This chapter outlines a comprehensive multimethod approach that integrates ethnography and quantitative data analysis to explore the concept of exit. Building on Hirschman’s exit–voice–loyalty theory, the chapter delineates two distinct forms of exit: permanent exit, characterized by the death of voters, and partial exit, which can be either forced or voluntary and does not always involve physical migration. The latter includes phenomena such as migration-related remittances, which symbolize loyalty from emigrants to those who remain. The chapter highlights how partial exit can manifest through voter attrition, often attributed to pandemic fatigue. The narrative indicates that the government did not instigate this exit, but it later discovered covert methods to leverage it for political gain. The chapter introduces the reader to the voter exit premium, the additional votes bolstering ZANU PF due to voter exit. Exit premium is calculated in Chapters 3 and 4.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

This chapter uses travel time to document how exposure to international slave trades produced Africa as a mirror image of Europe. At the regional level, the fundamental impact reduced the size of polities and increased the proliferation of ethnicities, a model flexible enough to explain the seemingly opposite outcomes of Asante and Aro. Exposure to the trade of captives on their way to the coast encouraged the spread of institution designed to preserve slave wealth: slavery, polygyny, and inheritance rules that concentrated wealth and political power in aristocratic families. Exposure to capture spread slavery among politically decentralized societies. Exposure also disrupted long-standing lineage and inheritance rules, indicating revolutionary changes in the political, economic, and cultural organization of societies. The inverse relationship between the export of slaves and the demand for money is evidence of a breakdown in specialization and trade that opened the door to Indian and British textile imports – underdevelopment’s version of import substitution.

The chapter begins by characterizing Patterson’s first problem of slavery as a coordination problem that exists in slave societies. Slave trading normalizes the violent abrogation of freedom. The co-existence of these norms (slavery and freedom) in slave societies has given rise to at least five different slave cultures in world history, each with its own set of institutions for preserving and growing slave wealth: matrilineal, patrilineal, Western, Chinese, and Muslim. Western slave cultures, with patrilineal inheritance of free status and matrilineal inheritance of slaves, is the most efficient at preserving slave wealth over the generations. Western slave culture has given rise to two major slave systems: the Greco-Roman system with the peculium as an institutionalized path to freedom, and modern American slavery with its socially constructed race as a barrier to freedom.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

This chapter explains why, where, and when regions of sub-Saharan Africa became the hunting grounds for the slaves of Christian and Muslim empires. It rejects the Nieboer–Domar hypothesis that low population density explains an African “tradition” of slavery that Europeans tapped into. It also rejects the hypothesis that the tsetse fly did the same. Evidence supports the hypothesis that the tsetse fly and soil erosion from tropical downpour produced pockets of poverty by constraining the development of animal-based agriculture. International slave trades “attacked” these pockets of poverty and left behind slavery as an institution. An alternative to constrained agriculture was gold mining. Sub-Saharan Africa was a major world exporter of gold until large deposits were discovered in eighteenth-century Brazil. The international purchasing power of African gold provides a long view of economic development in gold-exporting regions of Africa: A Golden Age (from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century), an Age of Trade (the seventeenth century), and an Age of Slavery (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).