‘Tarmacking is tedious': navigating city pressures in Nakuru, Kenya

Abstract

This article delves into the multifaceted concept of tarmacking to analyse urban pressure as experienced in Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya. It presents Tarmacking as a deeply sensorial and experiential understanding of city navigation underscoring the material and immaterial strategies that hustling urban dwellers employ to chart their way through the city and through life, capitalizing on opportunities while avoiding to succumb to the pressures this navigation entails. Tarmacking is part of what I present as Nakuru’s urban kinaesthetics. My analysis ultimately highlights insights about the life trajectories of young men, hustle economies, social navigation and concurring forms of pressure in the corporealities, materialities and mobilities that constitute the emergent fabric of Nakuru, offering a richer understanding of the somatic experiences of urban pressure and the strategies employed to counter them.

Keywords:

• urban pressure
• tarmacking, hustling
• ethnography
• medical anthropology
• Kenya

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to all the Nakuru tarmackers who allowed me in their lives and shared their stories with me. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough review and invaluable feedback, which have significantly enriched the final version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This remark should be interpreted as being partly driven by concerns among Kenyans regarding Africans being targeted for vaccine testing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

2 The research for this article draws from various extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork between July 2017 and August 2023 and based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews and regular ‘deep hanging out’ among Nakuru’s hustling youths.

3 Madaraka day is the celebration of Kenya’s independence from British colonialism in 1963.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork on which this article is based received funding from the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research [G.A005.14N].

Notes on contributors

Nick Rahier

Nick Rahier is at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Universiteit Gent, both in Belgium. Email: [email protected]