Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to explain the success of private club membership among the African private sector elite in contemporary Kenya. For the last 20 years, these social, sporting and service clubs have progressively become iconic of upper class sociability in Nairobi and Kenyan bigger cities.

Paper long abstract:

Clubs gather nowadays a membership of hundreds of prosperous professionals and executives, over golf courses, charity events or professional coaching sessions. Social and sports clubs indeed appeared during the first years of British colonization in East Africa, but the current growth of club membership owes to different social and historical processes than the sheer mimicry of colonial practices. Their success enlightens the local and global narrations in which African investment in these iconic avatars of bourgeois modernity are rooted. Such process is rooted in the formation of an urban upper class of professionals, managers and businesspersons; intimately related to the growth of a "private sector" which has to cope with the competition of political elites; and linked to the formation of a social group which understands itself as constituting a community of interests, sharing common imaginary of self-achievement, rooted in a nationalist vision of the country's development.

Clubs are significant in the making of trans-ethnic and trans-generational regimes of entrustment. They contribute to the promotion and actualization of elite lifestyles. Their membership mark a belonging to what we could term an imagined world bourgeoisie, a place where managers and professionals discuss and dream about Kenya becoming the Singapore or the Dubai of Africa. But clubs are also a contested ground, as they are also used to make-up inherited fortunes of uncertain origin, and to provide formerly corrupted businessmen and politicians with the bureaucratic attributes of respectability. And as private places, they represent a space where the origins of wealth and the responsibilities of social status are hardly questioned.