The moral economy of sex work in Mombasa, Kenya

Abstract

This paper investigates the process of individuals trying to figure out how the neoliberal economy works by focusing on women selling sex in Mombasa, Kenya. The article will explore the key tensions prevailing in sex work through encounters with supernatural forces narrated by women selling sex. The analysis presented will argue that there are two key tensions that define the moral economy of sex work in Mombasa: the strong stratification among sex workers that position a minority of already better off women in more advantageous ways, thereby leaving most others in precarity; and worries about changing masculinities that result in men who are non-human. Both of those tensions signify the anxieties surrounding an occupation that historically allowed women to accumulate capital and re-insert themselves into Kenyan society in more advantageous positions (see for instance, White 1990, Bujra 1977). Furthermore, the contemporary lived realities of selling sex also speak to the processes of neoliberalisation that are internalised by women selling sex and are becoming a key feature of contemporary commercial sex work.

Cet article étudie le processus des personnes essayant de comprendre comment fonctionne l’économie néolibérale et se concentre pour cela sur les femmes qui vendent des services sexuels à Mombasa, au Kenya. L’article explore les principales tensions qui prévalent dans le travail du sexe à travers des rencontres avec des forces surnaturelles racontées par des femmes vendant du sexe. L’analyse présentée soutient que deux tensions principales définissent l’économie morale du travail du sexe à Mombasa: la forte stratification parmi les travailleuses du sexe qui situe une minorité de femmes déjà mieux loties de façon plus avantageuse, laissant ainsi la plus grande partie des autres dans la précarité; et les inquiétudes concernant l’évolution des masculinités qui se traduisent par des hommes qui sont inhumains. Ces deux tensions soulignent les angoisses entourant une profession qui historiquement a permis aux femmes d’accumuler du capital et de se réinsérer dans la société kenyane à des postes plus avantageux (voir par exemple White 1990, Bujra 1977). En outre, les réalités contemporaines vécues de la vente de services sexuels témoignent également des processus de néolibéralization qui sont intériorisés par les femmes vendant des services sexuels et deviennent une caractéristique essentielle du travail du sexe commercial contemporain.

Keywords:

• moral economy
• sex work
• Kenya
• gender
• supernatural

Mots clés:

• économie morale
• travail du sex
• Kenya
• sexe
• surnaturel

[Sometimes] you have a good man, maybe the other girls will come, and you sit there, but they come and seduce that boy. There is a lot of competition, even those girls can make a plan and beat you. Because of the guy, they beat you. Some of the girls, they can even go to the witchcraft, make you even not normal. (Precious, 23 years old)

Yeah, nowadays they [men] don’t want to marry, nowadays they don’t want completely they don’t want. I don’t know why. I think for them, they found the life is tough, that is why I think they don’t want to get married. Things are expensive, things are getting harder, that is why. I think even them, if they compare, maybe a man, OK, maybe he is working, ok, let’s say he is being paid, maybe 10,000. What is 10,000? you have a wife and family. OK, let’s say he has a family. Is that 10,000 enough? With a family? It is not. So, I think that men they have sat down and found that it is hard. Because especially here in Kenya, even getting jobs is a problem. (Christy, 30 years old)

Too much competition. A lot of bewitching. There are those women who fight for people who buy sex from them. Or maybe they suspect that this one has a lot of money, so they don’t want him to attach himself to anybody. You understand? So, they go and tie him to herself. (Lilian, 27 years old)

This paper investigates how individuals navigate the workings of the neoliberal economy by focusing on women selling sex in Mombasa, Kenya. It will explore the key tensions prevailing in sex work through encounters with supernatural forces narrated by women selling sex. The analysis presented will argue that there are two key tensions that define the moral economy of sex work in Mombasa: the strong stratification among sex workers that position a minority of already better off women in more advantageous ways, thereby, leaving others in precarity; and worries about changing masculinities that result in clients who ‘are not men’. Both of those tensions signify the anxieties surrounding an occupation that has historically allowed women to accumulate capital and re-insert themselves into Kenyan society in more advantageous positions (see for instance White 1990, Bujra 1977). Furthermore, the contemporary lived realities of selling sex also speaks to the processes of neo-liberalisation that are internalised and are becoming a key feature of commercial sex work.

In African studies, the transition to the contemporary neoliberal socio-economic era is marked by the structural adjustment period that started in the 1990s and generated studies investigating neoliberal transformations and moral changes (Harrison 2010; Ferguson 2006; Wiegratz and Česnulytė 2016). Several scholars (Blunt 2004; Deacon and Lynch 2013; Smith 2005) point out that, in the case of Kenya, forces that are deemed to originate from the invisible and spiritual world also became more active with the advent of neo-liberal reforms. This is not surprising, as narratives about supernatural powers usually indicate not only anxieties about a new socio-economic order, but also help communities make sense of new living conditions, new forms of accumulation and progression (Geschiere 1998; Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998). While free markets and liberalisation from the 1990s onwards made poverty and stark inequalities visible across the country, they also created pockets of wealth in Kenya, pointing towards the possibility for people to accumulate wealth and achieve a good life (see Katumanga 2005 for an account of accumulation through banditry; Rasmussen 2017 on the lucrative sugar trade; and Mutongi 2006 on the transport sector). As Sanders argues, in the case of Tanzania, the neoliberal experience shows that ‘free markets’ can deliver on the promise of raising some people from poverty to wealth, and it is this possibility that animates people to investigate the ‘relationship between means and ends, actions and outcomes’ (Sanders 2008, 116). In such a context then, people are trying to determine how exactly one succeeds and how to make this new system benefit one’s aims. Keeping this attempt to understand the routes to success in mind, this paper will investigate the presence of supernatural forces in sex work and the relation between supernatural powers and personal (mis)fortunes in this line of work.

The argument presented in this paper is composed of three parts. First, I situate sex work as gendered, informal, and social reproductive labour that builds upon gendered differences in Mombasa’s economy. In this section, I discuss the highly unequal outcomes of selling sex among women, and how this differentiation, in combination with the performativity that sex work entails, results in a lack of clarity about what determines success in sex work. Here, I build on and contribute to literature on the gendered nature of labour in contemporary capitalism, especially debates surrounding moral economies and informal labouring practices in African contexts. Second, I focus on the contradiction between the need for cooperation to stay safe and the intense competition for clients in the context of increasing precarity as a key conflict in the moral economy of sex work. I analyse the scholarship investigating the supernatural on the Kenyan coast and debates surrounding neoliberal individualism to argue that both tendencies are linked to contemporary practices of differentiation, fracturing, and precarity that produces winners and losers in neoliberal structures. The third section investigates narratives of non-human men who appear as sex worker clients to explore sex worker fears about changing local masculinities and to argue that such changes represent a threat to the livelihood of many in sex work.

This analysis is largely based on primary data collected during the period of October 2010 to May 2011 and December 2015 to January 2016 in Nairobi and Mombasa. Mombasa was the main location of the research, where I spent six months collecting the life-stories of 41 self-identified female sex workers from different backgrounds, and ages, and with different incomes. All women cited in this article are quoted under pseudonyms they chose themselves.

Gendered labour markets and sex work in neoliberal Kenya

Sex work is not a new phenomenon in Kenya and has been an avenue for accumulation by providing social reproductive labour from at least colonial times onwards (White 1990; Bujra 1975, 1977). Women selling sex along newly constructed railway lines or accumulating capital through their prostitution activities in colonial Nairobi were engaged in the same process as women selling sex today – they were exchanging their social reproductive labour for money in economies that made male access to such labour, via traditional avenues of marriage or other familial arrangements, difficult (or even impossible) and where women faced limitations in labour markets. It is unsurprising then, that historically sex workers have always been present in and around places that host men for their labour, but were not welcoming women, such as military bases (Enloe 2000), colonial cities with gendered settlement regulations (White 1990), and mines (Parpart 1986).

While neoliberal theorists claim rationality and neutrality towards gender, neoliberal practices reproduce gender inequalities, because of their blindness to social reproduction and implicit male-bias (Elson 1995; Elson and Cagatay 2000; Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2016). Feminists investigating the social effects of Structural Adjustment Programmes or later generations of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in the Global South demonstrated that the neoliberal era reinforced traditional gender roles by relegating women to the domestic sphere to deal with social reproductive tasks that the state no longer contributed to – from caring for children, the elderly or ill, to producing and making food and acquiring petty jobs to pay for their children’s education (see Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2016; Sparr 1994). While women began facing double or triple burdens at home, men also started feeling the effects of neoliberal restructuring from decreasing employment opportunities or worsening conditions at work (Kinyanjui 2003; Kiruthu 2014). The new economic realities meant that most people started experiencing strains in the social sphere – as informal safety nets could no longer support individuals through familial arrangements, entering and staying in marriages became a complicated task in the context of economic difficulties (see Silberschmidt 2004). Neoliberal policies, with their tendencies to prioritise the markets and the economic sphere, resulted in a crisis of social reproduction (Tansel 2017; Fraser 2013).

Precarity and difficulties in making a living have become increasingly prevalent in Kenya since the 1990s, but it is also evident that some people have benefited from the new system. The crisis of the formal transport sector, for instance, opened opportunities for (mainly male) individuals to make a living and accumulate wealth through informal transport businesses in Eastern Africa (Sanders 2008; Mutongi 2006). The crisis of social reproduction meant that some (mainly female) individuals turned to the old practice of commercialising social reproduction (selling sex, for example) and a few among them managed to accumulate wealth in the process. For many women in sex work, this occupation presents a more profitable avenue for earning a living than the gendered alternatives (informal vending, agriculture or work in the service industry). Furthermore, as I have discussed elsewhere, (Česnulytė 2015) sex work is often seen by women as a temporary phase to accumulate capital that could be invested in other economic ventures (for example, real estate, retail, transport businesses) or to engineer social mobility (by entering the formal economy or dependency on male income through marriage or cohabitation).

While selling sex might be chosen as a temporary strategy by many women with the dream of a ‘good life’, the reality of selling sex does not always match this expectation. In fact, the realities of commercial sex are highly diverse, and women experience them in very unequal ways (see Česnulytė 2019). There are women who earn substantial amounts of money selling sex, successfully accumulate capital and invest it in real estate or other lines of business (beauty salons, shops, retail businesses; owning trucks, matatus, or motorbikes that are then rented out to provide transportation services; acquiring and then renting out rooms or apartments, among many other businesses). There are women who put themselves through education or training while selling sex and then find well-paying jobs in the formal economy. There are also women who marry the clients they meet and leave sex work for the roles of housewives (or mistresses) and achieve financial security in this way. However, not all women manage to use sex work in ways that would put them among those who emerge better off – some do not manage to save and accumulate, others do not make successful investments in the alternative sectors, yet others never earn that much. There are women who sell sex in addition to their other (formal and informal) low-paid jobs, and women who work only seasonally or irregularly to make up for the downturn in their families’ fortunes. Finally, there are women who struggle while selling sex and barely make a living, surviving in the most precarious ways. Selling sex is always accompanied by violence and dangers – violent clients and encounters with police, the possibility of infections, sexual violence or murder, discrimination and stigma attached to the occupation by the public are experiences shared by all women who sell sex. However, in this violent and abusive environment, some women manage to achieve a better life, thereby emphasising the very unequal outcomes of sex work and the highly diverse experiences of this occupation.

The unequal experiences of selling sex and the highly diverse livelihoods that such work helps create are sources of constant discussions among sex workers in my research. There are rumours about ‘girls from good families’ that sell sex ‘because they like it’, stories about women who came to magnificent wealth arising from this line of work through lucky encounters, and countless personal stories of success. However, there was no clear agreement over what determines one’s fortune; instead, various interpretations, ranging from accusations of unfairness (lowering the prices so that one attracts more clients) or socially unacceptable practices (selling sex without a condom or engaging in anal sex) to involvement with the supernatural circulate.

I argue that the lack of clarity about what determines success while selling sex is linked to the performativity that sex work entails. Ssewakiryanga (2004), in his study of Ugandan dynamics, demonstrates that sex workers construct their work identities in relation to social power structures and material contexts. Ssewakiryanga’s work emphasises personal attributes such as age, education, ethnicity, and sex in sex worker self-identity construction. I want to add to this by pointing towards the multiple femininities prevailing in society that are mimicked through sex work. It became clear throughout my research that women actively construct and perform different femininities they deem best to respond to men’s social reproductive needs and secure the highest pay. These range from open negotiations about money for sex where women play the role of ‘prostitute’ or Malaya (see Tamale 2011) to more ambiguous situations where women pretend to be out in bars for fun or engineer other seemingly everyday situations with the hope of becoming the girlfriend, wife, or mistress of their potential client, and so, gaining access to money, presents, or favours. In the context where romantic encounters often carry financial obligations (see Cole and Thomas 2009; Ferguson 1999), a woman pretending to be ‘somebody’s wife’ who is being seduced in a bar can mean a better financial outcome than a negotiated price with a sex worker on the street. As one of the women I interviewed, Robina, explained:

Sometimes you look at somebody, and you feel that you cannot tell him that you are a sex worker. Because he will ask you: ‘Are you free, can we have a drink together and talk, we can be friends?’ Maybe stay together in a hotel, because some are from Nairobi, some are from Europe, whatever. So, you have a drink together and he says: ‘Can you come with me to the hotel?’ And then you say ‘Yeah’, and then you can’t tell him the amount you want. In the morning he says ‘Ok, here are the money for you for taxi to go home’. He gives you money for a taxi, he is not saying ‘I give you money because I slept with you’, he gives you the money but says it is for a taxi to go home.

Strategies like the one explained by Robina, are common among women selling sex and many of them were attempting to present themselves in different ways to fit into different situations by performing different femininities. Efforts to dress in particular ways, with women trying to look ‘expensive’ when targeting tourists, or ‘decent’ when aiming for Kenyan middle-class clients, are part of such attempts, as is the behaviour that women adopted or the venue they chose for their work. All these gendered performances build on gender inequalities and gendered expectations associated with normative femininities and masculinities prevalent in society, from the ‘prostitute’ who can be engaged in transactions through open negotiations, to the promiscuous married woman who can be seduced in a bar and then given a present at the end of the night, or a young woman out in a nightclub looking for fun, to the struggling mother who can be taken advantage of in exchange for supporting her. Each of those femininities carry the possibility of engaging different types of masculinities and access to a share of male earnings. It is common for women to switch between different types of feminine performances in response to the developing situation and their financial needs (for example, starting the night by openly soliciting clients on the street for a quick but smaller amount of money, and then using the money to enter an expensive night club where the role of an ‘expensive lady’ is enacted with the hope of attracting a tourist who will pay more).

The illusions that are created by performing different feminine roles are targeted at potential clients and rarely match the lived realities of women. For example, when my research assistant, Grace, met the above-mentioned Robina and her two friends in a nightclub, she was dazzled by their beauty and assumed they lived in an expensive apartment. However, when Grace went to Robina’s place to take her to her interview with me the next morning, she found Robina and the same two friends from the previous night sharing a room together with their three children in rather harsh conditions, with no running water or electricity. While the performance of different femininities is part of women’s working strategies and attempts to earn as much as possible, it also has unintended spectators – just like Grace, other women selling sex find it hard to distinguish between their realities and performances when judging each other, which in turn facilitates jealousy and rumours among them.

Men and their circumstances are the second reason for the lack of clarity around how to achieve success in sex work. Despite many success stories that are shared among women selling sex, well-paying clients are not that common: foreign tourists only appear in the high season of tourism, and local clients who are rich frequent places that are not accessible to all; middle-class clients are dogged by the same worries about school fees and rising costs of living as everyone else and negotiate hard with sex workers (for more on masculinities and associated struggles see Uchendu 2008; Izugbara 2015; Ratele 2016). The well-paying clients that sex workers hope to find are rare, and most women work with men who cannot pay very high prices required for fast capital accumulation, thereby making just enough to survive or cover the very bare livelihood costs.

Women who sell sex, thus, dream about and try to achieve a ‘good life’ in a context of precarity where some sex workers seem to have ‘made it’, but their daily lived reality is often defined by struggles. It is this juxtaposition of lived precarity and seemingly close riches that is at the core of the moral economy of sex work in Mombasa and motivates women to look for the answer to the same question, like the bus drivers in Dar es Salaam explored by Sanders (2008): how does one really get rich? It is in this context that the supernatural forces and the occult appear, as will be explored below.

The supernatural in the moral economy of sex work of Mombasa

Talk about the supernatural is an everyday occurrence in Mombasa, as supernatural forces seem to be part of the city. There is a range of services available to help one deal with any misfortunes – from mirrors that can show snippets of one’s past (convenient if you had something stolen from you), to magical solutions to regain virility, reignite your husband’s or wife’s interest or avenge your enemy or various curses and spells (a number of waganga¹ services are advertised in public places). Some cats are said to be majini,² owls are suspected to be able to steal new-born babies’ souls, and one can buy a ‘lucky call’ that will bring you the news that you crave. Just as Mombasa is home to people from different parts of Kenya and the broader region, so it seems that supernatural forces arise from different origins – from Arabic influences of majini, to waganga from Tanzania, and new charismatic churches with broad transnational networks (Yong 2017) that offer prayer as a form of protection from occult forces.

People discuss matters of a supernatural nature just as they discuss politics or any other important topic; such discussions are part of public life. For instance, after the post-election violence of 2008, some people whose properties were robbed in Mombasa publicly cursed the thieves, calling them to return looted goods or face the consequences. As rumours started spreading about some thieves suddenly succumbing to serious illnesses or even death, many chose to return stolen goods to their rightful owners (see, for example, Achieng 2008). Just as supernatural events are part of Mombasa’s everyday life, so they are part of Mombasa’s sex industry. People selling sex told stories about supernatural events that were part of their work experiences and explained the ‘workings’ of magic with fluency. Many knew how much particular services cost and where to obtain them, even though nobody among my interlocutors admitted to ever having used them.

While the supernatural forces in Mombasa seem to be used to address or explain the daily worries of any big city – locating stolen goods, resolving sexual and marital problems, or getting a job – the stories about supernatural powers that I heard in the sex industries focused on two major areas that will be elaborated here. The first group of accounts contain narratives about the ways that occult forces can be used to gain advantage in sex work, and the different effects that such dynamics have on the rest of the colleagues in the industry. I argue that these stories point to a great divide among women selling sex, their income, possibilities, and capacities. Suspicions of using supernatural powers are usually voiced by poorer women who comment on the success of their peers, and, I argue, can be seen as commentaries on the different material realities and social progression that the same type of labour (sex work) results in. The second group of stories are commentaries on men who appear like good men but are believed to not be human beings. These narratives, I will argue, are reflections on the changing gender relations and emerging new masculinities that are shaped by increasingly precarious material realities. Just as ordinary men often find it difficult to live up to the expectations of the male breadwinner and often start failing in their duties to provide for families (see Izugbara and Egesa 2020 for instance); so, as recounted by sex workers, men who are not humans disappear without payment in the most mysterious circumstances or behave in violent manners not seen before.

Encounters with supernatural forces that women selling sex share are part of Mombasa’s moral economy of sex work. They identify key areas of social conflict, ambiguity, and tensions over the meaning and dynamics of sex work. On one hand, they help to narrate the very unequal outcomes of selling sex among women and the income divisions among them that determine women’s safety, income, and possibilities. On the other hand, such narratives comment on the changes brought by neoliberal dynamics and increasing precarity – men who look like humans but behave in ways that are not in line with locally recognised masculine actions represent a threat to the gender relations and to the usual ways sex workers, thus far have managed to capitalise on gender inequalities.

Competition, inequalities and the supernatural

The first category of accounts involving supernatural interventions in sex work are concerned with competition. It involves stories about different ways in which harnessing supernatural powers can give one an advantage in attracting clients, the undesired effects of this process for others and, of course, narratives of how to prevent oneself from falling victim to such unfair competition. This category of stories grapples with two important questions in the moral economy of sex work: (1) how does one really get rich in sex work; (2) how does one stay safe (and continue profiting) while others employ supernatural forces? Both questions are salient because of the strong inequalities of income and the resulting differences in the livelihoods of sex workers.

The dangers associated with sex work mean that many women rely on each other for their safety. Sex worker cooperation is important to ensure one’s safety when with a client, and some women reported practices of taking care of each other’s belongings to avoid robberies, safeguarding their colleague’s advanced pay to minimise the risk of non-payment, and checking on each other while they are with clients to mitigate the risk of client violence. Forming work alliances can also bring additional clients as women call on their colleagues when their clients have friends and serve as an informal knowledge-sharing mechanism regarding abusive clients, expected rates of bribes for guards or police officers in particular venues, as well as safe sex practices. Finally, solidarity with fellow sex workers can help to deal with difficult life situations, ranging from the shock of discovering a positive HIV status, to dealing with grief or disease.

While working together with fellow sex workers has obvious important advantages, such cooperation is not common. The Kenyan Sex Worker Alliance singles out the lack of sex worker organisation on the ground as one of the challenges for the sex worker movement in Kenya (Kinyili 2014), for which there are many reasons. Scholars studying informal workers point to the informal nature of sex work, the legal status of the occupation and stigma surrounding commercial sex activities as important explanations for a lack of solidarity (Kabeer, Milward, and Sudarshan 2013; Mgbako 2016). Still, as the women interviewed repeatedly pointed out, the most important reason for the apprehension to cooperate while working is the intense competition for clients among sex workers. Friendships and trust among sex workers is difficult because good clients are few and, when trying to attract them, some women choose to forego the benefits of solidarity. Many women told stories about competition for men that resulted in fierce violence among women selling sex – from severe beatings of newcomers in established locations, to fights when a potential client shows up. The second outcome of this intense competition is that in response to newly arrived young women in town, some more established women need to lower their prices to stay competitive and, thus, earn less than before; others start losing clients to women who are close to them, resulting in not only a loss of friendship but also a loss of vital income. Accusations about supernatural interventions creating winners and losers in sex work is then part of this local moral economy where, in the context of increasing precarity, women face a dilemma on whether to cooperate with each other to stay safe while selling sex but simultaneously risk betrayal from a close colleague who can impede the possibility of good pay and all the other possibilities that a man and his money in sex work represents.

Let me unpack the most popular types of accounts in this category. First, there are narratives about women who employ supernatural powers to achieve success in sex work. None of the women interviewed admitted to soliciting such aid themselves, but many knew exactly where one needed to go to strike such a deal. In line with other witchcraft practices in the region (see Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998), the most effective magic comes from faraway places (good waganga in Tanzania, effective spirits from Bahrein), but less effective services are also available locally in Mombasa. The cost of such services are also not secret. Here is account from Winnie (30 years old):

So, he [witchdoctor] tells you, now, you got to bring here two goats, one chicken, or three chicken, and some lesos:³ red, white; and some spice, the special food for ghosts⁴ from Baharini [Bahrein]. Like that.

Usually, there are rules that the mganga sets to be followed if one wants to succeed, different charms or products that need to be applied to a body for a certain period, or all the payment that a woman receives in one night/week/other fixed period must be brought to mganga to ensure the effectiveness of the supernatural effects. Lilian (27 years old) insisted that it is ‘very possible’ with the help of witchcraft to bond a man to a woman, because witchcraft ensures that every time a man thinks about sex, he always comes to that particular woman. In other similar accounts, the men became very generous in payment, where witchcraft helped attract many well-paying clients or generated a magical attraction that men could not resist.

What becomes apparent in these accounts is that women who are suspected of using supernatural powers are already winners in the sex work hierarchies because they have enough disposable income to be able to afford very high payments,⁵ or even travel to Tanzania. Even in cases where payment for witchcraft is all the profit they have made during the day/week, the woman needs to have enough savings to survive that day/week with no income from sex work. This is not an easy feat as sex work can entail quite a bit of expenditure: women have to pay for transport to their work places, pay entry for the different bars or clubs or other venues, purchase drinks, and pay bribes to the guards or police, among other expenses. Usually, women use the first earnings of the night to cover some of those expenses, but in this case, they should use savings, because all the profits made while working would need to be paid to the mganga, as per agreement. Furthermore, these women are connected to the international sphere, either through their imported Tanzanian magic, or through Bahraini spirits; connections that are available only to the few. Suspicions of witchcraft then are part of the local moral economy of sex work that is defined by stark inequalities, with some women on the winning side having access to, at least, some material resources and social capital, and women on the losing side barely surviving in precarity and, thus, having no access to the means to accelerate their progress. Witchcraft accusations that are voiced by poorer and struggling sex workers against the more successful ones are then the result of poorer sex workers’ despair that those who become winners in sex work are already in an advantaged position to be able to afford those costs.

Sanders (2008, 122), in his work on the Tanzanian transport sector, argues that narratives of witchcraft being able to create wealth from thin air mirror a wider neoliberal narrative about an ever-growing economy that benefits everyone with no harm to others. While I agree that such narratives reflect a neoliberal discourse about the ability to create wealth with little effort by entrepreneurial spirits, the women who shared witchcraft stories cautioned me that this is a very dangerous endeavour. However, the dangers they spoke of were not as much the dangers that the person using supernatural powers faces, but rather the dangers for others in sex work. Supernatural forces in these accounts were related to unfair competition and meant increased violence and loss of income for sex workers who are already disadvantaged and not earning as much.

Take, for instance, a story told by Chichi (32 years old) that is similar to many other accounts. Chichi’s friend once introduced her to a rich mzungu,⁶ who liked her. Chichi, her friend and the two men went out for dinner and drinks to one of the restaurants on the beach, and the evening was going well. At one point Chichi left the table for few minutes to use the bathroom, and when she returned, the man she was with was completely absorbed by conversation with another woman and ignored Chichi. Chichi concluded that this turn of events was facilitated by supernatural interventions:

When I came back, the mzungu was changed. I don't know what, the lady [who] was sitting there, what did she do to him! So, he changed, and he said: ‘No, no, not interested.’ But he liked me in the beginning when we were at home! So, I think it was witchcraft.

While losing a potentially well-paying client was one problem, the harm did not stop here – that night Chichi found herself alone, with no money in a bar far away from home. Having no money for a transport fare, she had to walk back, was attacked and raped. In Chichi’s account the harm that is caused by magic intervention goes beyond the loss of income, and results in violence and bodily harm as well.

Intense competition among women selling sex means that those who start with an advantage (for example, have enough money to travel to more remote places and return safely with money they saved) can avoid violence and often win in competition for clients. Chichi and other women who speak about similar encounters with supernatural powers comment on inequalities among sex workers – there are winners and losers in this work, and the losers pay very dearly in this unfair setting. The zero-sum logic employed here is very much in line with the witchcraft logic on the Kenyan coast where the accumulation of wealth and power is often seen as a zero-sum game, meaning that the accumulation of wealth by one person means the loss of wealth for another (Ciekawy 1998, 1999). Witchcraft is believed to cause blockages of potential development for another person. In the context of sex work, witchcraft accusations are employed as an explanation for personal losses in the competition, violence when working and as an explanation of blockages to success. In other words, women are looking for an explanation for the stark inequalities experienced among sex workers, where some manage to stay safe and accumulate capital successfully and others barely make a living and do not seem to progress.

The picture that witchcraft narratives paint is violent and dangerous for those who are not direct beneficiaries of the engagement with supernatural forces. James Scott (1985), examining class conflict in rural Malaysia, theorised on the everyday resistance of Malay rice farmers through the lens of weapons of the weak. In his framework, everyday life and class struggle is defined by conflicts over definitions of justice and morality that are extensions of the struggles over land, work, and income in the context of historical structural changes. Given the unequal power and resources that the local elites and poor have access to, the terrain, where the disadvantaged people have some power is ‘backstage’ (Scott 1985, 27): it is through gossip, tales, slander and anonymous sabotage – weapons of the weak – that the poor negate the power of the elites. Using Scott’s framework to examine the nightly labouring of Mombasa sex workers allows us to see the conflict and divisions between the haves and have-nots in sex work, their differentiated access to resources, and the role that narratives of the supernatural play as a weapon of the weak. By voicing suspicions of supernatural interventions in sex work, women comment on the inequalities and injustices that define their livelihoods.

Sex workers who try to stay safe from the negative effects of supernatural workings employ two types of strategies, that will be elaborated below, that, I argue, reflect ideological conflicts of society. The first kind of strategy is very much in line with neoliberal ideology where women aim to re-fashion themselves into anonymous, self-reliant individuals who are not rooted in local sex worker communities. The second strategy aligns with more powerful supernatural powers: those of religion.

Cinderella (28 years old) fears witchcraft. She used to have an Italian boyfriend, who, for three years visited, paid her house expenses, sent her money, presents and spoke about marriage.

… but that mzungu went back back without saying even bye. Up to now. They went to mganga, there they chased him with medicine. He doesn’t remember me, they stole my name, or what? Yeah, people in Mombasa trick. Ladies in Mombasa, they told me: ‘One day you will never see this mzungu’. You see, like bad passing there.

Cinderella is convinced that the disappearance of her Italian boyfriend is linked to a supernatural intervention that was facilitated by jealous women she knew. After finding herself on the side of the have-nots once more, Cinderella changed her tactics when working. Now she is very careful about who she associates with and always presents herself with a fake name to other sex workers. Guarding her personal identity and not forming personal links while selling sex, she believes, prevents her experiencing another jealous bewitching. Similarly, Lillian (27 years old) is careful to not stay too long in any one place at night and keeps changing the venues she works at so that her competitors cannot harm her. The danger of witchcraft is always associated with and rooted in the community or family ties (see for instance Geschiere 1997), so what Cinderella and Lilian are doing to protect themselves is the direct opposite: embracing an individualism that they hope will keep them safe.

Kinship-like relationships that sex workers form with each other for safety replace the support of the family which would be available in different circumstances. Once the word ‘family’ is replaced by ‘colleagues’ or ‘friends’, Ciekawy and Geschiere’s (1998, 5) observation that witchcraft ‘epitomizes the frightening realisation that there is jealousy and aggression within the intimate circle of the family where only solidarity and trust should reign’ remains relevant. Individualism, as embraced by Lilian or Cinderella, means that they forego not only the danger or bewitching that is associated with communal belonging, they also do away with the safety that association with other women might bring, taking the risk and hoping that it will pay off by allowing them to be on the winners’ side of sex work.

While neoliberal entrepreneurs like Cinderella or Lillian aim to prevent themselves from supernatural interventions by self-reliance and individualism, others, like Betty (31 years old) and Winnie (30 years old) embrace religion to protect themselves from supernatural dangers. Both Betty and Winnie do not deny the existence of supernatural forces or their active interventions in sex work. However, both claim that they are not afraid of such threats, because they are believers. Winnie, for instance, admitted that she once tried to attain the help of a mganga, but her attempts to engage supernatural powers failed: ‘One day I went there, but me, I am born to Christian family, so even if I go there, nothing works. [Since I was] small, I know how to go to church, when I get sick, I know how to pray’. Since then, she continues to pray at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa and believes that her faith will protect her. A growing body of literature focuses on new charismatic churches, promising protection from Satan (see Smith 2008), and helping ordinary Kenyans to take control of their everyday lives by emphasising healing, prosperity and the anointing power of church leaders (Deacon and Lynch 2013: 109). However, my interlocutors belonged to variety of different traditional and new religious communities, sometimes attending several churches of different denominations at the same time,⁷ but explained the superior power of God in the same way – spirits and witchcraft are less powerful than true faith.

These two kinds of strategies – a turn to individualism or reliance on religious protection – again reflect divisions in sex work. Women who manage to earn well and accumulate through their labour tend to embrace the neoliberal strategies of individualism because they have the resources to protect themselves while working without relying on their colleagues. For instance, Lilian, mentioned above, who was studying sales and marketing at the local college, paid her brother’s driving classes and exam, helped him to get a taxi driver license, paid for a private school for her son, and was planning to complete an IT course as well as obtain a driver’s license for herself in the near future – all funded by her sex work. She also reported spending significant amounts for clothes and other expenses – she clearly was a very successful sex worker. In contrast, a turn to religion as a strategy was mentioned mainly by women who have been in sex work for a while and whose income had started decreasing. These women are on the side of the have-nots in sex work and, so, their turn to religious communities is understandable; without the support of others their livelihood would be an even more difficult task. For instance, Winnie, mentioned above, has been selling sex in Mombasa for seven years, but was struggling to support herself and her child. She also recounted multiple failed attempts to leave sex work and mentioned that, recently, on several occasions she drank so much that she did not remember what happened to her that night and returned with no money in the morning – she was looking for help.

The narratives of supernatural interventions in sex work raised in relation to competition reflect the inequalities and structural violence that define the everyday realities of women selling sex. They speak of the advantages that women who are better-off have in attracting well-paying clients and the dark side of such competition for those who do not manage to attain clients and struggle to gain an income. Invoking the traditional logic of a zero-sum game of witchcraft, witchcraft accusations caution women that great riches are always achieved at the expense of others, and usually by those who are already on the ‘have’ side of the sex worker divide. In the moral economy of sex work, those divisions are further reproduced by those looking for ways to defend themselves; while some seek communal belonging and the safety that religious communities bring, those who are better-off tend embrace individualism and neoliberal self-reliance with the hope that such actions will move them closer to the side of the ‘haves’.

Men who are not human beings

The second category of supernatural stories contains narratives about frightening experiences, often involving violence, that women associate with non-human entities posing as clients. Such non-human men take women out of their usual workplaces to unusual venues, frequently offering a higher-than-standard pay, often drive black cars and always turn out to be an illusion of a good opportunity that vanishes, leaving women in dangerous situations with no pay. These narratives range from strange experiences where non-human entities act as clients, as recounted by Maria Karen below, to experiences where seemingly regular clients speak and act in incomprehensible ways and/or ask women to do ‘unhuman’ things (sex involving animals, for example). In this section I will argue that such non-human men that frequent sex workers represent the outcomes of social changes that are alarming: they hint at changing masculinities and practices that go beyond the accepted social norms in the community. Just as narratives about zombies and vampires, studied by White (2000), were signs of a new colonial modernity that brought new types of work, so these non-human men signify emerging types of masculinities and changes to the livelihoods of sex workers.

Dangerous clients and violence are part of every sex worker’s experience. As an analysis from the Kenyan Sex Workers Alliance points out, challenges and struggles that individuals selling sex face fall into six main areas: violence (perpetrators include clients, members of the police force, country askaris,⁸ members of the general public, criminal gangs, pimps, bar managers and others), discriminatory laws, access to healthcare, poverty, community organisation and minors engaging in sex work (Kinyili 2014). Whereas all these challenges are important, one of them – violence – features in sex workers’ narratives about work more significantly than others. Every woman interviewed had a story, or several, to share about violent clients who do not stick to the agreed price or the agreed practice of condom use, who are physically violent and rape women, or who bring women to gang-rape situations. Women selling sex are aware of such dangers and have strategies to avoid violence, from working with friends, taking payment first, being violent themselves or having somebody who can check on them once they get the client. These types of violence are almost expected to manifest themselves in clients, and women speak about them as normalised daily occurrences. As such, stories about the ‘unhuman’ behaviour of men who are not human beings then refer to something else – either violence and (sexual) practices that go beyond such ‘accepted’ levels, or another set of dangerous processes at work.

I want to use the story that was told by Maria Karen (21 years old) to explore this in more detail. Maria Karen started narrating her experience of an encounter with a non-human man after telling me about how difficult it is to find well-paying clients and collect enough money for rent:

We go there [the street behind a famous nightclub] at nine until one o'clock at night, we find a client to go and sleep with in the guest[house]. Some days you find even a ghost, not a client. One day I found a ghost.

Maria Karen met a ‘man, nice, handsome boy’ on the street where she always works. He arrived at the street driving his black car with tinted windows. As is the usual practice, she negotiated the price first, starting the negotiations with a high 2000 shillings⁹ (usually this price is the start of negotiations on the street, but many women expect that less than this amount will be agreed). To her happy surprise, the man in question offered to pay 3000 and she made her way to his car to head to the rooms for rent. While driving, Maria Karen tried to touch the man, but her hand could not grasp the body, and the man did not show any reaction to her attempts to touch him. In the rented room, the man started speaking in riddles, asking Maria Karen: ‘Will you do what I want to do? Will you do my work?’ but did not specify what that would entail. While he was asking these questions, he also was disappearing and re-appearing:

… he went just … janni, I didn’t see anything! I didn’t see a man who was in a room! I don’t see any man! And then after some time I see blackout, something like that, and then he came back again. And he told me: ‘Will you do what I want to do?’ I told him janni, ‘Let me think about it.’ And then he disappeared. Yeah. And then came back.

This situation scared Maria Karen and she said she wanted to leave, but the man told her it was impossible, that she would need to sleep with him.

He wanted janni to sleep with me, but he was not a man, he was not a human being. He was not a human being. […] Even I was sitting here, he was sitting here, and nothing. I was just touching him, and nothing [she could not touch him, because he was not a human]. Because, let me say, here in Mombasa, there are so many things. You can see even walking and you find a lady, but it is not lady, is not a smart lady, is a ghost. […] They are very smart. And they cannot have sex. So, that man, he removed his clothes and … he was having A BIG!!! [points to her needs to indicate the size of ghost’s penis] (laughs) BIG one, very big. Oi. So, I say, hapana,¹⁰ I was just fainted, something like that.

This was the last memory Maria Karen had of the night. She woke in the morning on the floor of the rented room with room attendants trying to wake her up and no money in sight.

In Maria Karen’s narrative, this encounter is part of her more general account of how hard sex work is and how difficult it is to find well-paying clients. In this context, the non-human man described by Maria Karen is an image, or, as White (1993, 29) puts it, an epistemological category, with which Maria Karen describes her world. The world, as described by Maria Karen, is a very uncertain place, where her livelihood is threatened and interference with her strategies comes from men. Men, who are supposed to be clients and allow her access to their share of income, not only turn out to not be men – a scary phenomenon in itself – but additionally result in no pay gained. This particular non-human man is a scary illusion, an image used to describe uncertainties surrounding new forms of masculinities that are no longer a reliable source of income.

Clients who are not real are common in contemporary sex work. Many women in Mombasa told me that there are fewer men than women in Kenya – a ‘fact’ that was mentioned often in interviews with my interlocutors. What women selling sex refer to here is not the actual ratio between males and females in the country, but the ever-decreasing number of men who could live up to the expectations of normative masculinities, especially the role of male breadwinner or a man as provider. Men, who in the current circumstances of material uncertainties and increasing precarity, cannot meet their financial obligations to their families, who negotiate hard with sex workers as they have less disposable income, and come up with creative ways to avoid sharing their money with women are all too common. Thus, many women do not count such men as ‘real men’. In sex work, the lack of ‘real men’ causes the increased competition and violence that I discussed in the first part of the article, but also means that sex workers start encountering more clients who are ‘not real’ and try to cheat them or cannot live up to the expectations that women might have about them. In an industry that is built on exploiting gendered differences and expectations, where women have elaborate schemes to access male salaries through sex work (see Česnulytė 2019), this presents a significant problem and anxiety about changing gender roles and gendered access to material resources.

If Maria Karen’s encounter with a non-human man helps her to comment on the changing material realities of Mombasa and the resulting shifts in men’s ability to live up the material side of normative masculinities, then the monologues of the non-human are not difficult to understand. She remembers the non-human man asking: ‘Will you do what I want to do? Will you do my work?’. When a man cannot live up to the masculinity that is associated with being a family breadwinner, this task of earning income is often picked up by a woman. Women become breadwinners not only because they might choose to, but because families break up and they are left with no other option – the death or desertion of the family man (be it a husband or a father) is among the key reasons for women’s sex work. Women who sell sex in Mombasa are often doing men’s work by earning money and providing for their families. While the reality of women having to do both the social reproductive tasks traditionally prescribed to women and earn an income – traditionally a man’s role – is only too well-known to women selling sex, what is alarming in a non-human man’s monologue is a different warning. Perhaps he is hinting at the possibility that selling sex is not a temporary phase, as many women hope, and a less reliable way to earn a living than it used to be. Such a possibility is a worrying thought for many women, including Maria Karen, who followed the story of her non-human client with accounts of her health issues and the difficulties of maintaining the room that she rents – not a reality in which one would like to remain for all of their life.

Non-human men who appear as clients at night are commentaries on the shifts in gender roles, masculinities and the local political economy in which sex work takes place. This is in line with broader changes in the material realities associated with neoliberal restructuring and accompanying accounts about the supernatural in Kenya (Blunt 2004; Deacon and Lynch 2013). Yet, I argue that the appearance of the supernatural in sex work also speaks to the gendered dimensions of the social transformations and could be seen as reflections of worries about uncertain futures, the fragility of livelihoods and the permanence of precarity. Perhaps, instead of accumulating capital and re-starting their lives in a different sphere, or finding a man to marry or co-habit with, women selling sex will have to settle for permanent precarity in sex work – a scary image of the future.

Conclusion

Treating narratives about the supernatural or occult forces as an integral part of the moral economy of sex work reveals some important tensions defining this type of occupation in Mombasa. The general puzzle that sex workers attempt to solve is of how one really gets rich in this line of work, and narratives about the supernatural point to increasing suspicions of a neoliberal discourse of never-ending growth and the possibility of personal success. The promise of success is in stark contrast with the lived experiences of women selling sex and this disjuncture is at the core of witchcraft accusations and the appearance of supernatural forces in Mombasa’s sex work.

Women selling sex are anxious about the great divides separating sex workers into different income groups and the very diverse livelihoods that allow them to lead, even though all women seem to be doing the same work – exchanging sex for money. Suspecting other, more successful, sex workers of engaging with supernatural powers to achieve success allows women to share their fears that, in neoliberal sex work, women who get rich are those in an advantageous positions to start with. The limit of social mobility is in stark contrast to the expectations that many women have when starting to sell sex and, thus, a very important tension defining sex work. Furthermore, women sharing stories about the unfair competition that is facilitated by occult forces are keen to point out the dangers that such an engagement results in for other women (often the ones telling the story). Sex workers’ experiences of precarity and difficult economic conditions are in conflict with the prevailing wisdom of sex work allowing accumulation and social mobility, and they are keen to invoke traditional notions of a zero-sum logic when pointing out that if winners manage to get all the well-paying clients, this leaves the rest in a precarious and dangerous place. Strategies of how one stays safe from the negative effects of the supernatural speak to the tensions surrounding stark inequalities in sex work that separate women into winners and losers, or haves and have-nots.

The second type of encounters with supernatural forces touch upon the shifts in gender roles and masculinities, in particular. Those shifts are linked to changes in material realities and result in men who are not humans, or men who are not men. These stories reflect emerging types of masculinities and the prevailing general preoccupation in society about men not being able to live up to ideals of normative masculinity. If men can no longer live up to the ideal of the male breadwinner then sex workers need to find a different way to depend on men’s income and their accumulation and social progression plans might be difficult to execute.

Both types of narratives about supernatural forces in sex work speak to the conflicting reality in neoliberal Mombasa. Moving forward in entrepreneurial ways might not be a straightforward task, where the reality for many in sex work is defined by high competition, stark inequalities and a reduced number of well-paying clients that make the dream of a ‘good life’ only that – a dream. Sex work, then, is also defined by conflicting meanings, depending on who is telling the story. It is an avenue for accumulation, progression and an easier life for a select few, usually the ones who are in advantageous position initially. For many others it signifies constant struggle, precarity and bare survival. The moral economy of Mombasa’s sex work is very much in line with global tendencies of contemporary capitalism that is increasingly defined by fragmentations, fracturing and precarity (Bhattacharyya 2018; Standing 2018). It is through these processes of endless fragmentation that neoliberal systems produce winners and losers and make the duality of the neoliberal logic visible: while winners can progress in the structures, the losers end up struggling to carve out their livelihoods.

Statement of Ethics

The research was conducted with approval from University of Bristol. All interviewees have been anonymised and gave consent to be interviewed for the purposes of this research. The interviewer clearly communicated the scope and purpose of the research project to all interviewees. All interviewees gave consent to be interviewed for the purposes of this research. All interviewees also consented to interviews being used for publication purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mganga (singular) and waganga (plural) in kiswahili means a diviner, a witchdoctor.

2 Jini (singular) and majini (plural) – kiswahili for a particular kind of spirit agent. Coastal peoples distinguish among different types of spirits living on the Coast (see Giles 1995; Ciekawy 2016), and these spirits have the potential to assist human beings in orchestration of processes and events that both heal or harm the human beings to whom magic is directed.

3 Lesos are the most prominent article of clothing for women along the Swahili coast of East Africa. The leso is a rectangle of cotton cloth, printed in bold designs and bright colours, usually with a message along the bottom.

4 Speaking English to me, a foreigner, Winnie (as Maria Karen does later in the text) uses ‘ghost’ as translation for jini – spirit (see footnote 2).

5 Consider the price as told by Winnie: the mganga asks for two goats (a middle-class family would purchase one goat to eat at the major celebrations), one or three chickens (less luxurious meat than goat, but a rare meal for many who are struggling), some lesos (poorer women would buy a pair of lesos once a year) and special spice. While this might be an affordable purchase for someone well-off, for the vast majority of Kenyans this list represents a very expensive set of goods.

6 Mzungu – kiswahili for a white Western person.

7 Some women reported changing their religious affiliations several times in their lives, either because of their long-term partners, or because they are looking for community that accepts them. For instance, Faith, 41 years old, told me that she was Muslim when she lived with her ‘Arab boyfriend’, then converted to Catholicism when she found a long-term Italian client who was staying on the coast for months at the time, and was currently attending both an Anglican church (because her family is Anglican) and a particular Catholic church in town (because ‘they say prostitution is ok’). While no religious denomination endorses sex work, women in this line of work had many different explanations that allowed them to reconcile their work with their spiritual lives. Phelister, a sex worker activist, for instance said, ‘The Bible says that anything that makes me happy, makes the Lord happy’.

8 Officers of the municipality enforcing local bylaws.

9 2000 Kenyan shillings was approximately 15GBP during the time of field research.

10 Hapana – no in kiswahili.