Stayers and Leavers

Kennedy: The Quiet Leader

I first met Kennedy in 2009. He is a tall, slender Kikuyu man who always wears a trucker cap and can be found in either his work overalls or an ironed shirt and jeans. Kennedy has a gentle demeanor and could even pass for a shy person. But over the years I have learned that he is perhaps a little quiet at times because he is always planning, scheming, counting. As long as I have known him, Kennedy has remained the chairman of his local youth group, Kibichoi Youth Group, and unlike other youth in the waste collection business, he has always continued to actually collect garbage himself.

After that morning of garbage collection in 2016, I sat down with Kennedy and asked him to explain the breakdown of his garbage business. At the time, Kennedy managed fifteen plots, which was typical of youth group leaders who had been involved in the business for many years. Over time, any person in the garbage business went from starting as a collector to eventually managing a plot and then having a crew work for you. You build your business incrementally, one plot at a time. If you’re a good leader, you start letting some of your crew (who show interest and potential) manage their own plot. In a way, being a “good leader” in this context means doing what other Kenyan leaders don’t do: you let go of some power to share with others. In part you do this because it’s a form of redistribution, but it’s also a smart way to ensure you do not become the source of envy and bitterness.

Garbage collection happened twice a week. And the truck that came did two trips each time, from Huruma to Dandora, where the municipal dumpsite is located. That’s four trips per week from that one Kibichoi baze. Each trip could carry fifteen tons of garbage, so sixty tons a week. “Monday is worse than Thursdays,” Kennedy once explained, because it was after the weekend and people had consumed more (and discarded more). In each building (plot), there were 57 apartments on average. That’s 855 households, each paying 150 KES (US1.15), a total of 128,250 KES (US99) a month. The costs included “the sacs, paying the guys who collect and wash the sacs, and paying the lorry driver 2,000 KES per month.” For each morning of work, the other waste collectors got about 500 KES each, considered a decent daily income for a “casual worker” in these neighborhoods.

When the truck driver finally arrived around 9 a.m. that June 2016 morning (Kennedy had been calling him since 7 a.m. to make sure he was coming), Kennedy asked him if he had had breakfast. And for the next twenty minutes, Kennedy and the truck driver sat together under the corrugated metal roof of Naomi’s tea stall, next to Geoffrey’s mandazi (fried dough) stand. This moment was anything but “small talk”; it was a careful investment in mutual trust. Kennedy later explained that the driver was a “friend” and there were no issues with him. But the driver was contracted by the city council. And if the city council failed to pay him, he would not come because he wouldn’t have the money to hire the truck in the first place, let alone pay for gas and his time. Both men, Kennedy and the truck driver, depended on the cooperation of the city council, but in the meantime they had developed their own working relationship and deals, and the small acts of reciprocity such as the shared mandazi and chai at Kennedy’s baze were an important social investment—maintaining a direct tie to the person who provided the bridge between the garbage economy operating in underserved neighborhoods and the fragile cooperation of the city council willing to outsource the collection of garbage so it could be taken away. That window of time, taking chai and mandazi before getting on with the task at hand (already delayed), was a vital “waste” of time. Inevitably, it was also performative. The two men were seen by all on the streetscape of Kibichoi baze. It was a subtle but important performance of the peculiar alliances across seemingly antagonistic entities—the youth in the popular neighborhoods; and anyone representing local government who had increasingly ignored these neighborhoods, was simply too underresourced to properly reach lower-income areas of the city, or (related to the previous point) might simply have no incentive to do so given the very minimal tax base of largely “informal” workers (Parnell and Pieterse 2014).

Kennedy’s arrangement with the truck, and the social ritual associated with its arrival (as unpredictable as the timing could be), was the result of years of savvy political maneuvering on the part of Kennedy, who had been able to negotiate numerous forms of provisioning on behalf of his neighborhood over the years. Kennedy had cultivated strong relationships with all the caretakers of the buildings he services and had a direct contact with the city council’s youth officer, Susan Kimani, who in turn felt that she had a direct contact in a neighborhood where many middle-class Kenyans living and working in the other parts of the city never ventured into. As Kennedy put it, “Many organizations have a mission, but it doesn’t match youth’s reality and timescale. The unique thing about Susan’s approach: anakuja mtaani [she comes to the ghetto], and she asks youth to take initiatives.” In Kibichoi, there was also a water tank that had been “gifted” from the local MP of that constituency at the time, Margaret Wanjiru (also a religious leader and “bishop”). “I helped her during her campaign a while back,” admitted Kennedy. He explained that the “Bishi” (as she was affectionately known to supportive youth in her constituency) “did a lot for us youth.” For some local politicians, getting votes is often contingent on demonstrating certain material commitments to the otherwise underserved neighborhoods in their constituency. Here, it is not my place to judge Bishop Wanjiru’s political stratagems to win over her constituency, but it is worth mentioning that Bishi has often recalled her own struggles with poverty and single motherhood as a way to connect with underresourced communities. Her effort to reach out to youth in particular and advance the case for improved access to water and sanitation in Mathare “villages” has been received with much celebration among the majority of youth I have gotten to know. They have never been duped by the “political game,” but they learned how to benefit from it for the common good. Bishi’s “gifts” were always directed to a common resource, inviting youth groups to manage it and enabling not just a revenue-generating resource for youth but also cleverly facilitating a mechanism for stigmatized youth to gain some additional legitimacy and respect within their communities. Kennedy understood this well.

The water tank was placed in a crucial spot at the interstice of residential alleyways and the strip of commercial stalls a block away from the matatu stage. There was a fee to access water from this water point, but it was reasonable compared to most other water points in Mathare. It was also next to public toilets that were cleaned daily by Kennedy’s youth group. They also kept chicken coops near the water point, and after the morning garbage collection the organic waste was brought to the chickens.

In 2017, Kennedy sent me a photo of the Kibichoi base and said, “T, look, the space that is always so muddy where we leave the handcarts, you see, they have come to pave the road there.” When I saw him in person a few months later, I asked Kennedy to explain how he managed to get the road paved. I knew there had to be some kind of deal. He said, “I was an eye for the MP.” This was happening during the early stages of pre-election tensions across Mathare communities. So “keeping youth busy” was a form of violence prevention, or what Jaremey McMullin (2022) would call “hustling as peace-building.” Kennedy became the subcontractor of the roadworks at that time, and he figured that the best way to mitigate any tensions would be to ensure the pavement work benefited the whole surrounding community—including small business operators, the parents of children going to school, and laborers needing to push around heavy handcarts. At the same time, the cement work and every step involved in paving this strip of road needed to involve youth who were constantly in and out of work, including youth who teetered between “making” and “breaking” (Honwana and De Boeck 2005; G. Jones 2012). Kennedy made sure to give different young people work for three days at a time and then give work to another set of youth. This meant training new people each time, which could be regarded as “inefficient” by any business manager unversed in the “mtaa way” and its micro-politics. This was a pragmatic and opportunistic strategy of diversifying distribution (Ferguson 2015) among local youth.

Kennedy’s quiet leadership combined with the strategic moral ambiguity of his occasional dealings with local politicians brought together the logics of social justice and social enterprise, a kind of discrete but radical social enterprise (Pieterse and Thieme 2022). The road had needed paving for years. It reflected the wider set of environmental injustices (Bullard 1994) affecting too many underserved popular neighborhoods. Figuring out a way to get the road paved would be a form of social and environmental justice. Ensuring that the modalities of getting it paved would render visible efforts to localize the labor involved, “putting youth to work” was an act of social enterprise because it involved investing in training and time. And unlike Kazi kwa Vijana, the tokenistic youth employment programs discussed in chapter 3, here youth were working where they lived, seeing the benefits of their labor, and performing their work in front of their elders and fellow residents. They got paid on time, and the work meant something. To echo Simone’s (2004) notion of “people as infrastructure” and Ash Amin’s (2014) “lively infrastructure,” in this Kibichoi baze in 2017 the assemblage of people living and working there formed a particular kind of lively peopled infrastructure of production, reproduction, distribution, care, improvisation, collection, transaction, sociality, rebuilding, and repair. Kennedy was an integral part of that infrastructure and understood that a paved road might mean less dust and less mud, but it would also mean more than that. The collective and plural forms of labor and maneuvers, overt and behind the scenes, that had made this happen ensured that the pavement of a popular pedestrian path would not only link homes, businesses, the primary school, the water point, the public toilets, the transit dumpsite, and the chai and mandazi stalls; it would also make everyday chores and life a little bit easier. Kennedy consciously or unconsciously managed to facilitate a connection between infrastructures of sociality, of care, and of material improvement.

This moment was significant for another reason. Around this time, younger youth were starting to make trouble across Mathare, contesting the established hierarchies of the garbage collection system. The teenage school dropouts who were neither in school nor in employment were seeing older youth “doing well” and felt “we need our share.” Both Kennedy and Kaka, another youth leader in a neighboring ward in Mlango Kubwa, explained that the younger youth wanted to “redraw the map” of garbage collection to “get a piece of the pie.” This reflected a wider dynamic at play across different hustle economies in Nairobi, where there was an implicit understanding among different generations of youth that the older youth needed to provide for younger youth in the absence of other forms of support. That logic of intergenerational distribution and obligation is reflected in a careful negotiation between individual investments and collective returns.2 That is partly why Kennedy has continuously persisted in doing the actual garbage collection rather than simply getting paid to manage a set of plots and outsource the manual labor to younger underlings. He has therefore remained a youth leader precisely because when it comes to the graft, he is always “one of the guys,” who can at the same time use his political connections at the right moment to advocate for the commons. Kennedy was constantly, therefore, operating alone when it came to political maneuvers and deals but working in collectives and ensuring youth in the area were getting paid work. That combination of solitary and collective labor, short-term gains and long-term investment, made him stay in Huruma despite the fact that he very probably could have left a long time ago.

Kennedy’s hustle was about accumulation within, for, and thanks to the mtaa economy. Kennedy was in his late thirties at the time I was writing this book and continued to “get his hands dirty” each week doing those early morning garbage runs, sharing chai and mandazis with his workers but also with the truck driver. From there he would take his time getting cleaned up (I will always remember the scene of his messy bachelor pad but the meticulous care he put in every time he ironed a clean shirt) and usually rushed off to a “meeting” of some kind. As Eliza (introduced in chapter 5) once remarked, “It’s all about connections. Everyone has connections, but people use them in different ways.” Kennedy’s leadership was evident, but he operated with discretion at all levels—from waste work to the political maneuvers, he deployed his connections as a youth group chairman in ways that continuously invested in building relationships of trust from above and below. He knew that Bishi was trying to “buy” votes in the last election, but his calculation factored in the need for a water tank in that part of his community. It wasn’t all altruism. He managed those public toilets and wanted to keep the chicken healthy. Having access to water in that particular corner of the base was good for his business as much as it served his community. When I asked him one day in 2017 why he had invested in a secondhand shoe stall around the corner from the water point (one of his multiple businesses that seemed slightly at odds with the rest), he smiled and said, “I make sure to just have ladies’ shoes in stock, because us men, we just have one pair of shoes each year, you know. The ladies, they like changing on different days.” A business idea that seemed like an odd choice given Kennedy’s focus on waste work actually made complete sense—it was another extension of the circular economy, and he had identified the more lucrative angle.

In one of our conversations in 2017, he spoke about the importance of diversifying one’s businesses “because you can’t predict what’s going to happen. If something happens to one of the buildings [like it gets renovated] there is no revenue on that plot. If chickens don’t lay as many eggs or they are sick, no revenue.” Diversification never stopped for youth who built their mixed livelihoods within the mtaa. In addition to the other businesses (with garbage as the main source of income), Kennedy had also invested since 2014 in a small local bar in Kibichoi, which reflected his respect but also business eye for leisure and the inextricable linkages between kazi (work) and “downtime,” and the ways in which that nexus needed to happen at the baze in order to foster placemaking and to keep an eye on the guys. It is best to know where your workers are drinking if you want them to show up at work the next morning. But his own personal project, one that did not involve the Kibichoi youth group and was not visible to his fellow Kibichoi and wider Huruma residents, was outside the mtaa. He started going up-country now and again to tend to a small plot where he was incrementally building and upgrading a small house. “It’s a good investment,” he said proudly in 2019, without knowing exactly what he would do with it yet. But still, Kennedy stayed in Kibichoi. As he said in April 2023, “You feel very established in your baze. If you have strong networks, you can change things.”

Mtaani Men or Just Old Boyz in the Hood?

A few streets away from Kibichoi, in Mathare Number 10, the youth group discussed in chapters 3 and 4, known as Mathare Number 10 Youth Group (MANYGRO), had also created a mark at the nexus of social and material infrastructure. MANYGRO consisted of fellow veterans of the garbage collection economy, based in one of the poorer areas of Mathare in terms of its hardware infrastructure, household average incomes, and exposure to environmental harms. Unlike Huruma ward, where Kennedy lived and worked, Mathare Number 10 in Mabatini ward was mostly made up of horizontal shacks, with fewer tenement-style walk-ups. During my last few field visits to Mathare Number 10 (in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2023, 2024), the MANYGRO youth I had met and spent time with between 2009 and 2012 had by now become “old boyz.” They no longer operated out of a corrugated iron sheet lean-to as they used to but instead sat under the shade of a tree that had been planted during one of the “World Environment Day” community celebrations. MANYGRO had become well versed in the development lingo, well known to the likes of Pamoja Trust, which had identified a number of well-organized youth groups in the early 2000s, and they had kept engaging with these groups over time.

A virtuous cycle took place: once a youth group was known to one NGO, it tended to become known to others. Lynsey Farrell (2015, 10) has documented this Nairobi phenomenon poignantly through her in-depth ethnographic study of youth in Kibera who hustle in what she calls the “shadow aid economy” that emerged over the course of the twenty-first century as a by-product of Nairobi’s growing NGO business. The “saturated NGO environment” (4) that Farrell describes has been especially acute in Kibera, where the concentration of NGO activity has tended to surpass that of other popular neighborhoods. But what Farrell terms the “NGO hustle” (140) was also integral to how some young people in Mathare coped with and experienced their own sense of liminality. The NGO hustle was, as illustrated in chapters 3 and 4, interconnected with a range of other development-related interventions, including social enterprise initiatives (such as Community Cleaning Services). As such, these particular hustles shaped networks of reciprocity (Kinyanjui 2019) within the mtaa as well as connections beyond it. In turn, this created an apt terrain for potential opportunities that allowed certain savvy social sector hustlers to advance their own individual pathways through or out of the mtaa economy. It was never a guaranteed pathway out, but it was a pathway nonetheless, which informed the “criteria of respectability” (Farrell 2015, xi) of youth who became skilled navigators of multiple social and organizational environments, all the while often operating from or at some point returning to the baze, even if it was only to check in and assert seniority and enduring membership.

For example, MANYGRO members, especially the more socially gregarious and confident ones, had become savvy navigators of the NGO scene, which was one of the reasons why “World [anything environmental] Days” tended to take place in areas like Mathare Number 10, where NGO workers could make an appearance to both celebrate the efforts of community-based organization and render visible (for a day at least) the need for greater support and attention. Over the past decade especially, these “World [water, handwashing, or toilet] Days” connected mambo ya mtaani (neighborhood issues) to global struggles and solidarities in other popular neighborhoods of the Majority World and to globally legible metrics such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Add to this the advent and acceleration of various social media platforms featuring photos “from the hood” with SDG hashtags, eliciting a trail of Instagram and Facebook likes.

The days after these “World Days,” the kawaida (usual) days, perhaps a few relics of the celebrations would remain—artifacts like branded parasols, a few T-shirts, maybe a plaque. The tree was a particularly welcomed commemoration on World Environmental Day that year, and it was planted next to the M-Pesa kiosk that the MANYGRO members managed since 2016. That bit of social infrastructure—the tree and the M-Pesa kiosk situated at the bottom of the path that led to the matatu stage on Juja Road—was the outcome of years of investment in social relationships, in becoming known for regenerative community businesses and services. MANYGRO “old boyz” had earned the privilege of taking a seat under the shade of that tree, while one of the members (Daniel) manned the only M-Pesa kiosk in the area. Because diversification was the rule of the hustle game in the mtaa, the kiosk also had a water tap that had been rerouted and served residents who came throughout the day to refill their Jerry cans for household use, and inside the kiosk, in 2019, the guys managed to get a refrigerator so they could also sell cold sodas. At the MANYGRO baze, you could as a local resident get water, get phone credit, send money to a family member up-country, and buy a cold drink (though this was reserved for special occasions for most). And of course, the water point in any neighborhood where water is accessed in a shared public space always ends up becoming the space for catching up on the gossip of the day, as everyone gathers and waits their turn to fill up their jerry can.

As time went on, with each visit back to Mathare it became clear that the MANYGRO members were all less of a collective now. Each of them had their own side hustles, including sometimes up-country (Mwaura 2017), as discussed in the previous section and chapter. They each spoke about their kids and joked that they were now “well fed” as they patted their kitambe (belly) and had “less time for [football] training.” And yet a subset of MANYGRO, including at least a few of the older boyz, would consistently assemble under the tree on most days, at one point or another. In addition to socializing in close proximity to the M-Pesa kiosk / water point, they also had the view of the public toilet they used to clean daily and worked hard to negotiate control over in 2007. The sign of the social enterprise “Community Cleaning Services” discussed in chapter 4 was still on the door, faint but still there. There was no need really to freshen it up because people just knew it was the MANYGRO toilet. The faded sign was an affirmation of its former marketing efforts when it was a novel business and its present nonchalant endurance. No pretense needed. Younger youth who were recent school leavers were the ones tasked with daily cleans now.

As Eliza remarked in April 2023, some youth groups give work to younger youth on an ad hoc basis, or “casual things.” Other groups (and here she mentioned MANYGRO) “recruit youth to shape the next generation. . . . They won’t let these youth go astray.” As many of my Mathare friends explained throughout the years, youth growing up here were in need of mentors, motivation, something to do, and a sense of belonging. Of course, these things can come in many forms. In many villages of Mathare, some youth were getting pulled into crime and substance addiction. Many were getting killed by police who simply saw youth as “thugs” (Van Stapele 2019) and Mathare as a zone of “outlaw spaces” (Kimari 2020). In Mathare Number 10, however, MANYGRO members had long understood that one of the challenges facing young men in particular was the gendered pressure to “provide” for your family and thus to either feel like a failure if you could not or resort to any means possible in order to do so (see Van Stapele 2021). In Mathare Number 10, through an attentiveness to homegrown youth-owned businesses focused on local services and peer-to-peer apprenticeship, MANYGRO had dealt with the security concerns that got so many youth in trouble and made residents feel unsafe. As one of the members remarked in April 2023, “we have turned this area into a crime-free zone.” In doing so, they had managed over the years to defy the stigma associated with Mathare neighborhoods. Symbolically, the tree, the M-Pesa kiosk, the CCS toilet, and the modest urban farming patch a few meters away all served as vital “eyes on the street,” as Jane Jacobs (1993, 54) described when writing about what held an “animated neighborhood” together and helped “keep the peace.” As Jacobs remarked, there is nothing simple about keeping that peace. In this baze of Mathare 10, it helped that there were nodes of possible apprenticeship and mentorship for any youth who was a school leaver without a job but ready to hustle and learn a skill.

While the older MANYGRO boyz had upgraded and further diversified their portfolio of local businesses, they persisted in speaking about their hustles. In part, they were managing the carefully built but ultimately fragile hierarchies within the baze that had all started with their garbage collection and plastic recycling business in the early 2000s. They were now the sonko (boss) figures of these seemingly horizontal youth-led businesses, and they were aware that younger youth could feel left out. It was up to the old boyz to perform an intergenerational solidarity, which involved giving younger youth access to local opportunities in the way that they knew—all things related to basic services that were not provided by the state and could become forms of local service provision like waste collection, water vending, sanitation services, and so on.

At the same time, MANYGRO old boyz recognized the different aspirations and lived experiences of this younger generation, who “grew up with Google,” as Edwin once remarked with a sigh, explaining that the digitally connected youth who grew up in and of the twenty-first century had a different conception of “hard work” as compared to their older brothers and fathers. Of course every generation tends to make this argument. But perhaps what was particular about this situation was that the generation of youth who grew up in the 1990s had seen Kenya’s transition from a single-party state to a multiparty state. They had witnessed the rise of NGO-isation (Choudry and Kapoor 2013) that accelerated from the early 1990s, before its recent decline, not least with the significant funding cuts of international development budgets following the austerity measures enacted due to the protracted effects of the financial crisis of 2008. They knew life before the digital revolution. They had pioneered youth-led homegrown businesses that were physically based in the mtaa and often deeply and literally entangled with the material (waste), the social (youth groups), and the spatial (the baze) infrastructures of their neighborhoods.

In contrast, the younger generation had literal and virtual windows that opened onto neighborhood, citywide, and global scenes. Their own stories and profiles were entangled with performative, multisituated stages thanks to the smartphones in their pockets. They had not known life without these devices. They embodied that paradox of modernity—where more young people today have access to a mobile phone than access to a safe, clean toilet option (UN-Habitat 2008). While the group of youth I first met in the early days of my fieldwork in 2009 would hang out in between jobs chatting with each other, using their Nokia brick phones only for quick texts and basic mobile money transactions, the younger youth I met in the second decade of the twenty-first century on my return trips to Nairobi usually hung out together while consulting their smartphones, not unlike their age mates in any other city of the world. Though they, too, spoke of their hustle, their ideas of hustling took on their own forms. Some wanted a “piece of the [waste economy] pie,” but many also imagined alternative ways to hustle using digital platforms that reached beyond the baze. As my friend Mambo (himself a father of three boys) explained in April 2023, “Everything is going digital. Some are good innovations . . . but it’s changing youth’s mentality.”

Kaka: The Mlango Kubwa Paradox

One morning in 2016, I got off the matatu at the Mlango Kubwa Bar. I asked a group of young teens stationed along the street-side businesses near there if they’d seen Kaka from the Mathare Environmental Conservation Youth Group (MECYG)—they pointed up ahead and confirmed that he was around, “at the Peque baze.” Mlango Kubwa ward has been known over the years for being one of the hot spots in Mathare for gang violence, homeless street children, and police brutality. But it is also home to a vibrant baze where MECYG has elicited much attention in the past fifteen years. At the baze locally known as Pequeninos, a palimpsest of various initiatives has targeted this area in the name of youth-led development. The youth groups around this area were some of the first to be involved in the taka ni pato (trash is cash) NGO-run schemes that tried to support homegrown youth-led garbage collection businesses. Supporting these household collection businesses back in 2005 included encouraging groups to see the value of sorting different kinds of waste that each had value: metal, paper, organic, and especially plastic materials. In 2007, the Ford Foundation, seeking to sponsor “youth entrepreneurship” in income-poor communities, partnered with the local Slum/Shack Dwellers International organization Pamoja Trust to provide Peque base with a plastic shredder. The intention was for this shredder to help youth groups add value to each kilogram of shredded plastic, that they could then resell to companies starting to recycle plastic in the industrial area.

On most days, the normalized state of breakdown in Mlango Kubwa called for some kind of continuous adjustments. Youth grew up learning how to adapt to what did not work as much as to understand how things worked. “Today there is no water,” Kaka shared as we walked away from the Juja Road sounds. He had that demeanor I recognized, a look of concern coupled with nonchalance, making it seem like he and his peers had things under control. I started noticing the handcarts with jerry cans—always a sign that there was a water shortage and that someone was making a business of selling water when it didn’t come out of the taps. As we passed the butcher at the corner, we veered off the paved road into the unpaved labyrinth leading to the baze where Kaka and his peer group spend hours of their day. A young boy was riding a bicycle three sizes too big for him, and as he couldn’t sit on the seat and reach the peddles, he bopped up and down, his oversized flip-flops stuck to the pedals, his bottom swerving side to side as a young girl laughed on the roadside while she watched and provided loud commentary. Another child rode a scooter on the same path, her friends watching and chatting, and a few minutes later they swapped turns.

Children here always found objects to play with and made games of all sorts. The wheel pushed around by a stick as children ran alongside was a longtime favorite. But to see a bicycle and a scooter used for play was not something I had seen before. Kaka explained that there was a guy here who owned them, who probably found them half broken and left for trash in a wealthier part of the city. “You can fix anything in the ghetto, and then you make money from it.” The local children paid 10 KES (about US0.01) for a ten-minute ride. To put this in perspective, 10 KES would fetch a cup of chai in this neighborhood or a matatu ride up Juja Road. The other kids waited their turn, but if they didn’t have the money they found enjoyment in watching their friend have a go, the same way their older siblings found meaning in standing at the jobless corner while their friend did work. Any activity—running your business, doing domestic chores, playing, or even waiting—usually involved company: someone to watch your back, watch your goods, go fetch some change in case you need it for your customers, and importantly someone to banter with.

That morning in 2016, when I reached the baze, there was a group of young men draped over a few boda boda motorcycles just outside the social hall with the big sign over the door that reads Mathare Environmental Conservation Youth Group. The two youth wearing yellow vests were clearly the drivers, while the others hung out as wingmen. As long as I’ve come to this area, since 2009, the space just outside the social hall has always felt pretty male dominated. In 2009, young men hanging about outside the social hall during the late morning hours were often in between activities—they might have been doing garbage collection for their local area since early morning, and they would later sort through the recovered plastic—and working out how much they had in their inventory and whether it was enough to sell. A few years later, some of the youth group members turned to the boda boda hustle and used the space outside the social hall to park and wait for customers. Kenya had recently removed import duties on motorcycles, so these Indian-made motorcycles hit the Kenyan market in 2016, which created a whole new economy of motorcycle taxis across the city.3 This became an off-shoot of the Uberized transport economy. You would not see many Ubers riding or stopping in these parts of the city, but the boda boda service was available to middle- and working-class Kenyans alike—so the motorcycles were seen navigating all over.

A few years later, one morning in April 2023, there was an elderly woman with a heavy bag of vegetables who was about to hitch a ride from one of the boda boda riders outside that baze in Mlango Kubwa and who had by now become a well-established presence in this corner of the mtaa. Though she was still strong, her body was worn down, her upper back was kyphotic, and her mobility was limited. Like so many other female elders working in the mtaa, the years of daily embodied labor involved being bent over to clean, to cook, and to arrange fruits and vegetables on the tarps from which produce was sold on the roadside. She was too tired to smile but her sense of humor was intact, and the young men’s demeanor of tough masculinity suddenly softened as they became deferent to their elder. They called her cũcũ (pronounced shosho, Kikuyu for “grandmother”), and the driver waited patiently for her to find the little peddle behind his standing leg so she could step on it with one foot, left arm holding on to his shoulder. She slowly got her other leg over the seat and adjusted her kanga skirt, and the other young man handed her the large burlap bag of vegetables. Older men might hold most of the power in Kenyan politics, but on the streets, older women commanded everyone’s respect—everything and everyone slows down for the grannies of the hood. With too little written down about the history of these neighborhoods that formed on the edges of the city and defied colonial and postcolonial urban planning, the macũcũ (pronounced mashosho, meaning “grandmothers”) are repositories of local oral knowledge.

Kaka and I walked into the youth group’s social hall, where I had not been since my last visit. Inside the structure, there was a palimpsest of rough graffiti art on all the walls; one tag always jumped out at me in particular: “crazy world B carefull. None but prayers. One Love.” This tag was a reminder of all the young lives lost through police or gang-related violence. To get to your thirtieth birthday in the mtaa was considered a feat. In contrast to the gritty graffiti, there was a wall that displayed a laminated board with a series of NGO, development agency, and multinational company logos: UN-Habitat, Samsung, USAID, and Comic Relief, among others. This made it seem as though these organizations had sponsored the social hall in some way. But spending time with Kaka and his peers at different intervals over the past ten years, and witnessing their Facebook feeds when I was away, has made me realize that the performativity of these displayed logos was not always reflected in the actual support the youth group (and others like them) received in practice. MECYG was one of the lucky organized youth groups that had been identified as “entrepreneurial,” with “natural leaders,” and it became for many organizations a channel through which particular interventions might operate.

Youth groups across popular neighborhoods had become well versed in the art of participatory workshops since the early 2000s. Indeed, the expansion of the MECYG social hall that took place between 2009 and 2013 provided an opportune space (bigger than any other public space aside from St. Theresa’s Church up Juja Road) for external organizations wishing to engage community groups for various events. But these events and workshops have historically tended to be one-offs, featuring a familiar pattern: an opening prayer and cordial welcome of guests, facilitation of break-out discussions, sodas and local female-owned catering businesses providing (and getting paid for making) lunch. Promises of follow-up were always made, a tour of the neighborhood was given following the workshop, photo ops were available outside the social hall (to later be posted on various Facebook pages), and then the “sponsor” would leave.

The cluster of organizations exhibited on that board was in effect more of an archive of external organizations that had come and gone. But these names gave a certain credibility to the group, whose members, as individuals and as a collective, had perfected their narrative—able to perform resilience or dejection depending on what response they wanted to elicit. In many ways, the occasional presence of external support or visits was just one of the various income-generating activities of these youth whose hustle economy comprised a portfolio of income-generating activities that each had their own specific function and form of redistributing gains and assigning leadership. Once a free lunch was organized, a participatory workshop held, a slum tour given, a photo op taken, and a report written a few months later, the logos on that wall were the lasting relics of these ephemeral encounters. The social hall would once more become underresourced and the youth for whom this baze was more of a home than where they slept had to find ways to be self-sufficient once more.

There was always something youth groups could do best without external support—manage residential garbage collection. This had always been a reliable stepping stone to other forms of provision and the foundation for diversified livelihoods. But Kaka and his peers had wanted to do more with the Peque social hall and its surrounds. To a degree, they did build a remarkable “social infrastructure” (Klinenberg 2018), a shared physical space that facilitated meaningful social encounters and sustained social relations, while enhancing the “respectability” of MECYG vis-à-vis neighboring residents and any visitors. Some of the MECYG members had become savvy social sector hustlers indeed.

The nearby businesses benefited from, and provided for, the local youth group. From the early days of my fieldwork (2009), when the social hall was but a small iron-sheet shack, to its later expanded form as a one-hundred-meter-square concrete structure, a small stall serving tea and food with three tables inside stood meters away. I remember when Mama Caro’s stall was roughly the same size as the youth group’s social hall. Later it would seem tiny in comparison. Most MECYG youth group members who had engaged in residential garbage collection for the past twenty years made a ritualized pit stop at Mama Caro’s for chai and a chapo at the end of the garbage collection rounds.4 They were her best customers but she also had the license to boss them around—she wasn’t quite a cũcũ (pronounced shosho), but she could be their mother and as such she showed unconditional affection for these boys but was also exasperated by them sometimes. For the same reasons she would worry about the boys’ welfare and ability to stay out of trouble and harm’s way, she also knew that her stall would never be burgled. These boys were her vigilantes.

Challenges for MECYG included lack of reliable power and lack of space to store the plastic before it was worth renting a truck to transport it to the industrial area, let alone intergroup disputes and managing the micro-politics of garbage collection among different youth groups meant to “share” the common resource of the shredder. But despite these obvious problems, some of the youth group members became savvy brokers with the NGO sponsors and even local government officials that started streaming into this hub for youth-led development innovation. Bishi (the local MP mentioned earlier) had also courted youth in this area during her political campaign, and in exchange for youth mobilization on her behalf, she contributed funds to the upgrading of the social hall that both stocked the plastic and was to become a community center for all to use.

In 2010, UN-Habitat urban planners and architects “without borders” decided to help design and build the social hall. Moved by the story that youth had excavated a small space formerly used as a community transit dumpsite near the youth group’s baze in order to make a modest football pitch for local kids, UN-Habitat followed up with the sponsorship of a state-of-the-art football pitch in a part of the city where any space of recreation is absent or often takes place on top of or next to a landfill. UN-Habitat, in the years that followed, acquired a license, it seemed, to invite “guests” to parachute in whenever they please to “see for themselves” what a little investment in a poor neighborhood could bring. With each visit, members of the local youth group, MECYG, whom had become savvy ambassadors of their baze, showed the “slum tourists” around, let them take a few selfies, thanked them for all they had done, and continued to perform a combination of struggle and resilience. UN-Habitat has written a series of reports since then, a kind of self-congratulatory (partly deserved, partly inflated) ode to the power of investing in local placemaking, local leaders, and the power of sport to bring communities together. All parties were implicated in the humanitarian hustle.

In several villages of Mathare, there have been “upgrading” schemes facilitated by solidarity networks (or “community federations”) that have involved incremental community efforts to improve local housing infrastructures and shared amenities (Weru 2004). These have entailed a practice of accommodation and deliberation, what Arjun Appadurai (2019, 36) calls a “politics of patience” and a form of mobilization “from below.” But among youth who hustle, and especially those who “know how to use their connections,” the mobilization hasn’t just happened from below (as it tends to among elders, still deferent to particular hierarchies and slow temporalities). The mobilization has happened from all sides, a kind of transversal provisioning. There are moral codes, and a language of morality is frequently evoked in everyday discourse, from the common expression “cleanliness is next to godliness” to the shunning of idleness. But to a degree, the moral economy of hustling is malleable and it gets stretched depending on the situation. You don’t want to deal with the wakubwa (big men), but if you have an entry point to any elite’s ear or sympathy, you hustle them too: the sympathetic MP, the UN-Habitat folks working on youth programs, the landlord of that building where you might get a cleaning contract, the nice lady at the City Council who actually cares about youth. In a way, it is the combination of mobilizations from below and from all sides that together forms what Ash Amin (2014, 157) calls “lively infrastructures,” which in Mathare are the diverse formations and interventions undertaken by “micro-collectives” who find nodes of possibility for the making of claims. The mtaa needs both a politics of patience and a politics of impatience, the politics of accommodation and the politics of opposition.

Paradoxically, hustling is counterhegemonic, but at times it is deliberately not antiestablishment activism. It is pragmatic and opportunistic, and it is perhaps at the nexus of social justice and social enterprise—where “radical social enterprise” (Pieterse and Thieme 2022, 192) takes form—that the moral compass may stretch in different directions to get things done. For certain individuals within youth groups, hustling involves navigating eclectic constellations of potential “sponsors” (NGOs, social enterprises, and local politicians) to potentially access some support (whatever that may be) that would benefit the local commons. The hustle is thus a kind of performance that might enact yet also undo appearances of urban marginality: hustlers strain to raise funds to build a state-of-the-art football pitch in the middle of their neighborhood where recreational space is a rarity, as is a community social hall. They find ways to connect their eco-hustles with other aspirations and logics that are rooted in commitments to placemaking, where collecting garbage is a lever to justifying and making space (literally and figuratively) for youth to congregate and play.

Kaka once explained to me the additional reason for supporting younger youth with job creation and the importance of knowing how to deal with NGOs and “sponsors.” It was connected to knowing how to maintain “tight security” in an area that had and continued to fall into violent sparks. He said, “In Mlango, eighty vijana [youth] are involved in security and let police know. Most of them are reformed thugs. We call them retired. Then twenty to thirty do garbage collection in Peque. The chief, DO [district officer], landlords, and tenants have agreed to pay for security. They all pay 50 KES for security and 150 KES for garbage.”

Over time, Kaka’s remit as a local leader, hustling and dealing, took him to international UN-Habitat youth conferences; he became featured in numerous short documentaries and was frequently courted by international NGOs and development agencies to participate in various projects, workshops, and deliberations on topics such as gender-based violence, insecurity, and youth social enterprise. And yet, despite these notable interventions in Mlango that had supported the plastic recycling business in 2007 and the building of a community center in 2012 and a football pitch in 2015, another youth leader, who grew up alongside Kaka but who has not stayed in that neighborhood, says it isn’t enough.

Kahos

Edward (known among his friends as Kahos) was born and raised in Mlango by a single mother with five other siblings. He said of his childhood, “we were the poorest of the poor.” But the fact that he both enjoyed school and was fortunate to find St. Theresa’s church, where he could hide after school and take time to study, meant that Kahos got top grades in school. “It was my own victory, because Mama couldn’t worry about my studies.” Later a pastor at the local church was “sympathetic” and paid for Edward’s school fees. He eventually made his way to the university. He remarked that alongside his commitment to school, there was the pressure to “do the macho thing” and have unprotected sex with his girlfriend. So in 2004, Kahos became a father. He was nineteen years old. His mother told him that he was about to fall into the same cycle of early pregnancy and poverty. And for the first time she intervened and pushed him to continue his studies, helping Kahos by taking care of his son in the meantime. Kahos then took out student loans and studied law, feeling out of place, “me with my Sheng and looking streetwise.” But he persisted and did well, interning with different labor rights advocacy centers, engaged in contractual work with the Kenya HR commission, and finally got a scholarship for an LLM in law at the University of Pretoria, where he received a distinction.

Despite these successes that “got him out” of the mtaa, Kahos always returned to the baze. He once explained, “There is no place that makes me feel at home like being at the baze after a long day, seated with my childhood friends.” Kahos did admit that the friendship group had gone through challenging dynamics over the years. He explained, “We were the pioneers of garbage collection. But even in the group there are grudges, and disputes, and there are unstated tensions when they see you doing well.” In our conversations, Kahos humbly rejected the notion that his education made him important somehow: “Our system in Kenya has placed so much emphasis on formal education. It is an unjust scenario because there is little emphasis on other talents and skills.” He alluded to his friends, all mostly school dropouts and formally unemployed but whose “talents” he saw as totally underutilized. At the same time, he was not easy on them. He claimed he had represented some of them in court (for their “thug” thing). He deplored the motivation of too many youth to have

nice jeans, nice shoes, go to Reggae on Sunday. And the problem is if there is not work or no projects to keep you motivated, you come to terrorize at night. And the problem with thieves is that they kill patience. Easy money. So many underestimated how hard it was to keep garbage collection going. You know, customer relations and all that.

While he celebrated the resources that his baze had gotten over the years, during a conversation in 2019, he talked about the intergenerational rift that was happening. There were all sorts of business opportunities, from recycling to the little kiosk built into the social hall, but “if there is no regular income, you can’t dictate the levels of commitment.” Kahos explained how the “younger thugs” had started to assert their claim in the later 2010s, as if to say, “we belong here too.” As someone who had a foot inside and outside the mtaa, Kahos admitted that the older boys had been holding on to resources perhaps, and “redrawing the map” could be more equitable. Ultimately, he lamented the fact that “there is a football pitch but we don’t have a library.” The library was, for him, a symbolic but powerful resource that would allow younger youth to stop relying on “sponsors.” Older youth like Kaka had learned how to hustle those sponsors, but the young youth ultimately had become too complacent. As another younger leader remarked, “what good is this public space if there is nothing to do?”

Kahos and I have deliberated over the years on the tensions between different youth from Mlango Kubwa and considered the different life trajectories that ultimately shaped his peers’ relationship to their neighborhood and the claims and the mark they could make.5 As Kahos explained one afternoon, Peque had identified the value of recovering, reselling, and recycling different materials of the collected waste, plastic being the most lucrative to sell to recycling companies in the industrial area. They were one of the first groups in popular neighborhoods to sell shredded plastic. The other core income-generation activity for the group was a “pay-to-watch” service, held in the MECYG social hall, where residents of Mlango Kubwa could assemble together and pay to watch live European football league matches. After more than two decades of serving community residents in various ways (from garbage collection to community outreach programs for street families, and keeping an “eye” on the street), Pequeninos has continued to operate as a local football club in a football league organized by the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA). The group’s model of generating income by serving community residents and combined sporting activities was replicated by other youth groups in the larger Mathare area. These youth organizations and their activities collectively contributed to keeping Mathare relatively clean and safe by dissuading hundreds of youth from resorting to opportunistic crime for survival.

Today, the dynamics of this “self-help” city within the neoliberal city of Nairobi are changing. In Mlango Kubwa and in the wider Mathare, a significant number of youth (now middle-aged adults) who founded organizations such as Pequeninos are still holding on to their initial and now well-established neighborhood businesses, though their work would be classified as “non-standard” employment (ILO 2018). Their livelihoods and investments (and for some their reputation) depend on these homegrown hustles. Over the years, however, tensions have emerged between these (now older) pioneers of homegrown services and the younger generation who are keen to tap into established youth-led businesses. The stayers like Kennedy, the MANYGRO old boyz, and Kaka have been grappling in their different styles with an intergenerational tension and reckoning, as a new cohort of young adults demand a share of the income-earning opportunities, if not a total takeover. They are challenging the original mapping of the community that allocated sections of the neighborhood to the founders, trying to make a claim to the territorial zoning of the eco-hustle. In the past five years, the tension between the stayers and these younger youth has been palpable and described by Kahos and other interlocutors as often on the verge of violence.

The leavers, on the other hand, who grew up with the stayers and were part of the founding youth organizations, have left the mtaa mainly thanks to opportunities like higher education, professional sports, and formal employment in Kenya or even beyond.6 Yet many maintain a deep connection to the mtaa and keep returning, pulled back by strong family and friendship ties, the obligation to provide, and the attachment to the baze, despite all its vulnerabilities. Some have developed a personal brand that leverages both their local street credibility in the mtaa and external connections, which helped them campaign and even win political seats within Mathare in the 2022 general elections in Kenya. Both stayers and leavers who cofounded local CBOs have at different points consulted with international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and UN agencies “on behalf of urban poor youth.”

For members of Pequeninos, Mlango Kubwa has thus become an economic and social melting pot for the stayers and leavers who are deeply connected to their hood. For both groups, Mlango Kubwa is a repository of social capital, belonging, and allegiances, but it is also an increasingly contested terrain contending with diverse youth imaginaries. This raises questions about the future of peaceful coexistence between peer groups who make claims to youth-led economies. In a way, this highlights a wider phenomenon within the self-help city, where different peer groups are constantly under pressure to find renewed forms of distribution, including intergenerational solidarity. This becomes part of a necessary calculation: to protect but also extend livelihood opportunities to new entrants into the local hustle economy, while continuing to provide vital basic services to residents who have come to depend on them. It is likely that the stayers holding on to the established community-based hustles will, sooner or later, be pressured to relinquish their hold of (or at least share) the garbage collection territories to the new generation of youth, who will inevitably outnumber the older youth.

Jackson

From the perspective of youth who strongly identified with their local youth group and could often be found at the baze to find hustles or spend time hanging out in between jobs, being part of a collective offered the benefit of risk reduction by diversifying “ownership” and reducing the traceability of any individual gain from the entity. The difficulty of group membership, however, transpired for youth seeking to set themselves apart from group activities to pursue their individual ambitions while retaining a sense of “belonging” to the mtaa, their baze, and their cohort.

Jackson from Mlango Kubwa one day explained to me that he had “gotten lucky” a few years prior—given a second chance to finish school and leave behind what he referred to as a “life of group crime.” Emphasizing the importance of mentors and role models for at-risk youth, he said, “If you have someone who shows that they believe in you, then it makes a big difference,” inferring that this was not a luxury he had grown up with but one he would later encounter. Jackson eventually finished secondary school and pursued further qualifications, which led to formal employment in the city center. Faced with the chance to “get out of the hood” in every sense, Jackson instead made specific choices about which parts of the mtaa he would leave behind and which he would remain connected to. When I first met him, he had recently upgraded his living conditions to a “self-contained” apartment building (including sanitation facilities, running water, and electricity) outside Mathare, in the nearby lower-middle-class suburb of Pangani. He had a salaried “office job” in the city center (though I was never really sure what that entailed), and this is where we met on a few occasions to have a chat. Though we would meet over a chai in an extremely noisy café in the CBD, this afforded a space slightly removed from the mtaa to reflect on his trajectory and how he balanced having one foot in the mtaa and one foot outside it. I found it telling that despite the apartment in Pangani and the office job in the CBD, during my weekly visits to see the guys in Mlango Kubwa in my first year of fieldwork, he could often be found, especially during the weekday afternoons, back at the baze. He even admitted that he would change from his city work clothes to his “mtaa clothes” to hang out with his Mlango Kubwa peers at the baze.

Even though Jackson was no longer staying in the neighborhood in 2010, he was still an active member of MECYG, involved in the management of garbage collection and plastic recycling businesses, and often the first one to speak during group meetings of any kind. He was a savvy chameleon, and he seemed at ease in any group situation. During meetings he spoke passionately about the group’s activities and their shared goals, affirmation of their commitment to working on their own, a kind of shared self-employment model (to borrow from Kinder’s [2016] notion of “shared self-provision”). At the same time, during one-on-one conversations that took place outside the mtaa, out of earshot of the group, Jackson would open up about his personal life goals and aspirations. In Mlango Kubwa, he self-identified as a fellow hustla, one of the guys, and part of the city’s fringe underworld. Outside the mtaa, he was a salaried professional proud to say he was providing a secure livelihood for his wife and son in the “main” city. I remember the look on his face when he followed that statement by specifying that he could pay for his baby’s “pampers,” reminding me that this was uncommon in the mtaa. At the same time, he insisted on maintaining his hustla persona vis-à-vis his peers when he was back at the baze, which required concealing or at least being discrete about the extent to which he was “doing well.” And what I later would learn (as I had with Eliza’s trajectory, discussed in chapter 5) was that the seemingly secure jobs could fall through at any point—making the hustle economy and the mtaa way the actual secure backup plan. It wasn’t necessarily what would ever make you rich, but it was what you could always fall back on, so investing in local relational ties, the youth group in Jackson’s case, required constant maintenance through hours of kuzurura, just hanging out with no major purpose other than passing the time with your peers. These hours of kuzurura were what ultimately gave him the ability to share some of the fruits of his individual successes (including his accounting skills, which would help the garbage collection business), and in turn this secured his own safety net in case the day job fell through. Time at the baze was what solidified relational obligations of redistributive solidarity.

In 2019, on a day that I was visiting the Peque baze to meet with Kaka and anyone else who was around, Jackson appeared by chance. I hadn’t seen him in years, and as I realized shortly after his arrival, neither had some of his childhood friends. Jackson was now living in shags (the countryside), and he proceeded to explain to his peers how glad he was to have left the city. It sounded like he was now living on a farm with his family—in a way, reversing the usual rural to urban migration route. It was not clear whether he returned to Nairobi every so often to just check in with childhood friends or whether he still had a foothold in city hustles, including shares in Mlango Kubwa’s main youth-led eco-hustle, the garbage economy. These are questions I wish I had had a chance to ask him, but it wasn’t possible on that day, not in a group setting. What I did realize for the first time in that moment, as I and all his peers were listening to Jackson’s monologue, was what a performer he was. I suppose he had been a performer the whole time. He was an NGO hustler and perhaps a savvy “research” hustler too. He had no difficulty answering difficult questions and seemed to enjoy my invitations to self-reflect on his own experience and analyze his circumstance and those of his peer group.

Ultimately, two childhood friends from Mlango Kubwa and the same baze, Kahos and Jackson, showed distinct styles of “leaving” and “returning.” Jackson comes back to talk about his life outside the mtaa, perhaps to justify to himself and his peers why he chose to leave. Kahos comes back to check in with his childhood friends and ask about life in the mtaa, perhaps to remind himself about where he grew up and to remember who his closest friends are, even if he went to law school and is now finishing a PhD in a European university.