Rhythms of the unemployed: making art and making do through spoken word in Kisumu, Kenya

Frederik Unseld

doi:10.1017/s0001972020000856

Abstract

AbstractYoung people from the low-income settlements in Kenya's third-largest city, Kisumu, struggling with unemployment refer to their efforts to generate a livelihood as ‘hustling’. At the same time, many of them put art (dance, music, poetry) at the centre of their lives. This article attempts to account for the significant popularity of the arts among Kisumu's youth. It understands the ‘way of the artist’ as an alternative interpretation of work and a framework in which people situate their experiences of unemployment, waiting and insecure work. To examine this framework in action, the article follows Janabii, a poet who has been at the centre of attempts to establish a spoken word scene in Kisumu. Janabii has spent several years in limbo, oscillating between glittering performances and a more discreet daily life, marked by functional homelessness and a refusal to surrender to the violence of Kenya's informal world of work. The article contributes to recent studies about hustling by combining an ethnography of a week in Janabii's life with a literary analysis of excerpts from one of his poems, in order to elucidate how his struggles to get by are narrated and stylized through a spoken word, artistic imaginary that interrelates with his everyday life.

Highlights

Despite the casual bonding and ostentatious inactivity, the spectre of the mainstream economy was still present in their reference to themselves as ‘machimney’, an allusion to their almost industrial smoking habit
When we reached the rehearsal space, a youth centre run by an American nongovernmental organization (NGO), we found a very different space to the shared
The closed bar opened up a comfortable space for freedom of expression which all three were quick to exploit, ridiculing the pompous ceremony and military parade and hooting at the euphemisms in the overblown presidential address that described Kenya’s economy as ‘resilient’

Summary

Monday morning blues and the absence of obligation

When I met Janabii on a bright Monday morning in Migosi, a low-income neighbourhood in the north of Kisumu, he was just moving out of a tiny, corrugated iron shop-cum-bedsitter that he had shared with two flatmates. While it had been comparatively easy to record Janabii’s life story and artistic endeavours, and those of other Kisumu artists, it had taken time for me to be invited to the other, more mundane side of their everyday lives in the structurally disadvantaged neighbourhoods that they referred to as ‘the ghetto’. Janabii is a son of working-class parents and grew up in various low-income settlements in Nairobi, Mombasa and Nyakach (Kisumu County). He never received his secondary school certificate because of outstanding school fees and describes his chances of getting regular employment as low. Despite the casual bonding and ostentatious inactivity, the spectre of the mainstream economy was still present in their reference to themselves as ‘machimney’ (chimneys), an allusion to their almost industrial smoking habit

Poetic reflections of the hustle

Hustling as an open secret

Conclusion