‘Almost everybody does it … ’ gambling as future-making in Western Kenya

This article discusses how Western Kenyans imagine and plan their futures in contrasting ways with a focus on three different gambling practices observed in a cluster of patrilineal homesteads. While participating in the national lottery entails an understanding of the future as organized by other actors and as, in principle, projectable, I analyse the practice of regularly placing low-risk bets on football games as a consequence of negating the possibility to plan one’s future in the long term. I lay bare a third conceptualization of the future by closely examining a betting ‘system’ one of my interlocutors had developed to hit a weekly jackpot. This conceptualization assumes that the future unfolds in ways that are, although very difficult to grasp, laid out in the present. The article concludes by distinguishing three ways in which gambling deals with the future, i.e. how it disclaims, upscales and invents the certainty of the future.