The Nairobi Prostitution Histories: Perspectives from Kenyan Novels

ABSTRACT

This article articulates novelists’ constructions of prostitutes’ humanity in the city’s complex spaces that are both enabling and problematic. Through a reading of selected novels in tandem with Kenyan social histories, the article underpins why the city developed into a refuge for prostitutes and other urban outcasts but also shows how the allures of the city metamorphose into mirages for the ostracised. Glimpses into represented young women’s choices of prostitution reveal their determined confrontations of powerful cultural constrictions to their humanity in rural spaces. The cultural constrictions sanctioned by patriarchal practices in the familial spaces manifest through incestuous rape, domestic violence, stigmatisation of barrenness and premarital pregnancy. Yet, having fled from the patriarchal countryside and chosen prostitution for survival or as an attempt to exercise their liberties, the prostitutes in Nairobi encounter unspeakable hostilities precipitated by a callous capitalist culture in the city too.

KEYWORDS:

• Nairobi prostitution
• barrenness
• Malaya
• social histories

Acknowledgement

This article is a revised version of a subsection of my PhD thesis chapter five titled ‘'The City and Kenya’s Socio-Political Transformation'‘ (168–181). The thesis is titled ‘'Narrated Histories in Selected Kenyan Novels, 1963–2013“ (March, 2017). My heartfelt gratitude to my supervisors Prof Grace A Musila (Witwatersrand University) and Dr Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi) for their invaluable contributions in shaping the ideas for the earlier version of this work during supervision.

ORCID

Wafula Yenjela http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8586-9212

Notes

1 In both My Life in Crime and My Life with a Criminal, John Kiriamiti fuses the activities of the prostitute and bank robbers. Jack Zollo, the narrator in My Life in Crime, hates prostitutes because they spy for the police who are also their clients (1984, 59). In My Life with a Criminal, Milly, Zollo’s fiancée believes prostitutes are inseparable from vice even though her mother is a long-time prostitute. While gazing at Zollo’s bank heist in bewilderment, Milly remarks: ‘But it was the same money that turned people into murderers, robbers, prostitutes, conmen and conwomen’ (1989, 42). In Mwangi Gicheru’s Across the Bridge, prostitutes are portrayed as almost subhuman, only useful to criminals when they need a hideout from police (1979, 74). However, the same hard-core criminals trivialise them by paying for the prostitutes’ services with fake money and making the desperate women the laughing stock (1979, 110).

2 Sociosemiotic approach in translation integrates referential, intralingual, pragmatic and formal features in transference of meaning from source language to target language (see Ping 1996).

3 Luise White (1990, 148) observes the presence of over 70 000 troops in Nairobi from June 1940 to 1942 comprising of Royal Airforce troops, the King’s African Rifles, Gold Coast Regiment and Royal West African Frontier Forces.

4 COYOTE was ‘[f]ounded in San Francisco by ex-prostitute Margo St. James’ while WHISPER ‘emerged in the early 1980s […] in New York City [and it’s] made up of volunteers, feminist scholars, and clergy who are concerned with saving prostitutes from the life of prostitution’ (Jennes 1990, 403,412).

5 Scott Geibel et al (2008, 746) in a ‘capture-recapture enumeration estimated that 739 male sex workers who sell sex to men were active in Mombasa’ in 2005.

6 In Mwangi Gicheru’s Across the Bridge (1979), schoolgirl pregnancy is portrayed as a dilemma that forces Caroline to marry Chuma, a houseboy in her father’s mansion, despite glaring class differences. Here, schoolgirl pregnancy features mainly as a precursor of class struggle as the love between Chuma and Caroline reawakens Chuma to fight for his love through fighting the rich.

7 In Zainab Burhani’s Mwisho wa Kosa, Monika disrupts the moral restrictions of her Swahili community by freely engaging in transactional sex with various rich men. She also cares less of filial responsibilities. Her liberalism is attributed to her schooling in America. In Gicheru’s Across the Bridge, Caroline violates her father’s moral script by soliciting for sex and love from the houseboy, Chuma.

8 Women’s stories (herstory) need to be liberated from masculine stories (history) (see Niekerk 1996).

9 Malaya prostitution emerged in the 1920s Nairobi where women had rooms to offer accommodation and sex for a night (White 1990, 58).

10 King’ala’s evocations of Anasa’s criminality is heavily influenced by F.H.H. Katalambula’s detective novel, Simu ya Kifo (1968), ‘Phone Call of Death’, which focuses on a mysterious serial killer who, after every murder, calls the police to inform them of the crime.