“Conclusion” in “Hustle Urbanism”
Conclusion
Hustle Nation?
Agakhan walk, Nairobi Central Business District, April 5, 2023
One afternoon in 2023, my friends Eliza, Kennedy, and Shei were explaining the nuances of the Sheng verbs kusota and kuomoka in a neighborhood café in Huruma. In her usual assertive and cheerful self, Eliza broke it down:
You see, T, nimesota means “I’m struggling.” Nimeomoka means “I’m doing better.” And you will hear people ask, “Umeomoka?” This means “Have you made progress, are you rich?”
As I scribbled on my little notepad, jotting all this down, I asked, “Do kuhustle [to hustle] and kujaribu [to try] come in here? Where do they fit?”
Kennedy took my pen and made an arrow on the page, connecting the words nimesota and nimeomoka, and said, “Hustling is what connects the struggle to the progress, unaona [you see]?”
In Nairobi today, that constant dance between struggle and progress underpins the choreography of hustling across spaces of the city, from the popular neighborhoods to the realms of middle-class Kenyans. It has become part of a cross-class vernacular, increasingly represented not merely as a survivalist strategy but as an important skill enabling people to move between experiences of struggle and moments of achievement—navigating a “lower middle income country” (LMIC) marked by limited formal employment prospects and profound inequality in terms of material infrastructure, urban development, and provisioning.1 Yet this constant move between kusota and kuomoka also involves an ability to plug into the globalized fetish for innovation, digital literacy, and entrepreneurship.
The work of this book has involved acknowledging the ways in which the idea of hustling echoes other places and histories but also how it reflects particular logics and terrains in the Nairobi context. As the previous chapters have illustrated, hustling has become a narrative, an idea, an allegory, a practice, a performance, and a story about how everyday Kenyans navigate their reality in an affirmative way, while mitigating the ever-present risk that something might go wrong. As such, hustling has become a language of action and resistance, to make sense of diverse forms of adversity, uncertainty, and “incompleteness” (Guma 2020).
In the introduction, I argued that hustling is profoundly relational and spatial, echoing the argument made decades ago by Karl Polanyi (2001). Drawing on Polanyi’s call to pay closer attention to the ways in which all economic processes are embedded in particular social relations and institutions, the chapters of this book illustrate how hustle economies are not just hyperlocal and disconnected from “modern” market economies—they are indeed deeply entangled with formal market economies and formal urban systems. But they are also profoundly embedded in particular social relations and place-based micro-politics of provisioning and care. Chapter 1 shows how the idea of hustling has connections to other histories and contexts, and in this it is a palimpsest concept. The rest of the chapters have unpacked some of the multiple ways in which Nairobi hustles reveal something particular about this city—how it moves and how people find ways to make things work when so much of the cityscape is in a simultaneous double state of breakdown and becoming (Fontein et al. 2024; Guma 2020; Thieme 2021).
Read together, these chapters think with Nairobi to argue that hustling offers an important commentary on marginalized youth’s relationship to urban life in cities that have experienced urbanization without large-scale industrialization and employment opportunities, without widespread public basic infrastructure and services, and without social welfare programs. Each chapter has focused on different scenarios to show how hustling describes more than a singular precarious economic activity and how it operates in spaces beyond the lower end of the so-called informal economy. The book is essentially a multisituated conceptualization of hustle that seeks to encompass a more-than-economistic and legalistic reading of survivalist activities. As Simone (2013, 244) puts it, “what is nearly impossible to come to grips with is the simultaneity of immense infrastructural, political, and social problems with real legacies of residential skill in the construction of viable built environments and livelihoods.” Hustling in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods involves a vast repertoire of spatialized and temporally contingent forms of provisioning, distribution, and problem solving, finely tuned to a context where neither mainstream state nor market infrastructures are reliable.
As a constellation of strategies and performances of “real economies,” hustling comprises an entanglement of logics, affirmations, contestations, and diasporic cultural hooks (chapter 1). It is economically, morally, and socially pluralistic, describing on the one hand modalities of making work outside (or alongside) waged labor, and on the other hand the multiple configurations of social, economic, and environmental activities that take place when youth engage in mixed livelihoods and establish a range of commitments in their neighborhood, against the historical backdrop of coloniality and underinvestment (chapter 2). These activities include the eco-hustles of youth who provide essential services in their neighborhoods, from garbage collection to servicing shared sanitation facilities. It involves self-organizing neighborhood “cleanup” events that occasionally affirm and render more public the labors of local water, sanitation, and waste workers (chapters 3 and 4). They include the NGO or social business hustles when youth attend NGO-driven workshops and business training sessions, learning about “entrepreneurship” but also learning how to appear entrepreneurial to potential sponsors, while staying embedded in local relational ties (chapters 4 and 5). It includes using some of that development and business language when facilitating grassroots meetings with other youth groups to strategize about shared community-oriented endeavors (chapters 6). It involves taking and posting community selfies to showcase the paradoxes of life “in the ghetto,” to make sure that local news gets told by local residents, and goes a bit more global as youth have become savvy digital curators and storytellers. It brings street theater and hip-hop into social campaigns but also into leisure spaces so fun is had for its own sake because sometimes it’s not always about being political (chapter 7). Many youth may be formally unemployed, but they are engaged in a constellation of activities that create value in a variety of ways and pose different kinds of risks, rewards, and attachments. Hustling produces more-than-economic value (McMullin 2022) and can be read as a kaleidoscopic urban practice and a multivocal narrative: hustling is tied to experiences of precarious labor, yes, but it is also a cultural, political, and affective articulation.
This final chapter offers a set of ruminations to open further dialogue about the conceptual, methodological, and analytical registers of hustle. The chapter offers a series of intentionally juxtaposed “fragments” (McFarlane 2021) of ethnographic encounters and reflections that complement and echo the ethnography of the preceding chapters, but these fragments also hang on their own in deliberate suspension, to invite pause as the book winds down. The narrative style here is inspired by the writings of Christina Sharpe (2023) and Kathleen Stewart (2009), where the juxtaposition of vignettes, short excerpts of field notes, and more than academic citations invite a particular kind of analytical sensibility—permission to refrain from “making sense” of the whole but rather to consider what happens when we think with ordinary fragments, moments, affects, and stories. What does this mode of thinking (and writing) do for what might be classically regarded as a “conclusion,” especially if the intent is to do anything but conclude? I hope that this chapter might instead invite new openings.
In what follows, the question that runs through each fragment presented here is whether hustle is partly produced “from above” or “from below.” Hustle is celebrated and mobilized “from above” via discourses of self-reliance and enterprise circulated by international NGOs, social businesses, populist politicians, and media. In contrast, the vernacular and urban practice of hustle move “from below” to the rest of the city, becoming an action-oriented self- (or even collective) narration that has remained appropriately ambiguous with regard to earnings, prospects, plans, modalities, rhythms, and outcomes. As the previous chapters illustrate, hustling has shaped Nairobi from below and been appropriated from above.
The following fragments start with a brief reflection on what hustling meant during the Covid pandemic in Kenya and how shifting hustlescapes in the pandemic economy produced global resonances and echoes that went beyond Nairobi and perhaps also boomeranged back. From there, I include an ambivalent and unfinished reflection on the effects of the current Kenyan president’s incorporation of hustling into popular political vernacular. I ask what doing so has done or undone, acknowledging that there will be much more to be seen and say on this as events and political drama unfold in the months and years to come. The chapter then deliberately returns to the seeming antithesis of hustling—the idea of the “job”—to show that hustling in Nairobi, as it always has elsewhere (Valentine 1978), does not operate in isolation from other forms of work but rather entangles itself with various other stations and tempos of waged, precarious, unwaged, and care work. Then the chapter pays homage to a friend who once reminded me about all the things that could be fixed in the most precarious environments where hustling has always been intimately connected to a foundational form of work: that of repair in all its senses. This becomes a moment in the chapter and indeed the book to dwell on life’s ultimate fragility and the limits of repair, by thinking with the late and much-loved Rosie Nyawira. The final fragment sits with the concept of “remains,” thinking about what remains when people, projects, and things have left, moved on, are beyond repair, or have become something else altogether. This “final” chapter therefore ends with openings, placing emphasis on remains as generative matters, and here a key opening is the plea to consider what “hustle studies” might offer our intellectual, empirical, and cultural practices, as one of the ways to navigate and think through these troubled and dynamic times.
Hustling through the “Hunger Virus”
Over the Covid-19 pandemic period, the numbers of Covid cases and deaths were relatively low in Nairobi, but the lockdown was ruthless.2 “There is no coronavirus, there is a hunger virus,” exclaimed a friend over the phone in April 2020. Another friend wrote to me, saying, “Some hustles have really suffered, but other new ones have come up” (WhatsApp communication, June 2020). Amid the crackdown on street economic activity and movements, people found ways to take their businesses off the street and into people’s pockets. The matatu digitized payments, something many had tried to do for the past ten years (from MIT grads to Google) but couldn’t. Youth groups, who did their best to stay economically active but had to find new sources of income, became frontline workers: they were the digitally savvy generation who were connected to the NGO, humanitarian, and activist networks whose staff were now working remotely. Mutual aid networks formed at speed, building on the local knowledge and ingenuity of youth born and raised in these neighborhoods, catering to the most vulnerable, and adapting their various hustles to provide vital sources of distribution and care. Campaigns to spread messages about proper hygiene circulated on social media, with hip-hop tracks and videos from young Mathare artists spitting rhymes like “Covid is real . . . hashtag sanitize.” Street vendors, no longer able to operate on the street, started using their WhatsApp profile picture as a way to signal what goods they had to sell that day and where they could be found.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the notion of hustling has morphed in Kenya and globally. Already over the past decade in Kenya, hustling had started to move beyond the realms of popular economies, as references to one’s “side-hustle” (Mwaura 2017) became folded into a growing number of middle-class university graduates’ self-narrations as they developed their own strategies for generating income and “opportunity spaces” (Mwaura 2017, 52) in an uncertain labor market or created a back-up plan in case they lost their “day job.”3 But this became amplified during the pandemic and was not just happening in Nairobi. In 2021, I spoke with a Wall Street Journal reporter about a piece on the “pandemic economy.” She mentioned that some of her New York City interlocutors in the finance sector spoke of “day trading” as their side hustle. It was also during the pandemic that Dolly Parton’s hit song “9 to 5” was remastered for a Squarespace commercial during the U.S. Super Bowl in January 2021. Those alive during the 1980s might recall her famous feminist anthem (and theme song of the film with the same name) with the refrain “9 to 5 . . . gotta work hard to make a living,” describing the gendered inequalities of the waged office city job. In 2021, the remastered track featured the adapted lyrics “5 to 9 . . . gotta hustle to make a living,” with an advertisement that showed a diverse cohort of young professionals who come alive once they’ve “clocked off” the day job, as they each start to dance, imagine, and plan how to monetize their side passions (whether yoga instructing, landscape consulting, or catering). The point, of course, is that these “side hustlers” are going to need an affordable and user-friendly website to market their services. This humorous but quite telling reframing of the familiar track resonated more than ever with the wider postpandemic trends across labor markets and geographies, from Nairobi to New York. The world of work, in its spatial, temporal, organizational form, was shifting dramatically, as were narrations of work, including “hustle.”
In the aftermath of the pandemic, after 2021, numerous articles came out debating the changes in the labor market and their short-, medium-, and long-term effects. For a while, news articles and podcasts unpacked the apparently rampant trends of the “great resignation” and “quiet quitting” in the protracted pandemic economy of the Minority World.4 Some of these trends did not seem to make sense to those seeking to understand these shifts. In the 2023 UK employment statistics, for example, unfilled job vacancies were up, alongside rising unemployment in the context of a cost-of-living crisis. According to a Deloitte survey conducted around that time, twenty-three thousand workers aged eighteen to thirty-eight expressed wanting to prioritize work-life balance when choosing an employer, and 75 percent preferred remote or hybrid work. The debates around universal basic income (UBI), which were fringe a few years ago, have seen a serious resurgence across political and academic forums.5 To this, 2023 added a panic around the future of work as generative AI pushed well beyond automating industrial work and began encroaching on creative and “white-collar” work.6 The UK, where I live and work, has seen a confluence of labor unions striking across sectors over these past few years, raising vital questions about what counts as decent work and what claims workers in certain long-standing sectors can still make. Here, the agentive moves to refuse work that is exploitative or seen to permit limited freedoms called for serious deliberations on people’s relationship to work and increasingly nonnormative pathways to making a living.
Beyond the realms of the wage economy and its rapid shifts, as the world emerged from the thick of the pandemic, some Gen Z-ers who had embraced or at least popularized “hustle culture” hashtags in the second decade of the twenty-first century were now posting videos on social media that included anti-hustle declarations, equating refusing to hustle with a choice to orient their time and attention differently. In other words, while making hustling look easy and cool had become one version of the globalized performance of hustle positioned as deliberate detachment from the drudgery and predictability of waged work, the imperative to “hustle harder” is, in the postpandemic economy, not only questioned by some but increasingly called out for its own forms of exploitation and normalization of precarious labor markets (as discussed in chapter 1). And yet, across geographies the narrative of hustling and side hustles has continued to persist and has been, if anything, amplified in the postpandemic economy. Many of my own students admit, more than ever, to having side hustles (often plural) in order to subsidize their increasingly precarious student budgets and cope with rising costs of living. While few identify as “hustlers” per se, a growing number (especially final-year students close to graduation) admit that they identify as “hustling” when we have discussed this topic in class. In other words, the post- (if there is a post) pandemic era has further entrenched the logics of hustling—in affirmative as well as precarious dimensions and at different scales.
Populist Hustle
While those across popular and now middle-class economies hustle, so do political elites in various positions of power. It goes beyond the scope of this discussion to debate what kind of “hustler personae” political strongmen like Narendra Modi in India or Donald Trump in the United States portray in their performative public-facing modes. But what is relevant is the explicit and unapologetic way in which hustling has become folded into the contemporary populist pitch of Kenya’s political class (Lockwood 2023).7
In the run-up to the 2022 presidential elections in Kenya, William Ruto, running for president in opposition and the eventual winner, spoke about Kenya as the “hustler nation.” Speaking in Nyamira County in 2022, Ruto was quoted as saying, “Some people are telling us sons of hustlers cannot be president. That your father must be known. That he must be rich for you to become the president. We are telling them that even a child of a boda boda or a kiosk operator or mtoto wa anayevuta mkokoteni (child of a cart pusher) can lead this country” (Kahura and Akech 2020). In their piece, Kenyan journalists Dauti Kahura and Akoko Akech (2020) write about “the political movement that is seemingly sweeping the country: The Hustlers” and explain that Ruto’s populist “wheelbarrownomics” (a word coined by Kenyan economist David Ndii) resonated with youth in low-income areas who felt like a politician was finally relating to their reality. They write,
In a country that is teetering on the brink of economic meltdown, a youth bulge and political despair, this is music to the ears of a desperate youthful population . . . So why does Ruto proudly claim to be the “hustler-in-chief”? Hustler means different things to different people, but for many Kenyan youth, it signifies humble beginnings or means of eking out a living—respectable or otherwise. Being a hustler means one has found a way to stay afloat, particularly in hard economic times. The ambivalent feelings this word evokes match the legal and moral ambiguities that Ruto has built around his political career. The deputy president has the gall to identify with the very youth whose present and future the Jubilee government has committed to misery by mismanaging the economy. He is appealing to youthful voters who will comprise the majority of first-time voters in 2022. (Kahura and Akech 2020)
How was William Ruto different from his predecessors? Let’s remember that the Jomo Kenyatta presidency (1963–78) saw the early years of independence and the rise of the urban informal sector (K. Hart 1973; ILO 1972), with no real public housing or industrial employment programs; the Daniel arap Moi years (1978–2002) legitimized the jua kali sector (King 1996) by promising shade and registration for small businesses but again did not push for major employment policies, instead normalizing light industries; and the Mwai Kibaki years (2002–3) were known for liberalizing the Kenyan economy and encouraging foreign investment as well as NGO activity, which only further deferred any real debate about youth employment. Youth became versed in development lingo and became expert participants of participatory workshops, and learned to mistrust any government-led programs claiming to “put youth to work,” especially after the farcical promises of Kazi kwa Vijana (Work for Youth) that followed the 2007/8 postelection violence and was palliative and patchy at best (see chapter 3). The Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta years (2013–22) saw efforts focused on devolution, a policy and governance move influenced by international donors and the World Bank, claiming to distribute power and resources to local constituencies, with various degrees of success.8 This push included explicit attention to “youth empowerment” under the National Youth Service (NYS, founded in 1964). But most of the initiatives were, again, perpetuating short-term opportunities in low-paying and low-skilled work. Ironically, many of the efforts involved public “cleanup” days that were said to “employ youth.” Many of my interlocutors whose livelihoods depended on residential garbage collection and hard-earned community trust were frustrated by these NYS schemes that temporarily undercut the homegrown youth-led garbage economy. The cleanup schemes did not last long (these schemes never do), but they disrupted the local waste economy and again proved to youth in popular neighborhoods that they could not count on elite politicians to understand the youth hustle, let alone know how to support youth businesses. Then came Ruto.
The discourse of Ruto’s campaign did not pretend to include promises of large-scale “youth employment” programs. Instead, he acknowledged Kenya’s existing economic structures and embraced the logic and vernacular of hustling. He made it clear that hustling in Kenya had become an identity marker that transcended other forms of difference (including tribal affiliation), to the extent that in my conversations with Nairobians in 2023, many spoke about the current president’s call to the “hustling classes” rather than to a particular tribal community, contrary to former political leaders. President Ruto’s performed allyship with the hustling classes can be interpreted as tokenistic and a clever campaign slogan by a populist politician (Lockwood 2023). But even as such, it reflects a notable shift in the popular imaginary.
Hustling in Kenya had been narrated and practiced as a collective and shared reality, even if the effects have been differentiated across individual lives and circumstances. It had gone from a largely popular and ordinary street-oriented vernacular to a term that has increasingly creeped into certain business advertising slogans. As shown by the sociolinguistic research of Annah Kariuki, Fridah Erastus Kanana, and Hildah Kebeya (2015), this reflects an increasingly common trend in Kenya, where certain Sheng terms and phrases are incorporated into certain business advertisements. What had previously been regarded as the language of Nairobi’s urban youth (Githiora 2018) now features across the marketing campaigns of big corporate companies (including mobile phone and insurance companies as well as financial institutions) and NGOs who use Sheng to connect with their wananchi (common people) and attract maximum attention. As Kariuki, Kanana, and Kebeya (2015, 229) argue, this phenomenon indicates that the formerly stigmatized “non-standard, peer language” of Sheng has become destigmatized through its incorporation into twenty-first-century marketing campaigns. Certainly, the incorporation of “hustle” into marketing campaigns may reflect a destigmatization of the Sheng terms kuhustle (to hustle) and hustla (hustler), but it also says something about who is seen as hustling. Here we see that kuhustle goes beyond the mtaa and beyond the lifeworlds of Nairobi’s urban youth in popular economies. Take, for example, Premier Bank Kenya, a subsidiary of Premier Bank Limited, Somalia, described as a privately owned “Sharia-compliant commercial bank incorporated in Kenya in 2023 through the acquisition of the majority shares in First Community Bank” (Ambani 2023). Outside Nairobi in 2023, there was a billboard featuring an advertisement for Premier Bank with a young woman wearing a hijab, smiling while holding a plate full of mandazi. The campaign read: “New Beginnings mean believing in your hustle.” The point is, while Ruto’s “hustle populism” (Lockwood 2023) may have been highly performative (to the frustration of many!), it did loudly and explicitly elevate and recognize the value of hustle economies and the capabilities of those who hustle, regardless of their income class, tribal or religious affiliation, gender, and age. And yet, what did this elevation and recognition really mean in practice?
The Hustler Fund, Microloans, and Hustle
Whether Ruto appropriated or elevated the narrative and practice of hustling is always an interesting question. We debated this with my friends in Mathare, every Uber driver I met, and anyone I had a conversation with on my trip to Kenya in 2023, and the consensus was that Ruto had done a combination of both—appropriation and elevation. There is no doubt that he put hustling on the political map, and this label traveled beyond Kenya. When I saw my former PhD supervisor—someone who had all those years ago encouraged me to write about hustling if that was a major theme emerging from my fieldwork—at the University of Cambridge at an event in September 2022, he came up to me, saying, “Tatiana! Did you see that even the new Kenyan president now calls himself a hustler?” What is the implication of this, more broadly? It shows that hustling and its multiplicity of values can get extracted and abstracted, even marketized, at different scales. If hustling can become as much a self-narration as it is a practice and a story that can be marketed and sold (as a tour or through a song), if it can be “harnessed” for entrepreneurial projects by NGOs and social businesses, then it can be capitalized in more serious ways by the likes of Ruto and his administration. What does that do for the hustlers of the mtaa? The Hustler Fund may provide a useful answer to this question.
When Ruto came into office in 2022, one of the first initiatives his administration took was related to “financial inclusion.” Ruto wanted to replace the current credit-access system with a graduated scoring system that did not leave out the poor from accessing cheap credit facilities. Access to cheaper credit was a key part of his campaign message. With public funds, Ruto established a low-interest, collateral-free loan scheme. The Hustler Fund was introduced in 2022 as a collateral-free financing product for micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The first time I heard of it was in the UK, when I happened to meet an Uber driver from Kenya shortly after Ruto was elected. He raved about the Hustler Fund. Anyone with a mobile number could access 500 KES (US3.88) and needed to pay it back within fifteen days. With time, you could borrow more money each time. During my trip to Nairobi in April 2023, I asked everyone I could what they thought of the Hustler Fund.
As one friend in Huruma explained, “The Hustler Fund was supposed to be 0 percent interest, but it’s 8 percent interest. So people feel it’s somebody’s business.” Among other friends across Mathare, the consensus was as follows: people in the mtaa felt it was a joke. “What can I do with 500 shillings? I can’t start anything with 500. I need 10,000.” As start-up capital, 500 shillings was too little to make much of a difference because it’s not earning any money, and yet it was too much to easily pay back quickly for someone living in the kadogo economy. It was a useful small amount that could be used as ad hoc working capital. For all the Uber drivers I met in Nairobi on that trip, the Hustler Fund was useful “to get fuel, then pay it back right away with the next job.”
During these conversations about the Hustler Fund, people also spoke about the other fintech services around. Safaricom had come out with Fuliza, pitching itself as a “lending scheme in a smart way.” Fuliza offered instant assistance but you needed to pay it back immediately. Introduced in 2019, Fuliza was an overdraft mobile money product jointly operated by Safaricom and two of Kenya’s largest banks, NCBA and Kenya Commercial Bank Limited (KCB). It was embedded within M-Pesa with an opt-in, with limits determined by a credit score. It was therefore a “short term digital loan product” and had a near perfect repayment rate because funds were automatically deducted once the customer received money via M-Pesa. M-Shwari was another short-term loan product that was jointly operated by Safaricom and NCBA. What my friends were describing here reflects the rise in “mobile phone-based lending” in Kenya, which has accelerated over the past few years, essentially financializing Kenya’s popular mobile banking platforms such that “newfound credit provides necessary liquidity” (Donovan and Park 2022, 1064). Kevin Donovan and Emma Park argue persuasively that “digital lending sits at the nexus of public austerity and corporate monopoly” (1081). The negative effects of financialization and indebtedness notwithstanding, my friends in Mathare were highlighting the ways in which they subverted these modes of financialization and debt “from below” (Zollmann 2020).
Once my friend David had finished explaining the different mobile lending platforms, he laughed and said, “But now you see, T . . . most of us have several SIM cards so we handle different mobile money options! That is what we call the Hustle Nation!” When I cross-checked this with other friends and interlocutors, indeed they also admitted that of course they have multiple SIM cards (you can legally have up to four), and if someone needs to send them money, people often say, “Use this number, not that one” because if you have taken out a short-term loan with the Fuliza scheme but a friend is sending you money that you want to use toward a certain expense, you do not want the funds to be immediately deducted from your account to pay back the Fuliza debt. So you ask for the money to be sent by M-Pesa to another phone number. This is how people manage these small amounts of loans and debts. That is the hustle. What is clear, however, is that the Hustler Fund per se is a ruse and not necessarily helping the actual hustling class.9 Instead, it is inserting itself into the situated practices of hustle diversification, using a label that performs allyship with the struggling working poor, seemingly masking its predatory logics.
It seems that the hustle involving digitally mediated small loans is not just about accessing “liquidity”; it is also about how to access multiple loans at the same time. There is much more to explore here. Thinking with the recent work of Julie Zollman (2020) on how Kenyans navigate financial scarcity, I am sitting with the following questions: To what extent should or could acknowledging the ingenuity of this savvy micro-loan hustle lead to more genuinely inclusive public and private (fintech) services to support and amplify existing hustles? And furthermore, how could the hustlers of the mtaa access a more meaningful amount of capital without falling into the traps of indebtedness, predatory lending, or individualistic profit seeking? When I spoke with social justice activist Jack Makau from Slum/Shack Dwellers International, he said, “Give a hustler 10,000 shillings, they’ll know what to do!”
From Hustling to the Job, and Back to Hustling
Much of this book has dwelled on what takes place outside the wage, beyond the “proper job” (Ferguson and Li 2018). But in a way, it is perhaps ironic and appropriate to end with a note about the job. Here I quote the Kenyan musical artist Tetu Shani’s 2020 track “Furukazi” (A full job): wallahi hakuna kazi . . . nilienda mbali nikachoka? (For how much longer will the youth have to go to extreme lengths to make a living?). Shani’s lamentation echoes the International Labour Organization’s 2022 report on youth employment trends, which states,
Globally, unemployment among young people is more than three times more common than among adults. In Africa, youth unemployment remains below the world average for both women and men. However, this fact masks substantial differences across the region, with youth unemployment ranging from almost 30 per cent in Northern Africa–where almost every other woman in the labour force is unemployed—down to 11 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa (with no substantial difference between the sexes). Yet unemployment is an incomplete indicator of deficits in decent employment opportunities as it does not take into account employment quality. In sub-Saharan Africa, the low unemployment rates among young people partially reflect the fact that many cannot afford to stay unemployed but need to engage in insecure—often low-productivity—jobs for income.
There is no doubt that a celebration of hustling risks overlooking the inherent precarity and vulnerabilities associated with the perceived need to hustle in order to survive in the city and risks normalizing hustle economies as the contemporary mode of work. The following two short vignettes illustrate this point.
On the day in April 2023 when I boarded the matatu with Andrew heading away from the CBD (see the introduction), once he jumped off, I stood near the conductor, who was leaning against the side of the open doorway with his feet against the first step, so as to stay steady as the vehicle moved. He was counting cash and folding the bills of 50 and 100 KES (US0.39 and 0.78) customers had given him, logging who needed change, all the while keeping an eye on the road as the matatu started to drive faster now that we’d gotten out of the city center traffic. As I was hanging on to the rail and trying to lock my feet to stand firm, he saw me staring at this ritual of folding money in this particular way. He looked back down and continued what he was doing, and then said, “You see, this is my hustle. But if I can get another job, I’ll leave this matatu thing.” I am fully aware that this comment could have been performative, expressed with the assumption that I would not perceive this job as a good job. Indeed, most Kenyans regard matatu work as dangerous work and matatu workers as a nuisance (Ference 2024). But it also signaled the disposition of young people in Nairobi—a disposition of adaptability and readiness to jump off and take on another job if it seems to offer better prospects. In the meantime, you stand in the doorway, holding on firmly, with a demeanor of nonchalance, folding what you can make.
Another scenario that took place during that same month made a similar point about the desirability of employment. I was at a restaurant in Westlands, on a rare evening on my own, with the company of my field notes. A table of six people arrived for dinner next to me, three women in their late thirties and forties, and a young teenage girl, a toddler, and an infant. I couldn’t help but overhear some of their conversation, and the teenage girl reminded me of my own daughter in some of her mannerisms. They all ordered a lot of food, a big seafood platter, and it felt like a big celebration of sorts. At the end of their meal, the woman gesturing to pay the bill gasped and said, “Oh my God, we’ve eaten for 15,000 shillings!” To put this in perspective, this is the amount that Eliza used to earn per month when she was employed. The woman then reassured everyone around the table, laughing nervously, “Don’t worry, I’ve prepared for this . . .” and she put down her credit card. Everyone looked shocked, nervous, but elated at the same time. I tried to be discrete and kept focusing on my field notes and tea. But I thought I overheard that it might have been the teenage girl’s birthday, so as they started to leave, I looked up at the teenage girl and said, “Have a good night! And happy birthday! Was it a birthday?” The girl smiles and says, “No, no. It’s my mum. My mummy got a job.”
I sat there for a while, thinking about what the girl said. I was putting together the proposal for this book at the time, and this scene was a beautiful provocation. As I was trying to tighten my conceptualization of hustling, a family (all women) was celebrating the fact that one of the two women had gotten a “full job.” A salaried job. A job that would allow them to have a big meal out on a Friday night. So is “getting a job” still, despite the reality of the hustle in Nairobi, the marker of achievement? Probably yes. This echoes not only the rhetoric of many conference and policy debates on the “future of work” but also some of the popular discourses among both the political right and the left calling for more “decent jobs.” As Elizabeth Fouksman (2020) argues based on her research interviewing underemployed South Africans, a “moral economy” of work persists in many people’s imaginations, even when the reality of a “full job” is neither guaranteed nor easily sustained. So we have growing casualization of work on the one hand, and a “job creation” agenda on the other, with policy actors focusing on how to ensure a youthful African population will be able to secure decent jobs (Lawhon, Millington, and Stokes 2018). Employment remains the aspirational goal. And yet the reality may be something in between the job and the gig. The hustle is not the absence of jobs; it is the ability to move between the job and the absence of jobs, the ability to make something out of nothing, the ability to hold a job for as long as it may last while knowing that it may not, to understand how to figure out the next steps, and to constantly have a couple of plans on the side, just in case.
To what degree could “job creation” efforts take seriously the skills, knowledges, and experiences of hustling portfolios, such that the future of work does not become narrated as either the realm of “proper jobs” versus “nonstandard” work, or presume a wageless economy where the only choice is incessant hustling? This question connects to recent debates on universal basic income, and here it would be worth exploring how hustlescapes would shift or be reconfigured in a UBI scenario. What would that do for risk mitigation, the values and logics, the stature and the flexibility of hustling? In the meantime, does hustling become the proxy for what UBI offers, which is a basic financial safety net? As we saw in chapter 5 with Eliza, the hustle can be the secure safety net when jobs are either uncertain or compromise one’s autonomy.
Museum Hill Hustles
In April 2019, during a day spent at the Nairobi National Museum of Kenya with my two children, I took notice of three young men we greeted as we made our way to the museum compound. These young men, who must have been in their twenties, were hanging around the liminal spaces between the museum entrance and other buildings within the gated circumference of the compound—which included various offices of anthropologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and conservation researchers. The National Museum is located on Museum Hill, near the bustling traffic on Uhuru Highway. Its physical location sits in between worlds—that of Westlands (with its shopping malls, fancy eateries, and cool clubs catering to middle- and upper-income residents) and that of the Central Business District, the administration center of Nairobi with myriad architectural echoes of its colonial past, its long-standing presence (and policing) of street hawkers, its cultural and retail amalgam of “tradition and modernity,” with offerings catering to all budgets. The CBD is where anyone taking a public transport must pass through, changing matatu at one of the various stages. The museum’s in-between location represents in many ways this encounter between different corners of the city, and anyone hanging around the museum can be discrete about where exactly in the city they “stay.”
In that compound, you could be a researcher, a curious visitor, a staff member, or just someone wanting a little respite from the noisy traffic sounds. That’s the thing about Nairobi—within minutes you can often manage to move away from the cacophony of urban soundscapes and find serenity in the courtyards or back gardens of even unremarkable venues. It’s a space of calm, with bird sounds, some shade under the tall trees, and some relative quiet. And once you are at that museum compound, on Museum Hill, no one knows if you stay in the ghetto, a middle-class estate, or the posh Runda neighborhood where the United Nations and other INGOs have their offices.
As the kids and I walked in, one of the three young men introduced himself after we greeted them and started walking with us up the hill. His name was Willis, and, after asking us where we were going (“the main museum,” I said), he suggested that he could give the kids a tour inside the snake park after we were finished with our visit of the museum. My kids (who were nine and eleven at the time) were over the moon with Willis’s proposition. “Yes, please!” they exclaimed in unison, turning to Willis and then to me, waiting for me to say okay. There were two simple reasons why I couldn’t say “no thank you” or siku ingine (another day): First, for my kids, seeing the live reptiles seemed like a well-deserved reward following a visit to the museum’s curatorial displays about Kenya’s colonial history, its cultural diversity, and its wildlife. Second, as this book probably makes clear by now, I am sensitive to young people’s ability and agility to invent some kind of work in this city without jobs. In that moment, on a day that was meant to be a personal day taking my kids to the museum on the first day back in Kenya since my prior trip in 2017, I realized once again that kids offer new insights into the city, and again, research intersects real life in surprising ways.
It wasn’t clear that Willis was hired by the museum to offer his snake park tour services, but that didn’t really matter. Later that day, I understood that he was allowed to run his private tours of the snake park because he clearly lured museum goers into the snake park, which was a separate space with its own entrance fee. Willis was bringing the snake park more business, and in exchange he hoped to get a tip at the end of the tour (having asked for nothing at the onset). Willis had extensive knowledge and passion for zoology and had an understanding with the snake park caretaker who had lived on-site for more than two decades. By the time we met the caretaker, it seemed perfectly logical that the African rock python he was holding would be wrapped around the neck of my son, who was completely delighted. My daughter, who was enamored with the chameleons, carried one around on her forearm the whole time we were there, until Willis broke the news, with a gentle laugh, that the chameleons were food for the crocodiles. To this day, both kids still remember all the “cool facts” that Willis taught them about snakes and reptiles and other “misunderstood” creatures. When we were leaving the museum compound, Willis’s two friends were still hanging around the gate. They too may have had a Museum Hill hustle, or perhaps they were just there to hang out with Willis, to pass the time. I will never know.
With the museum site behind us, we walked toward the matatu stage and waited for a while along Uhuru Highway. It was rush hour and all the matatu leaving from town had every seat filled, and where we were standing was neither the CBD or the typical stops where people got off in droves. While we waited, we spotted a little kiosk a few meters away from the roadside. Waiting can always lead to something, so we bought cold sodas (it was incredibly hot that day) and, as always with the purchase of a drink in a glass bottle, we made conversation with the guys hanging around the little kiosk along the roadside before returning our empties. Miki owned the shop, and his friend David said he was a researcher working as a “data collector” at the University of Nairobi; Samuel was a mechanic “without a shop” because, as he put it, “It’s too expensive to rent a space, so I go and fix cars around . . .” Samuel went on to explain why he wasn’t working out of a fixed car repair station like the ones you see operating in full view along the roads. “The problem is in Kenya it’s difficult to get capital to start your own business.”
That day on Museum Hill highlighted the ways in which hustling moves across the city. As the other chapters illustrate, hustling is perhaps most acute in popular neighborhoods where provisioning, distribution, and daily operations depend on small-scale homegrown businesses alongside a steady stream of improvised solutions to make things work. In those popular neighborhoods, the low levels of public support and uneven access to basic goods and services have long been an accepted reality, so the habitus of hustling has shaped particular skill sets and capabilities. But as Willis and his peers showed, there are countless youth across income classes throughout the city who are hustling: making work in some way, deploying the skills and knowledge they have, finding whatever points of access to particular “opportunity spaces” (Mwaura 2017) within the city they can get (e.g., the museum compound, the space around a roadside kiosk). During those hours of making work, labor is often intimately entangled with forms of sociality that might make the day’s uncertain prospects a little more bearable, safe, and enjoyable, as they wait for a customer, a chance, a window to turn nothing into something. This social element of hustling also comes with the obligation to share, recognizing that individual gains are always grounded in some kind of collective effort.
My friend Sammy Gitau once asked a rhetorical question that in many ways runs through this whole book: “Does hustling just become, for everyday Kenyans, a way of accepting our hardship?” During this Ruto administration, and more globally in the postpandemic and postwage world of the 2020s, I sit with Sammy’s question. Does hustle entrench and normalize hardship? Or is it offering new articulations for making work, making life, and making meaning in changing times?
“Everything Can Be Fixed in the Ghetto”
One afternoon, Rosie and I walked from Jonsaga matatu stage in Huruma toward a community event taking place on the football grounds. On our way there, Rosie suddenly tripped and looked down at her left flip-flop. The main strap gripping her foot had snapped off, leaving the shoe unwearable. I started looking around for a shoe vender. In Huruma, it is common to see street vendors selling second- and thirdhand shoes of all sizes and brands. I was naive to think we would be buying a “new” pair of shoes, now that the flip-flops were broken.10 Within two minutes, Rosie spotted a middle-aged mzee sitting on a corner with an open tattered leather briefcase, exposing carefully arranged scraps of fabric and string intermingled with a few sewing needles and various sharp objects. Neatly displayed on top of the upper rim of the briefcase were three small bottles of shoe polish.
With this “toolbox,” in about fifteen minutes, the shoe fundi (handyman) sewed Rosie’s broken strap to the sole with white string and wrapped a small piece of first-aid tape around the strap to smooth out the bit that would sit between her toes. I remember being impressed by the handiwork, the speed, and the meticulous manner with which the fundi managed to give Rosie’s shoe yet another life. But Rosie was not as impressed, protesting that the white mending against the black strap of her flip-flops looked bad. “Ngoja, ngoja” (wait, wait), said the fundi, as he meticulously but with rapid dexterity covered the white tape with black shoe polish, minding the pink colored sole and successfully camouflaging the mended part of the shoe. After a couple of exchanges to negotiate the price, Rosie paid him 15 KES (US0.12), and off we went to resume the course of our day. As I smiled in silence, mentally registering this vignette for that evening’s field notes, Rosie let out one of her familiar contagious laughs and then said,
You see, if I had been in Westlands when this happened, I would have had to go into a Bata shoe shop and purchased a new pair of shoes for 3,000 shillings. Here in the ghetto we can get everything fixed. There is always a fundi for everything, ’cause it’s not just secondhand stuff in the mtaa. We fix and sell third- and fourthhand goods all the time. Things you think of as unusable taka taka in the rich neighborhoods, here you can always fix it and find a use for it.
That idea, everything can be fixed in the ghetto, has stayed with me since that day. It was said with such humor and pride (echoed a few years later when Kaka said the same about the old bicycle and scooter that the kids were riding in Mlango Kubwa). But as much as it is true that so many things that break find another use, another life, another pair of hands (or feet), that so many people learn how to mend, fix, repair, restore, repurpose in the mtaa, some things are beyond repair. Tragically, Rosie was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 2018. Despite huge collective efforts among friends near and far to raise funds for her treatment, drawing on her expansive network in the hood and beyond, Rosie didn’t make it. No one could cure her cancer or reverse that fatal tragedy.
Rosie worked across most popular neighborhoods in Nairobi (and indeed beyond) at one point or another, through various NGO organizations, often hustling on temporary NGO contracts as a field officer or the facilitator of community meetings. Rosie was often the person tasked with complicated political and interpersonal navigations that could involve meetings with local authorities (the district officer or the local chief) and engaging with the most marginalized local residents, including street children idling on street corners.
Rosie directly and indirectly paved the way for countless young girls in Koch and the Mathare Valley area more broadly. At a time when women and girls continue to face extraordinary gendered adversity in countless ways, the role of women with public-facing roles who project a deep connection with the grassroots is of vital significance.11 In addition to their work and advocacy, they shed a spotlight on the countless ordinary women and girls doing extraordinary work to guarantee some form of provision for their immediate kin as well as their solidarity networks. These include the sex workers, the alcohol brewers, and the female landlords who invested their earnings into modest mabati (shanty) structures when the time was right, the mama mbogas (greengrocers) who have occupied the same street corner for years or persist in finding a corner they can claim if they keep being pushed aside (see Kinyanjui 2014, 2019), the young teenage girl taking care of her younger siblings while pursuing her studies, the NGO and social enterprise hustlers, and the hip-hop performers. As Eliza reminds us (in chapter 5), ghetto gals are not just survivors. The mtaa is a space of risk and harm but also a space where countless feminists, groundbreakers, activists, entrepreneurs, and organizers shape meaningful countercurrents that operate within, through, and alongside the subversive margins of the city. What are the links between hustling and activism? What can hustle studies teach us about the way that those who repair, who see something broken and get to fixing it, balance the dynamic precarious factors of their ways of being, repairing, surviving, thriving?
What Remains in the Wake
When I met with my friend Salim in 2023, exchanging views on how youth were doing in the mtaa and what was needed, he paused and said, “We just need a bunch of Rosies . . .” That same month, I met with a group of young women in their early twenties who went by “Dream girls.” They were finding ways to combat gendered violence through their own hustles, their own artistic practices, their activism, their words. Like Rosie, they were finding strength and joy in their everyday militancy (Montgomery and Bergman 2021). Rosie’s legacy and stories about her keep circulating among those who knew her and have animated the imagination of those who only knew of her, such that the idea itself of Rosie and the person she was endures. This absence/presence dualism points to the wider significance of what remains in the wake of lives (Sharpe 2016)—the wake of human lives, projects’ lives, material lives. This book has reflected on people, projects, places, and pieces. How do the lives of all these things unfold and transform with time? What changes matter most, and what kinds of endurance make a difference? What are the effects of lives, efforts, and interventions that have formed out of or embedded themselves into situated hustle geographies?
As I reflect on the past fifteen years of engagement with different corners of Mathare and Nairobi more widely, I now sit with the traces of “left behinds” and wonder how to evaluate and value what remains. The remains of the various experiments discussed in this book include people-led initiatives and those of external organizations (including social justice organizations, NGOs, social businesses, and committed social workers connected to local government). They have all at one point or another endeavored to work with communities in popular neighborhoods, to different degrees of success depending on the vantage point. The remains might include what is concretely left behind (such as an upgraded social hall, a public facility, a water tank, a toilet cleaning product, the tokenistic plaque), but it also includes the oral histories of a project or an event, what is remembered and by whom, and what gets folded back into local knowledge and evolving practices.
The remains include individual and collective attempts of various kinds to repair what is deemed broken, for any object that circulates in these neighborhoods (from phones to shoes to solar lamps) is immediately scrutinized for its potential fixability. It includes the community kitchens facilitating creative collaborations between youth and women’s groups to organize mechanisms of provisioning for the most vulnerable residents in already underserved neighborhoods. It includes the peer-to-peer coaching that happens among youth in order to build not just self but collective esteem among childhood friendship groups who know that youth are too often marginalized and criminalized on the one hand, but on the other hand hailed as valuable change makers and “natural leaders.” There are conversations about how to harness and invest in youth collective knowledge but also tense debates about when that knowledge (and youth’s time) is at risk of being exploited. It also includes the countless daily efforts to maintain infrastructures in constant states of breakdown and how differently certain forms of shared provisioning might be read. Let me give an example to illustrate this latter point.
Some of the water and electricity providers have at different points been called “cartels.” In 2023, a four-part documentary called Ghetto Gava, produced by independent media house Africa Uncensored, featured footage from undercover journalists who had been documenting electricity and water “cartels” in Nairobi’s “biggest slums,” Kibera and Mathare. The point here is not to assess the veracity of the documentary’s narrative (which seeks to depict the criminality and corruption of these networks) but rather to point out that there are continuous competing discourses at play that raise questions about how “self-help” provision might be interpreted, at what cost, for whose benefit. By framing these groups as “cartels,” it engages with a politics of blame: blaming the “criminal gangs” presumably exploiting ordinary residents, and blaming the government for letting hundreds of thousands of people live in at-risk environments where electrocution and water contamination is a daily reality.
Under another light, and another name, some youth refer to themselves or their fellow youth group members as watu ya maji or watu ya stima (water people or electricity people) and then describe what that involves as they evoke the skills of a yet another form of fundi (repairman) work that seeks to connect the “off-grid” neighborhoods to the city’s metabolic energy flows. When watu ya maji and watu ya stima operate with infrastructures that are in constant breakdown, the line between creative bricolage, piracy, service provision, and potential harm is thin. Are these “water people” hacking water pipes to sell water one jerry can at a time during water shortages to blame? As with other hustles, it might depend on the optic, the narrative, the intent, and the moral economy at stake. What matters in the precarious present is that there is a need for a service or provision of some kind; there are people who need income, and there are creative ways to earn some income out of providing an unmet service, albeit subversively. Perhaps there is a spectrum, like with every other business and service, between those who are simply providing a service to their fellow residents and those who take advantage of the infrastructural shortages. Then there are the local residents who line up to get water and accept that under conditions of scarcity, neighborhood youth will be “making something small” while finding a way to get water to their mothers and sisters.
The remains of Community Cleaning Services (see chapter 4) include the faded “CCS” sign on the toilet door in Mathare Number 10 and the washed-out T-shirts from the Story Yetu documentary filming still worn by those who took part. The remains also reside in the transfer of local knowledge—knowledge about how to run a community-led cleaning business, including how to balance local provision of services and taking the business and the mission beyond the neighborhood scale. In Kevo Uduny, we see the new generation of youth leaders, for example. As Kevo explained in 2023, he was inspired by CCS in his young teens and is now running his own portfolio of circular businesses: a sanitation service and an urban agribusiness, including raising poultry, goats, and a vertical sac farm set up in the compound near his Huruma youth group baze. Every month, Kevo can be found leading discussions among an alliance of other youth groups across the city who are all focusing on waste management and circular economies. Kevo represents the gradual shift toward coalition building among grassroots waste workers.
The remains of NGO-led outreach events include the tree at the MANYGRO baze planted one year as part of the annual World Hand Washing Day “celebration.” The tree now provides some physical and figurative shade for older youth who are not quite becoming wazee (elders) yet but who are slowing down a little and letting their younger peers devise their own hustles under the “hot sun.” The shade reflects the NGO hustle of the older youth, and the evolving relationships between one cohort of youth and another—shade represents one of the various ways in which youth claim a sense of place, and in this case, a changing sense of pace.
Finally, there are remains of all the stories about the various development projects that have taken place in the mtaa, which have become folded into local folklore about who was a founder of this or that initiative, or who was the key leader and contact person of one project or another. Some of these initiatives have slipped away or morphed into a different version of themselves, with different players involved. Some of these experiments, including unlikely alliances and bedfellows at times, have provided openings for other things to happen, for other engagements with everyday mtaa life and aspirations. Some of these initiatives have continued to hustle for funds from one external source of support or another. But across these diverse remains of interventions, collaborations, and connections, there is a shared effort to narrate, project, and perform a reclaiming of the homegrown, a detachment from the “sponsor” and the letting go of false promises.
Some of the organizational imaginations of how things could be did not necessarily pan out. But it is less the formal intention and its embodiment that matters. Perhaps it is the recalibration of these intentions into the realm of what is possible in the precarious present that remains more relevant and lasting. The mtaa, for all its vulnerabilities and volatilities, will continue to be a place for staying, dwelling, working, learning, consuming, cooking, sharing, playing, exchanging, lending, borrowing, dreaming, making, repairing, passing the time, and just living life.
Hustle Recentered
As illustrated throughout these chapters, hustlers fill many vacuums in under-resourced contexts, shaping diverse forms of self-organized provisions, inventing diverse income opportunities, providing mentorship to vulnerable peers in the absence of other institutional support, and developing an array of creative endeavors across the arts, leisure, and recreational spaces that enhance the city’s popular culture. Read together, these chapters argue that hustles, in their plural forms, shape vital spaces of economic life, activism, grassroots political mobilization, community-oriented care, and popular intellectual and cultural life. Hustle urbanism therefore dances between mixed livelihood pursuits, commitments to justice (economic, social, environmental, and spatial), and a kind of playfulness.
In Nairobi, there is a popular expression: Tuko pamoja. To break this down: The verb kuwa means “to be,” and depending on the form of conjugation it can mean to be in the existential sense (to exist in a particular way) or in the spatial sense (to be in a place). As my Swahili teacher taught me years ago, tuko means “we are in a place.” For example, tuko nyumbani means “we are at home.” But if you say, for example, “we are cold,” you would say sisi ni baridi, where “ni” means “are.” So in “proper” Swahili, these two forms of grammatical conjugation signal the difference between ontological and spatial being. And yet, in Sheng, the popular slang vernacular spoken in Nairobi, grammatical conventions are constantly transgressed, such that the more colloquial way of conjugating the verb kuwa is to use the spatial meaning. So the common phrase tuko pamoja means “we are together.” In what sense? That is the point. It can mean we are in this place together, but it is also used to infer that we are together in solidarity and together in mutual understanding. We exist and understand together, and we are in place together. Tuko pamoja is an apt metaphor for the spatial practice and relational matter of hustle. Learning with Nairobi hustles, then, is about recognizing the spatial and the ontological dimension of hustle, such that place and being are inextricably entangled. All the while, the specifics of place and being are always left somewhat ambiguous; what exactly that place and that way of being entail is never fully known and that’s part of the point. We are together but each hustling our own unique hustles.
This book does not claim to provide solutions or offer conclusive assertions about what should or could happen. Such deliberations require collective thinking and working through. This book instead provides openings for further deliberations, which could include addressing the following conundrums: How might we acknowledge the aspects of hustling that merit harnessing and praise, without missing the aspects that merit critical examination and caution—the forms of environmental, social, political, and economic injustice that shape the contexts for hustle economies to persist in the first place? Paying attention to hustling in its plural registers offers a way of seeing without presuming to know, being open to different imaginaries of life and work, and noticing different expressions of care, aspiration, sustenance—without losing sight of the vulnerabilities and dispossessions that can underpin (and even enable) hustle economies.
Let me reemphasize that this book is not encouraging people to hustle more; to do so would be to blindly celebrate hustles without acknowledging their inextricable ties to persistent structural dispossession and uncertainty, which would in turn normalize and romanticize hardship and injustices. This book is about encouraging us all to recognize the work that hustle is doing and to acknowledge that so many people are hustling in a variety of ways that often go unseen or undervalued, or become stigmatized when measured against narrow legalistic, economistic, moralizing parameters.
It is telling that it has been under the government of Ruto—the very politician whose campaign was built on the claim that Kenya was a “Hustler Nation”—that a series of weekly protests known locally as Maandamano took over the streets between the months of June and September 2024. These protests were different from others: they were not incited by the political opposition or any political elite persona. The protests were, as many proudly affirmed on X during those first few weeks in June, “leaderless and tribeless” and led by Gen Z, those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s who are the digitally literate, educated, but underemployed demographic who know their rights and are not afraid to speak out. Facing police violence on several protest days, youth on X and in conversation frequently said that they had “nothing to lose.” The protests started with the contestation of the 2024 finance bill, but it became much more than that in the end. These protests represented an emboldened politics of opposition, and as Rosebella Apollo, Jerry Okal, and Jack Makau (2024) argue, they “challenged the established political order” that would have political elites be the primary holders of power. The protesters who took to the streets were coming from everywhere—from the intellectual middle-class university graduates to the Gen Z youth from the mtaa. Elders hung back and I heard many chuckle and admit that they were proud. They were curious and intrigued. They listened and let the youth speak, tweet, and chant. The wider implications of these protests and this moment are still uncertain as I finalize this conclusion. And I have wondered, since my most recent trip to Nairobi in June 2024, when the protests started, how this all connects to hustle urbanism. One thing is for sure: youth are hustling to make life work in the city, they are tired of having to hustle hard, and hustling is a skill that shapes diverse economic, social, political, and cultural articulations that are counterhegemonic, creative, sometimes discrete, and other times loud. Perhaps declaring that Kenya was a Hustler Nation was to admit that the hustle is real, and it is not quiet.
Therefore, the plural stories of hustle, in their diasporic and intergenerational forms, are crucial to recenter, not just to acknowledge and study as fringe subjects. Hustling practices have for too long been overlooked, stigmatized, or dramatized because they did not fit the hegemonic schema of what was legally, economically, politically legible. To recenter them, in their diverse forms, means avoiding segregating our studies of urban economy and geography. I would like to see what we could call “hustle studies” become integral to the study of urban life, livelihoods, and popular culture. Doing this could enrich wider collective projects seeking to imagine and construct more just economic, social, political structures, grounded in existing practices that work with imperfect circumstances to forge more “viable” lives (Dyson and Jeffrey 2023). Here there is a careful balance to be struck: taking hustling seriously does not mean fetishizing a new bootstrapping uplift narrative, nor does it call for a moralizing discourse that would judge how hustling is operationalized, relying on criminological theories that criminalize or exceptionalize hustling practices. This book has tried to recognize its affirmative dimensions alongside the conditions that render individuals relationally precarious. As Bettylou Valentine (1978) explained in her ethnography of “hustling and other hard work” decades ago, hustling is relationally constituted, entangled with other forms of labor, from paid work to unremunerated household or community work. The contribution of hustlers in Nairobi, and beyond, cannot be overlooked. They may start and often take place at the margins, but they are not marginal.
Hustlers cannot be left to fend for themselves and their peers without more substantial access to resources that would allow them to amplify their existing talent, ideas, and small-scale enterprises. As a means to an end, hustle showcases not only the ingenuity of popular knowledge but also its propositional and hopeful registers. The heavy rains in April 2024 that flooded some of the most vulnerable communities in Nairobi were immediately met with grassroots emergency responders who continue to hustle for funds and resources from within their neighborhoods and beyond to provide for the families affected by the floods and those affected by the subsequent demolitions that occurred along the river’s riparian land. From the Mathare Social Justice Centre, to Huruma’s Ghetto Farmers, to the collective of women self-organizing community kitchens, countless groups of diverse organizational structure and visibility have provided care, repair, river restoration plans, resistance, and resolve. They keep going. The disposition of hustling is one that recognizes the precarious present but also journeys into a future of potentials. Greater support for hustlers needs to come in diverse forms, but importantly it should not involve ignoring the hustle and promoting more “licit” and “acceptable” modes of work and conduct. We need hustle studies to learn with and design with the hustle rather than simply ask hustlers to become respectable entrepreneurs.
Hustling affords a sense of place and time and grants permission to not know exactly where we are headed. Part of the hustle is a deep and active attention to the spatial, relational, and temporal, alongside an acceptance of the unknown point of destination. The key is the dance between different modes and positions of being. As shown throughout these chapters, the logic of hustling goes beyond the binaries of job/no-job, beyond the idea that labors are remunerated or “productive” in an industrial capitalistic sense, beyond the formal/informal and self/collective dualities. It is about getting things done, working around problems that cannot be fixed at the point of manifestation. It’s about staying with breakdown and building something otherwise. And in that, do we not all have something to learn from Nairobi’s hustlers?
To study hustle is, to put it simply (but not to conclude), to pay close attention to what people are doing (and have always done) at the interstices, at the margins, in the rubble, in the meantime, and in spite of the trouble and the breakdown. To pay close attention without ever really knowing how they’re doing it or what endless permutations and variations the form of hustling will take over time. To just try to learn and listen and notice and acknowledge that hustle matters.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.