The Mubaba Industrial Complex

Field report

I have been observing the Nairobi Mubaba in his natural habitat for approximately fourteen months. The findings are extensive. The findings are damning. The findings include, but are not limited to, the fact that a 56-year-old man in a slightly too-tight Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt can, in fact, learn the chorus of an Ayra Starr song if his life depends on it. And dear reader, his life does depend on it.

For those of you new to these streets, a Mubaba is the Kenyan name for an older, monied gentleman who finds himself, mysteriously, romantically entangled with a 23-year-old named Cynthia who studied Mass Comm at Daystar and runs a podcast called “Unfiltered.” He has a wife. He has children. He has a Prado. He also has a WhatsApp Business account he uses to send Cynthia 30k for “hair.” She does not have hair appointments that cost 30k. They both know this. This, my friends, is the dance.

I have classified them into three primary tiers, because as my Form 4 Biology teacher always said “Fungua penye ulichora diagram” and “classification is the beginning of understanding.”

The Tender Mubaba

He hangs around the Club. He wears Versace, but the kind with the gold things, the way your maternal uncle wears Versace. He has “just signed a tender” with a county government he will not name. He buys six bottles of Belaire even though nobody at the table actually wants Belaire. Cynthia wants tequila. Cynthia is too polite to say. He calls her “msupa” with the confidence of a man who last used the word in 2007. He drives a Range Rover Sport, but the back seats are full of NHIF paperwork and a half-eaten mahindi choma. His ringtone is a Mugithi song. He is, in many ways, our most authentic specimen.

The NGO Mubaba

This one is more dangerous because he reads. He has opinions on Yuval Noah Harari. He has been to Cape Town. He calls Cynthia “my dear” and writes actual messages, full sentences, sometimes with semicolons. He took her to Hemingways for her birthday and ordered the wine in a tone that suggested he knew things. He did not know things. The waiter pitied him. He works for a “consulting firm” you cannot find on Google but which has, allegedly, an office in Gigiri. He pays for Cynthia’s MA at USIU. In exchange, Cynthia must laugh at his TED Talk references. She is earning that degree, eh. She is earning it.

The Diaspora Mubaba

The most elusive of the three. He lives in Atlanta but is back home for “December.” December, for him, runs from October to March. He has a fake American accent he deploys mostly around hostesses at Ngong Hills Hotel. He says “y’all” but with the rising tone of a man who grew up in Kakamega. He flexes by paying for everything in dollars, which is irritating because the bartender now has to walk to the back to get a calculator. He brings Cynthia luxury perfumes he bought at the duty free in Doha. She has six of them. She has never opened any of them. They sit on her dressing table like little glass monuments to a civilisation in decline.

Habitat

You will spot them in the wild at: Tin Roof on a Wednesday, Cultiva on a Sunday, anywhere with a fire pit and a tasting menu, and (controversially) the Westgate parking lot, where deals are struck and engines are revved. They do not go to Java. Java is for the youth. Java is where Cynthia goes with her actual boyfriend, Brian, whom she truly loves, and who is currently doing his attachment at KRA and earning a stipend of 8k.

The Ecosystem

Here is the thing, and please sit with me on this one. Mubaba culture is not just a Mubaba thing. It is an economy. There is the girl. There is the girl’s friend who introduced them. There is the friend who manages the spreadsheet (yes, there is a spreadsheet). There is the salonist who knows. There is the Bolt driver who has seen things. There is the matron at the Airbnb in Kileleshwa who has truly seen things. And there is, somewhere in a quiet suburb in Karen, a wife who knows too, because wives always know, and who is currently doing her own little thing with a younger gentleman named Kevin, because the universe is just, and balance, my friends, is real.

Verdict

I came into this study expecting to find moral decay. I left with something far more interesting: a complex, multi-tiered economic and emotional ecosystem held together by Java cappuccinos, Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts, and one extremely overworked salonist named Wambui who knows where every body is buried.