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“Never at ease”: cellphones, multilocational households, and the metabolic rift in western Kenya

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Abstract

Western Kenya has been a labour-exporting region for over a century, with many households straddling both rural and urban contexts. While the spatial separation of migrants from their rural places of origin represented the first tangible metabolic rift within Kenyan agricultural production systems, that rift is being reshaped as rural families engage in new forms of interconnection with migrant members (“multilocationality”). These changes appear to be driven by the ongoing crisis of agrarian livelihoods and are supported by the advent of cellphone communication and mobile money transfer technologies. Interviews and ethnographic data collected in a western Kenyan community and amongst its out-migrants reveal the role of cellphones in mediating social, financial, and knowledge flows within multilocational households. The increased ease of communicating and sending money is associated with less frequent physical movements between rural and urban settings, with commensurate disruptions in the acquisition and development of agro-ecological knowledge, and a shifting burden of agricultural labour. Gender relations are also put under further stress: migrant men remain (or believe they have remained) involved in rural affairs but appear to be using cellphone technologies to reinvent their household roles, replacing previously social or labour contributions with financial ones and by asserting claims over the on-farm decision-making of rural households previously considered female-headed.

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Notes

  1. Responses are anonymized using a pseudonym, place of the interview, and the year.

  2. A livelihood comprises ‘the capabilities, assets and the activities required for a means of living’ (Chambers and Conway 1992, p. 6).

  3. Calculated using 2014 data (KNBS 2015): 2,372 billion shillings of total mobile money transfers (KNBS 2015, p. 235) versus 5,357.671 billion shillings for GDP (KNBS 2015, p. 9). Di Castri and Gidvani (2013) are widely cited for a lower proportion (31 %) using 2013 data.

  4. These were an IDRC-funded project (2001–2008) on local agro-ecological knowledge (implemented by the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility (TSBF) Institute in Ebusiloli and five other sites) and an NSF-funded project (2008–2010) on land-use change (jointly implemented by UW-Madison and University of Ottawa that included Ebusiloli, another Kenyan site, and two sites in Niger).

  5. While the OluNyole word “okhuhela” describes the courage or manliness associated with a young man setting up his own, new home “in the wild”, our respondents indicated that while the term was formerly most associated with the risks of confronting wild animals away from human settlement, it now refers more to the resourcefulness needed to migrate and set up homes away from Ebusiloli as a way of dealing with the problem of land scarcity.

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the kindness, patience, and hospitality of the people of Ebusiloli, and the hard work of Gideon Omito, Caren Akech, and Edgar Kadenge. Thanks also to Lincoln Addison and Matthew Schnurr for organizing the symposium and for their helpful contributions (along with those of two anonymous reviewers) in improving earlier drafts of the paper. Despite the good efforts of these many people, I must remain accountable for any deficiencies in the final product. Finally I am grateful for the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.

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    Joshua J. Ramisch

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Ramisch, J.J. “Never at ease”: cellphones, multilocational households, and the metabolic rift in western Kenya. Agric Hum Values 33, 979–995 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9654-3

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