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ABSTRACT
This article discusses how Western Kenyans imagine and plan their futures in contrasting ways with a focus on three different gambling practices observed in a cluster of patrilineal homesteads. While participating in the national lottery entails an understanding of the future as organized by other actors and as, in principle, projectable, I analyse the practice of regularly placing low-risk bets on football games as a consequence of negating the possibility to plan one’s future in the long term. I lay bare a third conceptualization of the future by closely examining a betting ‘system’ one of my interlocutors had developed to hit a weekly jackpot. This conceptualization assumes that the future unfolds in ways that are, although very difficult to grasp, laid out in the present. The article concludes by distinguishing three ways in which gambling deals with the future, i.e. how it disclaims, upscales and invents the certainty of the future.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Franziska Fay, Joachim Knab and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on former versions of this article. I furthermore thank Alfred Anangwe for assisting me in the archives, Jack Misiga and Esao Mwalo for support during fieldwork in Nairobi and Western Kenya and the participants of a workshop on gambling I organized with my colleague Christoph Lange for helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Cassidy, “Casino Capitalism.”
2. Meiu, Ethno-Erotic Economies, 261.
3. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Occult Economies,” 281.
4. Daily Nation, 29 November 2015
5. Ibid.
6. Weiss, “Introduction,” 19.
7. Notable exceptions include the work of Parish (e.g. “Circumventing Uncertainty”) and Van Wyk (e.g. “Tata Ma Chance”).
8. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions.
9. Places and individuals are anonymized.
10. Beckert, Imagined Futures.
11. Schmidt, “Disordered Surroundings,” 278–9.
12. Riches, “Cash, Credit, and Gambling.”
13. Vernacularized terms such as ‘systems’, ‘formulas’ or – as exemplified by Van Wyk, “Tata Ma Chance,” 58–59 – ‘plans’ carry a slightly different meaning than in British or US-American Standard English as they mostly refer to the systems of others, i.e. to systems that one has not yet fully grasped. This allows jo-Kaleko to often use these terms sarcastically – e.g. when they refer to the ‘system’ of a drunkard.
14. Pink and Salazar, “Anthropologies and Futures,” 5.
15. Appadurai, The Future as a Cultural Fact, 295.
16. Psychological research is often preoccupied with inventing complex personality tests that allow scholars to differentiate between so-called ‘problem and non-problem gamblers’ in order to predict the behaviour of individuals. See, e.g. Clarke, “Impulsiveness.”
17. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 58.
18. Van Wijk, “Bad Luck,” 157.
19. For a critique of the equation of sacrifice with gambling in Western Kenya, see Shipton “Trusting and Transcending.”
20. Cf Pickles, “Introduction,” for Oceania.
21. Two games are played regularly. Itisha (‘shout it out’) is played by two players. Player A chooses a card, for example a seven. Player B then removes one card from the deck, puts it in front of A, then removes another card and puts it in front of himself, continuing like that. The player who first gets a seven wins. Itisha is considered a game of pure luck. In contrast, flowers, a form of crazy eights, is, as one gambler told me, ‘a game of the mind’.
22. Hauge, Luo Religion, 54.
23. Kenya National Archives [KNA], Folder PC/NZA/2/7/1, 4. ‘Crown & Anchor” is a relatively simple dice game that used to be played by members of the Royal Navy.
24. KNA, Folder PC/NZA/2/7/1, 5.
25. The Information Services Handout No. 251. Public Sweepstakes and Lotteries Organised in Kenya handed out to all provinces in 1949, e.g. demands that not ‘less that [sic] 40% of the gross takings to be allotted to the charity’. KNA PC/NZA/2/7/1.
26. The state’s wish to control gambling is still prominent today. According to Kenya’s constitution, gambling in the streets is illegal which, e.g. leads to regular police raids of Kaleko’s ‘casino’.
27. Moore, “Prosperity in Crisis,” 7.
28. The Weekly Review, 17 March 1989
29. Cf. with the entrepreneur Said Omar of Gilgil who successfully and legally organized ‘carnivals’ that included games of chance in the area around Nakuru for several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, KNA DC-NKU 2/25/28, passim.
30. All of the applications I found that were sent by black Kenyans were rejected, cf. KNA DC-NKU 2/25/28.
31. In a questionnaire distributed to 111 jo-Kaleko, 55% of the men and 20% of the women answered that they have betted in the past or are currently betting with peaks in the age-group between 18 and 35.
32. A ‘multi-bet’ is composed of several bets which odds are then combined. ‘Multi-bets’ are preferred by most gamblers as the potential win increases exponentially.
33. Casey, “Domesticating Gambling” is a notable exception.
34. Although betting is much more visible in towns, it takes place in the rural-urban continuum, i.e. people from both rural as well as urban areas discuss and debate odds and upcoming games via WhatsApp and other social media. Jack, e.g. regularly talks about betting with his father, a retired primary school teacher known as “the professor” who is one of the most active gamblers in Kaleko. They also send each other money in case one lacks the means to bet.
35. Van Wyk, “Tata Ma Chance,” 41, see also 50–52.
36. Johnson-Hanks, “The Future Decides,” 370–1.
37. Herskowitz, “Gambling, Saving, and Lumpy Liquidity Needs,” 3. Herskowitz ‘paper takes seriously his interlocutors’ perspective who ‘view and report to demand betting as a means of liquidity generation’ (ibid., 4). In contrast to what my informants suggest, he concludes that it is the lack of saving opportunities and not the lack of earning opportunities which causes such a demand.
38. Johnson-Hanks, “The Future Decides,” 376.
39. Newell, The Modernity Bluff, 21.
40. Van Wijk, “Bad Luck, Slippery Money,” 166.
41. Cosgrave and Klassen, “Gambling against the State.”
42. Van Wyk, “Tata Ma Chance,” 44–46.
43. KNA AG/42/274, 4.
44. Ibid., 22.
45. Ibid., 28.
46. Peebles. “Inverting the Panopticon,” 236.
47. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
48. Geissler and Prince, The Land is Dying.
49. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 153.
50. Pickles, “Introduction,” 213.
51. Schmidt, “Money as Life,” 72.
52. Zeitlyn, “Divinatory Logics.”
53. Parish, “Circumventing Uncertainty.”
54. Ibid., 77.
55. Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design, 307.
56. Cf. Appadurai, The Future as a Cultural Fact; Barnes, “Environmental Futures,” Pink et al., Anthropologies and Futures.
57. Johnson-Hanks, “The Future Decides,” 370–1.
58. Pels, “Modern Times,” 781.