Mario Schmidt, University of Cologne

Mototaxi drivers wearing face masks, supermarkets obliging customers to wash their hands before entering, hawkers selling indigenous vegetables as prophylactics against COVID-19, and strangers running away from me shouting “Corona, Corona, Corona” only to smile and break out in laughter—these are all strategies that inhabitants of Pipeline, one of Nairobi’s (and sub-Saharan Africa’s) most congested estates, and my home since June 2019, employ to deal with the looming pandemic and, supposedly, prevent the spread of the virus.

Yet, few people have changed their lives drastically. Do they hoard toilet paper or food? No money for that. Do they flee back to their villages? No time for that. Do they seek testing when they suffer from cough, fever or headache? No time or money for that. Do they obey the one-meter rule of physical distancing? No space for that. Do they stop shaking hands? No reason for that – or, worse, they risk social stigma as this might be interpreted as proof of them carrying the virus.

As my foreign colleagues left Kenya to return to their homes amid the present pandemic, I decided, after much consideration, to stay—to stay in Pipeline and continue my fieldwork, albeit while restricting my movement in the city.

In the last ten years, Pipeline has become emblematic for how middle and upper class Kenyans imagine the lives of other, poorer Kenyans. “Looming nightmare,” “disaster zone,” and “concrete slum” are just a few of the names journalists have used to describe it, while some scholars—rightfully in my opinion—consider places like Pipeline to be sub-Saharan Africa’s urban future (Huchzermeyer 2011). That future involves population densities above 10,000 people per square kilometer, endless rows of high-rise buildings, and an almost complete privatization of services by the rich “tycoons” who own the vast majority of flats. (The housing sector offers one of the highest returns on fixed capital assets.) Although Pipeline’s image is that of a low-income estate whose inhabitants work in Nairobi’s industrial area or at the airport, many residents work in the informal sector, the gig economy, or remain unemployed.

Another blind spot in the upper classes imagination is ignorance of the fact that inhabitants of Pipeline who work at the airport and in factories contribute significantly to the growth of the Kenyan economy. Moreover, their labour is vital for the country’s connection to the world. Meanwhile, international NGOs and the Kenyan state neglect poor estates like Pipeline and focus their interventions instead on informal settlements like Kibera and Mathare. Pipeline has thus become emblematic of the living and housing conditions of hundreds of millions of people across the global South who live and work in terrible conditions, but who do so without being recognized as deserving because people elsewhere live in even worse conditions.

While Pipeline’s inhabitants see themselves as common wananchi—ordinary folk who work hard without escaping their miserable livelihoods—they often attribute the enormous wealth of religious, economic, and political “big men” to opaque and unknown causes. Such self-perceptions reflect Pipeline’s rapid growth from a swampy, mostly uninhabited area in the 1990s, to an informal settlement whose inhabitants were forcefully evicted by Kenya’s wealthy elite, to an estate of high-rise tenements built under contract to those same elite. In short, the history of Pipeline mirrors that of many such neighborhoods around the world.

Against this sketch of Pipeline’s incorporation into Nairobi, Kenya, and the world, the following engages a set of questions that anthropologists working in similar settings are likely to encounter during the COVID-19 pandemic. What to make of my decision to stay, especially in light of the apparent lack of concern about infection among my interlocutors? What motivates their refusal to follow the Kenyan government’s suggested safeguards? Is my decision not to return home unethical because I could endanger vulnerable people in the field? How does fieldwork change when social relations should be kept to a minimum? This post is first and foremost a reminder that even in a crisis that reaches many places across the globe, an ethnographically informed understanding of peoples’ decisions about how to act is indispensable.

Dwelling in pandemic times

In his hot, tiny, and humid apartment—the worst place imaginable if one intends to self-quarantine oneself—I prepare rice and cabbage with Michael, a student at the University of Nairobi’s business school. The university has been closed, as have the offices of the behavioral economics advisory firm that I work with to explore interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and behavioral economics. While his son is busily playing on the rooftop with other children who have been sent home from school, Michael tells me that COVID-19 is a “high-end disease” that only infects people who venture out of Kenya. Other rumors about Corona circulate in Pipeline. Some people are certain that Corona is a “Western” virus, which only affects rich and white people who are not used to the hard life in Pipeline or in shantytowns like Mathare and Kibera. Others say that the Kenyan government has staged the COVID-19 pandemic in order to pocket money from World Bank funding for African countries that report infections. These rumors can too easily be dismissed as mere urban myths or as dangerous misinformation. And they certainly are. However, they also illustrate the efforts of Pipeline’s inhabitants to make sense of their position in Kenya’s class structure. Thus, these rumors are best understood against the backdrop of how the disease is framed in Kenya and beyond, and in light of government measures and recommendations to prevent further infections.

Consider the recommended switch from cash to Kenya’s mobile money service (m-pesa). This is an option for better-off Kenyans, who do their groceries in supermarkets. But for most of Pipeline’s inhabitants that switch is impossible due to the debts they have incurred on their mobile money accounts. Cash is also the standard means of payment at the mama mboga–“vegetable mamas”—who sell fruits and vegetables from informal shacks. Likewise, it is impossible to avoid crowds or contact with other people more generally, since forty people often share two toilets and an unreliable water supply. Meanwhile, despite the government’s calls for physical distancing, social media and online exchanges are inaccessible to many of Pipeline’s inhabitants who do not own smart phones. For those who do have such phones, Pipeline’s dense architecture blocks network signals to many houses and flats.

Shortly after the first COVID-19 case had been reported in Kenya, a meme began circulating on social media illustrating the gap between official regulations and life in Pipeline. The meme depicts a typical and, in the Nairobian context, iconic façade of an eight-story tenement with clothes hanging from the balconies of many flats and people chatting on the rooftop. The statement across the top of the picture reads: “When they tell you to avoid public gatherings but where you stay is a ‘public gathering’.”

There is no right life in times of Corona

When Michael’s wife starts coughing, we try to convince her to go to the hospital. She is currently the main breadwinner of the family and refuses to go because the household has limited money and she does not want to be quarantined. I offer financial help, but Michael tells me his wife has recently registered for health insurance and so he just needs to visit the authorities to declare which hospital will be responsible for her. The next day, he comes home from town and tells me that his request can only be processed at the start of the next month because the people in charge have, due to the pandemic, been asked to work from home. Michael decides to take her to a hospital and informs me later that she has been diagnosed with a bacterial infection—but he adds, “Tests for Corona are only done in town.” Of course, “town” is always elsewhere, never in Pipeline. In Pipeline, bars and restaurants remain crowded; while in wealthy estates like Lavington, Kilimani, or Westlands, they are closed. As the streets of Nairobi’s Central Business District get emptier by the day, Pipeline remains as overcrowded as ever. And while most of my middle-class friends are afraid and have self-isolated at home, Pipeliners move on with their lives, almost as if nothing has happened.

These observations make me question the assumption that there exists only one right way of life in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The health recommendations of the Kenyan government—to stop using cash, to increase hygiene levels, to practice “social” distancing, to get tested fast if one shows symptoms, and to self-isolate—cannot be the only way forward if the livelihoods of so many Kenyans, in Pipeline and beyond, rule out all of these safeguards. They may be the most appropriate way to deal with the pandemic for Kenya’s upper and middle classes. But they offer no practical advice for people living in more difficult conditions. This discrepancy seems to me a perfect recipe for attributing blame if the virus cannot be contained in Nairobi. If that happens, the inhabitants of Pipeline and other poor areas will be portrayed as idle, unteachable, and egoistic because they refused to heed warnings and avoid social contact. This response will exacerbate an existing stigma surrounding inhabitants of informal settlements like Kibera, who are regularly blamed for inciting political violence during election periods, even though politicians carefully orchestrate such violence. As in those cases, many politicians will be quick to blame Pipeline’s inhabitants for an outbreak of COVID-19.

The difficulty in implementing the Kenyan government’s recommendations in places like Pipeline, the impossibility for Michael to process his wife’s insurance, and the moralization of the pandemic are interconnected processes, variants of which can be seen not only across Kenya, but in Europe as well. These processes deserve deeper reflection.

Talk about ethically correct and incorrect behaviour implies that it is possible to fully grasp the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic will unfold under vastly different livelihood conditions. But this process remains very difficult to determine in societies with a high degree of inequality. It is noteworthy that calls for individual “ethical” responses to the pandemic have come from politicians, academics, and journalists who have previously argued that we live in an increasingly complex world whose problems cannot be tackled with simple solutions.

When I asked Michael why people in Pipeline remained calm amid the pandemic, he responded, “In Pipeline, panic is unnecessary.” And indeed, while panic and widespread fear of a COVID-19 outbreak has motivated wealthier people to stay at home and practice social distancing, such behaviour would in Pipeline actually increase social mistrust. It would also lead to scapegoating along ethnic and national lines, and force people to implement devastating economic measures—to close one’s small restaurant, for example, and thereby risk bankruptcy and the survival of one’s family. For individuals living in comfortable flats with well-stocked fridges to demand physical distancing from people crammed in hot, humid, and overcrowded apartments that lack basic amenities is to ignore Kenya’s class divide and the ways in which this divide is reinforced in the housing sector.

As I write this, I remain uncertain about my decision to stay in Kenya. As much as staying risks my own and other people’s health, leaving the country does so too. On the road home I would come into contact with many other travellers. I could infect them or they could infect me. The risk of spreading the disease while moving might therefore be higher than catching it if I stay. Thus, the limits to ethically “correct” behaviour in this matter apply to me as well. I suggest, however, that such unequal limitations will become the normal state of affairs in the coming months. Like the inhabitants of Pipeline, I am acutely aware that dealing with COVID-19 is not a narrowly ethical issue, but rather a political and economic issue, which if not dealt with accordingly will be most devastating in poor neighborhoods like Pipeline. As Michael said some days ago, “If Corona reaches Pipeline, we are all dead.”

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Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne. His current research focuses on the interdisciplinary potential between anthropology and behavioral economics. He is also interested in scrutinizing the economic strategies of educated but unemployed Nairobians living in tenement housing.

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Shortly after writing and editing for this blog was completed, the Kenyan government announced that it would suspend all international travel from March 25th and for an indefinite period of time. This made it impossible for Mario Schmidt to continue his fieldwork. When our editors last spoke with him, he was waiting for a travel agency to confirm his flight home.

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References

Huchzermeyzer, Marie (2011): Tenement Cities: From 19th Century Berlin to 21st Century Nairobi. Trenton: Africa World Press.

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Cite as: Schmidt, Mario. 2020. “‘In Pipeline, Panic is Unnecessary’ – How Poor Nairobians Deal with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.” FocaalBlog, 23 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/03/23/mario-schmidt-in-pipeline-panic-is-unnecessary-how-poor-nairobians-deal-with-the-advent-of-the-covid-19-pandemic/