Europeans seek sex at African prices in Kenya-El pais

Europeans seek sex at African prices in Kenya: ‘They push me onto the bed without even saying hello’
Three sex workers recount the violence and scams their peers face in the country’s tourism zones A few days ago, Grace* had a terrible argument with a man. It even came to blows, and she was so afraid that she started running, trying to flee. The guy, an older Italian, was trying to force her to have anal sex. He wanted to pay her 2,000 Kenyan shillings, less than $16, with vaginal intercourse included. “No, no. I’m poor, but you can’t treat me like this,” Grace told him. She had no choice but to turn to sex work when she was 28 years old after her husband abandoned her and their two children, leaving them without even a roof to sleep under. She looked for other employment, but couldn’t find anything. There was no option. Now, Grace is 34 and has a small home with adobe walls and a roof made of coconut leaves, which she paid for with her own money, located on the outskirts of the Kenyan town of Watamu, on the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The coast of Kenya has been taken over by Europeans, who come not just for vacations, but also to build their own houses and start their own businesses at African prices. Watamu and the neighboring town of Malindi now resemble Italy, with pizzerias, ice cream shops, “ciao bella, como stai” heard on the beach, local spots with names straight out of Roman legend. The Italians put down the investment money — and earn the profits, of course — at such establishments. But the labor is provided by young Kenyans like Robert*, who works 12 hours a day, seven days a week in a small hotel for 18,000 shillings a month, or less than $140.

His hypothetical job is to take care of the pool, but he also works in the garden, as a porter and sometimes, even as a waiter. He also tracks down anything guests might need, both during his working hours, which literally extend from sunrise to sunset, and in the hours he supposedly has off to see friends and his daughter, who is almost two years old. A boda-boda, as mototaxis are called in local parlance? Robert can get you one. A place to eat or to go party? Robert will make a recommendation. Massage? Robert will set that up. It’s part of the responsibility of those who struggle every day to make a living that the white man, the mzunga (in plural, wazungu) not lack for anything. He’s the one bringing in the money — though it’s far from easy to get such funds, given the schedule they imply.

As part of his extra-official duties, Robert also links white men, generally between the ages of 55 and 70, with local sex workers like Grace. He is one of the few that knows about her secret profession.

Seven Islands Beach, one of Watamu’s idyllic beaches, at sunset on December 25, 2024.
Seven Islands Beach, one of Watamu’s idyllic beaches, at sunset on December 25, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
“I don’t want the kids to know what their mother does. For us, it’s a disgrace. My mother also lives here. If she found out, she’d feel terrible. How can I do that to her?” says Grace.

Grace and Robert live in the same area, a grouping of clay homes amid dense vegetation that stand a few minutes from Mida Creek, a large mangrove forest where one can book boat trips and wildly beautiful sunsets attract tourism. They’ve known each other since they were young, and call each other brother and sister. Robert translates Grace’s Swahili into English, since her skills in the language are limited to numbers, a couple phrases and little else — only what she needs to more or less get by at work.

“Sometimes I have problems communicating with clients,” she says. “Since I’m also a masseuse, there are times when I agree to give a man just a massage, but then he wants more. We negotiate the price and come to an agreement, I can do that. Many take me to their room and don’t even talk to me. They push me onto the bed without even saying hello. They often give me very little money, less than we’d agreed on. When I ask them for more and tell them we’d agreed on a different price, they tell me they don’t have it,” she says. She pauses and adds, “Sometimes, they make me cry.”

Alcohol and drugs to escape reality
She says she hates her work. She’d quit this second if she could get a “normal” job and still support her young children. “When I can get something for my kids, I’m OK,” she says. Like others who charge for sex in Kenya, and beyond debates in Europe over whether “prostitution” is real work or not, Grace doesn’t struggle with semantics. She calls herself a sex worker, and that is that.

Grace wears her hair in short dreadlocks that go from black at the root to bleached blond at the tip. She wears a long skirt and a patterned blouse. It’s almost never cold on the Kenyan coast. Sitting with her friends — among whom is Robert — in a small hut with a large metal roof that serves as the local bar, she barely speaks, chewing incessantly on something as though it were gum.

“It’s khat, do you know what that is? I use it to not be sad,” she says. Khat leaves have been consumed going back centuries for their mild stimulant properties, and contain alkaloids that are structurally similar to amphetamines. Many young people in Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula countries consume khat. They’re distinguishable by their red eyes and stained, yellow teeth. In Kenya, one in every three people survive on just $2.15 a day, the extreme poverty line as measured by the World Bank.

The local bar near the adobe houses where Grace and Robert live, on December 25, 2024.
The local bar near the adobe houses where Grace and Robert live, on December 25, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
Today, instead of khat, or perhaps in addition to it, Piero has drank a lot of alcohol. He says that he started this morning and is still going at 9:00 p.m., taking sips from a beverage called coconut wine. He, like many other young people, works at doing whatever it takes to make white tourists happy. In the morning, he goes to the beach, one of the hundreds of beach boys who are everywhere on the paradisaic shores of Kenya and who offer anything visitors might desire in exchange for extremely reasonable prices. A trip to Marafa canyon, a coconut freshly picked from a palm tree. When night falls, he dresses up “very elegantly,” highlighting his muscles. He puts on cologne, and heads to one of the two bars where he finds the most business. Sometimes, he dances. Other times, he simply sits and waits for an older European woman, almost always an Italian, to approach him and strike up a conversation. Both — and everyone else in the bar, if they’re paying attention — know how such talks will end.

Silence and ‘omertà’
Omertà is everything when it comes to the sex work — and in some cases, sex trafficking of minors — that takes place in tourism areas. The law of silence: everyone looks, but no one sees. That which is whispered about, but not discussed openly. Hotels and restaurants — many of them owned by Europeans — pretend they have no knowledge of such practices, but will open their doors to anyone who accompanies a paying white. Even if that company is a minor, according to those who work in the industry, and human rights organizations.

Federica, an Italian who runs a small hotel with a handful of rooms in Watamu, will only respond to questions by text message. “Mixed couples come in who make reservations for several days and arrive together. Obviously, they are asked for identifying documents. If a single man or woman has company, whether they’re white or black, they are registered as a guest upon request at arrival and a supplement per room is charged. The minors I have had here have only come with their father and mother.”

Robert hates the Italians. And the rest of the Europeans. And the wazungu in general. Around these parts, people don’t make many distinctions among white people. “I don’t like them,” he says. “I hate them, the men and the women. They do really ugly things.”

A tourist boat named ‘Subira. Italia Uno’ on December 25, 2024.
A tourist boat named ‘Subira. Italia Uno’ on December 25, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
His remarks are similar to those of Amos, a beach boy who has been walking along the ocean all day selling his coconuts, a visit to the hiding place of the moray eels or a trip out to the isola dell’amore, which he says is heart-shaped.

Not all beach boys are open to charging for sex, say Robert and Piero. There are some who have never slept with a tourist. Telling them apart is very difficult, which can’t be said for the women. “They dress in really short shorts. If they’re on the beach all day, it means that’s their job,” says Piero, who despite his disgust for all things Italian does not refer to himself as Peter.

Three beach boys accompany a European tourist couple at a Watamu beach on December 25, 2024.
Three beach boys accompany a European tourist couple at a Watamu beach on December 25, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
He is 29 years old and has twins. He began doing sex work at 23 because it’s “a good way of getting money.” His clients are primarily from Italy and usually between 60 and 70 years old. He has no doubt that he’d abandon this work if he found another job that paid better. When he was still with the mother of his children and could come home with a bag of rice, she didn’t ask him questions about where the money came from. It was Piero’s secret and it still is, though he does dream of someday finding a European woman of his own age with whom to be “free and happy.”

“There are tourists who behave well, who adopt you as if you were their son and even bring you to Italy. The richest ones can do that,” says Piero, though he’s still unsure about the idea of getting “kidnapped” for money and taken to a foreign country.

Fake relationships
Piero and Grace have spent days, even weeks, with their clients, who pay for housing, food and transportation, and who will often give them around $485 per week, during which they must constantly playact to make the mzungu feel special. Both Piero and Grace have also been tricked by those who promise to spend the whole week with them and then after two days disappear, having paid only a tiny fraction of the total price they agreed on, and sometimes, after promising idyllic futures that will never come to pass.

Lying is another aspect of this business that causes suffering among those who have no choice but to sell sex. Its impacts aren’t just psychological — they can also be physical. “A client I liked asked me to stay with her for three weeks. She said she would like to take me and my children to Italy, and that we would get married. In the end, I found out she was HIV-positive, and that she had infected me,” says Piero. Since he learned he was seropositive, he only sleeps with tourists using a condom.

“There are some who try to force me, but I turn them down. Two or three times, I’ve had to run from a place where I was with them because they were insisting on doing it without a condom, and I’m the first to not want to give it to tourists. If they force me, I tell them I’m leaving, and if they ask why, I tell them I love myself.”

In 2023, there were 1.4 million HIV-positive people in Kenya, a rate of 3.2 for every 1,000 individuals in the adult population (from 15 to 49 years old), according to data from the United Nations’ UNAIDS, which estimates that there are around 197,100 sex workers in the country.

A European man and a young Kenyan woman ride a ‘boda-boda’ in the town of Watamu on December 26, 2024.
A European man and a young Kenyan woman ride a ‘boda-boda’ in the town of Watamu on December 26, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
The high price of gay sex work
It’s nighttime and Piero is drunk and tired of looking for clients. Tonight, he’d rather go party with his friends, including Robert, at Carwash, an open-air club where the nearly all-local crowd sings and dances non-stop to the rhythm of Slow Dancing and Calm Down, the songs of the moment. There are only four wazungu: two girls who seem a bit lost and leave quickly, a young Spanish journalist, and a middle-aged guy with two young women, one on each arm, with whom he too quickly retires. There’s no doubt he’s paying them. Omertà.

Among those having the most fun on the dance floor is a young man of no more than 25 years old who has enviable dance moves and smiles non-stop, at times with his eyes closed, sometimes with his gaze fixed on a faraway point, his focus firmly on the joy of movement. Robert looks him up and down. He knows him. “He sleeps with white men,” he says.

On the right, the ‘Isola dell’Amore,’ one of the tourist attractions offered by the beach boys on Watamu Beach, on December 25, 2024.
On the right, the ‘Isola dell’Amore,’ one of the tourist attractions offered by the beach boys on Watamu Beach, on December 25, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
Kenya is still a very homophobic country, if not to the same extent as its neighbors. Uganda, for example, recently approved a controversial law that can sentence members of the LGBTQ+ community with up to life in prison. Still, LGBTQ+ individuals do suffer considerable social discrimination in Kenya, and sexual diversity as well as gender continue to be taboo topics in general, though that is changing among younger generations, who have increased access to the internet and higher levels of education.

“Man-man sex can be a lot of money. Just two times can be between $316 and $400. It’s not easy to get a man to offer you his ass.” Piero says the words with evident distaste — and some anger. To earn as much as the dancer does in a night, he’d have to spend an entire week with a female tourist.

Violence, criminalization and abuse
In Nairobi, some 348 miles from Watamu, it’s likely that Mary would have left her children in the care of her older siblings while she looked for work in the places where men come to find sex workers, the “hot spots,” in her words. Or she’d be calling a girlfriend to see if she knew of anyone who might be interested. Or a regular client, to ask if he didn’t have anything better to do. At 41 years old, she doesn’t often find foreigners who want to sleep with her. They prefer younger girls.

She says sex workers face violence, that they are frequently attacked and even killed, that they have to deal with passivity and distrust from hotels and police. Hotels don’t take down johns’ information and don’t register their stays. They don’t see them as a threat. In contrast, they do ask for the women’s information. Sex workers are poor, and since they don’t have money, they could be thieves.

“The police act the same way. They only arrest the women, they don’t touch the men. They often take advantage of the sex workers’ situation,” Mary says. She pauses and laughs incredulously. “Sometimes they take you into the station and ask you for sexual favors.”

Those who refuse to pay bribes when accused of minor offenses are usually punished by local courts with a fine of between $3.50 and $7, or one month in preventative detention, according to a study by the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. Sex work is not illegal in Kenya, but municipal laws like those of Nairobi often ban it.

An “old whore” who has seen it all
“Your friends have to know where you are at all times for that reason. We are a family. We have to stick together for safety,” Mary says, speaking with the certainty of one who is beyond pain, who has gone through everything. She is 41 years old and calls herself an “old whore.” One night, she thought she was going to die.

“One time I had a client, and we went to the Eastleigh neighborhood. He tried to take advantage of me. He hit me in the head with a bottle and I lost consciousness. He was scared because he thought I was dead and picked me up and laid me down in the bed. He waited until I woke up,” she laughs. “I realized I had lost a lot of blood, but I didn’t have the money to go to a hospital. I went to the police to file a complaint, and they told me that it wouldn’t go anywhere. It was hard, it was hard. The reason he hit me with the bottle was that he wanted me to have anal sex with him and I didn’t want to. They force us to do it. They say they only do it in front with their wives.”

On other occasions, they’ve tried to steal her money or phone. They’ve also offered her a lot of drugs: marijuana, cocaine, even injected substances. Ever since they forced her to take something without telling her what it was, and she woke up the next day having blacked out, Mary turns down all drugs. She has a lot of experience, has spent many years as a sex worker, and she knows what to expect and how to react. But younger women are more malleable. That’s one reason why they have more clients. “The majority of foreigners want young girls so that they can control them. They like them young, even children.”

She knows because she’s been there, too. She started in the industry when she was still underage, at 17, when she already had two kids. Mary began working in the sex industry for the same reason they all do: to get ahead and so that her little ones wouldn’t have a childhood as rough as her own. Mary has been an orphan since she was a baby. “Being a kid is so beautiful. I didn’t experience the feeling of being a little girl.”

Mary’s family doesn’t know her profession either, even though some of her children are the product of her relations with clients. “They know I work in a club, but not what I do there. Probably someday I’ll tell them, when they’re old enough to understand. Right now, I don’t want them to look at me differently.”

Mary, among the tall buildings of downtown Nairobi on December 28, 2024.
Mary, among the tall buildings of downtown Nairobi on December 28, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
Mary wouldn’t do this either, if she had any other option. She insists that at her age — she even has a granddaughter — it’s getting harder and harder to find clients. The majority are Kenyan, with some foreigners. They pay $16 a night, $8 if they don’t want to sleep with her, although she says some leave good tips. These days she rarely makes such trips, but in the past, she often traveled to the coast — Malindi, Diani, Mombasa — with tourists to spend a few days with them. She says she forgets how you have to spend the whole time telling them how much you love them and how handsome they are.

Though pimps aren’t essential in this panorama, and the majority of those who do exist are Kenyans, Mary complains that on the coast, there are some wazungu who start out as clients and wind up starting businesses. They build houses and bring girls, the younger the better, to live in them.

A European man and a young Kenyan woman leave a Nairobi bar together on December 28, 2024.
A European man and a young Kenyan woman leave a Nairobi bar together on December 28, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
“They really take advantage. The women are in a situation where they can’t say no, because they’re poor. And then they can’t leave because they live there. It makes me feel bad, because I get the sensation that they’re using us. Why are they paying me such little money if that’s not what they pay in their own country?”

Mary belongs to the sex worker organization Bar Hostess Empowerment and Support Program (BHESP), a network that offers sex workers support, such as medical assistance and legal services. It also provides sex education and facilitates access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to avoid contracting HIV. Sex workers in Nairobi and other large cities like Mombasa are much better protected thanks to such groups.

A European man and a young Kenyan woman in a Nairobi establishment, one of the “hot spots” for sex work mentioned by Mary, on December 28, 2024.
A European man and a young Kenyan woman in a Nairobi establishment, one of the “hot spots” for sex work mentioned by Mary, on December 28, 2024.
Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán
Mary has set a goal to leave the industry within three years. It’s not that she hasn’t wanted to before, just that she hasn’t been able to. “When you don’t have savings, you can’t change. I need to feed my kids and I haven’t finished paying off the house. I drop off the kids at school in the morning and I don’t even feed them breakfast. I hope that when two or three of them get work, they’ll help each other. I think about it so much…” she says. She’d like to have a small beauty salon, earn just enough to finish paying off the house.

Today, Mary has no plan. She’ll return via matutu — a graffiti-covered micro-bus — to her house in the periphery of Nairobi and will spend what’s left of Sunday there, watching the time pass slowly. She doesn’t work every day. Three shifts a week is enough to get by and maintain her eight kids.

They’re not all hers in the biological sense. Some of them were left orphans and Mary, who grew up without a father and mother, couldn’t bear the idea of seeing them in the street. They would be poor, but at least they’d have love and shelter, she told herself. They’re the children of two women who were Mary’s friends. Both were sex workers. Both were brutally murdered by men from which all they expected was a few bills in exchange for sex.

*Names marked with asterisks are fictitious, at the request of interviewees.

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