Travelling multi‐level marketing schemes and whispers of fraud in Kenya

Abstract

While the transnational flows of goods, people and ideas have been increasing in the last decades, many people in Africa feel excluded from the possibilities that these connections bring. In Nairobi, some multi‐level marketing schemes are offering everyone the chance to partake in new forms of wealth creation, and hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have joined them. Such schemes have been travelling rapidly worldwide and seem to successfully circulate neoliberal rationalities and fantasies. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, the paper explores these multi‐level marketing schemes as travelling models, which need to be translated into local contexts. These schemes do not conform to conventional definitions of fraud but bring suspicions of it to the fore, doubts that haunt their glamorous marketing presentations. Such whispers imply the re‐emergence of notions of morality that are very much the opposite of the ideas that the schemes bring with them. Studying such schemes allows us to explore how actors convey, desperately want to partake in, and believe in capitalist rationalities and imaginaries. The suspicions of fraud also suggest a certain disillusionment with these rationalities, making apparent that they have become a matter of belief.

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