Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on urban dwellers strategies to simultaneously avoid and put pressure within their own networks, intersecting family, generational, class and gender expectation during a sudden and rapid deadlock of Tamale’s urban economy.

Paper long abstract:

Facing a nationwide economic crisis, with its severe inflation and skyrocketed fuel’s prices as primary consequences, Tamale, capital of Ghana Northern Region, has been hit harder than southern Ghanaian cities due to its geographic position and economic structure. As major hub for Northern Ghana goods distribution and informal trading those outputs set an enormous amount of pressure on city dwellers and their incomes. That’s a specific scenario where social pressure among extended family members, wives and husbands, elders and youngsters, small boys and big men, is higher than usual due to frail economic situation. A young man can be pressured by his family to get a wife and ‘become respectable’ while he pressures a wealthy uncle to give him money to start his business or a big man he worked for to give him something to get by.

The anxiety to always have to look for somebody and to always be looked for makes the city a ‘minefield’ where everybody tries to hide and seek at the same time. Hiding money, spending it for vanishing goods like drugs or alcohol, ‘traveling’ without any notice, hiding and sitting in the forest for the day, hiding inside the compound are only few of the tactics used by people to face the social pressure during times of economic constrain. Drawing on ethnographic research I wish to explore how Tamale is lived by its inhabitant through the lens of pressure and its effects.

Paper short abstract:

The argument developed in the paper will explore pressures at two levels – national and personal – to show how the effort to release systemic pressures at the national scale result in pressures surrounding personal and professional lives of community workers.

Paper long abstract:

Kenyan Constitution of 2010 introduced a new set of mechanisms under the umbrella of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) that allows communities to mediate, negotiate, arbitrate and settle minor cases that are petty and non-criminal in their nature. ADR came about in attempt to remove some pressures from already over-burdened Kenyan legal system and facilitate people’s access to justice at the community level. This paper is interested in exploring the gendered labour, depletion and pressures that de-pressuring Kenyan legal system resulted in among Kenyan sex worker paralegals using ADR. The article will draw on data collected in June 2022 when working with sex worker organisations in Nairobi. The argument developed in the paper will explore pressures at two levels – national and personal – to show how the effort to release systemic pressures at the national scale result in pressures surrounding personal and professional lives of community workers. It will do so referring to feminist scholarship on social reproduction, triple burdens of women in communities and depletion to illuminate the gendered dimensions of pressure in today’s Nairobi.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the concept of ‘pressure’ as a means of understanding the gendered livelihood strategies of young rural migrants in a post-pandemic Addis Ababa. It also draws attention to the social and economic consequences of navigating 'pressure', examined through a gender-sensitive lens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper operationalises the concept of ‘pressure’ to deepen our understanding of the social and economic embeddedness of the everyday practices of rural youth in Addis Ababa, examined through a gender-focused deconstruction of survival strategies and stress factors. Drawing on qualitative data collected in 2022, this paper finds youth ‘survive’ the city by devising strategies to deal with multifaceted gendered forms of pressure that characterise their lives as informal citizens in the Ethiopian capital. These expressions of pressure include meeting childcare responsibilities, addressing financial obligations to families of origin, living without access to state-provided services, and confronting rising costs of food and rent within contexts of social precarity and economic uncertainty. These strategies, structured around the diversification of income-generating activities and through activities linked to the realisations of future aspirations, form an integral part of migrants’ everyday lives. Nevertheless, this paper also finds that strategies devised to survive the city produce compounding layers of pressure, including the acquisition of debt, patterns of pathological substance abuse and gambling, and the seemingly unavoidable pursuit of future migration as a means of transforming lives for the better, pointing to the particularities of these gendered experiences, practices and future imaginaries as well as to the negative outcomes they create in the lives of migrant youth. This paper highlights the need to challenge normative theorisations of the disenfranchisement in the urban, using ‘pressure’ as a conceptual lens to underline the intricacies of everyday life in the new, post-pandemic African city.

Paper short abstract:

This article explores how the dense living conditions of Pipeline, a high-rise residential settlement in Nairobi, create gendered forms of pressure and constraint on tenant lives and everyday realities, affecting their social interactions and relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This article explores how the dense living conditions of Pipeline, a high-rise residential settlement in Nairobi, create particular forms of pressure and constraint on tenant lives and everyday realities, affecting their social interactions and relationships. The cramped, high-rise residential district comprises dense rows of multistorey private rental flats, and is predominantly inhabited by young and primarily migrant individuals and families. Many of these tenants are unemployed, or employed in the low-wage industrial areas. Of special pertinence is the question of how the neighborhood’s spatial conditions shape gender relations, and how they influence the ways in which women organize their private and professional lives. Based upon 24 months of fieldwork, dozens of qualitative interviews with female migrants (wives, single mothers, business women, students), and a deep understanding of Nairobi’s housing policies and history, the article zooms in on physical and social spaces occupied by women, such as apartments, corridors, balconies, and chamas - economic self-help groups - to explore women’s strategies to reduce social, economic, and romantic pressure. These are contrasted with male spaces and forms of “depressuring”.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a young family living on the northern fringe of Nairobi city, this paper illuminates the shifting meanings and manifestations of 'pressure' over time. In a cost of living crisis, 'pressure' to be successful is soon replaced by economic pressure to generate cash to solve domestic crises.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that tropes of ‘getting by’ in the city lack sufficient specificity to properly describe the sorts of economic struggles experienced by those who derive their wages from the informal economy. ‘Pressure’ and its multiple manifestations offers an alternative means through which to glimpse the normative pressures for success placed upon young men establishing their own households and families, but also the way in which economic pressure shifts over time – how minor crises in the domestic life of a household (illness, for instance) – produce knock-on effects that intensify the economic pressure to plug financial gaps by courting the assistance of potential patrons. Drawing on the travails of a particular household in peri-urban Kiambu, just beyond the borders of Nairobi city, the paper argues that a concept like ‘pressure’ can usefully identify the wider normative emphasis on economic success characteristic of contemporary Kenya. But in a cost of living crisis, one that is global as much as local, pressure’s material connotation returns home to roost. Rather than an analytical concept divorced from history, reified for anthropological abstraction, the paper argues that the advantage of ‘pressure’ is in its historicity - as a means of identifying local response to broader changing economic dynamics, recalling Wale Adebanwi’s notion of ‘a political economy of everyday life’.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of a group of West African migrants in urban Ghana to consider how social and economic pressures convert into efforts at, and frustration about, relational detachment.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine the experiences of a group of West African migrants in urban Ghana to consider how social and economic pressures convert into efforts at, and frustration about, relational detachment, especially from kin back home. In the context of increasing opportunities for transregional mobility and of simultaneously declining opportunities for economic success both at home and abroad, many transnational urban migrants are torn between responsibilities to their families and their own migratory goals. Based on ethnographic research conducted intermittently from 2012 to 2021 in Accra, I show how gradual, selective and temporal social detachment becomes a means not only of escaping what are often perceived to be onerous obligations to kin, but also of cultivating what I term durational ethics: a disposition enabling endurance in the face of socioeconomic predicaments, often for many years on end. I draw on the migrants’ shifting experiences of distance, progress and the felt lack thereof to explore conceptions of pressure and the motivations behind, and effects of, cutting off social relations in times of stress. I argue that the migrants’ efforts at relational detachment, facilitated through geographical and social separation, set in sharp relief – but also contest – the political-economic structures that propel economic inequality and marginalisation, particularly in urban contexts. Conversely, the migrants’ understanding and practices of detachment offer a nuanced reflection on how social and economic pressures are felt, endured and acted upon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper sheds light on life ‘under pressure’ from the perspective of Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya. It presents Nakuru as a place where pressure manifests itself as a highly volatile and affective force that is rich in meaning about what it means to (de)pressurize beyond the megacities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sheds light on life ‘under pressure’ from the perspective of Nakuru, a (re)nascent, secondary city in Kenya situated 160 km Northwest from Nairobi. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork between 2016 and 2021, this article presents Nakuru as a place where pressure manifests itself as a highly volatile and affective force that is rich in meaning about what it means to (de)pressurize beyond the megacities. Against the backdrop of Nakuru seeking city-status at the time of fieldwork, the article foregrounds how smaller cities such as Nakuru compete with the metropole, how urbanites perceive this competition in terms of pressure and what a theorization of ‘pressure’ from the point of view of smaller secondary cities can contribute to the literature on urban Africa. The article ultimately argues that pressure in Nakuru is best described as a double bind: on the one hand, the city appears to be a place where life is ‘cooler’, away from the hassle of the metropole Nairobi, while on the other hand, youths struggle with profound feelings of ‘directionlessness’ and anxiety. These feelings echo larger concerns about the increasing pressure Nakuru’s city-status brings along in terms of expectations and life worlds the aspiring youth struggle to live up to.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the massive investments – both psychic and economic – people make in the construction of a home in southern Benin. Indeed, building a home is locally a crucial marker of self-accomplishment and social distinction that many men experience as a site of acute pressure.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the massive investments - both psychic and economic - people make in the construction of a home in southern Benin. Indeed, building a home is locally a crucial marker of self-accomplishment and social distinction that many men experience as a site of acute pressure.

In fact, having one's own 'home' is, in Benin, a major source of social recognition, against which men are likely to evaluate their place in the social world. This is why everyone invests in a house that can become a real showcase for their success. In the upper classes, large multi-storey houses are built, increasingly surrounded by barbed wire walls. In the working classes, aesthetic concerns take a back seat, but efforts are made to build at least a few rooms, to install a false ceiling that would provide some insulation from the heat of the tin roof, and perhaps later to tile the living area.

The scale of the investments that working-class men make in the construction of their own homes also suggests a clear awareness of what is at stake, both in terms of differences in living conditions and in terms of the subjective distinctions that divide local social space. In fact, the economic strategies and social experiences of the men involved in the construction of these houses, in often uncertain conditions, reveal a dialectic between internalized norms and social pressures, whose entanglements support the urge to ‘realize’ a house which will testify to the social value of the owner.