‘Our time to recover’: young men, political mobilization, and personalized political ties during the 2017 primary elections in Nairobi

Abstract

In this article we show how youth groups in Nairobi's poor settlements engage politics and how they try to carve out a political space for themselves and provide a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalisation and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Rather, based on longterm ethnographic engagements we argue for a more complex dynamics between local youths and politicians. We employ the emic term kupona (Kiswahili word meaning recovery or healing) to explain the youth's political engagements along lines of participation, recognition, and re-distribution, which all in different ways concern the task of social recovery. Empirically, the article draw on events and examples from the primary elections in 2017, which provide a privileged frame for investigating local politics and responses to the recently initiated devolved government structure i .

Providing to belong: masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi ‘ghettos’

“…Large groups of poor young men today also struggle to live up to the ideal of the provider. Following drastic economic restructuring after independence, such as the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) (Gibbon 1996; Babb 2005; Gertz 2007), the place of poor young men in patronage configurations that make up the economic and political power relationships in post-independence Kenya has become even more confined (Berman 1998: 310–11; Ocobock 2017; Rasmussen and van Stapele 2020). SAPs led to widespread land dispossession among farming communities, which accelerated migration to urban centres where wage employment was virtually unavailable, and most people relied on highly insecure small-scale enterprises.…”

“…Most young men in my research conflate family, neighbourhood and community and imagine these as decidedly female spaces to which they can forge belonging only through male providership. They position themselves as youth in society (Rasmussen and van Stapele 2020) but as men in ‘their’ community.…”