This chapter presents an ethnographic account of students from an elite school in Kenya who volunteer at a Bible Club for street children and children from poor families. Volunteering is often cast as requiring the construction of a different other and for the students who feature in this chapter, volunteering at the Bible Club is precisely an encounter with the excluded other of their school, ‘the people outside the gates’. The ethnographic account and analysis in this chapter concerns how volunteering as a mode of engagement with the excluded other feeds into the formation of the students who volunteer as privileged subjects and their relation to the public outside the school compound. The ethnographic account shows how the students give what they call ‘love’ and assume ‘responsibilities’ towards the children who attend the Bible Club, treating them as members of a public in which they do not themselves take part as equals. Based on personal relationships and senses of responsibility across different ethnic backgrounds (with which the students are generally not concerned) and vast socio-economic differences (with which they are), this new public thus emerges around something akin to what James Ferguson (2013: 232–3) calls ‘social inequality’. Social inequality, for Ferguson, is inequality that is lived and experienced within personal and moral relationships as opposed to inequality that is not conceived of in relation to the mutual obligations of a society. The analysis in this chapter shows how volunteering instils senses of personal relationships and responsibilities across socio-economic inequalities in some of the students who volunteer, rendering the inequalities social in part.

Most of the social-science literature on volunteers in Africa has been concerned with international volunteers in elite positions, European and North American students on gap years, and young Africans without work who seek a professional identity or minor material advantages through volunteering. In concerning young Africans from privileged backgrounds who volunteer, this chapter introduces a new type of volunteer. This also entails a shift from situating volunteerism mainly in relation to global socio-economic inequalities towards situating it in relation to inequalities that are internal to contemporary African societies.

My analysis is inspired by the anthropological literature on gated communities, which approaches them as a spatial expression of socioeconomic inequalities.