Abstract
Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiations of dominant gender norms to elucidate how these inform their social navigation towards male respectability, now and in the future. Adding the dimension of positionality here is useful to bring out how individual negotiations of gender norms in space and over time allows a nuanced view on situated entanglements of aspirations, pathways and dominant discourses and how these convolute and intensify in particular decision-making processes. The analyses are based on longitudinal ethnographic research with youth gangs in Nairobi for four months annually on average since 2005.
Highlights
Resumé Etudier les aspirations des jeunes hommes à Mathare, Nairobi, met en évidence leur devenir sociale au sein d’un contexte dans lequel ils risquent incessamment la mort, socialement et physiquement
Most of the youth were seated with stretched backs to catch the strip of shade from the iron sheet roof of the mud-walled bar, hand stretched above their heads to hold on to the wooden beam to stay balanced
Starting from the narratives of interlocutors such as Fake reveals aspiration as a relational concept in myriad ways. Highlighted by his words and life story are the way aspirations depend on dominant norms and how these are negotiated by people and on the interaction of particular aspirations with other temporal and spatial aspirations and, perhaps even more so, with the multiple pathways that are mapped and enacted in their quests to actualise these context-bound aspirations
Summary
“To have a future is a decision, it is all about focus.” Kingi, a middle-aged but young-looking man from the marginalised neighbourhood Mathare, Nairobi, and an ex-gang leader, looked piercingly at the youth present around him. Fake’s description of his peers as ‘don’t care’ was a common phrase in Mathare which alluded to a dominant modality with which (mostly) young men attempted to present an impervious demeanour (Majors and Billson 1993) Fake himself mastered this ‘cool pose’ exceptionally well but he no longer wanted to ascribe to the risk behaviours that were often associated with this attitude, such as mugging people and using various types of drugs. Against the backdrop of quick and slow death, everyday violence and hardly any ways to earn money outside dangerous forms illegality and criminality, Fake’s decision that he wanted to change his life around to have a future was a big step for him, as he put it, and he needed my help He explained that he could not talk to Kingi or his male friends. Fake imagined denoted unfathomable risks while potentially negating other more immediate aspirations such as being respected by his peers or his mother
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