Drinks with the Girls

It’s impossible not to notice Nairobi’s dirty little secret: In every club and downtown bar, beautiful, well-dressed women drinking and chatting with disproportionately unattractive old men. There might be three or four sitting at a table, all fawning over the same guilty-looking guy. That guy might walk out with a woman on each arm. One out of three of those women are HIV-positive. These are Nairobi’s “Twilight Girls,” and their lives are not always very fun. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows about it.

A recent World Bank/UN report found that sex workers in Kenya possess one of the highest rates of HIV in Africa—37 percent, to be exact. This came weeks after a new push from Nairobi City Council to legalize prostitution.

A public protest followed the pro-legalization announcement, wherein masked sex workers took to the streets and demanded an end to sexual violence and police harassment—a bold move considering the abject terror most feel about revealing their identities or messing with the authorities. In a city with 7,000 sex workers serving three or four clients each night, the ensuing political debate has been intense.

I sat down for drinks with the working girls at Abu’s, a horrifying hole in the wall bar/brothel on Nairobi’s extremely sketchy River Road, to hear what the sex workers are saying about it.

When I arrived, jaded-looking women in various degrees of intoxication lined the walls on the stairs up to the bar. Some were just lying on the ground, flophouse style. It was a pretty grim scene.

Mary, who’s 19 years old, has been in the business for a year now. She lives with her sister, who has no idea that Mary’s not spending her days and evenings working at a salon. (Understandably, none of the women allowed me to take their pictures.) This is the classic cover for most women I met at Abu’s—to their families they are late-night hair and nail salon employees. Beauticians.

They wake up around noon, head to whichever bar they’re working at, and stay out drinking and looking for clients until 4 or 5 AM. If there are kids (Mary wants two, eventually), they get fed in the morning. A bit of sleep, then repeat the process.

“It’s a crazy lifestyle sometimes,” Mary told me. “At home I am a Christian, and I tell my sister I plan to go back to school soon. Out here it is something else.”

So how exactly does it work? According to Mary: Approach a dude, sit at his table, ask for a drink. If he obliges, work him. Flirt, laugh, ignore the fact that he is 30 years older than you and most likely married.

“It’s not complicated. I go with him, I take out the condom, we fuck. I don’t kiss him. It’s just business. And then I leave. I don’t care about most of them. I have maybe three who I see often. The rest are forgotten,” she said.

Mary charges 200 Kenyan shillings, or about $2.50, per client. On a good night, she’ll pick up two or three. If they up the price to 500 shillings, however, she’ll do it without a condom.

“I know the risks and I fear them,” she said, “but I need food, I need clothes, I need a place to sleep.”

Many of the sex workers here are single moms, desperate to support their kids and bring home enough for food and rent. They try to insist on using condoms, but often their clients pay more to go without. (Seriously, guys, 37 percent? Like. Come. On.)

The difference between 200 shillings and 500 is huge, 22-year-old Shayla told me.

“I have a six-year-old daughter waiting at home. What can I do for her? If there is no money, we don’t eat,” she said.

Shayla tries to mitigate the risks—never get drunker than the client, don’t hang around anyone who’s on drugs—but it’s not always enough. She still remembers her first client, at Abu’s three years ago.

“I had finished high school and moved to Nairobi, but there were no jobs. I spent more time here, and one day a man told me to come to his table. ‘I just want to talk,’ he told me. But then he told me I had to fuck him, and we left together. He said he didn’t want to use a condom, and he slapped me when I tried to leave. Afterwards, he gave me some bus fare and I left,” she said.

Like Mary, Shayla swears she’s not HIV-positive. Most sex workers do.

“It’s not like you could tell someone even if you were. It would be the end of you,” she said.

Adding to the near-constant threat of contracting HIV or facing violence and rape, Nairobi’s prostitutes are also constant targets of police harassment.

“Even if you are crossing the street alone at night, they can stop you to harass you. You bribe them and beg them or spend the night in a cell. We lose so much money this way,” said Shayla.

Catherine Mukundi is a pleasant and friendly program coordinator at Hope Worldwide Kenya, an NGO that works to address the challenges facing Nairobi’s sex workers. She declined to comment on the hot-button legalization issue, but then went ahead and said something anyway. “I think some of the problems exist because sex work is criminalized,” she said. “We have incidents where somebody is caught with condoms, for instance, and they are harassed by the police. Because they are working underground, they’re not confident even carrying the protection they need.”

HIV rates could be improved and the ladies would be much safer if they weren’t taking shit from people on both sides of the law, Mukundi said.

“The women are not empowered enough to negotiate for condom use. If someone doesn’t have food for their children, then they can’t demand a condom. Our role is to tell them we don’t need to bow to that kind of pressure,” she said.

But with Kenya’s unemployment rate sitting at an estimated 40 percent, it’s unlikely many Twilight Girls will be taking back the night any time soon. Back at Abu’s, Mary told me she doubts legalization would improve things much.

“Until we are making enough money to survive and leave this lifestyle behind, we will keep doing what the clients say,” said Mary. “What other choice is there?”