Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the moral lives and self-evaluations of a group of low-status and economically marginal young men living in the southern peri-urban areas of Kenya's Kiambu County (itself located on the outskirts of northern Nairobi), drawing on 19 months fieldwork 2017-18.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars of Africa are no strangers to the plight of unemployed and underemployed young men. A growing body of scholarship attends to their lives, temporally "stuck" in modes of "waithood" and boredom, unable to accumulate the wealth to marry (and thus the concomitant social capital required become adult men). (John Lonsdale called this normative teleology of masculine becoming the achievement of "civic virtue".) Whilst this literature has had much to say about the experiences of "abjection" that defines the lives of such youth, this paper explicitly explores the moral premises that inform the evaluation of them by others, and their self-evaluations.

To do so, this paper discusses the lives of a group of young men living in Kenya's peri-urban Kiambu County (itself located on the outskirts of northern Nairobi), drawing on 19 months fieldwork. The group of young men with which this essay is concerned are generally seen as "lazy", "idlers" by other residents of the peri-urban interstice, particularly those aspiring to a middle-class standard of living. Yet rather than resisting such moral judgement of their life choices through constructing alternative understandings of their predicament, young men must contend with their normative influence. Instead of countering narratives of themselves as socially valueless "idlers", youth I befriended often sought to claim that they were "serious" in contradistinction to others within their social circles who, it was argued, truly embodied social failure.