece of information in her mind as she smiled and walked away. That chance meeting would be the start of a friendship that has blossomed in different directions, transitioning from what I initially felt—a subject of her study—to a comrade who understood and respected us.

Preparing a “response” to Tatiana’s book was not easy because of the mixed feelings that come with “studying” what is so familiar to me, enjoying the very detailed and accurate descriptions of what always was and remains mundane to me, the eye-opening “bigger picture” of why we as a community in Mlango Kubwa and the larger Mathare are where we are and what perpetuates our reality. I therefore thought it best to share, as I read the text, what it reminded me about life in Mathare (as one of the “leavers” who regularly returns).

Tatiana’s ethnographic work in Nairobi generally and specifically in Mathare is, in my view, a fair and accurate account of what transpires in my city and my hood. I say fair and accurate account, but not complete, because the fluidity in a field such as Mathare means the quest for certainty and completeness will always be postponed. As I read the book, the first sense I got was how respectful she was in and with her field of study. Aside from the necessary setting of the “scene” that the academy and convention demand, this book is essentially about the people that Tatiana met and befriended in Mathare. I appreciated her work for its respect for me and other interlocutors in the years of observation during her visits, stays, and returns to Mathare. We are not footnotes but at the heart of her work in Mathare, and it was clear that we were seen and heard through the accounts in the book. We were not just “studied”; there was respect and friendship, and even though we “gave access” informally, we did so consciously. When I read about her encounters with different actors in our community like my friends Kaka and the late Rosie, it was clear that what she was getting by way of information was not “performed,” as individuals and groups commonly did when visitors and potential “sponsors” came, and Tatiana is spot on in picking out these performances. I credit this to the trust she earned with her interlocutors and the friendships that allowed genuine conversation.

The book wrestles with the question of who a hustler is and the apprehension that the elite have appropriated the term for self-serving interests, including those who have sought (and gotten to) high political offices, like President Ruto, on the currency of the hustler narrative (or rhetoric). To my mind, the idea of hustling has been with us longer than the linguistic genealogy of the term hustla/hustler. I would go as far as suggesting that Tatiana’s efforts in Mathare make her a hustler. She comes to Nairobi the first time; she sniffs a possibility and returns to explore it further and does so relentlessly. Arguably, the hustler spirit rubbed off on the author because to hustle, in one sense and as her observations reveal, is to strive, to keep showing up even when what you come back to seems to stagnate. Repeated returns to the field of hustling eventually breed breakthrough for most hustlers in Nairobi, and it bred acceptance and paved the way for a clearer picture of Tatiana’s “field.” How she gained acceptance in Mathare is strikingly similar to how we admitted new members to Pequeninos. You see, at Pequeninos there were two tiers of membership—the “founders” and those we recruited after the foundation of the youth group had been laid. The criterion for admitting additional members, although unstated, was simply those who had “hung around” our baze long enough and returned consistently. Having been vetted by their longevity with us, these “fresh recruits” could then be trusted; they could sit with us and listen to our stories, including incriminating ones. Tatiana was in a way “recruited” into Pequeninos, to Mlango Kubwa and Mathare at large. She had hustled her way through her own studies, her teaching, her writing, and into our hearts. This striving, or the “grit and persistence,” as she describes it, makes her the quintessential hustler.

I really liked that Tatiana accurately picks this idea, in the storytellers chapter, of our hood being both a stage and a commodity. This reminded me of the word we actually use(d) in reference to the hood—shamba (Swahili for “farm”). We cultivated and harvested from the hood, and because of the limited acreage of the shamba, individuals and groups have to mark territory. So that public toilet is “managed” by Group A, and members of Group B have to respect this. For Group A, the toilet, which they charge members of the public to use for a small fee (in return for keeping it clean), is their shamba. Members of Youth Group X collected garbage in a particular “zone” exclusively because this was their shamba and Group Y could not extend services to this zone. The examples could go on. Even for the “roadside time killers” that Tatiana spots along Juja Road, I would argue that she misses to “see” that they essentially idle at their shambas. They “kill time” at strategic places of opportunity and are still “at work” while waiting. As some of the youth kill time at a shoe-shining place along Juja Road, the makanga/dondaa (conductor) in the matatu will get one of them to temporarily take charge (and be paid for it) as the conductor goes for lunch. There are numerous examples of this model of “work” or “going to work,” but in sum, if you leave the house and assume the position of “ready to work,” you always give yourself a chance to eat in Mathare and generally in Nairobi.

The idea of the hustle terrain being defined by shared street knowledge rooted in “entangled biographies that combine tragic and comedic moments” also struck a chord with me. It reminded me of the powerful role of storytelling in the trajectories that the lives of most young people in Mathare take. Tatiana may not have known this until now, but in my youth group, Pequeninos, the narrative we gave all visitors was the shiny, acceptable one of being pioneers of garbage collection in Mlango Kubwa in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What a visitor could not have known is that at some stage, about 90 percent of our members engaged in crime as a side hustle to the main hustle of garbage collection. The way members of our group were recruited into crime, incredible as this may sound, was through storytelling. We had a few of our friends from other parts of Mathare (already engaging in crime) that regularly came to our baze and on most weeknights and weekends, they would tell colorful stories of how a robbery went in Nairobi’s CBD, how dramatic the escapes were, how the police patrolling the CBD had to get their cut to allow our friends to operate with impunity, and so on. We were hooked to these narrations, and one by one, members who were hitherto only “garbage collectors” and footballers started joining the group that engaged in crime as their mainstay. This is how we lost more than a dozen members to police shootings, lynching or “mob justice,” and long periods of incarceration. To these fallen soldiers, as we call them, may they continue resting in peace.

I have reflected on this history to also relate it to my appreciation of Tatiana’s concession that she needed to “leave room for the unknowable” and that she could not always see what lies behind her ethnographic encounters in the hood. She is also right that those of us in the hood did not always know each other’s hustles. One of the reasons why some hustles remained unknown was because some were extralegal or illegal and the less others knew about them, the safer for those involved. The other phenomenon was that there was/still is a lot of copying or replication of the other person’s idea, and so to eliminate competition, you kept what you do to yourself or were at the very least vague on details. You protected your shamba this way. Part of the “unknowable” also relates to my own story of becoming a dad at the age of twenty, as narrated in the stayers and leavers chapter. There is a general practice in Kenya that a boy who completes primary school (at thirteen or fourteen years old) undergoes circumcision. There was a very particular and prevalent culture in Mathare in the 1990s where a boy who got circumcised was actively encouraged to have sex as the “final step” to his transition to manhood. I was subjected to the same pressure when my turn came and I had, for five or so years, to keep up with a lie to my peers that I had “done it.” In Mathare, a pregnancy at twenty years old was/is not viewed by most as an “early pregnancy” and it shocks very few, if any. I remember that some of the girls I knew (in their early twenties) would be taunted as “barren” for not having a child yet! So being a dad at twenty was normal and even expected in my community, the only universe I was familiar with before I left Mathare to study law at the University of Nairobi. That is why even with ethnographic work such as Tatiana’s work, the question of “with which eyes or lenses” do we view Mathare (or any other field) is pertinent and how we label what we see even more important. For this reason, I appreciated that Tatiana reflects on her positionality and its attendant privilege, limitations, and biases.

My reflections are a tiny fraction of what stood out for me as I read the book. I would, overall, like my “review” of this book to be understood by the readers as a “thank-you note” to Tatiana. I thank her for zooming in to curate the “everyday” of Mathare and simultaneously zooming out to explain and connect our lived experiences to the broader social, economic, and political discourse. I thank Tatiana for problematizing the meaning of “work” and “jobs” in a hustle topography defined by informality and creativity that is too often neglected, if not criminalized. I thank her for “seeing” our industrious mothers in Mathare, the Mama Mboga street vendors who include my own mother, Mama Kahos, and whose roles are often rendered invisible. Without them, the hustler story in Mathare and Kenya as a whole is incomplete. Many of them may not be able to read this book but they teach us a great deal, and I’m grateful that Tatiana gave them a place at the table through her work. I thank her for spotlighting politicians who have failed us and preyed on us. I am grateful that she minces no words in calling out NGOs, INGOs, and multilateral agencies that come to Mathare to also hustle by piggybacking on the hustlers in the hood through box-ticking approaches. I am grateful for her eloquence on the unacceptable inequality, neglect, and exclusion of those at the margins of cities such as Nairobi. I thank her for fairly packaging the good, the bad, and the ugly of my hood and valorizing details of my home, Mathare, and the amazing individual narratives and perspectives from there as useful knowledge worth the time of those in and out of academia. I thank her for this scholarly articulation of the realities, plight, frustrations, hopes, and dreams of her interlocutors without appropriating their voices. I thank her for being a respectful and genuine friend of Mathare.