Ambiguous Pleasures: sexuality and middle class self-perceptions in Nairobi by Rachel Spronk (review)

In 2012, Rachel Spronk published her pathbreaking monograph Ambiguous Pleasures. Based on long-term fieldwork at the beginning of the 2000s and indepth biographical interviews with twenty-four women and twenty-five men in their twenties living in Nairobi, Spronk explores in outstanding ethnographical detail and with exemplary analytic rigour the discourses and practices of sexuality and belonging of young urban professionals in Kenya’s cosmopolitan capital. Since its first publication, the work has been extensively cited, referred to and discussed. The challenge of this review is thus to go beyond a first evaluation of the book, a task that has already been done very well by previous reviewers (Brown 2013; Cesnulyte 2013; Smith 2013). Instead, my aim is to reflect on the way in which the monograph has been received and read within wider debates in anthropology and African studies.

The main topic of the book is a complex engagement with different aspects of sexuality in Kenya. Out of the eight chapters of the book, including the Introduction, more than half are exclusively dedicated to an in-depth treatment of various aspects of sexuality. Chapter 1 provides a state-of-the-art summary of regional, theoretical and methodological aspects of sexuality, Chapter 3 discusses sexuality in Kenya in the context of AIDS, Chapter 4 presents biographical and ethnographical narratives of lived sexuality of Spronk’s female interlocutors, while Chapter 5 does the same for the male interlocutors. Finally, the concluding Chapter 7 dedicates large parts of the final discussion to sexuality. The remaining Introduction and chapters provide either contextual information (Introduction and Chapter 2) or discuss romantic love and social media (Chapter 6), an aspect clearly related to questions of sexuality. The complexity and innovative quality of Spronk’s data and analysis of sexuality of young Kenyan professionals is superb. Not surprisingly, then, the work has become a central and influential contribution to the study of African sexualities.

More surprising, though, is that Rachel Spronk’s book has had almost the same impact on the emerging field of African middle-class studies. Influential overviews (Lentz 2016) and edited volumes (Kroeker et al. 2018) refer to Spronk’s book as an important contribution to the new ethnography on African middle classes. I do not question that the book provides some fascinating findings on class and what Spronk terms ‘Africanness’. In their struggles to belong, Spronk’s interlocutors create unique lifestyles of being ‘modern Africans’, going beyond narrow and limiting categories of ethnic, regional and religious belonging. But how does this relate to questions of the ‘middle class’ that are being addressed in the emerging field of middle-class studies–both African (Kroeker et al. 2018; Melber 2016; Southall 2016) and global (Heiman et al. 2012)? Spronk herself acknowledges that she is using class not as an analytic concept but ‘rather as a descriptive notion’ (p. 65) to describe the group she is studying. Consequently, crucial information on class and class relations is missing in the book. In terms of social and economic stratification, the class position of the group studied remains vague. How do the interlocutors perceive themselves? How are boundaries with those below and those above being created and maintained? Is class belonging also contested? Beyond pleasure and leisure, how important is work in the lives of the interlocutors?

Of course, one book cannot tell it all. Spronk has to be congratulated for having written an excellent and highly influential monograph on a hardly researched and hard-to-research topic–sexuality–focusing on a specific group she labels as middle-class. She does not claim that her book is a monograph on the (emerging) African middle class(es). Still, the book has been read in such a way. To understand this reading, I propose taking inspiration from a comparable discussion in urban anthropology. More than...