Storytellers Performing the Hustle

Stages

In 2010, I collaborated with a local crew of young filmmakers known as Ghetto Films Trust to shoot a short low-budget documentary film we called Story Yetu (Our Story).1 In June 2010, my brother, Sebastien, a music composer and teacher based in Berlin, came to Kenya to work with young musical artists to coproduce a set of collaborative music compositions that would be featured in the documentary film being shot in these same neighborhoods. Sebastien got to know a group of aspiring young artists between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who had not (yet) had any formal music training but whose talent and street-oriented knowledge meant they had stories to tell and nothing to lose. Among this group were three young boys, Cheddaz, Kissmart, and Donga, barely eighteen years old at the time. They identified as artists and spent much of their day around a small container that had been repurposed as a makeshift recording studio and resource center in Kosovo, run by Sammy, the local activist and youth mentor who featured at the start of chapter 4 and in chapter 6. Kosovo was one of the most underresourced corners of Mathare yet eerily situated right next to the police barracks and near the infamous Mathari Mental Hospital, the only public mental health-care facility in Kenya. Together, Sebastien and the group of young artists spent over two weeks working daily, putting together three music tracks, combining musical genres and local sounds: genge hip hop and jazz influences, street soundscapes from near and far including frying mandazi and matatu horns in the distance, and working with improvised percussive instruments alongside a single acoustic guitar. Together the group decided on a name for the music credits: Mashanti. The name referred to “My shanti” to evoke both the fact that the music was produced in a shack and the personal pride associated with the creative labors that can emerge from the prototypical makeshift structure. Three tracks were composed for the documentary.

Years later, when booking an Airbnb for a return trip to Nairobi in 2016, I noticed that one of the first links to appear below Nairobi Airbnb when I did my first quick Google search was for Nairobi “street tours” with a social enterprise called Nai Nami. The faces of those three young friends featured as the Nai Nami image on the homepage of the website. In the meantime, I had followed each of these young men on Facebook since the early 2010s, seeing their progression as a local hip-hop group calling themselves Nairobeez. Over the course of a decade, their twenties, the young boys I had met in 2010 had gone from spitting rhymes for each other at the Kosovo baze, to hooking into a documentary project that would invite them to collaborate on the music score, to developing their own musical sound and furthering their musical education, to honing their entrepreneurial confidence while continuing to make “connections” both within and outside the mtaa, to being the first hit on the Nairobi Airbnb page by 2017.

This chapter explores the multiple stages on which youth perform their hustle and project localized storytelling and packaging of the mtaa (the hood) for citywide and international consumption. Here, the first generation of digitally connected youth tell the stories of everyday hustles and hustle to tell stories. Through their performance and engagement with various stages, the spatialities of the mtaa become entangled and stretched. This chapter connects music, digital platforms, and street-corner socialities of the baze to reflect on the particular mise-en-scène that emerges when youth “perform their agency” (Esson, Amankwaa, and Mensah 2021, 194) through forms of popular storytelling. As such, a set of hustle aesthetics are fashioned to make hustling look good and easy, while presenting a kind of “joyful militancy” (Montgomery and Bergman 2021) as an affirmation of life, play, and movement amid backdrops of breakdown and harm. Nick Montgomery and Carla Bergman (2021, 57) specify that joy is not the same as happiness, that “ridiculous thing we’re all supposed to chase.” No, joy is something else, something that can be generatively entangled with “everyday acts of resistance,” “spaces of ethical questioning,” and “grounds on which to build” (2) something otherwise. Joy is “the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things. . . . It is aesthetic” (60), insofar as it evokes an intensity of the senses.

While most Nairobi youth in popular neighborhoods talk about life and labor as a form of hustle, some bear witness to youth hustles and use creative repertoires to tell stories about the everyday hustles that animate “ghetto life” (Unseld 2021). These three youth I met during the filming of Story Yetu positioned themselves over time as witness bearers and storytellers. And their stories, over time, became one of their hustles. They used both digital mediums and their local street-oriented knowledge—one helping to market the other. As they went on to pursue musical training, along the way they recognized that they could turn the art of storytelling into a livelihood—there was a business to be had by telling stories about the “ghetto” from the perspective of young people who had grown up in it and navigated every facet of street life (Di Nunzio 2019). There was honesty in recalling the days of petty crime as much as in recounting with pride the ways out of “that life.” In the decade that followed, tapping into the video selfie culture and digital platforms that had become widely available across the globe among digitally connected youth, these three childhood friends were now using social media to market both their music and their stories.

While the chapters of the book so far have focused on the aspects of hustling that reflect efforts to make work, provide, redistribute, repair, and navigate everyday breakdown, this chapter focuses on a particular performative dimension of hustling, such that hustling involves the art of storytelling. Chapter 6, on stayers and leavers, examined how some “connected” youth have used their epistemic credibility to carve their pathways out of popular neighborhoods, while others have deliberately stayed back to focus on community development from the inside. This chapter builds on these reflections by further complicating the understanding of who stays and who leaves by exploring not just what youth do and from where but also by paying attention to the particular stylized narrations that emanate from the mtaa. The chapter therefore offers a series of ethnographic ruminations on the entanglements of youth voices, street stories, and digital stages. The chapter explores the performative registers of hustling through digitally mediated youth-led stories that reach diverse “global” audiences with different effects. In some cases, these audiences are development “sponsors” or potential ones at that; in other cases, the intended audiences are other youth navigating their own precarious urban terrains in urban elsewheres (Kidula 2012; Ntarangwi 2009; Rollefson 2017; Weiss 2009).

Throughout the twentieth century, the discipline of cultural anthropology animated long-standing debates about what constitutes culture and how to go about interpreting and writing about situated cultural forms, knowledge systems, and particular places (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1977). But as the study of culture(s) moved beyond the early anthropologists’ fetish for the exoticized Indigenous other, it became clear that studying culture called for seeing culture and cultural production as an outcome of plural influences and encounters. Here the works of postcolonial theorists Edward Said (1978), Stuart Hall (1990), and Homi Bhabha (1994) have brought vital perspectives by examining and conceptualizing the modes of representation and “hybridities” of cultural formations that are intimately connected to the dynamics of power, knowledge, who has the authority to speak, and on whose behalf. Through Said, Hall, and Bhabha’s writing (and indeed their own biographies), contemporary cultural formations appear as layered manifestations of histories and continuities of colonialism, entangled with anti-colonial struggles to form postcolonial diasporic encounters and identities. In geographical studies focused on youth cultures, Doreen Massey (1998, 122–23) writes about the “spatial openness” of urban youth culture, positing that all youth cultures are “hybrid cultures.” And as Cindy Katz’s book Growing Up Global (2004) shows, when it comes to globalization and economic restructuring in the twenty-first century, there are threads that connect the experiences and subjectivities of young people across seemingly disparate contexts, from Sudan to New York City.

The forms of “hustling as storytelling” explored in this chapter involve making music tracks (particularly homegrown hip-hop) featuring local young artists who rhyme as much about structural violence against youth as about everyday joyful flirtatious banter among youth; and organizing street tours led by youth from the mtaa to share local youth knowledge with Nairobi visitors. There are three key stages involved here, avenues for reaching different audiences: the street (where the audience are fellow peers and community residents including elders, and where street life becomes the aestheticized backdrop of both photographic posts and music videos), the studio (the creative production space where music tracks and local radio shows are recorded and edited, using various forms of digital media and equipment), and the digitally mediated space of social media along with digital platforms where social networks and opportunities to monetize stories form beyond the spatial boundaries of the neighborhood.

A Methodological Note about the Digital and Thinking with Stories

Sometime in 1998, my undergraduate anthropology professor Kathryn March asked our small seminar class on “Life Stories” to think about the word history. HIS-story. She paused. It was a light-bulb moment for all these budding anthropologists in the room invited to dismember the word history and separate the masculine pronoun HIS from the noun STORY. We realized that “history” as an academic discipline involved as much narrative, partial, gendered construction as did the oral histories of an elderly illiterate street hawker might.2 We went on to discuss who tended to write mainstream “history” books, who could get published, which stories tended to be told, and which ones reaffirmed dominant narratives and understandings of the past: the white men who won the wars, and those who had time and could afford to write. Hence we were invited in that class to delve into the counterhistories, the “her-stories” and “their-stories,” and think about the range of ways stories are told beyond the published canon. What of popular histories and different genres of writing, our professor asked. This exercise made us reflect critically on the relative validity of any story—each partial, contingent, and grounded in “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988), but it also made us realize that each story has its importance, its place, its voice, and perhaps its intended audience. And when we conduct an ethnography, perhaps we have to avoid trying to search for the “right” story because in a way some oral histories will incorporate elements of “tall tales.”3 The key, then, is to triangulate different narratives and at times to hold space for different stories that do not sit comfortably side by side, recognizing that each carries its own epistemic significance and lesson.

So what happens when the “telling [of] young lives” (Jeffrey and Dyson 2009) is informed by digitally mediated encounters that occur when there is physical distance, complementing in-person ethnographic fieldwork? As ethnographers returning to a field site over time, what can we learn and say about young lives whose intimate vacillations we cannot ever claim to know but whose carefully curated digital profiles present a stylized form of auto-portraiture? What if the presentation involves using the real and raw backdrop of the everyday to fashion a particular portrayal of “ghetto life” that couples evocations of struggle and breakdown with joyful playfulness (Arora 2012, 2019)?

Urban ethnography in the twenty-first century poses a host of epistemic, ontological, and methodological conundrums. The role of digital life over the past decade, since the start of my ongoing ethnographic engagement in Nairobi, has increasingly extended the temporality and spatiality of urban ethnographic research. Digital mediums of communication mean that over the past decade especially, one no longer really “leaves” the field. At the same time, how and when one “enters” the field or gets to know new interlocutors can combine face-to-face and remote communications. As methods themselves evolve when we incorporate digital devices, this then reconfigures both our methodological repertoire and the ways in which the social (and cultural) is performed with and through these technologies (Back 2012; Back and Puwar 2012; Ruppert, Law, and Savage 2013).

When interlocutors can reach out and be reached via WhatsApp or Facebook, it facilitates selective and punctuated access into their lives. These windows present different facets of lived experience and communication. For example, in the case of Facebook or Instagram posts, these tend to be highly curated auto-portraits, sent to a wider “friends” and “followers” network. Those who react, through “likes” and other emojis or actual responses, confirm having “seen” the post. To emoji or to add a textual response is to affirm and acknowledge, but it is nevertheless a public forum and inevitably somewhat impersonal in its profoundly performative dimension, as much as it can simulate a sense of solidarity and support. One-on-one WhatsApp texts and voice messages, in contrast, facilitate asynchronous personal communications that are stripped of artifice, less presentational, sometimes even deeply confessional and reflective. The text “thread” can become a precious archive of a conversation, more immediate than email but giving more consideration and time to pause between responses than a phone conversation. The WhatsApp group chat is a combination of both—less public and exposed than Facebook or Instagram but less intimate than the one-on-one exchange. And yet it can be a precious forum for sharing news, supportive accolades, and humorous banter among a selective group.

With the added ethical and personal responsibility that these forms of communication entail in terms of mutual boundary setting and maintenance of ties, this extension of fieldwork through digital platforms calls for new methodological considerations and taking seriously how these modes of communication inform the mutual sense of “knowing” about each other’s lives and the traces they leave in the wake of seemingly ephemeral exchanges. To be clear, this chapter does not provide an ethnographic account of everyday uses and appropriations of global technologies; rather, it focuses on the ways in which these technologies reveal particular capabilities for storytelling and telling particular stories about Nairobi hustles.

As this chapter reflects on three modalities of storytelling (social media posts, music, and street tours), it also involves different qualities and kinds of encounters. For example, with Eliza and Kennedy and Kaka (mentioned in previous chapters), I see how their Facebook posts present particular stories and I can triangulate the performative portrayal of self that appears online with the version of themselves that they present in real life with different people in their lives—from the NGO folks, to me the researcher turned friend, to their childhood peers at the baze, and with different family members. Eliza, for example, presents a version of herself on social media that leans into the persona of strong, independent single mother (whether or not she is single at the time), who is an activist, proud to be from the ghetto, and loves wordplay. Kaka posts on behalf of fellow youth struggling in the mtaa, often posting about events that promote youth resilience and youth-led community development. Over the years, some photos show him outside the UN-Habitat headquarters, or just about to head into a conference for youth leaders, or part of a group selfie featuring visitors who have come to see the efforts in Mlango Kubwa. For Kaka, his Facebook page is curated as though it represents a wider collective—an individual profile standing in for the many youth who have not had the chance to express themselves in front of a wider audience. Kaka knows this responsibility and for years his Facebook page has been managed with his wider peer group in mind, while inevitably promoting his leadership and status, because in any social media post, humility has its limits.

It is not to suggest that there is more performance online than in real life, but certainly there are different qualities of presentation, different kinds of selection and curation involved. In both cases, particular aesthetics of hustling or doing well are projected depending on what’s needed, and there is always a blurring of the lines between the real and the aspirational, a point that Sasha Newell (2012) makes in his ethnography of the “modernity bluff.” Newell describes how his interlocutors in Côte d’Ivoire engaged in modes of conspicuous consumption to mask their precarious social and economic status. But this performance is not just about pretense; it is importantly reflective of the collective labors involved in blurring the distinction between the “real” precarity and the “fake” success. Inherent in the bluff, in other words, is a productive troubling of this binary between real and fake, struggle and success, and the wider point then is to show that everyone has a stake in making sure that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other, or that perhaps they are completely dialectical. This dialectic between struggle and success is reflected in the representational politics of storytelling through these multiple modalities and stages.

When it comes to the three young men I met in 2010, introduced at the start of the chapter, for several years I only kept in touch with them through Facebook, very aware that this was a selective, curated, and partial space for communicating and “seeing” how and what they were doing. More recently, since May 2023, I have gotten to know another group of young hip-hop artists in Nairobi through focus group discussions followed by primarily WhatsApp group communications. The WhatsApp group chat has become a space for them to share and promote their new tracks and videos, where they post a new track or upcoming gig and request for all in the group to promote and share with our respective networks. When I provide responses (and share with my own Nairobi-based contacts), I also pose questions about the musicality, the social commentary, and the creative process. It is with this in mind that I want to consider how the prism of social media and digital communication in itself informs and complicates ethnographic encounters and demands careful consideration when it comes to writing about what these encounters say about lives and young people in popular neighborhoods—in popular Nairobi. Here again, Glissant’s (1997) notion of “opacity” is important for thinking about how stories emerge and how they might be understood, always with some degree of obscurity, such that to try and understand requires sitting with the unknowable and to simply take in.

I write this chapter fully aware that the very focus on “storytelling” has multiple registers. The digital ways these stories are disseminated is key here, but there is also a strong dialectic between the digital stage and the everyday street stage—the two co-influence one another. The next sections explore how stories are told through the medium of social media, the medium of song, and the medium of a city tour. At the same time, stories are also told through the medium of an ethnographic encounter, a research interview, even a conversation between friends. Stories in all their forms therefore involve selective curation and editing, selective memory and choice about what gets foregrounded and what gets left out. It is not to say that a story is untruthful—rather, the story itself is an interpretation and a particular recitation, describing and analyzing the connection between events and one’s experience, perception, and emotional response to those events.4

Growing Up Digital

In African cities, youth popular culture reflects an amalgam of genres and influences, such that a rich repertoire of “intercultural and transnational formation” shapes particular forms of what Paul Gilroy (1993, ix) calls “black vernacular culture,” reflecting an “inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas” (xi). These Afro-diasporic encounters inform the production of multivocal, multisituated popular culture, always coming from someplace but with echoes of other places. In other words, stories are “situated” (Haraway 1988), but ideas are derived from or connected to multiple elsewheres (Massey 1998). Here the sense of porosity and possibility is not one of newness per se but rather one of reconfiguration and repurposing: repurposing in the sense of recovery, rejigging, and reusing but also in the sense of “re” (Latin for again), finding a purpose, again.5

Multisituated stories with resonances of elsewheres and resonating in elsewheres include, for example, the British series Top Boy, about Afro-Caribbean youth navigating “road life” (Bakkali 2018) on a London housing estate, which youth in Nairobi mentioned to me with joy when I was in Nairobi in 2023. Connected to this, in Brad Weiss’s (2009) ethnographic account of young men working and socializing in and around shanty-structure barbershops in popular neighborhoods of Dar Es Salaam, the stylized backdrop of graffiti art and music that fashioned the streets of urban Tanzania reflected a local genre of youth culture that referenced African American hip-hop icons to form a kind of street-based cosmopolitanism. Mario Schmidt (2024) writes about rural-urban migrants in Nairobi who constantly negotiate their aspirations and what is possible—aspirations informed by a variety of personal and global pressures that define particular conceptions of masculinity, in the face of the complex realities in their high-rise estates.

When I first started doing fieldwork in Nairobi in 2005, many young people had access to a “brick” phone, contributing bits of pay-as-you-go phone credit to a shared device, and a few had a Yahoo or Hotmail email address they would check every few weeks at a local internet café. When I later returned in 2009 to conduct my PhD fieldwork, the young people who would become my key interlocutors and friends all had a mobile phone of their own, and many had a Facebook account. Over the course of the 2010s, all my key interlocutors have gotten smartphones and become superconnected to digital platforms. Today, if many youth living in Mathare Valley are unable (or unwilling) to imagine living and working elsewhere, they nevertheless project themselves and their neighborhood onto an imaginary global stage, through digital platforms that have increasingly become part of their everyday grammar and embodied experience.

The spaces in popular neighborhoods where youth were seen as “idle” a decade ago if they were on the jobless corner are now “connected,” even during their states of waiting and kuzurura (hanging about, loitering). Hunched over their devices, Nairobi youth in these neighborhoods may still not have access to what the World Health Organization would regard an adequate toilet option, but they have access to WhatsApp and mobile banking services, and as a young man named Felix was explaining to me in 2019, “it doesn’t even matter now if you can’t finish high school [because you don’t have school fees]; at least now we have Google.” The subtext of Felix’s comment and the conversation that ensued with his three friends all sitting at the baze in the middle of the day was this: the smartphone has helped youth access modalities of learning and working in the city even when they are “just sitting” on the jobless corner. As Julie Archambault (2017) shows in her ethnography of mobile use among youth in Mozambique, the smartphone can enable a “politics of pretense,” enabling both social relations and forms of disguise. In the mtaa, the smartphone is simultaneously a technology of inclusion and one that facilitates ambiguity around the performance and “status” of (being in or at) work, leisure, planning, or just killing time.

While development practitioners speak of material poverty in these neighborhoods and the lack of educational facilities, young people who have grown up with smartphones have shaped a kind of leapfrog urbanism using global brand names as a synonym for various forms of connection, education, and information that they can access from the street stoop. Just as they say, “Now with Google I can teach myself about anything,” in the “Education” section of their Facebook profiles, they humorously and proudly state, “Ghetto University.” Together, the “Google” global and the “ghetto” local are enmeshed to produce a kind of street-based knowledge that is embedded in local social realities on the one hand and inflected with global echoes on the other (Weiss 2009). Google has become a kind of emic term for the endless online labyrinth of information that transcends class and economic status as the cost of smartphones and data bundles reaches the most under-resourced communities, and this allows youth from popular neighborhoods not only a window with a view of the rest of the world but also access to a stage on which they too can perform and curate their cosmopolitan selves. In a lifeworld where a large number of teenagers do not finish secondary school due to a complex number of extenuating circumstances, and where the prospects of waged employment are scarce even when they do, the younger youth of Mathare have differentiated themselves from their older “brothers and sisters,” the “youth” I first met more than a decade ago. For this new generation of youth, with a smartphone, some smarts, and some gall, many are trying to hustle their way out of joblessness through a nexus of work-leisure practice that is acutely aware that retaining street credibility and “ghetto” roots is perhaps now less about how “hard you can hustle” and instead how easy (and good) you make hustling look. All the while, as argued by Wendy Willems (2019) in her piece on “politics of things,” there is an intimate connection between “publics” that are digitally constituted and the physical spaces in which these publics manifest themselves, such as the social infrastructure of the baze.

Here the hustle is actioned and experienced through the multivocal and multisituated creative practices of storytelling in different forms. The stories are autobiographical or about the collective “we,” and the modes of getting these stories out and viewed (as well as heard) reflect the rapid rise of the digital (r)evolution that accelerated in the 2010s. This happened as music production and distribution became more digital and access to mobile phone and computer technology widened across income classes. There was a growing convergence of the digital economy and the endeavors to turn creative practices into livelihoods. But in addition to this, the art of storytelling is in itself a form of hustle insofar as storytelling from the mtaa has shaped a hybridized economy. It is at once hooked into the currency of informational capitalism via digital platforms, while also staying hyperconnected to situated genres of expression. Additionally, the presentation of stylized popular imaginaries gets projected via the mobile platforms of matatu vehicles, which in themselves feature graffiti art stories and play tunes that feature local artists, some of whom started by recording their tracks in the makeshift recording spaces of the mtaa. Here, the (lived) street, the (recording) studio, and the (digital) stage converge. The stage also has triple meaning here: the stage is metaphorical insofar as the urban resident watches the performance on the “digital” stage from wherever they are sitting in the city. The stage can be a physical place of (live) performance, and in Nairobi popular vernacular, the “stage” is also the place where matatu stop to let on and off passengers—a known place to regulars but one that can change and is never really fixed. All these “stages” have animated the mtaa sounds, musical experiments, and media projections of young creatives from these popular neighborhoods. Yet the “audible infrastructures” (Devine and Boudreault-Fournier 2021) in Mathare have evolved, informed in part by everyday rhythms, sounds, and stories of the streets but also by the techno-digital-scapes that have intersected with these over the past twenty years. These audible infrastructures have shaped what Clovis Bergere (2017) calls a kind of “digital society,” where youth carve out domains for debating politics via digital spheres to assert their participation in public discourse while experiencing sustained marginalization. Focusing on his ethnographic field site in Guinea, Bergere is drawing on Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) distinction in Politics of the Governed between civil and political society, the latter being the sphere of the urban poor who create spaces of political contestation and participation when excluded from formal rights to citizenship and urban services. Connected to the idea of “digital society,” the writings of Kenyan scholars George Ogola and Nanjala Nyabola have offered foundational analyses of digital life in Kenya, focusing on the “digital (dis)order” of the Twitter space (rebranded as X since July 2023), for example (Ogola 2023), and how “digital democracy” has advanced Africanized feminist politics (Nyabola 2018). The next section explores the particular creative expressions of digital society and democracy in homegrown hip-hop in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, to illustrate this complicated tango between struggle and success, politics and play (Arora 2019; Newell 2012).

Hustling to Make Songs: Mtaani Hip-Hop

In Nairobi, youth popular culture is expressed through their everyday urban vernacular of Kenyan Swahili known as Sheng (Githiora 2018). The Kenyan hip-hop genre of genge that emerged in the late 1990s mirrored U.S. African American hip-hop styles and Jamaican ragga to form what would come to be known as muziki wa vijana (music of the youth) (Ntarangwi 2009). The creative performative practices of street linguistics through the constant wordplay of Sheng and genge’s “youth music” have formed a vibrant urban youth culture that provides an auto-portrait of everyday life in the city from the perspective of young people who were born and raised in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, facing paradoxical economic, environmental, and social realities: on the one hand, young lives are cut off from formal institutional support (education, health care, and employment opportunities), but at the same time, they are the sources of investment and attention by the myriad improvement schemes purporting to tackle the “youth crisis.”

Since the 2010s, the concomitant rise of hybrid development schemes promoting social innovation and entrepreneurship, alongside the acceleration of information communication technology (ICT) services, has meant that Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods are home to the marginalized majority of young people in the city—digital natives who are simultaneously superconnected to digital technologies and the most vulnerable when it comes to securing stable employment opportunities. As youth make work in all manner of ways using the resources at hand, the question being not “what job can I get?” but instead “how many hustles do I need?,” some youth have included the performance arts into their portfolio of mixed livelihoods. The inner cities have long been “stages” where the art of the spoken word and the skill of telling a good story are integral to everyday survival in some cases and everyday banter. Hip-hop artists often allude to the connection between learning to spit rhymes on the streets and getting yourself out of trouble. It is also a mode of reclaiming one’s history and asserting one’s presence in the city, especially in the face not only of adversity but also of silencing, criminalization, and stigmatization. As George the Poet remarked on his podcast episode “Songs Make Jobs,” “Young Black people can turn a difficult situation around by making music, and they have done so across the world.”6

To tell one’s story becomes, therefore, a vital living archive and, as George the Poet calls it, a form of education and ethnography in itself—where observations and representations of a place are told through the perspective of those living in it. These stories became vital repertoires for both members of the urban youth culture who may never leave their hood and those who do (see chapter 6). Both project imaginaries of shared cosmopolitanism with “global” youth (Weiss 2009), some staying anchored in place and some finding other stages beyond the “ghetto streets.” It is against the backdrop of every city’s inability (or unwillingness) to support marginalized young lives along with global economic restructuring of the past decades that structural injustice has deepened youth poverty. This is especially pronounced in the Majority World, and notably in African cities where there is such an acute concentration of vulnerability alongside relentless resourcefulness. As such, creative genres of youth-led storytelling across urbanscapes have not only emerged from the streets but also spoken to other youth across multiple elsewheres (Katz 2004; Massey 1998). And in so doing, youth make claims that are at once symbolic, material, spatial, and social.7

Hip-hop in Nairobi is, as Felix Mutunga Ndaka (2023) argues, an “alternative archive,” a mode of cultural production rooted in the lived experiences of popular neighborhoods and street-oriented knowledge. It relays the “struggle and insurgency” (Jay-Z 2010) of the streets in neighborhoods where marginalized communities are cut off from basic services and excluded from mainstream economic, political, and social life. Hip-hop is descriptive and analytical; it is portraiture and social commentary from the margins, though it can of course become folded into the commercial mainstream. In his piece “Lyrical Renegades,” on the hip-hop tracks that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ndaka (2023) argues that the urban margins have always contended with overlapping crises—the pandemic was simply one among many. Consequently, these overlapping crises have always given way to creative survival strategies and constant combats against systems of oppression. During the pandemic, for example, the crackdown on the popular economies meant that there was a more acute “hunger virus” (as my friends lamented over WhatsApp texts in 2020) as opposed to fears of the Coronavirus. Across different moments and lived crises, Ndaka (2023) argues, hip-hop serves as a form of theorization. It theorizes everyday “ghetto life,” it speaks truth to power, it calls out hyperpolicing of young men at the neighborhood level, but it can also theorize wider systems of economic inequality, speaking about global capitalism or development. Hip-hop, therefore, has a way of becoming both representation and repertoire—holding space for oral histories, memories, local knowledge, and panoramic analysis.

Musical and spoken-word artists reflect on and represent themes and stories that speak about social, economic, and political lives of residents who are living at the margins but are vital members of the city—the fundi that repairs all things that break down, the service providers filling the gap when there is no “public” provision, the storytellers who provide a counternarrative to the dominant tropes depicting these parts of the city as spaces of negation. Importantly, the role of youth in hip-hop and all forms of artistic expression illustrates the refusal, defiance, and rejection to abide by the Kenyan gerontocracy—where all those in positions of political power are elders (often men) who do not represent the interests or the views of the marginalized majority demographic—the Kenyan landless, wageless, but digitally superconnected youth. Elites in Kenya have throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras systematically policed young male bodies and tried to quell their practices of resistance. From the Mau Mau freedom fighters in the years leading to independence, to the Mungiki gangs in the late twentieth century, to the twenty-first-century youth hanging around in the streets, youth masculinities have long been stigmatized for defying authority, subverting norms of propriety, and making trouble.

Hip-hop in Nairobi has therefore become a form of art, subversive activism, and a business. It is style and critique. As in many cities across the globe, it contests power structures and figures of authority, including symbols of the state personified through the police force. Globally, hip-hop has carved out a space not only for alternative archives, but also for alternative scripts of masculinity and belonging in the city (Dattatreyan 2020; Rollefson 2017; Ndaka 2023). And at the same time, hip-hop refuses to be overwhelmed by lamentations and dejection. Through its tradition of wordplay, it inserts creative banter, humor, and wit into its lyrics, and in Nairobi, its beats animate the street corners, matatu, and clubs where the tracks are performed and played. It therefore shifts from modes of heavy political and social commentary to modes of lightness and playful description of ordinary pleasures and pastimes.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal book Decolonising the Mind (1986) lamented the fact that European languages had dominated African literature, even in the postcolonial era. There has since been a long-standing debate concerning language in African literature. For example, Aimé Césaire (1947) and Édouard Glissant (1997) both expressed the complicated relationship between their Martinique roots and European education, and this came through in how they both played with the French language in their prose, both advocating for a creolized Black French. Similarly, Chinua Achebe (2003) argued that writing in English enabled African writers to Africanize English by representing African voices and experiences and at the same time ensuring a wider readership beyond African readers. Questions concerning literature, language, identity, and translation were central to Kwani’s 2015 literary festival, held in Nairobi, titled “Beyond the Map of English: Writers in Conversation on Language” (Nderitu 2015). Present at the festival was U.S.-based author and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, now a professor of Africana studies at Cornell University, who wrote a piece in conversation with his father’s work titled “What Decolonising the Mind Means Today” (2018). In this piece, he both pays homage to and advances his father’s work, explaining that “decolonising the mind became useful as a conceptual tool through which to understand the ways in which power imbalances were practiced as culturally encoded automated reflexes.” He goes on to argue that “African languages have to move from being primarily social languages to vehicles of political, cultural, and economic growth. . . . Our imaginations draw from our creolised cultures, and have had their own approaches to aesthetics.” These debates are relevant to the politics of language of African hip-hop, which has become a vehicle not only of African languages but of African creolized vernacular like Sheng. What is notable here is that through the digital medium, these hip-hop tracks, in all their diversity, enable the hyperlocal vernaculars and experiences to reverberate beyond the mtaa streets—the expressive mtaani grammar reaches beyond linguistic and spatial borders, becoming perhaps a form of linguistic decolonization through its circulation.

In Nairobi, everyday street banter, through the urban vernacular and repartee of Sheng, has become material for creative youth practices of storytelling, and the streetscapes of the corrugated makeshift dwellings and loitering corners serve as the backdrop of DIY music videos featuring mtaa life. These videos include prosaic scenes featuring vignettes of ordinary residential, commercial, social, and working life that coexist in concert. These hip-hop tracks, now consistently accompanied by some kind of video production (ranging from the super-low-budget to high-tech production) turn the mtaa inside out, rendering it simultaneously a “spectacle” and a “dwelling place” (C. Richardson and Skott-Myhre 2012, 10) to defy the tropes that would present these neighborhoods as only one of the following: carceral, overpoliced or ignored, or a place of humanitarian drama and intervention. The scenes feature shared public spaces that move from wide-shot panoramic views of the neighborhood’s hectic rhythms seen from a drone’s-eye view, to the up-close and personal hand-held camera footage of individuals looking in the camera to remind the audience that “this shit is personal” as well as public and political. Here we see the “alternative archive” combining the playful as well as the resistance. These stories do not gloss over the struggles and the hassles, but it also depicts the hustle as entangled with ordinary joy, young life, young love, likes, emojis, vibes, and everything in between. Thus for Mathare youth versed in hustling their way through these different forms of mtaa life, this dwelling place becomes a stage to tell their stories. Inflected with stylized autobiographical content meant to reflect shared struggles and solidarities but also simple pleasures and pursuits, the tracks are simultaneously rooted in place and meant to travel, even if youth themselves cannot (Kidula 2012).

As Cornel West writes in his foreword to Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby’s book Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (2005, xi), hip-hop has forged “new ways of escaping social misery, and to explore novel responses for meaning and feeling in a market-driven world.” From American hip-hop (Perry 2004), to UK grime (Hancox 2019), to European hip-hop (Rollefson 2017), to East African genge (Ntarangwi 2009), talented urban youth have created Afro-diasporic sounds that are manifestations of rhythmic experimentations, bold artistic expression, and social commentary.8 Hip-hop has been as much about playful entertainment shaping global popular culture as it has become a set of political and philosophical meditations on a particular time and place. As a genre, it is at once hyperlocalized in its place-based ethnographic descriptions and hyperglobal in its wider resonances with other urban contexts where marginalized youth experience equivalent challenges.

Its musical composition is equally simultaneously local and global insofar as lyrics are steeped in localized slang, wordplay, and inside references, while the art of sampling—where segments of existing music are incorporated into the new track to create something unique but with recognizable elements—creates a connection with other places and other times. Youth marginalized by formal institutions share certain experiences across cities, and through music they spread their rhymes and hook into each other’s lived realities at diverse scales—first performing for each other on the street corner, then recording tracks in some kind of studio space with tech capabilities, then posting videos to reach a wider audience through digital technologies, and, if possible, going back to a “live” stage to perform the tracks that have come to be known by fans. Not all these steps happen each time, but some combination of these tends to. The key is moving between scales of relevance and reach.

In her book Terraformed, about inner-city Black youth in East London, Joy White (2020, 40) explains, “For Black youth in particular, the contemporary music scene is a site of emancipatory disruption where it is possible to take on a new identity as an artist, a performer, or an entrepreneur.” Similarly, Rosalind Fredericks (2014) argues that hip-hop in Senegal has become a way for youth to assert their citizenship and agency by engaging with representative politics through subversive musical soundscapes, contesting authoritarian elders and rule. In Nairobi, genge hip-hop tracks are rehearsed on neighborhood streets with references to local tragicomedic happenings and then played on the matatu, as the first kind of dress rehearsal before wider dissemination.

On October 16, 2023, I received a text from one of the female members of a hip-hop group I’ve been following: Pause N Play X Wagala, based in Mathare. Milly posted the link to one of their new tracks and YouTube videos, titled “social media.”

Milly: Check out our new song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlgkkAiXHXo

♨️♨️♨️♨️

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The video is a little over three minutes long. It starts with a bird’s-eye view of Mathare streets (probably shot from a drone), with the opening beats punctuating the changing scenes that follow. We move from seeing the aerial view of the unpaved streets of Mathare and corrugated metal, to seeing a person from the waist down in a bright-orange boiler suit washing a car, to then seeing the panoramic view of the wider city of Nairobi. As the lyrics start, we now see a group of youth assembled together—we are now on the street. Female vocalists ask in Sheng, “Do you use Instagram? Do you follow TikTok and what about Snapchat?” and all the while we see youth not just looking at their own phones but clearly chatting about what they see on their phones, laughing and bantering about the digital social as they hang out in person, being social. We then see different representations of labor familiar to the popular economy in these neighborhoods: the street vendors preparing food snacks with their parasols and small modular stations, working in pairs and keeping their hands busy while singing and chatting and clearly combining livelihoods with liveliness.

The group of men we see in the next shot seem to be hanging out without clear indication of labor taking place, though we don’t know if they’re taking a break from work or just taking time to socialize. We see some handling khat leaves, the stimulant drugs commonly chewed by men and often sold on the street alongside comestible produce. Chewing khat is at once stigmatized and normalized, especially among young unemployed men (Di Nunzio 2019; Mains 2011), but in these neighborhoods it can also sometimes simply indicate the deliberate subversion of propriety and signal a chosen moment to visibly not be working. It is the in-between, the kuzurura (idling) with intent, and an unapologetic performance of leisure and not giving a fuck about judgment.

There is then a montage of images, shifting quickly from the female vocalists who are the street vendors preparing snacks and wearing an apron as well as a short pink cropped pixie hairdo—they sing and look into the camera. Then we see the men, who are speaking and looking at their phones, their eyes bloodshot, high on khat. The beats pause and the instrumental section comes to the foreground, and here there is a repartee between the women and the men. They are not in the same physical space; they are, it seems, communicating via the smartphone, using social media to talk about social media and their respective “slay.”

In this video, we see the ordinary street life of popular economies at work and at play. Work may be repetitive and arduous (we are especially reminded by this when we see a man hunched over, pulling a heavy mkokoteni [handcart]), but it can also be playful when work space and time permit some degree of social banter in person as well as online. Here it is not about whether people are socializing in person or online but rather how the in-person and online are increasingly entangled, how the ordinary scenes of life become framed as worthy of “snaps” and “likes.”

When I received Milly’s text and viewed the video for the first time, I wanted to further understand the meaning of this track and its intended commentary. I asked Milly if she saw the track as a sort of criticism of social media or a celebration of it or a bit of both. I also wanted to know more about the gender dynamics at play. Milly replied:

Milly: It talks about how people know each other on Social media, flirt, post and all sorts of things.

Tatiana: Do you think this use of social media for flirting, getting to know each other, humorous banter . . . does it go beyond the baze? Like does it allow youth to connect with others who live in other parts of town, or is it still about mtaani social networks? Like would a gal from Mathare flirt with a guy in Buru or Koch or Kariobangi? Or do youth date and flirt with others who stay closer to their side of town? I wonder if social media expands the dating/flirting scene and space, or is just another way to flirt online with the people you see on the streets at the baze in real life . . .

Milly: I think it connects both people from the same hood and from different hoods, just depends on your fan page coz to be honest, nowadays internet connects people more than any other platform.

As Milly explained, the track is about the uses of social media for flirting, getting to know one another. It showed these young people doing so in the midst of everyday ordinary practices—in the midst of the hustle, hustle as work, and hustle as anti-work—chewing khat and knowing that part of hustling can mean not doing anything that advances one’s prospect for income generation but instead asserts a collective right to just be in public space with other peers. The track also shows that the presence of female MCs in Nairobi’s hip-hop is growing, as is women’s agency to contest the macho behavior and be the ones seen as being both in work mode and able to hold their own when it comes to quick, witty repartee. Here the “ghetto gals” are asserting themselves in new ways, in part thanks to social media. The main vocalist in the video recalls the style of dress, hair, and gall of Salt-N-Pepa, one of the 1990s all-female hip-hop groups in the United States. But Milly and her girls are not just performing and rapping; they are doing so while performing work and hustle. Hustling is part of the dance, the rhythm, and the performance. Their hustle, apron, hard-boiled eggs, parasol, and all are part of the aesthetic and what gets included in the frame and the selfie. It is not cropped out or blurred; it is integral to the imaginary of the 2020s in Mathare.

Hip-hop has contended with misogyny in all hip-hop cultures but it has also seen female and nonbinary gender representation come onto the stage, and in Nairobi this has been happening at a rapid pace over the past decade. At the end of the video, we see a guy checking out a girl’s ass, an all-too-familiar scenario that will perhaps make the female viewers think, “There we go again.” But there was something deliberate here, as if to say, guys may always check out a girl’s ass. The question is, will she be in a position to jokingly or firmly retort back (including checking out his ass)—if she is, the power balance is restored. And here the track may be suggesting that the question “Do you use Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat” is also a way of saying, “Because I do.” And if you think you can check me out, let me make it clear that I can check you out too.

Here the works of Payal Arora (2012, 2019) and David Nemer (2022) resonate. Nemer’s research in Brazil points to the vital and perhaps overlooked role of digital technologies in providing levers of sheer fun and pleasure among marginalized urban communities. Arora’s writing on “can the ‘Third World’ come out to play” challenges understandings of ICT for development that equate the use of digital media purely with techno-optimistic discourses tied to development and economic goals. Yes, digital technologies can be used for political claims making (think Slum/Shack Dwellers International and the forms of “mobilization from below”) and for “development,” and yes, digital divides are a real issue to enabling both political and economic “freedoms” (Sen 1999). Building on Arora and Nemer’s arguments, I would argue that this track and the video tell other kinds of stories, beyond “digital society” (Bergere 2017) and “digital democracy” (Nyabola 2018): it points to the lightness that social media can bring; it reminds us to acknowledge that digital technologies can also be about enjoyment and social experimentation, while nudging changes in gendered power dynamics through humor and banter. It does not shy away from representing the everyday realities of mtaa life, but it does not impose a sentimentalism portraying this life as “misery” and makes no mention of hardship, poverty, or struggle. It does not bluff its way out of the mtaa as it is; instead, it uses the mtaa as the stage not to feature a story about basic infrastructures or violence or joblessness but to focus on the lightness and playfulness of mtaa everyday life and how social media inserts itself into (and perhaps even facilitates new kinds of) mtaa joy and play.

Here it is worth stressing that this track and its accompanying video story call for the suspension of excessive interpretation. As Susan Sontag (1966, 97) argues in her essay “Against Interpretation,” “the task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?” Sontag says that “the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities” (98). She argues that by refusing to leave the work of art alone, we lose the ability to really “see more, to hear more, to feel more” (104). Rather than try to interpret the content of art, we must try to consider and describe its form. And for that, she writes toward the end of her essay, “we must recover our senses” (104). Going back to what Milly says to describe the track and the video: “It talks about how people know each other on Social media, flirt, post and all sorts of things.” The “all sorts of things” is notable here. It recalls the Latin expression et cetera (etc.), literally meaning “and the rest,” used in many languages to mean “and other things.” Et cetera often evokes “the rest” that might be imagined but needs no mention. Perhaps this is exactly what the track and video are implying: don’t overread into this. We are just experimenting and expressing ourselves through these global platforms, familiar to every digitally literate young person across the globe, but doing so from here, in our everyday, self-help city. We flirt, we post, et cetera. That’s it. Don’t overread into it; just pay attention to the form.

Power of the Selfie: Our Stories, Our Streets

This section explores the temporal and spatial registers of the stylized digital auto-portraiture of the three young friends—Cheddaz, Kissmart, and Donga—I met in 2010 during the filming of a documentary called Story Yetu, in collaboration with Ghetto Films Trust, when they worked with Sebastien to record a track titled “Everyday.” These three youth in their late teens were from one of the poorest areas of Mathare, known as Kosovo, infamous for its illegal brewing activities along the river. In “Everyday,” they sing,

Lazima hustle,

Tumia muscle,

Kutafuta riziki

[you need to hustle

use muscle

to make a living]9

The three childhood friends saw an opportunity to form a business out of the convergence between love for music, lived experience in all manners of hustling, living in a city with a vibrant tourist economy, and the expansive possibilities of the digital world to connect unlikely consumer-producer pairings. They were part of the generation of youth who were both landless and wageless, and at the same time, their formative years of education were not spent in formal schooling but instead on the street and online. They were the first active users of the African digital revolution such that they were at once precarious in relation to housing, work, and social status but vocal and visible on digital platforms. They were at once “stuck” in their neighborhoods, and yet their own stories and modes of representation were fashioned in relation to cosmopolitan elsewheres. Their own vernacular, music, artistic persuasions, and learning were locally grounded but also informed by global expressive articulations.

Consider the particular subjectivities and performative reach of a particular kind of the now widely familiar and globalized phenomenon of digital life—the “selfie.” For Mathare youth, the selfie can serve as a mode of self-styled activism, auto-portraiture, and storytelling. It displays a counterrepresentation of neighborhood life, defying Afro-pessimistic portrayals that would only focus on infrastructural violence, informality, unregulated housing markets, and municipal underinvestment.

When I met Cheddaz, Kissmart, and Donga, they were spending their days around the makeshift recording studio in their neighborhood where they worked on their rap rhymes and performed for each other and anyone who cared to listen. Their lyrics and beats were raw and real, but this local street poetry coming from the marginalized voices of youth was at the time largely unheard beyond their baze, a semipublic nondescript part of the neighborhood where these childhood friends gathered to form a kind of site-specific performative act to assert their turf as well as confirm their presence in the mtaa. This is where they passed the time or came back to, shaping everyday youth street culture while increasingly hooking into youth imaginaries beyond their baze.

Over the past decade, these three friends built their music, visibility, and a local storytelling business thanks to the rapid expansion of ICT across the city. During the months (and sometimes years) when I could not get myself to Kenya, I paid close attention to their curated online presence, eager to follow their progress as artists and more generally. I could see that they had built up their own hustle portfolio centered around creative practices, becoming a three-member boy band known among their social media circle as Nairobeez. Widening access to smartphones and affordable data bundles enabled creative youth like them to regularly upload video selfies onto Facebook and later Instagram. They performed stories from the streets of Mathare that did not sanitize the everyday realities but rather pointed out the beauty at the corrugated interstices, and they also regularly posted footage from the recording experiments to share the “behind the scenes” creative process—exposing the creative backstories of their “ghetto greenroom.”

But this public performance still had limited reach or direct income opportunities, so in order to subsidize their music enterprise, they eventually connected with a wider base of potential customers through a digital platform during the growth of the Airbnb era of the 2010s. With the support of a social entrepreneur passionate about youth and popular culture, they coproduced a narrative that would appeal to Nairobi visitors interested in seeing the city beyond its familiar tourist landmarks. The three boys from Kosovo connected their local hustle with the digital economy, marketing themselves as three former street kids with in-depth local knowledge of the city center and its difficult-to-reach peripheral spaces. When avant-garde tourists on a budget and with a taste for grit log on to the Nairobi Airbnb page, they will come across the local “Nai Nami—Our Streets. Our Stories” private walking tours, where tickets can be booked for US38 per person. This clever form of hustling found a bridge between local lived realities and a global audience keen to take part in off-piste city tours tailored to visitors keen on seeing the city differently, through the eyes of youth with street-oriented expertise and experience.

In Mathare, youth hustles include combining a kind of hunt for ways to stay both economically active and credible on the streets. This can involve a particular performance where “making a living” also appears to contribute to a common cause or be read as an expression of community activism. While many youth living in Mathare have over the past three decades engaged at some stage of their young lives in the homegrown residential garbage collection economy as their stepping stone into working life (see chapter 3), a growing number of younger youth who have grown up digitally connected are turning to genge hip-hop to be both protagonists and activists of “ghetto life,” becoming, as George the Poet put it, ethnographers with lived experience, describing and, as Ndaka (2023) suggests, theorizing their streets and telling their stories. As they do so, they expose the realities of everyday street life in Mathare in solidarity with other global “ghettos” (Rollefson 2017).

Consider the tag line “our street, our stories,” particularly the possessive pronoun. It serves as an appropriation, a kind of “taking back.” Under colonial rule, Nairobi as a whole could not have been their city. In the early postcolonial era, their neighborhood was systematically regarded by the international development and donor community as in dire need of upgrading, clean-up, order, and education. Others regarded it as a “self-help city” (Hake 1977), which was framed both in an affirmative sense because it meant people were auto-sufficient but also in a pejorative sense because it meant people were left to their own devices, underserved, and cut off from mainstream support. Therefore, to refer to the Nairobi streets as “our streets” signaled an important declaration of belonging and reclaiming—“we belong” to these streets, in the Central Business District of the main city, as much as the dusty streets of the hood. In turn, “these streets and stories” belong to us.

In other words, they placed themselves at the center of the story, the story of Nairobi as it is today, as it is being frequented today by fellow age mates and other visitors wanting to learn about the real Nairobi. It is no coincidence that the street tours start at the Hilton Hotel, just across from the National Archives. This positioning is telling—the Hilton Hotel, epitomizing privilege and a global brand of affluence in the hospitality sector, stands across the street from the National Archives, repository of decades’ worth of colonial and postcolonial documents and a curatorial space featuring Kenyan cultural artifacts. The starting point of the walking tour therefore faces both sides of Nairobi and the different facets of youth culture tout court: a stylized amalgam of cultural heritage, coloniality, decoloniality, and creolized expressions of global brands. That starting point on Mama Ngina Road is at once “easy to find” and highly symbolic.

In their music, Nairobeez performed everyday life as a kind of magic realism: rendering the ordinary a cosmopolitan ghetto style; and conversely, what might have seemed unattainable becomes banal. Here there is a connection between the modes of cultural production that took place in the United Kingdom with grime music (Hancox 2019) and that of genge hip-hop in Nairobi (Kidula 2012; Ntarangwi 2009), both emerging in concert with the rise of digital platforms and social media. Young aspiring artists of grime or genge did not get “signed” by producers but rather hacked their way onto the virtual stage through free-to-upload platforms, such as YouTube. They didn’t need to sanitize their tracks; they could “spit rhymes” that retained their subversive edge, and they didn’t speak about the ascent to fame and success but instead provided a real-time, graphic novel–style musical expression of street life and could do so in their vernacular. They retained the raw and grit of everyday violence on the street and the gall of youth who have nothing to lose and a story to tell.

Nairobeez used their mtaa as their backdrop, stage, and turf from which they produced music videos as a genre of auto-portraiture. They narrated their exploits with style but did not bluff about riches. It was more complex than that. In their photographic posts and music videos on social media, they have not painted a picture of hard-core struggles against historical dispossession and segregation the way some other hip-hop artists of the Black Atlantic have. Nairobeez have always done something a little different: they did not beautify or romanticize the ghetto but they rendered the ghetto beautiful, just as it was. One day, Donga posted a video featuring an ordinary morning scene along Nairobi River, taken from what is often considered one of the most precarious places to stay, in a shack along the river down Mathare Valley, near the changa brewers, near the accumulation of waste, near the potential floods during rainy season. On that morning, Donga documents the sounds of chickens roaming around the organic waste looking for scraps. He shows the movement and sonic murmurs of the river below and the morning sun piercing through the tall blades of grass. The camera slowly flips to show Donga’s face. He laughs and says: “Mathare!” and then his face goes serious as he pauses. “It is beautiful . . . It is my home!”

The three young men, who described themselves as former street kids, surviving on the streets through petty crime, had become artists, street tour guides, and entrepreneurs, now hiring other youth to give street tours. They were storytellers, portraying a particular kind of “ghetto style,” integral to the generation of youth shaping the creative restyling of deep Sheng across the city, generating new ways of constantly redescribing and reaffirming their attachment to place, particularly the importance of this place. Mathare was fashioned as home, and the baze became a hyperlocalized expression of global youth culture in its hybrid, spatially open, unfinished forms.

On another occasion, Donga posted a selfie with his mother, who some twenty years ago would have been a teen mother like so many young women in Mathare (see chapter 5). Donga’s mother looked tired and didn’t smile for the selfie with her son, but she did stare back at the phone camera, acknowledging the moment. She was between morning chores, it seemed, and the corrugated metal shack they lived in featured in the back, with a line of laundry hanging across the frame. This photo, posted on Instagram and Facebook, could be read as a curation of “this is what it is.” It was not like Tracey Emin’s art installation My Bed (shown at the Tate in 1998) because nothing about that “ghetto” scene was meant to appear messy or unkept. It exposed the mundane hardships of life in a neighborhood where even the prosaic cup of chai requires hours of labor and material cost and where youth are increasingly targets of police brutality, extrajudicial violence, and systemic underemployment. Thus these millennial self-proclaimed “ghetto boyz,” who have grown up in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods with a smartphone in their pockets, know how to reach a world beyond their streets while appearing ever-more tied to, and proud of, their baze, from which they project shared struggles and solidarities with fights against many crises and injustices. In 2020, these same youth used their growing digital platform to showcase their localized allegiance to the global movement protesting police brutality against young Black bodies. Posting selfies with makeshift masks that read, “Kenyan Black Lives Matter,” was another example of the ways in which they were constantly reworking global imaginaries and movements. At the same time, all this did not mean that they would forever “stay locally put.” They could still evoke “Mathare” and “home” but choose to “stay” outside the ghetto. When I met with them in 2023, they admitted that they had moved out of Mathare, away from their Kosovo baze, saying that it was important to show other youth that it was possible to leave. It also seemed to be important for them—as an affirmation that they could leave the streets of their childhood and navigate other streets in the city. “My streets, my stories,” from Mathare to the CBD and everything in between. It was through the navigation of tenuous times and spaces that the telling of their stories became a vital creative social practice. To quote João Biehl and Peter Locke (2017, ix), “The worlds on edge, and the open-endedness of people’s becoming, is the very stuff of art.”

This chapter has focused on the performative dimensions of hustling and some of the ways in which these are mobilized through various stages and produce different modes of storytelling that seek to reach different audiences. Through this, the chapter emphasizes that there really is no single hustle story, which perhaps is partly why it is so difficult to define and so plural in its manifestations.10 The chapter also seeks to engage with some of the older and more recent debates about hip-hop and its place in popular culture, and the extent to which hip-hop is a form of political speech, social commentary and critique, playful poetic verse, or a form of creative expression among youth who find their place at the nexus of music and online media to talk about their ordinary travails, deeds, and exploits that coincide with playful commentary on the ordinary joys of everyday social life. This form of hustling as storytelling and storytelling as hustling is not just about commodifying the “ghetto”; as the street tours show, it is about projecting the magic realism of life in the ghetto and rendering it a little more visible, though not necessarily legible. Rendering more visible here operates at the nexus of the social sector hustles discussed in the previous chapter (see also Farrell 2015) and the representation of “real life” without the “filters.” As such, the hustle plays with the dialectics of struggle and success, politics and playfulness, outrage and joy.

This chapter also illustrates how hustle carries a certain pragmatic realism as well as hopeful and joyful register. The hustle here carries an acknowledgment of the unavoidable reality that underpins both the hip-hop story and the street tours (and their connection): the reality is that hip-hop artists can’t necessarily make a living just off their music—most can’t anywhere in the world.11 The work of Katrien Pype (2021) makes a relevant point about “digital creativity and urban entrapment in Kinshasa” when she argues that digital experiments cannot necessarily solve precarity, and thus she cautions the celebratory rhetoric that sells the idea to many youth globally, but perhaps especially to young Africans (as part of an entrepreneurial development story), that finding “global” connections will “empower” youth and pull them out of poverty.

To illustrate this, just as we see with Milly and her peers in the video, there is a representation of doing music and spitting rhythms but also doing other work—ordinary work that many other Mathare folks do, among a host of other things. We see everyone hustling in the video, the key protagonists along with the other wananchi animating life on these streets. The creative labors are integrated into that web of mixed livelihoods. As for the street tours: the three boys from Mashanti realized this reality a while back. They did what all other youth hustlers do in the mtaa: they built on their existing base and expanded, diversifying their economic opportunities, but they did so on their own terms and grounded in what they know. They know these streets, and they have stories they know people will want to hear.

As Clive Chijioke Nwonka shows in Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023), hip-hop along with other representations of “the hood” in popular media tell street stories that people across the globe love to hear about, sometimes to the detriment of those living there. If the hood is glamorized in the hip-hop track (or the Top Boy series), it is stigmatized in lived practice. Nai Nami did not just reskill (the act of learning a new trade if the one you know is in decline, typical in contexts of deindustrialization, for example). They skilled out, spreading their skill as performers and storytellers to do city tours, and in the process gathered more fans, more followers, and more clicks, taking advantage of the fascination Nairobi tourists might have with the stories of youth from the hood, but in doing the tours, Nai Nami also bring the fetish fed from digital media culture down to the ground. The stories told online are triangulated with the real people in an actual physical space. Even if the street tours stylize the stories, even if there are elements of “emotional truth” in the narrations, they are doing their tours, and the work they’re doing to bring in more youth to lead them is providing a modest catalyst for greater youth-led representation and economic progress.

In summary, this chapter has brought into conversation discussions of hip-hop, changes in digital tech over the past decade, and the ways in which storytelling has been informed by the cultural production of homegrown hip-hop and amplified by digital platforms to produce new kinds of hustle in the city. Here it is worth reflecting on how this particular story—hip-hop, hustle, and the digital—connects to the previous chapters. The “dusk” of youthhood among those who had founded homegrown youth-led economies in the early 2000s centered around the value of waste has seen a shift—as explained in chapter 6, younger youth have made claims to a “piece of the pie.” Claiming a piece of the pie in part meant demanding certain shares and access to the established (and in some cases lucrative) waste economy, but it has also meant finding other hustlescapes. As the young hip-hop artists discussed in this chapter show, creative hustles signify not only the importance of digital platforms as a global stage to reach a wider audience but also the gradual encroachment of the digital economy onto the mtaa economy. For the Nai Nami tours, these three childhood friends and the other youth they have trained have positioned themselves as expert guides of the “real city” (Pieterse 2011). This “real city” is not necessarily just the mtaa city or the CBD. Rather, it is the city that connects the ghettos, the CBD, the Silicone Savanah tech city, the shopping malls in Westlands, the designer cafés and restaurants. Nairobi is all of it. The Nairobi “off the beaten track” is the interconnected city, where you can step into a matatu at the dusty Mathare Number 10 stage and eventually end up at the CBD, taking the next matatu to ABC café in Westlands. The storytellers who hustle and hustle to tell stories are the ones who know how to traverse that city. The hustle has, along the way, gone viral—from the mtaa, to the CBD, to the wider Nairobi and nation, and perhaps even globally too.

While youth in popular neighborhoods digitized and monetized the stories of the mtaa through music and street tours, forming an alternative popular archive, at the level of national politics, the story of mtaa hustle has, since 2020, been picked up and appropriated, notably by the current president, William Ruto. Did Ruto validate the story and shed light on the human ingenuity of the mtaa way, the way of the hustle, as a kind of realpolitik? Or did he co-opt the story and turn it into a political slogan as part of his populist political pitch? This is what the next and final chapter explores, along with wider concluding reflections.