In the middle of May 2014, I borrowed a car from a friend in Nairobi and set off with Tom – my close friend, research assistant and host in Kaloleni – and Kevin, Tom's friend and our regular company on explorations around Eastlands. Our plan was to trace various ex-Kaloleni residents back to their rural upcountry homes, to see how they were living, what kinds of houses they had built and how they remembered Kaloleni. The majority of Kalolenians, including Tom, are from the Luo ethnic group, who hail from the lands around Lake Victoria in western Kenya. In the preceding weeks, we made dozens of calls, spoke with relatives, friends and neighbours in Kaloleni and elsewhere, to track down the locations of homesteads that we could visit. For the three-week trip, we would base ourselves at the home of Tom's parents, Dominic and Judith Nyanya, who themselves had been Kaloleni residents, bringing up their family in house A20 until they retired and returned to their homestead in Busia district.

As intimated in Chapter 1, questions of mobility and flow, as much as dwelling and place, frame life in Kaloleni, influencing how people plan ahead and how they try to turn aspirations into reality. This includes movement between rural and urban Kenya; maintaining a relationship with a rural landscape that is also understood as vital to projects of self-making. The persistence of urban-rural connections has been a longstanding theme in the scholarship of urbanisation in Africa, and researchers have long argued that the making of African cities cannot be understood without reference to the social, political and economic import of rural ties (see, for example, Heisler and Marwick 1974; Geschiere and Gugler 1998; Burton 2001). In Kenya, the relationship between town life and village is one of the enduring themes of the country's history, with important implications for labour, livelihoods and national politics (Collier and Lal 1986; White 1990; Robertson 1997; Carotenuto and Luongo 2009). Rural to urban migration continues to account for a considerable proportion of Nairobi's growth, and exerts a powerful enough hold on the imagination to preoccupy many writers, singers and filmmakers as well as academics.