In February 2022, Roy and I were drinking beer together at the County Motel. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had finally returned to Kenya and, as usual, I found myself watching football with my friends from the Ituura neighbourhood and the Star Boyz football team. On that day, Roy started to talk to me about his love life, and recent break-up with his girlfriend.

The tensions had begun over her desire to go on what he described as ‘dates’ – trips to the nearby Two Rivers shopping mall, for instance. Recently constructed, the mall represented the pinnacle of weekend-based conspicuous consumption, its food plaza often full of young families and couples. Roy, however, had been in a habit of going out for lunch with his girlfriend in nearby Ruaka Town’s downmarket eateries. For his girlfriend, this was not a sufficiently prestigious activity. As a result, they had argued, most of this argument taking place in short, sharp messages traded over WhatsApp. Speaking of his newly built house, for which he had scrounged and saved over the course of a year, he explained how,

Although he laughed, he had serious points about the dangers of consumption and the burden of expectation he felt as a man in a world where women also worked for money. ‘For me it’s like a wastage of money. Second, she’s working, yet she’s only working for herself’, he continued.

Roy was not so much upset as he was perplexed by her prioritisation of short-term consumption over a shared long-term future.

For Roy, the situation evoked a more general predicament with which his peers also struggled – women’s supposed desires for consumption at the expense of genuine romance, resulting in the latter pursuing older men. ‘They’re just focused on money’, he explained. ‘It just happens that the older guys have money, so you just roll with it.’ Roy had adjusted his expectations, and for now he was content to let the relationship remain on what he called ‘silent mode’. But the stereotype remained his key point for me to take away. ‘They love free things – they like expensive things.’

Women’s Ambitions, Men’s Anxieties

Roy’s break-up story speaks to the character of gender relations in urban Kenya today, especially the feelings of economic inadequacy on the part of young men, spurred by the fear that older, more successful men are limiting their romantic options through their capacity to purchase intimacy. In turn, blame shifts towards women themselves, that they are self-interested, greedy, thinking only of their own futures. The economic frustration felt by young men has translated into gendered resentment, the sorts highlighted in a popular RnB song during my fieldwork, Ala-C’s ‘Walking Class’. In the song and music video, Ala-C laments that his beloved – a fellow university student – cannot seem to see past his economic status, brushing him off as a member of the ‘walking class’, unable to afford a car.

While Ala-C’s beloved initially makes off with a wealthy member of the ‘working class’ (portrayed as working at a bank), she is eventually ditched by this man for another young woman. The video concludes with Ala-C, now having found some success and driving a car of his own, stopping to pick up his now significantly distressed prospective girlfriend, only to abandon her himself, wearing a knowing smile as he departs into the sunset.

In Ala-C’s music video, the misfortune women experience in relationships with older men – and the very real possibilities for exploitation that these relationships harbour – quickly becomes a morality tale about their misplaced desire for money. The problem is that women want too much and, what’s more, they want it now. Roy contemplated his fate, waiting until he was an economically established older man to marry himself.

Such gender anxieties, circulating widely in Kiambu and Kenya more generally, recall recent attempts by social theorists to undermine the distinction between intimacy and material interests made in Euro-American folk thought and social analysis. Viviana Zelizer (Reference Zelizer2005) famously argued against the ‘hostile world’ view that recurs throughout Euro-American commentary on social change – the idea that economic notions of gain have the potential to contaminate intimacy, understood as a realm of pure sentiment. Anthropologists have had a particular relationship with this issue, having long drawn attention to the anxieties associated with money’s entry into the intimate sphere of the family, the ‘removal of the personal’ (Simmel Reference Simmel1978; Ragoné Reference Ragoné1996: 356; cf. Parry and Bloch Reference Parry, Bloch, Parry and Bloch1989).

Following this broad line of argument, anthropologists of Africa have shown how gifting from wealthier men towards younger women, not to mention the very power that the capacity to give entails, has become a central aspect of sexual relationships in a range of African contexts. The transformation of gendered inequalities into more stable patterns of ostensibly transactional relationships has been observed across urban Africa (see, e.g., Hunter Reference Hunter2002; cf. Stoebenau et al. Reference Stoebenau, Heise, Wamoyi and Bobrova2016). This is not to say, however, that forms of what commentators call ‘transactional sex’ are in any way normalised. As Lynn Thomas and Jennifer Cole (Reference Thomas, Cole, Thomas and Cole2009: 21) point out in their survey of intimacy across Africa, ‘increasing inequality and heightened monetisation of social relations in much of Africa has strained the co-constitution of affect and exchange, introducing the more familiar opposition of love versus money and many of its attendant problems’. As we have already seen, in contemporary Kenya, men are wrestling with their own anxieties about achieving intimacy in a world where its commodification is palpably felt, especially by younger men (Masquelier Reference Masquelier2005; cf. Archambault Reference Archambault2017: chs 4 and 5).

As this chapter goes on to show, in contemporary central Kenya, men of all ages are keen to remark upon what they see as the greedy nature of young, single women: their desires for lifestyles of consumption that drive them to seek partnerships with older men. A morality tale with a genuine situation of gendered and generational inequality at its core, narratives about greedy women are shown to be shaped by the personal experiences of young men pursuing not only romantic relationships but also their long-term futures, futures that require them to marry and have children. Anxieties men possess about their futures and concerns about greedy women are closely related. Ascribing a self-interest to women that is seen to undo the proper way of things, the beacons of propriety that patrilineal households constitute, men use these narratives to tell a wider story of corrosive short-termism similar to what we have encountered previously. In this sense, this chapter recalls the findings of Mario Schmidt (Reference Schmidt2024) who has written of the increasing mistrust between men and women in Nairobi’s Pipeline settlement. Masculine provider identities were placed under such a high degree of economic pressure during the Covid-19 pandemic that women decided to leave relationships and become their own providers or pursue more financially capable men (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2024: 84).

This chapter sheds light on masculine narratives about women’s short-termism as descriptions of social change, the curtailment of long-term patrilineal futures, damaged patriarchy, and, in its place, a new destructive desire for consumption embodied by women who have lost faith in marriage itself, preferring to remain single. At the same time, it aims to understand the aspirations of women within a changing Kiambu and its landscape of masculine destitution. Ethnic stereotypes about ‘Kikuyu women’ from central Kenya have their roots in a history of economic change that turned women into sustainers of their households. Connecting this history of women’s ‘independence’ to contemporary anxieties about the end of marriage, it shows how some women in Kiambu are embracing the possibilities of attracting ‘sponsors’ outside of their marriages, even to the extent that it reproduces a degree of economic vulnerability in which they become dependent on the money of those sponsors. These relationships are conscious attempts to escape the precarity they face in everyday life in settings like Ituura and access a higher standard of living. Their wider consequences are no less significant. The conclusion of this chapter illuminates the capacity of older men’s partnerships with younger women to transform social relations at the site of the patrilineal homestead. While such arrangements are hardly uncommon, the complexities they create in terms of inheritance creates crises for younger kin, who palpably experience their parents’ shift of priorities.

‘Man, who is there to marry from around here? I mean, really?’

As we saw with Ala-C’s popular song, women’s desires for men’s money have become a topic of debate in Kenya’s wider public sphere, especially amongst young men. Women’s apparent desires for lives of conspicuous consumption, over and above meaningful romantic relationships, are the subject of scorn and, occasionally, mockery. That day at the Motel in 2022, Roy told me about how his twenty-one-year-old sister-in-law Ann had been courted by a young man her age who she had genuinely liked. ‘But the guy din’t have cash. She was saying “the pocket is not good”’, Roy told me, relaying to me that she had ultimately ended the relationship – in spite of her feelings – because of the man’s lack of money. At the time, Ann had found a job at a butchery paying 1,000 KSh per day, what Roy called ‘good money’, ‘money you can grow with’. ‘But’, he continued, ‘even then she’s still focused on the money. It’s taken her mind!’, he laughed.

However, a twist in events became a cause for masculine schadenfreude. ‘Unfortunately, the guy got rich’, Roy told me, struggling to hold back his laughter. ‘He came around in a car, and she was like, “Ach! Why didn’t you tell me he was going to become rich?”’ Roy was dumbfounded by the admission that money mattered more than love. ‘How can you be that mad, and yet you were the person who refused to accept him?’ As Roy saw it,

From the mouth of Roy, such accusations of women’s short-termism evoke the sense in which the opposite gender no longer seems patient enough to tolerate the poverty of young men. ‘You’re not always on a good day’, he told me. ‘You can’t guarantee life will be perfect’, he insisted. The problem was impatience. ‘Women really do want comfort.’

In his view, younger women could not tolerate the suffering of starting a household alongside a man such as himself. We saw his travails working in the construction sector in Chapter 2, and his difficult quest to save money to put towards a new house. His struggling had informed his outlook. Not so much dismissively as jokingly, he told me how women, meanwhile, ‘want what they see in the movies’, having been influenced by the conspicuous consumption Kenyans associate with the lifestyles of white people (wazungu) from ‘majuu’ (abroad). ‘They have adapted the digital life of slay queens’, he explained.

Throughout my fieldwork in 2017 and 2018, discussion was taking place across Kenya’s public sphere about the phenomenon of the ‘slay queen’, a new category of woman who was described as chasing a better material life through cultivating relationships with members of Nairobi’s business and political elite. For some young women, particularly students at Nairobi universities, men from this category act as their ‘sponsors’, exchanging wealth for sex, maintaining their lifestyles through money sent to their mobile phones.

A clip from a Nairobi dating reality TV show went viral in 2017. It showed a self-declared ‘slay queen’, a woman in her twenties, rejecting her prospective date for not being ‘serious’. The young man she had been paired with had been open about his modest earnings and made it clear that he expected mutual investment in the household from husband and wife. The self-professed ‘slay queen’ rejected this thoroughly, stating that she would prefer an older man with a pot belly (utambi), a sign of wealth and capacity to maintain a wife. The clip was shared by thousands of disenchanted men reflecting on their shared predicament trying to cope with the expectation of ‘today’s women’.

At the same moment, Oyunga Pala (Reference Pala2018) wrote in Kenya’s The Elephant newspaper how women in these roles have increasingly embraced materialistic lifestyles. These discourses evoke what Mark Hunter (Reference Hunter2002) described as the ‘materiality of everyday sex’ in a South African township. Drawing on extensive fieldwork amongst women of wealthier urban and poorer rural demographics, Hunter showed that material gifts in sexual relationships between older men and younger women from the towns enabled consumption (such as the purchase of clothes) on the part of the latter. Rather than ‘prostitution’, these relationships were defined by certain obligations, and not the anonymity that transactions suppose. Crucially, Hunter illuminates the power possessed by young women in the town to generate money from their ‘sugar daddies’ and repurpose it, even to their much younger boyfriends. In a similar regard, the ‘slay queen’ epithet evokes the narrative of power through which young, urbane women who enter into these relationships seek to appropriate their partners’ wealth for their own ends. Nairobi ‘socialites’ were initially ‘shamed as personalities with questionable morals’, Pala explained, but eventually ‘turned their notoriety into savvy personal brands that are now mainstream media staples’ (Hunter Reference Hunter2002), generating followers on Instagram. Pala noted that popular ‘socialites’ were cited by younger women in a recent BBC feature on the sponsor phenomenon as inspirations for their self-avowed materialistic lifestyles.

Such self-avowed declarations of material interest have awakened male fears of female desires contradictory to their own – that women do not want to partake in the creation of patriarchal and patrilineal households, preferring instead what they see as lives of short-term fun and frivolity. The assertion that women have become greedy has become a powerful narrative of a gendered type of moral change. However, in the voices of Kenya’s generation of young women, the same words were wielded as signs of their power over older men and economic ambition over their younger peers. In 2022, discourses about young women preferring older men with money to younger, poorer men had reached new heights. Diana Bahati’s song ‘Mubaba’, with over a million views on Youtube, saw her articulate the desires of women to live lives of conspicuous consumption funded by ‘wababa’, men old enough to be their fathers. ‘Napenda [I love] good life/Napenda fine things’, Bahati not so much sings as declares, articulating her ‘allergy’ to poverty (umaskini). The subject position Bahati articulated was one of empowered womanhood, consciously using her sexuality to achieve her desired lifestyle defined by independence as a single woman. There was no prospect of being married to a ‘mubaba’. Ready to trade on her good looks, Bahati’s character was prepared to replace one mubaba with another if need be.

In these songs of empowerment, women described how the alcoholism of their young male peers had rendered a generation of young men impoverished, unable to act as providers. All that was left was to cannibalise the budgets of older men who, relatively speaking, were better-off than their grandsons. In December 2021, Gĩkũyũ-language singer Caro Katrue released a song articulating her desire to pursue elderly men (athuuri akũrũ), rather than her poor age-mates.

Katrue’s song captured the sense in which young men are no longer capable of sustaining relationships, and in which their female peers have decided it would be better to look to older, more established men than them. Katrue’s song and associated music video puts a predatory twist on the classic transactional set up by positioning herself as manipulating pension-age men in order to eat and drink at nyama choma (grilled goat’s meat) joints.

As Isabel Pike (Reference Pike2020: 289) has shown, the improved educational prospects of girls across contemporary Kenya have informed feelings that the ‘boy child’ has been neglected, especially in the central counties. In Kiambu, similar feelings have coalesced around the alcohol crisis that was the theme of Chapter 2. Indeed, such narratives of male failure are not confined to children nor educational outcomes alone, but a much more general sense that young men are not transitioning to adulthood, choosing lives of short-termism, as we have already seen. And as we have also seen, elders regularly criticise the state of male youth above the age of circumcision, the point at which they are deemed closer to adulthood, becoming ‘anake’ (youths) rather than boys (ihii). One aspect of this is that men are seen to be ‘falling behind’ their female peers to the extent that they are no longer fit for marriage. As Ndovu, the seventy-six-year-old neighbourhood elder, put it:

In local discourse, women’s success was regularly contrasted with male destitution. In 2022, Mwaura revealed to me that his younger sister Njoki, now twenty years old, was pregnant. Discussing whether she would marry the father, all Mwaura could do was shake his head. ‘Man, who is there to marry from around here? I mean, really?’ Njoki’s intention, he explained, was to raise her child outside of marriage, remaining on their father’s land, something that has been common in central Kenya for a long time (see, e.g., Mackenzie Reference Mackenzie1989; Chapter 6). The large number of young men who bear women’s first names as their surnames is a consequence of the contemporary phenomenon of young men who have no acknowledged fathers, and do not belong to patrilines, being brought up instead in their mothers’ homes.

Women’s Independence in the Early Twentieth Century

In central Kenya, women’s self-avowed orientations towards the short term, and the valuation of consumption over and above marital unions, have come to threaten what Kikuyu men today see as the proper order of things: a household where men can pass on their names, a ‘legacy’ facilitated by feminine loyalty to the patrilineal project. We have already come across the way men articulate their desires to have children in Chapter 2, framed even by my younger interlocutors as ‘a must’, an aspect of their existential accomplishment as men.

Contemporary anxieties about threats to this goal recognise the significance of women’s role in the achievement of successful domestic propriety. As Lynn Thomas (Reference Thomas2003: 14–16) has shown, in pre-colonial Kenya, women wielded power through their potential to bear life, making the reproduction of lineages possible, and allowing men to create affective and spiritual ties with their successors who would follow them. In Kikuyu moral thought, women were normatively associated with masculine continuity and the righteous social reproduction of the family forward through time. Greet Kershaw (Reference Kershaw1997: 24) showed that Kikuyu in Kiambu described women as ‘unlocking’ a man’s life, granting him continuity in land ownership through bearing sons who would inherit. As we have seen throughout this book, the continuity of kinship has been essential to masculine identities, and women played a central role in allowing this continuity to take place through their reproductive labour (Federici Reference Federici2004: 14). The economies that emerged in the forests around Mount Kenya and in the foothills of the Abderdares (contemporary Kiambu) had a gendered division of farming work (Kenyatta Reference Kenyatta1965 [1938]: 10–16; Kershaw Reference Kershaw1997: 25–6). While it was a man’s task to clear the forest – a difficult, dangerous, and arduous task that won admiration and respect – it was women who maintained the land once cleared. Women were prized partners in the social reproduction of the household. Acquiring a wife was a crucial juncture in a young man’s life, and young warriors (anake) regularly took risks to do so. Kershaw’s (Reference Kershaw1997: 25) oral histories (carried out in 1950s Kiambu) showed that young Kikuyu frequently raided nearby Maasai to capture women, their Maa names frequently recorded in Kikuyu family genealogies, and likely took great risks to do so. In their roles as mothers, rearing children and tending to their gardens, women achieved a form of accomplishment in their own right (Clark Reference Clark1980; Wipper Reference Wipper1989). It is not hard to see why even Kikuyu conservatives like Jomo Kenyatta were keen to emphasise the pride of place Kikuyu women had in pre-colonial and early colonial Kenya (Reference Kenyatta1965 [1938]: 10–16), that they were prominent, if not exactly equal, members in any successful household.

We have also seen in detail the effect that colonial-period economic shocks had on masculine capacities to reproduce the household. There were effects for gender relations in particular, as low pay undermined the ability of men to pay bride price and maintain households (Kershaw Reference Kershaw1997: 156). In the midst of the colonial period’s transformations – its expropriation of land and freezing of the southern frontier for Kikuyu migratory expansion – a full-scale crisis of masculinity began to brew, one that sharpened tensions between genders. Men were turned out of the house by the need to generate cash wages from work on white-owned farms and in the nearby city of Nairobi. But wages remained low, and poor Kikuyu families struggled to stave off outright destitution (Kitching Reference Kitching1980; Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale, Berman and Lonsdale1992). Kiambu lineages shed their tenants, creating an enormous number of impoverished, landless men in the region. A growing number of land sales, fuelled by economic distress, concentrated land in the hands of a nascent gerontocracy (Sorrenson Reference Sorrenson1967; Clough Reference Clough1990: 70–1). Structural poverty engendered marital strife. Derek Peterson has shown that the wives of central Kenya’s itinerant labourers were unafraid of criticising male failures, and the East African Revival offered women a distinctively Christian language through which to articulate male failure (Peterson Reference Peterson2001). Meanwhile, men feared the consequences for their household-based standing. In a moral world where men needed women for their own legacies, fears about wives’ prostitution were powerful threats to self-accomplishment (Peterson Reference Peterson2001: 475–6). Women’s entry into the labour market and a growing physical distance created by wage labour intensified masculine paranoia about the propriety of their households. ‘Men worried that wives maddened with money would sap husbands’ virility with sorcery’ (Peterson Reference Peterson2001: 476).

Women’s increased mobility had a deeper history.Footnote ¹ We should not imagine the pre-colonial period as one in which women were traded between male-dominated lineages: the effects of famine in central Kenya during the late nineteenth century made for a very different picture. As Luise White has shown, the breakdown of marriage payments (due to livestock deaths caused by the famine) spurred the migration of women who ‘transferred their own labor and reproductive power as survival dictated’, joining new lineages where they were incorporated as newcomers (1990: 33). White sees this as a vital moment in the emergence of a ‘heritage’ (White Reference White1990) of women’s mobility, and it was at this juncture that prostitution began in Nairobi – then only a small town. It is likely that fathers encouraged their daughters to go to Nairobi, since ‘[t]hrough prostitution women could provide their fathers with wealth as surely as they would have done had they married for cattle in their homes’. All-women families sewed themselves into the emerging fabric of the city as capital accumulators, turning their earnings into property holdings, and becoming early rentiers in the city’s designated African neighbourhoods like Ngara.

Women’s mobility became an economic necessity for many families in central Kenya during the colonial period. With men unable to keep their households afloat, women entered the labour market, selling produce at local markets and roadsides, or joining with other women to create financial solidarity networks (White 1990; Robertson Reference Robertson1997). Kershaw (Reference Kershaw1997: 156) noted that in Kiambu, even children recognised the extent to which it was their mothers’ work that fed them, rather than their fathers’.

However, it was not long before a new generation of Kikuyu conservatives from central Kenya began to take issue with such ‘prostitutes’, who, they claimed, had abandoned their families. As domestic anxieties were intensified by women’s newfound social, sexual, and spatial mobility, a conservative backlash soon emerged comparable to what Sylvia Federici (Reference Federici2004) has described in early modern Europe. Against the backdrop of colonial-period transformations, a new generation of Christian converts, educated in mission schools since the early part of the century, played a central role in articulating the immorality of Nairobi’s new women. Tom CunninghamFootnote ² has argued that the denunciation of Nairobi female traders as ‘prostitutes’ in the Gĩkũyũ-language nationalist literature of the mid-twentieth century betrayed the threat posed by newly mobile and newly wealthy women to notions of masculine respectability that were, at the very same moment, being articulated by this new wave of Christian conservatives as the foundation of any successful independent nation. Early Kikuyu nationalists – many of whom had been mission educated – imagined an independent Kenya as a morally reformed community of patriarchal households (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale, Berman and Lonsdale1992). They heralded the undoing of the social change brought about by colonialism, not least women’s independence from men.

The pages of Muigwithania, the newspaper of the Kikuyu Central Association and the mouthpiece of this new wave of pro-independence, mission-educated conservatism, were littered with moralising references to the degradations of ‘prostitutes’. Letters to the editor generally penned by older men, themselves self-styled modern men, often articulated the mission of ‘reconciliation’ after which the newspaper had been named – a sort of moral reckoning amongst the Kikuyu people who had been riven by a process of social differentiation that had divided generations and kin on the basis of class and labour migration. Consider, for instance, a ‘small letter’ written to the editor by a man named G. C. Job Muchuchu.

G. C. Job Muchuchu lamented the effects of labour migration to Nairobi as a facet of ‘youth’, and beseeched young Kikuyu women to send money home to their relatives, and not to become stuck in the town and entirely break off relations with rural kin. ‘Remember that Youth has to end’, he reminded migrants, suspecting they would then need their relatives in age. Muigwithania regularly voiced the concerns of a rural patriarchy.

Gachuchu’s letter looks comparatively moderate alongside the words of his contemporaries. Former Mau Mau veteran, Eliud Mutonyi, another influential member of this generation of Christian conservatives, wrote that

Such denunciations were common in this moment of nationalist moralising. After returning to Kenya from the United Kingdom, President Johnstone ‘Jomo’ Kenyatta took aim at ‘prostitutes’ specifically, articulating the domestic propriety and ethno-national self-respect that he saw it as rupturing. ‘If an Indian or Somali knows he can buy any Kikuyu woman or girl, how can you expect him to respect the Kikuyu people?’

‘Kikuyu women’, ‘Kiambu women’

Contemporary stereotypes about ‘women from Kiambu’m and specifically ‘Kikuyu women’, demonstrate that the same masculine anxieties about women’s economic independence are alive and well. But if young men like Roy felt their romantic relationships strained by such ‘new’ desires for consumption, the fears of established men carried this inflection in a rather more specific way. Older men articulated fears (and elaborated rumours) that women could marry into families only to expropriate their wealth, particularly land. Numerous stories circulated about their various attempts to murder their husbands. One of Roy’s friends told me a story about a woman who had murdered her husband via a conspiracy with her young lover to pin it on local youth, then hiding tissues stained with blood in the pit latrine. The police had searched the latrine and found the tissues, leading to her eventual arrest for murder. Her intent, he told me, had been to take control of her husband’s property. Kiambu women in general were regularly described by men as ‘deadly’ along these lines.

The spectrum and gravity of these stories varied, but all evinced a loss of confidence in the wider ideal of a patriarchal homestead, undermined by wives’ ambitions that ran counter to those of their husbands. At the close of Chapter 3, we saw one of the manifestations of the effect of this perspective on the part of men: disillusionment with continuity. Chege advised his peers not to leave wealth to ungrateful wives. If women were looking after their own interests, so should men. Consumption and enjoyment in the present were the only logical response to a world in which women had already come to the same conclusion.

Stereotypes of ‘Kiambu women’ have in no small part been shaped by sensationalist newspaper reporting on women who murder their husbands, or attempt to do so, in order to steal their wealth. The murder of Dutch businessman Tob Cohen by his ethnic Kikuyu wife Sarah Wairimu Kamotho, and the disposal of his body in the septic tank of their shared mansion, has shaped a black humour amongst men about ‘Kikuyu women’ more generally, and the dangers of ending up like Cohen.

Consider, for instance, the perspective of Ndungu, a thirty-five-year-old land-broker who had lived in Muchatha, a town adjacent to Chungwa Town, practically his whole life. Over a cup of tea in 2019, when I was ostensibly asking him about land prices, our conversation veered into a discussion of women, informed largely by his own experience. In 2012, he had divorced a woman he had met at the butchery where he worked in Muchatha in 2010, an experience that had turned him thoroughly cynical. ‘I don’t know what happens to women when you have money in your pocket – it’s like they know’, he told me. ‘They want what you [or he] have … Not what is in his heart’, Ndungu insisted. He had recently re-married a woman from Murang’a. ‘Even if there’s no woman in the world, I can’t marry a girl from Kiambu’, he told me. ‘Men in Kiambu fear women!’

Ndungu’s discourse applied to young women in particular – airĩtu, the term used to describe unmarried women. In masculine discourse like Ndungu’s, Kiambu airĩtu are described as ‘people whose eyes have been licked by a cat’ (andũ acone maitho nĩ mbaka), a saying that evokes the sense in which they can see ‘far’. In such discourses, women’s preternatural vision is associated with their witch-like capacity to read and exploit unsuspecting men, seeing into men’s hearts and exploiting their genuine love. As far as Ndungu saw it, it was women who were pressing their husbands to sell their ancestral land (see Chapter 3). He told me that women pressure their husbands to sell in order to fund more lavish lifestyles in Nairobi apartments. Upon moving to the city, these women would spend the money on themselves – regularly frequenting the salon, for instance – and then quickly abandon their now landless husbands, leaving them uprooted, unmoored, poor, and alone.

Young women in contemporary Kiambu are aware of the stereotypes that persist about them, but I found it curious that they rarely rejected these stories outright. Jata, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a neighbouring family and sister to Stevoh, who we have already met, practically conceded that the stereotypes of Kiambu women were true in her eyes. When I relayed these discourses about ‘Kiambu women’ to her, she twisted these ascriptions of ill intent into a narrative of women’s empowerment, one that valorised how ‘Kiambu women’ had seized a newfound agency in the wake of male failure. I quote from her at length.

Her words echoed those of my second Gĩkũyũ language teacher Joanna, a thirty-eight-year-old Kikuyu woman from Murang’a and who regularly liked to joke about the stereotypes of the women of her ethnic group. Hers, however, were more moralistic. She talked in terms of ‘exposure’ in Kiambu, that women there knew the attraction of a good material life and figured out how to get there by exploiting their sexuality. Joanna’s was a narrative of moral corruption caused by proximity to the city (compare Adams Reference Adams2009) – an accusation that women in the region desired quick, easy wealth over and above stable marriages.

In Kiambu today, young women stress the legitimacy of their desires for consumption, articulating the morality of their own economic agency in carving out life opportunities independently of men. When ‘Kiambu women’ narratives evoke the fears of men, they carry a kernel of truth about how gender norms have shifted over the last century, and how women now not only guard their independence, but actively and consciously pursue it for themselves. Rachel Spronk’s (Reference Spronk2014) important research on middle-class professionals from Nairobi discusses at length the newfound independence of upwardly mobile women who have lived their lives in the city, powerfully showing how these female Nairobians find their newfound agency cast as a ‘moral breach’ in conservative discourse, just as Kiambu women do. However, Spronk’s work might give the misleading impression that a newfound independence has been seized only by the upper echelons of Nairobi’s nouveaux riches. As Jata’s words show us, and as this chapter has already demonstrated to some degree, women from across central Kenya are quite consciously seizing their independence from the normative futures that marriage might once have presented.

In Ituura, successful young women were advised to be discerning in their choice of a husband. Consider, for instance, the case of Feye, the twenty-three-year-old sister of Ikinya, who we met in Chapter 2. Feye’s relative financial independence and her Nairobi office job were a stark contrast to the situation of most men her age in the neighbourhood, not least Ikinya. In 2017 and 2018, she became an even more prominent part of the social networks that connect women in Ituura, using her wages to join Catherine and her mother, Mama Gethii, in creating a women’s cooperative (kĩama) that invested in a tent for hire at local functions. In 2018, a growing friendship between Feye and Catherine saw the older woman carefully advise her to take her time in choosing a husband, and to choose carefully. In this regard, Jata’s words hold true, and an older generation of adult women who have earned a living ‘hustling’ in compensation for their destitute husbands (see Chapter 3) have been keen to ensure the next generation does not make the same mistake, encouraging their daughters and granddaughters not to rely on men, to maintain financial independence, especially in fear of divorce.

Along these lines, young women I knew regularly attempted to turn the tables on men, accusing them of being the short-termist, self-interested ones. ‘If they can get what they want [i.e., sex] without marrying you, then why would they marry you?’, Feye and Roy’s sister-in-law Ann told me in 2017. What if a man loves you and wants to be with you?, I asked her, perhaps somewhat naively. ‘I don’t believe in love!’, she answered. She claimed to have her sights set on a provider. ‘Maybe a Lawyer, an Engineer – if I’m on 50k [50,000 KSh], he has to be on 80k’. Per year?, I asked. She snorted, ‘Per month!’

Single with a Sponsor

‘If there’s anyone I admire in my life, it is Kim Kardashian. I will do anything to look and live like her, all these require money.’ The words of a University of Nairobi student quoted in The Standard newspaper look too good to be true from the perspective of sensationalist journalism – they are admissions of self-interest that powerfully illustrate the sense in which women’s approach to love has become money-oriented. The student, anonymised as Mumbua, described her life with a sponsor as a means of living a life far beyond her normal means:

Julie Soleil Archambault (Reference Archambault2017: 123–4) has shown that similar discourses prevail in Mozambique’s city of Inhambane, where a very similar situation of gendered inequality exists. Archambault shows how young women ‘traded’ on their subordinate status, choosing to ‘eat’ men’s money (Archambault Reference Archambault2017: 129) by extracting gifts from older men, taking full advantage of the crisis of patriarchal authority. Elizabeth Mandeville (Reference Mandeville1979) has also argued that such ‘love affairs … may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance’, showing through her work on Kampala that a large proportion of female traders in her neighbourhood actively chose to live without a husband. However, Mandeville’s research introduces another element to the discussion we have had so far – a sensitivity towards the changing age and life courses of women who partake in these lifestyles. For now, we have primarily looked at the discourses of childless younger women in their early twenties – both in the media landscape, and on the ground – but I want to now turn towards slightly older women with children who are in their late twenties, thirties, and above. For this older demographic of women, acquiring a ‘sponsor’ was a practical consideration rather than a pathway towards a life of consumption, a way of bolstering their finances, and an insurance policy on their husband, in case he decided to abscond or failed to bring home money.

Consider here the words of Wanjiru, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three from Muchatha in Kiambu. I met her through her younger sister, one of my friends and sometime research collaborator, Wangui, a twenty-three-year-old graduate from the University of Nairobi. In 2022, I spoke to Wanjiru about her experience of keeping a sponsor in secret, while deceiving her husband. She told me how

Wanjiru’s own case had been shaped by her desire for independence from her husband, who she felt ‘followed’ her activity. Sponsors, by necessity, kept a distance that suited her.

Anxieties about their husbands’ conduct as a rationale for partaking in the ‘sponsor’ lifestyle reflected wider concerns amongst women not just about men ‘denying’ (kunyima) them money for living expenses, but about the tendency for their husbands to abandon them for younger women. Consider, for instance, the case of Ann, who told me in 2022 how her husband of ten years had left her in 2018 for his younger ‘side chick’. However, his new relationship quickly collapsed, ruining him financially, as Ann told me that he had tried to live an extravagant life of spending, living with his new partner in Dubai. While she knew her husband was now destitute, and wanted to rekindle the marriage, she insisted he would not learn from his previous conduct, maintaining that her desire was to stay alone.

Ann’s situation in mind, I asked Wanjiru if she worried that her sponsor might also abandon her. She pushed back, insisting that the supply of unsatisfied men would never run out:

But when I pressed the topic, she explained that,

Wanjiru’s words open up the potential for discussing the vulnerability of women who pursued the ‘sponsor lifestyle’ to the whims and budgets of wealthy men, a consideration that she had clearly made. On the one hand, she stressed her ability to attract new sponsors, but other women I spoke to in Kiambu rejected this as merely another form of reliance upon men. Abigail, a twenty-five-year-old mother of one who had spent her youth working in bars in Ruaka explained to me how ‘Men only want the low budgeted woman. The foolish one.’ She contrasted herself with women who ‘just sit at home’, waiting upon their sponsor’s call when instead she went out to work. As we shall now see, avoiding the risks of being abandoned by men ultimately involved paid work and the education that supported it. This leads us to consider the ways in which older women articulate and experience their vulnerability – even in marriage – as something that necessitates self-reliance.

To Be Independent

‘There’s no young woman here’ (Hatirĩ mũirĩtu haha), said one of the women. I barely registered her comment at the time. It was only looking back through fieldnotes that I discovered it had been said, and it was only later that I realised its significance.

I was waiting under a large open tent in the centre of Chungwa Town, Kiambu County in the open grounds of a local high school. Plastic chairs had been arranged and a sound system set up for the arrival of ‘Mama County’, the recently elected Kiambu County Women’s Representative Gathoni wa Muchomba, to officially launch a new programme of evening classes at the local high school for adults to re-take their Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). I had been invited by the local Member of County Assembly (MCA).

I had arrived early and took a chair in the nearly empty pavilion as others slowly began to arrive. To my surprise, practically all were women in their thirties, forties, and fifties. I began chatting with a couple of women about why they had decided to pursue secondary education, and the answers were fairly unsurprising: gũthiĩ na mbere or ‘to get certificate’. The programme, named Tusome (Let’s study), promised to improve economic fortunes for the women in attendance, allowing them to gain KCSEs for the first time or to re-take the exams and improve upon poor grades they already had. ‘Men already have education, and they have jobs’, said one woman, ‘therefore, we need education’ (kwo gwo, nĩ tũrabata gĩthomo). Shortly, wa Muchomba herself would echo this logic: ‘Masomo halafu…?’ (‘Education, and then?’), she would say, asking for the audience’s response before herself interjecting: ‘Ni job’. Education (masomo) was a means to paid work.

Wa Muchomba eventually arrived with her motorcade, by which time an audience of close to 100 women had assembled. A charismatic politician, wa Muchomba had made her reputation as an ‘agony aunt’ of sorts on the Gĩkũyũ vernacular radio station Kameme FM. Adopting the name ‘the reconciler’ (mwigwithania), wa Muchomba presided over domestic and social dramas of all types: disputes between parents and children, accounts by the victims of crimes, marital strife. She had cultivated a reputation as a particular type of Kikuyu woman, one who embodied the moral authority that came with her Christianity, but also the celebrity of appearing on the radio and now in politics advising others on their marriages. Her show ‘Mwigwithania’ reflected an emphasis on personal virtues, grounded in Christian idioms, but her own triumphant voice reflects the authority achieved by older women who have achieved economic success admired by others.

After perfunctory introductions from the local area chief and the MCA, wa Muchomba took the microphone. I noticed a shift in the atmosphere as the audience responded to her charismatic presence. ‘Bwana asifiwe!’ (Lord be praised), she began, to a combined audience response of ‘Amen’. ‘Hallelujah!’, wa Muchomba responded. ‘You’ve not heard this voice in a while, right?’, she said, alluding to her absence from the airwaves due to her new political duties. She went on to introduce the Tusome initiative, claiming that she had been ‘alert’ (chonjo) in bringing it to Kiambu. But more than wa Muchomba’s self-praise, what caught my attention was how she framed the benefits of the scheme:

The audience broke out laughing, as wa Muchomba continued,

Wa Muchomba was reflecting on a debate she had initiated a few weeks earlier through comments she had made about polygamy. There, wa Muchomba had made an explicit connection between the irresponsibility of Kikuyu patriarchs and the crisis of youth. Young male alcoholics, she argued, were the unfortunate offspring of single mothers who had been made pregnant by absentee fathers married elsewhere. Not only was wa Muchomba again re-stating the responsibility of men, though in a heightened form, but she was also speaking to women about the significance of securing their own economic lives so as not to be reliant on unreliable husbands.

Such was the level of intimacy with which wa Muchomba was able to refer to many aspects of female experience. She deliberately parroted the disparaging voice of men claiming their wives ‘would not work’ (Matingĩruta wĩra), and she wondered how many women had been misled by their husbands, to responses of ‘Many!’ from the crowd. The women that had attended the launch of Tusome represented a particular demographic of women, one that had married and whose husbands could be seen as unreliable. They did not have the option that was associated with single and younger married women (airĩtu) of ‘searching’ for another provider (kuhanya-hanya). Tusome’s moral imperative, in wa Muchomba’s terms, was to do away with the need to rely on unreliable husbands.

The word mũirĩtu typically describes an unmarried woman who by implication is young. That ‘no young woman’ had come to the Tusome launch, and that it was remarked upon is significant – it reflects the threat that older Kikuyu women sense from younger women who stand to entice their husbands, diverting cash away from the home. In turn, wa Muchomba acknowledges what women also recognise. Threats arise not just from younger women, but from their husbands themselves, now cast as manipulators and liars, poverty-stricken spendthrifts who – while barely able to maintain their original wives – seek younger women further afield.

Wa Muchomba had shown her conservative stripes when she advocated for Kikuyu men to marry these women – a solution to the problem of children born outside marriages, and with no clear belonging in their patrilineal home. Wa Muchomba’s suggestion was for the reincorporation of the large numbers of young Kikuyu into patrilineal households, especially men who often take their mother’s name (such as Wanjiru or Wanjiku) instead of that of their father’s father, a sign to others of their single-mother parentage.

However, when wa Muchomba had aired her original views, about the need for Gĩkũyũ men to ‘step up’ and marry multiple wives, taking responsibility for the children they ‘sired’, she was widely dismissed. On Punchline Africa TV, broadcasters discussed the implications of wa Muchomba’s comments live in the studio. ‘Nowadays girls don’t cook like their mothers, they drink like their fathers’, the young urbane Kikuyu presenters concurred. And yet they disagreed with wa Muchomba’s suggestion that polygamy could provide an answer. While one young woman acknowledged the changes Christianity had brought to the household by causing a shift away from polygamy, she disagreed that the answer was to return to such arrangements. ‘We can’t easily go back’, she said.

When I asked Catherine what she thought about wa Muchomba’s views, she declared her ‘crazy’ (wazimu). Sitting with her then best friend Mama Nyambura in the house, both women agreed that the suggestion of polygamy was ‘not good’ (Ti wega). Catherine explained, ‘If Kimani has another wife, we can fight! If I see he is helping her more, I can fight her!’

Conclusion

This chapter has observed the way inequalities of class, generation, and gender shape a loss of confidence in marriage and romantic relations between men and women. In the context of Kiambu’s landscape of peri-urban inequality, some young women look towards older men as ‘sponsors’, seeking an exit from a life of hardship within a wider context of male destitution and the breakdown of provider identities. Women who attract sponsors do so consciously, aware of the risks as much as the benefits, to raise their standard of living, to provide for their own children, or to invest in education. Spurred by generational inequalities that favour these established older men, young men’s own anxieties have grown in response. They fear a new generation of ‘selfish’ young women interested in financing their own lives of consumption, shaping a growing cynicism towards women and the possibility of marriage. But men could also be jealous of such opportunities to leave rural poverty behind. Mwaura once remarked upon the way his female peers in Ituura were ‘so cool’ because of their capacity to marry out of the neighbourhood and become dependent upon their husbands. He highlighted the situation of his sister Njoki, who worked for wages at a hairdresser’s throughout 2021 whilst he remained idle at the homestead. He believed she would marry and go on to lead a better life than he would ever have. Gathu once told me that he considered following some of his male peers in trying to attract a so-called ‘suga mama’, an older woman who could provide him with economic security in exchange for intimacy.

If marriage as an institution and a moral aspiration has been undermined by these anxieties, it provoked women to search for economic security outside of it. In central Kenya, women have long entered the labour market searching for economic independence from men (see, e.g., Peterson Reference Peterson2001). In the 1980s, for instance, Maria Maas (Reference Maas1986) observed the way women in Murang’a province saved money collectively, pooling it into purchasing land as a contingency in case they left their households after divorce. In this chapter, a discussion of women’s vulnerability through their potential dependence on male ‘sponsors’ and their husbands has paved the way for a consideration of the ways in which women navigate it by insisting on the importance of having economic independence through paid work. In Chapter 4, we saw in detail how Catherine’s ‘hustling’ in the informal economy, alongside her wider social networking, supported her son’s education. It also provided her with a degree of status in the neighbourhood, allowing her independence from the absent Kimani.

In spite of her relative independence, Catherine’s suggestion that she could ‘fight’ her hypothetical co-wife points towards the anxieties created within families – especially amongst children – about older men courting relationships with younger women, so called gachungwa. We saw in Chapter 3 how men who had sold land now had much younger girlfriends living with them, girlfriends that Ituura residents imagined lived off the wealth generated by land sale. Ndungu’s description of ‘Kiambu women’ speaks to a genuine experience of economic inequality in extra-marital relationships that are seen to benefit younger women at the expense of older, propertied men. In Kenya’s media landscape, one regularly encounters newspaper articles with sensationalist stories about ‘gold diggers’, and yet one also sees articles offering genuine legal advice about the importance of marrying carefully (Mputhia Reference Mputhia2021).

For Mwaura, this possibility would soon spell disaster. The revelation that Kimani had been keeping a second wife in Murang’a emerged only at the time of Catherine’s death in 2020. After her burial in Ituura, Mwaura’s neighbours told him that his father had been seen with another woman ‘from around’. It was soon revealed that Kimani had a four-year-old son with his other wife and had therefore likely been in a relationship with her since at least 2018. What Mwaura also discovered in the wake of his mother’s death was that Catherine herself had travelled to Namanga to confront Kimani’s new wife, only to find the other woman living in better conditions than she was. While it was Catherine whose financial networks sourced money to pay for the roof of his stone house, her husband’s money had been providing for another woman. Finding this to be the case, she returned home and lay in bed for days, then became sick. Mwaura felt that it was the revelation that had led to her death.

The final chapter will show how Catherine’s death reiterated her prominent role in maintaining her son’s prospects – that it was not so much Kimani’s work, but rather Catherine’s financial networks, that had paid for her son’s university fees. Mwaura felt Catherine’s absence keenly in his reduced prospects, and his lack of networks with other families in the neighbourhood.