Surviving the Hood: a Walk Through Nairobi's Iconic Neighbourhoods
Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
What you up to I asked. I’m going back home to take some pictures for my foundation was the answer.
For us hood folk – no matter where we land – especially if we survive the hood – then it is forever home. Because we remember how far we have gone. And no matter what trauma and hardships we suffered – we remember this time through rose tinted glasses.
What? Going back home, home I said Yes, won’t be there for long but we can meet after. No way! I am coming with you. I am going home too. And so, we set off.
First stop Kaloleni – Ololo – for a walk and picture taking. You see for them Americans to give their hard-earned cash – we have to reaffirm our poverty and massage their saviour ego. But today I am not on that soapbox.
I am 7 years old, visiting a relative in Kaloleni – eating peanuts that Nyaredo (my uncle) has bought us. I am 7 years old – waiting for the medicine man to bring a variety of roots that need to be boiled and me washed with it. You see at age 7 I have terrible eczema and the many trips to Aga Khan courtesy of the KQ medical cover has not helped. Dana knows the cure – and so off we go to Kaloleni.
We say hi to Mama. She is shocked to see me. I am happy to see her. And of course, I come bearing gifts. I know she loves flowers – and these are bright orange. My Mama loved orange. Mothers are precious and I do miss my own Mama, so I channel that love to any mother I come across – especially my friends Mums.
These houses looked much bigger when I was 7. They seem shrunken – but we have grown. This takes me back to the sights and sounds of our homes growing up. Wow – it must have been loud – with laughter, joy, tears and hopes.
We walk around the old neighbourhood. There is a beautiful old building that was the maternity clinic back in the day. A safe place. Walking distance from any home for mothers to welcome new life. The library is next – open – recently renovated. The social hall still stands …and there is a handball pitch too. Hmmm – handball I inquire – yes, it has been here since our childhood.
This estate was planned. Every common space has a tree. The wooden shutters – painted green and that city council sky blue are still present. I am 7 years old, eating peanuts as I wait for the medicine man.
Next stop is my hood. Jericho.
Jogoo Road has changed but it is still the same. Barma market – where we bought live kukus for those special Sundays still stands. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We exit Jogoo Road as we remember the number 7 and 8B bus routes. Long live Kenya Bus Service!
Bahati estate is still the same. Jennifer would get off here. She was beautiful – Arab looking Kamba gal – Evelyn Tei’s cousin. Next Evelyn and Davi would get off at Kimathi. These were the it houses! 3-bedroom stand-alone homes – yo!
I was then in the bus by myself or with Agnes till Jeri. Funny – no one lived in Jerusalem or Ofafa Jericho…maybe they did, and we just didn’t take the same bus…
Welcome to Trench Town
The sign greeted me as the bus turned into my road. Then I knew I was home safe!
Oduko so – the big shops – the main shopping centre – our Mall I ate mtura there and ferried metal birikas of soup from there to neighbours’ homes. I got my shoes mended there at the cobbler outside the bar. My feet grew like weeds – no new shoes, mended shoes for me. My Mum’s local – drinking those small Tuskers with my Godmother and various aunties. Laughing. The field next to the dukas was where the monthly open-air movies were screened. To this day I wonder who was behind that… Bringing a screen and projector and showing a free movie to the masses.
Then the clinic… The clinic where you had to buy an empty small bottle for your cough medicine. In the hood, Actifed came in 5 litre jerricans. The clinic where Starehe Boys volunteered during the holidays.
Them in their very colourful uniforms – ever so smart. Patrick Shaw smart. The clinic that I ran to when I broke my toe… Which was not set properly – and has given me wahala ever since. I remember the day clearly because my uncle Cliff was there volunteering that day… The game was tapo…or blada…or cha mkebe… Anyway I ended up with a broken toe that healed funny.
St. Joseph’s …my nursery and local catholic church. Weird place, looking back. Lots of light skinned kids …pointies…running around. The only white jamaas were the…. yeap! ‘nuff said! We drive to the parking lot and I am 12. I loved a boy from that house.
He smelled sooo good – Old Spice I remember. First place I ever heard Tracy Chapman. His brother was playing his guitar to ‘Fast car’. But alas, he was smelling good for someone else…
Celestine’s house. Her mother told her not to talk to me because ‘I knew too much’. Celestine got pregnant in Standard 8… Clearly, I knew nothing!
Wiki’s house – Wycliff – his full name was too long for us kids. First boy and last male who ever slapped me. Heard my brother defended me by giving him a thorough beating! The joys of big bros in the hood.
Hilary’s house. Now that was an anomaly… Hilary lived there with his Mum. The end. Just him and his Mum…in that huge 2 bedroomed house! My family of 5 kids was the smallest…the average was 8 kids We had a cousin and house help living with us… We slept in one room. So, you see the thought of just Hilary – alone – in the room – solo…that was mind boggling!
Owanjo so…the big field Looks so small now.
Walking to church along the bougainvillea fence… Wondering why the boys are allowed to watch football whilst I have to go to church.
Oti Papa – towering tall. The coach. Superstar Someone scores, the crowd goes wild… I walk to church…
I am 10. Walking across the field after school to the far far corner to buy deep fried mhogo… Laughing with my two mates – Pauline and Mamie Pure bliss Them Mushrooms are having a jam/rehearsal session. The drums sound good, I fall in love with the guitar We eat and listen…
Thoma’s house. First real rejection. I am 15 going on 16 Standing in the kitchen – the gally kitchens of Jeri… Gathered courage to go in for a kiss. Dude jumped back as if I was about to stab him… Note to self – do not make any sudden movements towards the male species. They are somewhat fragile when not in control. Years later – we are back in the kitchen. Him from Sweden, me from my new hood. He has lost his Dad; I am saying pole. And I remind him …ai ai ai…wacha hiyo story Posh (my hood nickname). We laugh and he goes – lakini you are free ku jaribu tena.
The car park. With the Maasai watchie wrapped in his Raymond’s blanket, armed with his bow and arrow. It must have been a good year for Peugeot…everyone seemed to own one…or so it seemed. There was the occasional Datsun, Nissan and my Mama’s VW – KGG 908.
My street. Our house. Laughter – it is a Saturday and Mama is having her bura – she is laughing, my aunties are laughing, gossiping, listening, helping, soothing, accounting for the monthly contributions. They are drinking and laughing, and Franco plays in the background. Sisterhood – this is what it looks like. Joy – Earth, Wind and Fire – blasts from the record player. I am mesmerised by the sparkly cover. Fear – people running, horses…what? horses in Jericho? Screams… the 82 coup has arrived. Tears – loud wailing – my Uncle’s death – HIV – early days…he makes it into Newsweek… Violence – mwizi comes the rallying call. We all pour out of our homes… Nyerere with a panga, blood everywhere, leta mafuta… Later on I wonder how witnessing that affected us kids… Domes – the wall shook…my neighbour battering his wife. Her head made contact with the wall. The late-night knocks, the crying, black eye, broken bone – letting in a weeping female who needs to make it to hospital… Clear thought goes through my child mind – never marry a Kisii or a Luo for that matter…
The big easy – remembering the lazy Sunday afternoons, the footballers walking home, Leonard Mambo Mbotela asking us je, huu ni ungwana. The only time I think Luo men my Dad’s age attempted to understand Swahili.
The Bus Stop My stop – 3 steps and I am home. The bus stop where Mwangi gathered courage and gave me a love letter via Freddie. In their Martini uniform. Martini which I later realised was Martin Luther King Primary School. Go figure! Mwangi from Ziwani. As I got off the 8B – he got on. At times he didn’t. He sat there with a clear view of our kitchen and veranda. Young love. I turned him down gently…he swore to love me fore…
The Obembo tree. Weeping Willow – I discovered years later in my adulthood. Dhi kel kedi – go bring a stick. God help you if you got a dry one! It had to be flexible…so as it came down on you, you were dead just from the swishing sound it made.
I am 9. In standard 3… I have a toothache. I take a nap after lunch and I miss my afternoon classes. The maid reports me to my Dad with glee! Dhi om kedi. I die a thousand deaths. I am sick, in pain, my tooth! All my Dad hears is that I skipped school…like that is my fucking nature! I pick a nice flexible one because even in my misery, I want to be good and obedient and get a good kedi. I have seen this guy cane my brother. Watched my brother cry – my defender, my hero against the hood boys… I can’t imagine that wrath reigning down on me. My Dad is speaking… I can’t hear him… I am dying – can’t he see? I am crying – I am the good one. I am screaming – I am not lying! He raises his arm… I pee…right there where I stand. He looks at me in shock… I look at him in shock… He tells me to go shower. He never raised his hands again…to me. But everyone else got it…sadly. That is why only one boy has ever slapped me. One. Once. The end.
The hood. We connected at a basic level No pretence. No explaining. No pity. No judgement Just simple memories… The medicine man The bus ride Sunday football Them Mushrooms The Weeping Willow – which caused a lot of weeping Love – young unrequited love Friends – rest in peace Mamie Tracy Chapman Old Spice.
I am 45. Standing in an empty car park Facing owanjo so The bougainvillea is long gone There is a stone wall instead – protecting the space from land grabbers…Kenya! The grass and red soil are now gone… It is astro turf Kids play in their bright yellow jerseys…dreaming… Oti Papa would be proud. I wonder about Celestine, Wiki and Hillary…
Me at 45 Standing in the car park Old spice in my memory But now not quite Old Spice but an expensive scent Tracy in my memory… Nvirri the Storyteller on my mind Football in the background And in front of me… Home.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant. The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
In June 2002, veteran Kenyan chef Ms Alice Taabu bagged the prestigious Gourmand-World Cookbook Award in recognition of her two-decade-long career on the famed KBC TV cookery show Mke Nyumbani. Founded in 1995 by Chef Edouard Cointreau, the Gourmand Award marked a critical turning point in Kenya’s food conversation as historical dishes found their place on the global stage, and within a fast-evolving online life and culture spaces.
On June 5th Gourmand will be awarding their 2021 winner amidst a shifting influence in global food tastes, in an event that’s dubbed “the Oscars” or “the Olympics” for food enthusiasts, and one that has been increasingly dominated by chefs from the South and East, notably the Chinese. Alice Taabu’s versatile feature on our TV shows marked a gentle and progressive expression of our food habits within inter-webs that in hindsight we take for granted.
And it’s out of Alice Taabu’s years of pioneering work that now there’s a growing Kenyan culture of cooking shows, online recipes, and marketing of new social trends in food consumption in the internet streets. With their origins in broadcast television in Kenya, they have evolved tremendously with the growth and uptake of Instagram and YouTube.
This includes the adaptation of television food show formats onto multi-platform content channels such as Netflix, Pay-Tv, Amazon Prime, brand websites and digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
Yet, even as the ever versatile chef Alice stuck to the time-tested free-to-air TV model, younger, more boisterous incomers like Arthur Mwai were pushing beverage and culinary options away from the mainstream into newer spaces, including setting up the famed Psys, first on Langata Road and later in Westlands.
Since the mid-2000s the online food culture has evolved and birthed offshoots of Mke Nyumbani with varying shelf lives and scope. Buoyed by both the growing ease of content creation, falling cost of internet connectivity, and increasing demand for more local content and local delicacies, recipes increasingly find their way online and into the watching experience of Kenyans within ever- expanding digital ecosystems.
The 2010s saw the explosion of the online world as local content creators consolidated their influence, benchmarked against each other, and set-up entire platforms for curating similar content. It’s no wonder then that Yummy was launched a year later, in 2012, Eat Like a King in 2013, Kaluhi’s Kitchen in 2014, Get in The Kitchen on K24 in 2015, and Shamba Chef in 2017.
Kenya’s Anita Kerai secured a 7-part food series on Amazon Prime, and published her 170-page Flavours from Kenya cookbook. Then there’s The Great Kenyan Bake Off which is based on the British Version The Great British Bake Off, Ali Mandhry’s Tamu Tamu, and Martin Munyua of Dads Can Cook who pioneered the conversation around the legal protection of food TV formats 2013.
A 2015 survey by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) showed that the country has 64 TV stations, and that a majority of local TV viewers preferred local content to foreign programmes. So starting in mid-2016 onwards, the state agency mandated all local broadcasters to start airing 40 per cent local content, increasing gradually to 60 per cent.
The preferred formats are usually semi-structured discursive models involving cooking competitions, instructional methods, light entertainment, storytelling, global cuisine tours, and celebrity guests.
Food Shopping Apps
Locally, a February 2021 poll showed that nearly 4 in 5 shoppers are spending more on online shopping with data top-ups (92 per cent), clothing (67 per cent) and electronics (56 per cent) topping the list of products bought. Meanwhile services sought online include cooking recipes and techniques, dancing classes, learning languages, and mastering DIY projects. That number has inched even higher as COVID-19 restrictions closed down brick and mortar outlets across the country.
The music/movies segment tops the list of online search content, followed by electronics with fashion in third position. But the food segment is growing rapidly; online food stockists and delivery firms including E-Mart, Glovo, Chandarana FoodPlus, UberEats, Yum Deliveries, as well as Green Spoon and Jumia Food have recorded spikes in their online demand. Twiga, Kalimoni Greens, Kibanda Online, Gobeba, and a host of other online platforms have embraced digitisation and online payment systems to cater to the expanding palate of a tech-savvy society. As online food shopping gains traction, the numbers are bound to surge forward as consumers develop trust and make buying decisions based on the online visual displays, coupled with a seamless product and user interaction.
The influencer culture covers both cooking shows, shopping, dishes, recipes, and food markets in short simple, accessible TikTok and YouTube clips, and often highlights both exotic and local ingredients.
In typical Mke Nyumbani format, such shows offer useful tips on cutlery, techniques, recipes, hygiene, new appliances, first aid, or even what to do if things go wrong. The foodie culture blurs the lines between the food reality TV show and the everyday feeding choices of people and families at home.
Then there is the rise of “Indomie Twitter”, a subculture on Twitter which promotes the growth in the variety of foods consumed, sharing of recipes, online food delivery stores, and outlets.
Psychology of food influencer marketing
The question still remains though: why and how does the psychology of food influencer marketing work? What makes Mke Nyumbani, or Dads Who Cook, Shoba’s Cookouts or Indomie Twitter such a social phenomenon. The short answer is that influencer marketing plays directly into the human desire to belong. It amplifies our proclivity towards that which we already are familiar with.
Behavioural psychologists and neuromarketing experts call this the Mere Exposure Effect. All else being equal, the more we’re exposed to something that’s relatable, the more we like it. And fascinatingly, this preference for the familiar often appears to operate outside of our consciousness.
It appeals to our need for social conformity, and our mental processing functions. Basically, our brain is wired to respond to stimulation from influencer marketers whom we already trust at a virtual interaction level. We find their persuasion more authentic, more fun, and more attractive than other types of persuasions. The link is optimised when the awareness and affinity of the consumer gels with the creativity of the influencer.
Hence, for example Shoba Gatimu’s earthy humor, the ingenuity of the Indomie Twitter crew, Hannah Thee Baker’s digital influencing makes food products look good on set, given they are agile chefs who’re good at their craft.
The psychological terrain of the food influencer market is what happens when social users follow friends and famous users rather than corporate brands. These consumers turn to social platforms to connect and find out how people they look up to build their lifestyles and to look for relatable figures to help them filter through the hundreds of choices in the online markets. In turn they consume lots of visual content which food influencers are primed to optimise.
Research shows that well thought-out visual influencer marketing in the food industry incentivises an engagement rate of 7 per cent and can imply conversion rates of up to Ksh7 for every shilling spent. Ultimately, the partnership between brands and influencers is built on the social ingredient that their personas brings, while building up significant returns on investment (ROI).
To understand the psychology of persuasion, author Robert Cialdini places the construction of influence under six metrics: Reciprocation – the internal pull to repay what another person has provided us with. Consistency – we work to behave consistently towards a choice we’ve already made. Social Proof – when we are unsure, we look to similar others. Liking – the propensity to agree with people we like and the desire for others to agree with us if we like them. Authority – we are more likely to say “yes” to others who are authorities. Scarcity – we want more of what is less available or dwindling in availability.
The overall group psychology that happens ends up creating consumer tribes in which the pursuit of consumption of certain meals or dishes built into our ethnic, class, religious or moral influence is reinforced. This isn’t hard given that the need for social conformity is already hardwired into our brain’s reward system.
The evolution of the kitchen influence
An even bigger influence in group-wide food tastes and preferences among Kenyans stems from social sharing. Influence at that level is therefore built into our deep networks of trust, approval, love, companionship and even identity. The most enduring influence on our food tastes therefore comes from the social affections that we’ve built with our friends within family and friendship set- ups.
In the modern family kitchen, efficiency has gradually eroded camaraderie, as technology reorients and at times replaces our cooking traditions. Meanwhile convenience has become king, as cookware, countertops, drawers, ovens and cabinetry signal the gradual evolution of both the home, the consumer society, and technology.
Your typical modern Kenyan kitchen now bears little resemblance to the home kitchens of old. Before the dawn of modernity, human life revolved around the kitchen and the farm, and the roles that defined kitchen life were often assigned to the women in the community. This lent the home life to critical contestation at the dawn of modernity as family life shifted away from those two domains and into the urban environment.
The traditional designation of the kitchen as a place for mothers and women in general was challenged by the industrial revolution that drove the locus of civilisation away from the kitchen — and by extension the home — and into the milling factories miles away.
And as Ally Matsoso opines, “As men began to accumulate excess wealth and power, they gained freedoms women lacked. Survival and family stability were no longer their sole motivators. Women, as Nourishers of the family, decreased in influence as the family’s importance decreased, crowded out by commerce. Local bakers could now supply our bread. The spiritual center, the home, had to compete with a material culture, capable of satisfying needs the home once met, and of creating new needs as well.”
What we are seeing at the tail end of capitalism as we know it, is a major shift in food cultures and the nuances built around them. Male chefs grace our TV shows and Instagram food influencers represent a wide range of ages, gender, sexes, class, and persuasion.
There is increased diversity in meal plans, and orthorexia is now a prevalent habit that is defined as a genuine and critical concern about what someone eats. This could range from giving up sugars or oils or meat as a matter of preference. It can also be seen in veganism, vegetarianism or pescatarianism, diets that are adopted either because of health concerns, ecological issues, religious beliefs, or a myriad other social, cultural, moral or personal desires. Entire groups like Hindus, Adventists, Muslims have given up certain foods for one or more of the aforementioned reasons.
Recipes are getting increasingly local as health concerns, and choice of nutrition over taste gives preference to local delicacies once considered not cool enough for our social media streets. Nduma, ngwaci, boiled/roasted maize, bean bread, osuga, banana bread, githeri, chicken and ugali, fish, groundnuts, vegetable dishes, irio, kimanga, cassava and bean mash, matoke, mbaazi, njahi, porridge — to name just those — are sneaking their way back onto our dinner plates, Tiktok, YouTube, and Gram.
In this sense, the growth of cookery shows and food influencers is not so much the ultimate co- option of the home kitchen by modernity, as it is an imperfect recreation of what was, until the dawn of modernity, the soul of the home.
At the end of the day, the ultimate food influence in our lives may not be the familiar and likable chefs on TV, but our mothers and fathers, their recipes, the dinner table, and the food rituals in our family kitchen.
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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper In the early 1920s, the colonial administration of Nairobi municipality demolished a large number of “African villages,”—some of the few spaces providing residence for Africans in this urban node of the recently declared colony. The impetus was to make the city legible to empire—racially, spatially, ecologically, and economically.
One hundred years later, in May 2020, not too far from where Mji wa Mombasa, Kaburini, and Maskini villages were demolished a century earlier, 8,000 residents of Kariobangi and Ruai were evicted—their settlements deemed illegal—despite a court order halting such action. Both the Ruai and Kariobangi lands are to be used, supposedly, for water and sewage treatment plants for the “legal” city connected to these service grids. The evictions happened at the height of both a pandemic and the rainy season, and despite the fact that many residents had various forms of legitimate claims to this land.
In their recent book The City Makers of Nairobi, the urbanists Anders and Kristin Ese draw connections between such colonial and postcolonial incidences when they write: “in creating this image,” one of illegality and unwanted informality and people, “the city turns its back on its actual centre.” Through evictions, neglect, and historical narratives of degenerate “slum” life and people, the center of Nairobi, the former “native city” has historically been overlooked. As a consequence, the actual contributions of the majority of its residents—from vernacular forms of urbanism to Nairobi’s cultural, economic, and social life—is off staged. The authors argue, above all, that this “image” has been used, both on scholarly and public fronts, to uphold Nairobi as a colonial construct and its majority black residents as historically inconsequential peons in its reproduction. Rather, that the legacy of unjust and segregated planning has been disproportionately cited as having the largest imprint on the city, while the lives, work, and everyday practices of Africans who have lived here for generations has not been duly recognized as critical “city making.”
To make this argument, they dwell in a period of Nairobi’s history that is not well documented, 1899-1960, and bring together an exemplary mix of sources from the archives, oral histories, personal relationships, photos, maps, and other varied forms of documentation. Commendably, their concern is not just the spectacular; they paint portraits of mundane African “city making” in this period: from building mosques, local music festivities, neighborhood social functions and fights, alcohol brewing, Comorian migrants in the 1930s, and even trade union activism. In drawing out the multiplicity of these urban processes, their narration revolves around four fluid axes: between conformity and nonconformity, between structure and agency, between disruption and continuity, and between acceptance and resistance. In bringing forth these orienting continuums, they highlight the varied positions that Africans embodied throughout Nairobi, that have rendered its particular forms, and, ultimately, assert black residents’ prominence as important to past and ongoing social and spatial environments in the city.
In a context where monographs on the histories of Nairobi are still rare, and especially those that focus on the early colonial period, The City Makers of Nairobi is an important complement to this limited archive. Much of the recent work on this complex city has taken a developmental lens, focusing less on the “city making” of its residents, and more on its service inadequacies, poverty, and crime. Although these themes are important to reflect on, particularly the larger structural violence they point to, they disregard the life force and struggles that keep people’s homes in place; the different ways in which the majority on the margins respond to the always looming socio-spatial erasure. Important academic exceptions to this are the interventions by Andrew Hake, Nici Nelson, Louise White, Chege Wa Githiora, Joyce Nyairo, Connie Smith, Naomi van Stapele, and others. This academic work is expanded by the more accessible and much loved brash and often irreverent cultural offerings of writers such as Meja Mwangi, of “Going Down River Road” fame, and the music offerings of youth from former native cities, such as the recent Genje style that can only come from the heartbeat of Kanairo City (Nairobi in Sheng).
At the same time, while their argument is valid, I feel that Ese and Ese have overstated it. Though I agree that the perpetuation of Nairobi as a “colonial construct” endures, this does not mean that this one sided legacy “implies that inhabitants had and still have no command over city making.” Highlighting and privileging the violent coloniality that shaped this city, and continues to shape it, as many do, does not mean that we do not recognize and live the reality that it did and does not have total power in the landscape. The city sentiences described within the works of the authors listed above—from housing to kinships to languages to activisms—certainly do not ignore the vitality of African lives, and their primary role in shaping this city’s varied horizons, even if they highlight the enduring hegemony of colonial constructs.
Kariobangi and Ruai evictees in 2020, as their predecessors, will continue to find ways to make home within or without the vicinity of their demolished houses. And the presence of the oppressive colonial surveillance practices and ordinances, past and present, implicitly and explicitly recognize/d this power: that African forms of life and urbanism could not be suffocated, that there was and would never be an African city without them, even if the director of Public Works, from 1900 to 1922, stated that his department did more for oxen than had been done for native housing.
While cautious of the overstatement of a one-sided legacy, I commend the critical task that Ese and Ese have given themselves; that of highlighting African life by detailing housing patterns, cultural lives, and everyday practices in ways intended to decenter the colonizer. Ultimately, the authors have managed to “encourage people to reflect on the fact that this is indeed their city, and has always been so;” a supportive endorsement of Nairobi’s primary city making communities who, from 1920 to the present, continue to find the post-colonial eviction bulldozer at their door.
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
At a time when “social distancing” is becoming the norm due to the coronavirus pandemic, it may appear self-indulgent to reminisce about a period when going to the cinema was a regular feature of East African Asians’ lives. But perhaps now that the world is changing – and many more people are watching movies at home on Netflix and other channels – it is important to document the things that have been lost in the war against COVID-19 and with the advent of technology. One of these things is the thrill of going to the cinema with the family.
What has also been lost is an urban culture embedded in East Africa’s South Asian community – a culture where movie-going was an integral part of the social fabric of this economically successful minority.
Those who pass the notorious Globe Cinema roundabout, which is often associated with pickpockets and street children, might be surprised to learn that the Globe Cinema (which no longer shows films but is used for other purposes, such as church prayer meetings) was once the place to be seen on a Sunday evening among Nairobi’s Asian community. I remember that cinema well because in the 1970s my family used to go there to watch the latest Indian – or to be more specific, Hindi (India also produces films in regional languages like Telegu, Bengali and Punjabi) blockbuster at 6 p.m. on Sundays. Sunday was movie day in my family, and going to the cinema was a ritual we all looked forward to. The Globe Cinema was considered one of the more “posh” cinemas in Nairobi; not only was it more luxurious than the others, but it also had better acoustics.
As veteran journalist Kul Bhushan writes in a recent edition of Awaaz magazine (which is dedicated entirely to Indian cinema in East Africa from the early 1900s to the 1980s), “Perched on a hillock overlooking the Ngara roundabout, the Globe became the first choice for cinemagoers for new [Indian] releases as it became the venue to ogle and be ogled by the old and the young.”
Indian movies were – and are – the primary source of knowledge about Indian culture among East Africa’s Asian community. The early Indian migrants had little contact with the motherland, as trips back home were not only expensive but the sea voyage from Mombasa to Bombay or Karachi took weeks. (At independence in 1947, the Indian subcontinent became two countries – India and Pakistan – hence the reference to Indians in East Africa as “Asians”.) So they relied on Indian films to learn about the customs and traditions of the country they or their ancestors had left behind.
Exposure to Indian languages and culture through films was one way Indians abroad or in the diaspora retained their identity and got to learn about their traditions and customs. I got to learn about the spring festival of Holi and goddesses such as Durga from watching Indian films. I also learnt Hindi, or rather Hindustani – a mix of Hindi (which is Sanskrit-based) and Urdu (which is also Sanskrit-based but which borrows heavily from Persian and Arabic) – which is the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, and which is the language most commonly used in the so-called Hindi cinema.
On the other hand, the sexist culture portrayed in the majority of Indian films also reinforced sexual discrimination among East African Asians. The idea that women are subservient to men, and that it is the woman who must sacrifice her own needs and desires for the “greater good” of the family/community, were – and still are – dominant in Indian cinema. Love stories portrayed in films – where young lovebirds defy societal expectations and cross class, religion or caste barriers – were not supposed to be emulated; they were considered pure entertainment and not reflective of a society where arranged marriages were and still are the norm. I heard many stories of how if an Asian woman dared to cross racial, religious or caste barriers she was severely reprimanded or stigmatised.
Watching Indian movies was also one way of keeping up with the latest fashions. Men and women often tried to copy the hairstyles and clothes of their favourite movie stars. When the hugely successful film Bobby was released in 1973, many girls adopted the hairstyle of the lead actress (who was barely 16 when she starred in the film) Dimple Kapadia. (I used to have a blouse at that time that was a replica of the one the actress wore in the film.) When the famous film star Sharmila Tagore dared to wear a revealing swimsuit in the 1967 film An Evening in Paris, she opened the door for many Indian women to go swimming without covering themselves fully.
Since music often defined the success of a film, top playback singers, such as Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and Muhammad Rafi, were held in high regard, and people flocked to watch their live concerts in Nairobi. Wealth and opulence were in full display at these events.
The Golden Age
The 60s, 70s and 80s are often described as the Golden Age of Indian/Hindi cinema. Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, where there were large concentrations of Asians, had many cinemas devoted to showing films made in Bombay (now Mumbai) – often referred to as Bollywood. This was the time when actors and actresses like Rajesh Khanna, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi became superstars.
Cinemas in Nairobi were always full, especially on weekends when Asian families flocked to the dome-like Shan in Ngara, to Liberty in Pangani, or to the Odeon or the Embassy in the city centre. (except for Shan cinema, all the others are no longer cinema halls but are used for other purposes. Shan was rescued from decrepitude by the Sarakasi Trust, which changed its name to The Dome; it is now used for cultural activities.) Over the years, an increasing number of Africans began watching Indian films. Oyunga Pala, the chief curator at The Elephant, recalls going to the Tivoli cinema in Kisumu, where he first got to see Amitabh Bachchan in action.
“Right next to the Liberty Cinema was situated the clinic of a very popular Indian doctor,” recalls Neera Kapur-Dromson in an article published in the Indian cinema edition of Awaaz. “The small waiting room was always crammed with patients. But that never deterred him from taking ample breaks to enjoy a few scenes of the film being screened…”
But for Asian teenage girls and boys in Nairobi, the place to be seen on a Sunday evening was the Belle Vue Drive-In cinema on Mombasa Road. Young Asian men would show off their (fathers’) cars and young women would display the latest fashions – all in the hope of catching the attention of a potential mate. Food was shared – and sometimes even cooked – on the gentle slopes of the parking spots. Going to the Drive-In was like going for a picnic. And as the lights dimmed, the large bulky speakers were put on full volume so that everyone (usually father, mother, and three or four kids in the back seat) in the car – and beside it – could hear the dialogues. Fox Drive-In cinema on Thika Road was also a popular joint, but mainly with the younger crowd who preferred watching the Hollywood movies which were a regular feature there.
It was the same in Kampala. Vali Jamal, recalling his youthful days in Uganda’s capital city, says that the Sunday outing to the Drive-In was the only time there was a traffic jam in Kampala. “Idi Amin got caught in one of them, driving back to Entebbe with his foreign minister Wanume Kibedi,” he writes. “‘Where are we?’ quoth the president, ‘In Bombay?’ And the expulsion happened.”
He continues: “Well, let me not exaggerate, but South Asian wealth was on display on the Sundays accompanied by their notions of exclusion, and let us not forget that those two variables – income inequality and racial arrogance – figured heavily in Amin’s decision to expel us.” (In August 1972, President Idi Amin expelled more than 70,000 Asians from Uganda.)
Urban conversations
In her book, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth Century Urban Tanzania, Laura Fair describes how the Sunday evening shows became a focal point of urban conversations among Tanzania’s Asian community. They were meeting points, like temples, mosques or churches, where people sought affirmation.
As in Kenya, Sunday shows in Tanzania were family and community bonding events. “Cinema halls were not lifeless chunks of brick and mortar; they resonated with soul and spirit. They were places that gave individual lives meaning, spaces that gave a town emotional life. Across generations, cinemas were central to community formation,” says the author. Indian cinema thus played an integral role in the social lives of the South Asian community in East Africa.
It all started in the 1920s when Mohanlal Kala Savani, a textile trader, imported a hand-cranked projector and began showing silent Indian films in a rented warehouse in the coastal town of Mombasa. In 1931, when two brothers, Janmohamed Hasham and Valli Hasham, built the Regal Cinema, he began renting the venue to show Hindi films. Two years later, he built his own 700-seat Majestic Cinema in Mombasa, which showed Indian films and also hosted live shows.
The late Mohanlal Savani was a man of vision, recalls his son Manu Savani in an article chronicling how his father expanded movie-viewing in East Africa. “As time progressed Majestic became an established cinema on the Kenyan coast. The owners of Majestic also became fully fledged film distributors with links stretching, to start with, to Uganda and [what was then known as] Tanganyika.”
Famous Indian movie stars began gracing these cinemas in order to increase their fan following. Notable among these were the legendary Dilip Kumar, a 1950s heartthrob whose portrayal of jilted lovers set many a heart fluttering, and Asha Parekh, who made her name in tragic love stories such as Kati Patang.
Indian cinema had wide appeal not just in Kenya, but also in neighbouring Zanzibar, where the urban night life was dominated by Indian movies. Many a taraab tune came directly from the hit songs of Indian movies. As opposed to Western movies (often referred to as English movies), Indian films appealed to Swahili sensibilities, with their focus on values such as modesty, respect for elders and morality.
In Zanzibar, Lamu and other coastal areas where segregation between the sexes was strictly observed, there were special zenana (women-only) shows, where women dressed up in their finest to join other women in watching Indian and Egyptian films. For many Asian and Swahili women, the zenana afternoon show was a rare opportunity to leave their cloistered existence and let their hair down, and also to meet up with friends outside the confines of their homes. (I once went to a women- only show at Nairobi’s Shan cinema on a Wednesday afternoon with my grandmother when I was about eight or nine years old and I can tell you there was less movie-watching and more talking and gossiping going on during the show.)
Unfortunately, the old cinemas in Zanzibar are no more, which is surprising because the island is host to the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Cine Afrique, the only standing cinema in Zanzibar when I visited the island in 2003, was a pale shadow of its former shelf, with its cracked ceiling and broken seats. I believe it has now been demolished to pave way for a mall. The Empire, another famous cinema on the island, is now a supermarket and the once impressive Royal Cinema is in an advanced stage of decay.
The decline of the movie theatre
There are many reasons for the decline of Indian movie theatres in East Africa, among them piracy, declining South Asian populations and technologies that allow people to watch movies from the comfort of their homes. The introduction of multiplex cinemas in shopping malls has also lessened the appeal of a stand-alone cinemas, and made movie-going less of an “event” and more of something that can be done while doing other things.
Indian cinema has also evolved. Unrequited love, family dramas, good versus evil and the “angry young man” genre popularised by Amitabh Bachchan – constant themes in the “masala” Indian films of the 70s and 80s – have been replaced by more sophisticated and nuanced plots, perhaps in response to a large Indian diaspora in the West which is more interested in plots that are more realistic and reflective of their own lives. The escapism of the Indian cinema of yesteryear has given way to realism, which makes cinema-going less “entertaining”.
Indian actors and actresses are also getting more roles in films made in Hollywood, and American and British films are increasingly finding India to be an interesting backdrop or subject for their movies, as evidenced by the huge success of films like Slumdog Millionaire. This has expanded the scope and definition of what constitutes an “Indian movie”.
Some would say that Indian cinema has actually deteriorated, with its emphasis on semi- pornographic dance routines and plots revolving around upper class people and their angst. So- called “art cinema” produced by award-winning directors like Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal, which portrays the lives of the downtrodden and addresses important social issues, or distinctly feminist films like Parama (directed by Aparna Sen), which explores the inner worlds of Indian women, are few and far between.
But as any Indian movie buff will tell you (and I include myself in this group), the experience of watching an Indian film in a cinema cannot be matched on a TV or computer screen. Indian cinema in its heyday was a feast for the eyes. If you wanted to enter the magical world of Indian cinema, complete with elaborate and well-choreographed dances, heart-stirring music and emotion, you saw Indian films in a movie theatre.
Alas, those days are fast disappearing thanks to terrorism, technology and now COVID-19. And along with this, a distinctly East African urban culture has been lost forever.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
“Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection.” – Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011)
In February this year, just before the coronavirus pandemic forced the Kenyan government to impose a partial lockdown in the country, I moved to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a city with a population of 4.4 million, from Malindi, a small town along Kenya’s coast with a population of just 120,000. I had been intending to move back home for several years but 2020 seemed an opportune time to do it. I had spent ten long years in Malindi and was ready to get back to the thick of things where the action was.
Now I know, for most people who live in Nairobi, the city is not “home” – the “true north” of most Nairobians, as Alexander Ikawah pointed out in a recent article, is their rural home, the place they identify most with. Ikawah says that Nairobi is just a place where “city villagers” work; where they have “houses”, not “homes”.
But I am not among these people. I was born in Nairobi, and so was my father and my grandfather. Kenyan Asians don’t typically have a rural home (Asians in Kenya were not encouraged to settle in rural or agricultural land both before and after independence and so are concentrated mainly in urban areas). And even if they have an ancestral home in India or Pakistan, they don’t tend to refer to it as “home”, nor does this ancestral home loom large in their imagination. In fact, many Kenyan Asians have never visited their “motherland”.
I have lived in London in the UK and Boston in the USA, and have travelled to many, many, cities around the world – New York (my favourite city), Istanbul (a cultural delight where East meets West), Mogadishu (a wounded city with nice beaches), Kabul (wounded but with majestic snowy peak backdrops), Havana (a salsa-lover’s dream, arguably the world’s most egalitarian city), Paris (a romantic city with many bridges), Mumbai (a buzzing “maximum city” of people, people, and more people), Beijing (interesting but with high levels of air pollution), Cairo (history lives here), Florence (a beautiful outdoor museum), Johannesburg (a legacy of apartheid, not my favourite city), Dar es Salaam (a friendly coastal city with huge potential), to name a few – but for me, Nairobi is not only home, it is also the place where most of my memories reside.
I will not go into the details about my reasons for leaving Nairobi in the first place, but it had a lot to do with trying to regain some perspective on life after having led a busy treadmill-like work existence where career success depended so much on pleasing a boss and undermining colleagues to move up the career ladder. I was hoping that a break would allow me to do things I hadn’t had time for before, like writing and spending more time with my husband. I dreamed of looking out of the window and seeing palm trees swaying in the wind, and breathing in the salty Indian Ocean breeze. Oh what bliss (and it was)…until I discovered that meaningful social interaction was much more important to me than the sounds and smells of nature. Voluntary self-isolation, I discovered, is neither natural nor healthy. Human beings are wired to be social animals – that is how they survived as a species.
While living in a small sleepy town where nothing much happens gave me the freedom to pursue writing (I ended up writing three books during my self-imposed “exile”) and other interests, I had a gnawing sense that I was in danger of disconnecting and self-isolating myself from all that was meaningful in my life. I yearned for intellectual stimulation and missed cultural and literary events. I longed to go to the cinema and hang out with my family. My social interactions in Malindi were superficial; I was in danger of becoming like the many expatriate (mostly Italian and British) retirees in the town, whose lives revolve around bridge parties and afternoon siestas induced by copious amounts of wine.
The truth is, I was lonely. I had not found my “tribe” in Malindi.
Then COVID-19 happened. It is unfortunate that my return to Nairobi coincided with a dusk-to-dawn curfew and partial lockdown, so my intentions of absorbing myself into city life have once again have been put on hold. I am back to self-isolating again.
Cities are not the problem
The coronavirus pandemic has raised questions about whether cities will lose their allure, and whether people will look to leading simpler rural or small town lives. The fact that the virus emanated from the city of Wuhan in China and spread across the world through networks of cities and transport hubs is making people wonder whether we should be seeking more dispersed and less dense forms of settlement.
However, Tomasz Sudra, a former colleague who is now retired from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), told me that it was unfair to blame cities for COVID-19 because the virus could have been contained early if the Chinese government had not decided to suppress “bad news”.
“The medical doctor who blew the whistle on the virus and died from it was forced to confess that he was spreading false news and was arrested,” he said. “The epidemic [in China] became a pandemic because the government suppressed the free flow of information.”
Cities have not only been associated with the rapid spread of diseases, but environmental degradation as well. The concentration of human and industrial activity in cities and the over- reliance on motorised forms of transport have been blamed for the air pollution that characterises so many of the world’s large cities. Images of smog-free cities as a result of lockdowns (especially in China, where air pollution levels are so excessive that city residents routinely wear face masks) have been circulating on social media. People are asking whether the climate crisis could be blamed on cities, and whether COVID-19 will force us to seek alternative lifestyles.
John Gray, writing in the 3 April 2020 issue of the New Statesman, says that the current crisis is a “turning point” in history. “The era of peak globalization is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were,” he predicts.
Is the city – itself a product of globalisation and the movement of goods and people from one shore or trading route to another – losing its attraction? Will there be a return to the nostalgic longing for rural life popularised by people like Mahatma Gandhi, who said that “true India” could only be found in the country’s villages? I don’t think so. The world, including India, is more urban than it was in Gandhi’s time. “True India” is no longer only in India’s villages, but in its teeming cities and towns, which currently host 34 per cent of the country’s population.
Just over a decade ago, there were more rural folk on this planet than city folk, but that changed around 2007 when the world’s urban population equaled the world’s rural population for the first time. Though some regions of the world, notably Europe, North America and Latin America, became predominantly urban much earlier (around the 1950s), the rapid urban growth rates in poorer parts of the world in the last fifty years have demonstrated that the pull of the city is stronger than ever. Cities must be offering something that villages don’t, or can’t.
I must confess that I have spent much of my professional life writing about what is wrong with cities and what can be done about it. At UN-Habitat, where I worked as an editor for more than a decade, the emphasis was on urban poverty and all its manifestations, including informal settlements (also known as slums). In 2006, UN-Habitat declared that one out of every three city dwellers lives in a slum, with sub-Saharan Africa having the largest proportion of its urban population living in slum conditions, with little or no access to water, sanitation, electricity and adequate housing. Asia hosted the largest number of slum dwellers, though some sub-regions in the continent were doing better than others. Slums, warned UN-Habitat, were threatening to become a “dominant and distinct type of settlement in cities of the developing world”.
This grim assessment was followed by another one in 2008, when UN-Habitat sounded the alarm on rising inequalities in cities, and warned that economic and social inequalities in urban areas had the potential to destabilise countries and make them economically unsustainable. Highly unequal cities – where the rich lead vastly different lives from the poor – are breeding grounds for social unrest, and social unrest disrupts economic activities, went the argument. UN-Habitat stated that pro-poor and inclusive urban development could significantly decrease these inequalities and make cities more sustainable. While the UN agency acknowledged that energy consumption in cities was impacting negatively on the environment, it made a case for mitigating the impact of carbon emissions through solutions such as environmentally-friendly public transport and the use of green energy.
Cities are not the problem; how we plan them is the central issue, said the experts.
The benefits of city life
Throughout history, cities have a played a central role in creating and sustaining civilizations. Cities are not just places where economic activities are concentrated, they are also crucibles of innovation and culture. The rise and fall of cities has often been associated with the rise and fall of civilizations. Cities such as Rome and Athens had their “golden ages”; some survived a loss of status; others became relics.
In 2006, I was asked to write a short chapter on the benefits of urban living for UN-Habitat’s 2006 State of the World’s Cities report, which focused almost entirely on the gloomy topic of slums. The thinking was that there was a danger that in highlighting the problems in cities and slums, we might inadvertently throw the baby out with the bath water and that as the UN’s “City Agency”, it would be counterproductive to focus only on the negative aspects of urban life. In other words, by presenting cities as places where nasty things happen, we might actually be sending an anti-urban message to the general public and to policymakers.
Because cities were – and still are – viewed as the engines of economic development, and economic growth is generally credited for reducing poverty levels (though this has not been the case in some countries), I had to make an argument that made economic sense to governments and the public at large. So I argued that because so much economic activity in a country is concentrated in its cities, “cities make countries rich”. I further pointed out that the concentration of populations and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewerage systems, drains, roads, and other infrastructure. Therefore, the economies of scale that cities offer are not replicable in small, less dense human settlements. Building a hospital or a road in a town or village with a population of just 50,000 is far less efficient per capita than building a hospital or road in a large urban area that hosts a population of 5 million (regardless of the ethics of making such a choice).
The central argument was that rural people don’t just up and move to a city; the main driver of rural-to-urban migration is economic opportunities and the chance to lead a better quality of life. In almost all countries, rural poverty levels are higher than urban poverty levels. (For instance, the poverty rate in rural Kenya is about 40 per cent, compared to around 28 per cent in peri-urban and urban areas.) Indeed, the data showed that despite the pathetic and hazardous living conditions in slums, people who lived in slums often viewed them as a “first step” out of rural poverty. As Edward Glaeser, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, says in his book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, “Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.”
However, villages are not stagnant places either; some, like Mumbai, which was once a fishing village, grow to become megacities (defined as cities with populations of more than 10 million). Some cities, like Nairobi, were not even villages originally; Nairobi literally grew out of nothing except a railway depot built at the beginning of the 20th century. The world’s great cities did not only grow because they were centres of trade and commerce; they also grew because they were religious, political, administrative or cultural centres, and this is what drew – and continues to draw – people to them.
Many rural people move to cities because they believe that they and their families will have better access to health and education. Cities also offer women more opportunities for social and economic mobility. Unrestrained by discriminatory customs and traditions, urban women are more likely than their rural counterparts to have access to property and other assets. Child and maternal mortality rates are also lower in cities, including in slums, compared to rural areas.
The downside is that city life exposes people to hazards such as indoor and outdoor air pollution, congestion, and crime, which significantly impacts the health and lives of urban dwellers. Cities can be incubators of disease, crime and other vices; but these disadvantages have never stopped cities from growing, even when plagues and other health hazards infest cities and kill populations. The 1665 Great Plague of London, for example, killed thousands, but did not diminish London’s stature. COVID-19 has decimated populations in the city of New York – the city with the highest COVID-19- related death rate in the United States – but even images of mass graves of the disease’s victims are unlikely to deter people from moving there.
Safety nets are also weaker in cities, which is one reason why so many people in the developing world (where there are few government-funded welfare systems) identify with their rural homes, where, as Ikawah points out, social capital obtained through filial ties is much stronger (though associational life in slums, through cooperatives and self-help groups, have helped reduce some of this deficit).
Cities have also been derided for promoting mindless consumerism. They have been accused of driving a type of capitalism that encourages people to go on endless shopping expeditions to buy things they might never use or need. Large shopping malls – a distinct feature of modern cities – are filled with products that keep the wheels of capitalism moving. Alain Kamal Martial Henry predicts that the coronavirus will overthrow this “Western bourgeois model” imposed by capitalism. And this may lead to the eventual demise of cities and urban living.
The problem that has no name
I asked Daniel Biau, a former colleague who served as the Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat from 1998 to 2005, whether we could from henceforth witness a decline in urban growth levels, and whether people will now seek to move out of large cities to places that are less dense and concentrated.
Biau was not convinced that the coronavirus pandemic will change the way people view cities. “As usual, a few journalists will write about risky cities but their alarming views will be completely ignored by ordinary people who know very well that cities are, above all, places of job opportunities, social interactions, education and cultural development,” he said.
He predicts that in the digital age, it is likely that small and medium-sized cities will grow faster than big metropolises because teleworking will become the norm. “Already in France 40 per cent of the working population is currently teleworking,” he said.
“History has shown that some cities could shrink due to economic or environmental reasons. But cities have never disappeared due to health reasons. This is why the UN should provide guidelines for the promotion of safer and healthier cities as part of the wider sustainable cities development paradigm,” added Biau in an email exchange.
Cities will exist – and continue to grow – because of human beings’ need for social interaction, physical contact and collaboration. As Glaeser points out in his book, “The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist. We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another. Above all, we must free ourselves from the tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.”
However, despite their density and diversity, cities can also be lonely places. The “little town blues” that I talked about earlier are also experienced in large cities. People living in high-rise apartment blocks in big cities or in suburbs on the periphery of cities often report not knowing their neighbours and lacking a sense of “community”.
Some believe that rapid suburbanisation since the 1950s, especially in the United States, led to increasing disillusionment among married women, whose isolated lives in well-planned (but boring) suburbs led them to question patriarchial norms and the virtues of being stay-at-home wives and mothers. This angst (described by Betty Friedan as “the problem that has no name” in her book, The Feminine Mystique) sowed the seeds of the American women’s movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, and led many women to seek careers outside the home.
Some cities are better at fostering human interaction than others through carefully planned urban designs, and more people-friendly infrastructure, such as parks and other public spaces, including pedestrian-only streets. Recently, after a wave of rape cases in India, urban planners have also been thinking about how cities can be made more woman-friendly, with more street lighting and more gender-sensitive public transport. The designers of these cities understand one basic fact: cities are not about buildings and infrastructure; they are about people and communities.
The COVID-19 lockdowns have demonstrated how abnormal and disturbing self-isolation and social distancing can be. The pandemic has underscored the fact that human beings have an inherent need to interact with other human beings, even if it is at a cursory level. This physical connection with a diverse range of people from different backgrounds is what makes cities attractive, and is the reason why the city – in all its beauty and ugliness – is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper I went to Kariobangi North Sewerage settlement on 4 June, exactly a month after the dawn demolitions took place, and long after the tell-tale signs of the raid had been erased. On 4 May, at the height of a dusk-to-dawn curfew across the country, 8,000 people had been evicted from this settlement. The eviction was widely condemned but the authorities seemed unmoved by the plight of the evictees.
The chaos and commotion had ebbed away and life in Korogocho slum, one of the more than 200 informal settlements in Nairobi, had resumed its rhythmic motion. It was bustling with humanity – coronavirus or no coronavirus. Few people wore face masks; many more did not even bother to social distance. The Korogocho Market, the heartbeat of Korogocho ghetto, was a beehive of activity, with buyers and sellers haggling over prices of every imaginable merchandise.
“Without Korogocho Market there is no Koch [short for Korogocho]”, said Mwaura, my 24-year-old interlocutor, a Kenyatta University Bachelor of Education student who grew up in Grogan, one of the nine villages that make up Korogocho, but who now resides at Korogocho B. “Grogan, where my parents live, is now my gichagi [my rural home],” he explained.
People like Mwaura, whose parents came to the city in a wave of rural-urban migration (pushed by the colonial forces of the tumultuous 1950s) have always remained squatters after having been uprooted from their ancestral homes.
“The market breathes life into Korogocho area. “You can practically find anything you want at the market. It attracts customers from far and wide,” said Mwaura. The market has been embedded into the Korogocho peoples’ lives: Korogocho slum was the market and the market was Korogocho. “The market defines the Korogocho people – the best and the worst of the Korogocho people are found here – the market is a melting crucible of Korogocho’s hopes and aspirations.”
On the morning of 4 May, at about 5.30 a.m., David Maina Ngugi, an early riser, was having his cup of morning tea when his mobile phone rang. It was from his friend, who told him to quickly get out of the house because the bulldozers had moved in. When he came out, after hastily waking up his wife, the rumbling excavators had started their work in their conventional style of flattening everything on site. Accompanying the bulldozers were an assortment of armed-to-the teeth regular police, Administration Police and the General Service Unit (GSU), a paramilitary outfit infamous for its brutal incursions. “I think in total they were about 350 policemen,” said the 72-year-old Ngugi. “They’d come to ensure the four bulldozers executed their work with minimal interruption.”
The people waking up from their slumber watched the morning raid in utter disbelief. Uncharacteristically, they did not put up a fight, perhaps because they were too shocked by the surprise morning attack. Instead, they watched as their houses were being crushed to the ground. “Very few people salvaged their properties The dawn raid caught many people half-asleep and by the time they were waking up to the day’s realities, local hoodlums had also moved in to help themselves to anything that they could lay their hands on,” said Ngugi.
Mzee Ngugi, who owned four iron-sheet shacks, said he barely saved much from the rubble: “My iron sheets, steel doors and metal windows were stolen by thugs. I couldn’t restrain them; I was all alone and they were like a pack of wolves, so I just stood aside and watched.”
Accompanying the bulldozers were an assortment of armed-to-the teeth regular police, Administration Police and the General Service Unit (GSU), a paramilitary outfit infamous for its brutal incursions. “I think in total they were about 350 policemen,” said the 72- year-old Ngugi. “They’d come to ensure the four bulldozers executed their work with minimal interruption.”
Despite his age, Ngugi’s body is still strong. “I’m used to walking a lot. I’d walk from here to Allsopps,” he said. Allsopps area is at the junction between Outer Ring Road and Thika super highway. The distance between Kariobangi North and Allsopps is about seven kilometres. The latter is called Allsopps because East African Breweries Limited (EABL) used to have a plant at the corner of where these two roads meet, separate from the main beer plant in the Ruaraka area that manufactured Allsopps beer. The name stuck even after the EABL closed the plant many years ago.
“In the morning I’d do push-ups and physical fitness, but these demolitions have crushed my spirit,” said Ngugi. “At 72 years, I’ve been made to start all over again, but where do I even start from now?” The old man said he had sunk his meagre savings and pension into buying four plots in the area through the Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-help Group. “I’d hoped my sunset years would be spent here because I did not have any other place I called home.”
When I met Ngugi, he had just acquired a 10 by 10 rental room in Korogocho B, next to the wall of Daniel Comboni Primary School. He told me that after the eviction, he sent his wife to a family friend’s home in Grogan village. “The demolition separated families. I’ve not seen my wife for three weeks, even though we speak on phone. I couldn’t immediately get someone who would house the two of us together.”
The self-help group
The Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-Help Group was formed in the mid-1990s and given the name farmers because the first people who started frequenting the sewerage plant were women who would farm bananas, sugar cane, yams and other root tubers right next to the sewerage.
“The City Council of Nairobi, which owned the plant, allowed us women to farm on a section of the sewerage area in the evenings, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m,” said Mary Wambui Kamau. “The women were the first people to be allocated plots at the sewerage by the City Council officials who worked at the site because they had already developed a rapport with the officials.” Wambui said she first started farming in the area in 1996.
The 75-year-old lady said that to be old and poor in Nairobi was like being cursed and forgotten. A former employee of the defunct City Council of Nairobi, she had acquired two plots at the sewerage site and built her semi-permanent houses with her pension. “I bought my two plots for Sh600 each, quite an amount for people like me then, because I used to earn Sh320 per month and paid Sh90 as house rent. With her seven children (three later died) and a husband who did not have a permanent job and was landless, she believed that buying the sewerage plot was the wisest decision she had ever made.
Wambui grew up in Ndondori in what is today Nakuru County. “I was a little girl during the state of emergency period of the 1950s. [The British colonial government instituted the emergency between 1952 and1959] and my father was a squatter. Forced to flee from Ndondori, he found himself in Lari [today in Kiambu County]. In short, my father struggled throughout his life and never owned land.”
Wambui married early, at the age of 20. With her husband, she moved to Nairobi to eke out a living and start a family. “Rift Valley had been always a volatile region and so my hubby said we try our luck in the city where we didn’t always have to look behind our back.” Her husband died in 2004.
When the women corps who farmed the sewerage land grew and became big, the sewerage officials asked them to form a group, explained Wambui. This way it would be easier to engage in, mobilise for and push their agenda. To give weight to their agenda, they decided to buy plots of land within the sewerage area. They approached Adolf Muchiri, then the MP for Kasarani. Until 2012, the Kariobangi sewerage area was in Kasarani constituency; today, it is in Embakasi North, but government and social services are still run from the Kasarani DC’s offices.
“Muchiri backed our idea and we would have our meetings at the sewerage site. Later we moved those meetings elsewhere,” said Wambui. “Even as Muchiru backed our idea and said he would lend us political support, we continued to engage the sewerage officials, since, anyway, they were our gateway to owing a piece of the earth of the city council land.”
By the time the Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NAWASCO) came to run the sewerage site in 2004, Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-help Group was already in existence and allocated land adjacent to the Kariobangi light industries.
“The self-help group already had 370 members by the time the Nairobi County provided a surveyor to demarcate the land about two years ago,” said Ngugi. The 370-member group was settled on 11 acres of the 25-acre sewerage land. Of these 370 members, “Kikuyus formed the largest chunk of the group. They possibly constituted about 70 per cent of the members, followed by Somalis, then Kambas, then a small group of Luos,” said Ngugi. The mzee said the plots were divided into 24 by 50 sizes and claimed that all this work was done by the Nairobi County government.
“When I got my two plots, I gave them to my sons,” said Wambui. In 2010, one of her sons, who worked at the nearby Kariobangi light industries, started living at the sewerage area with his family of four. Wambui then moved to Kariobangi A village, where I found her and some of her grandchildren. She told me that her son and grandchildren had moved in with her after being evicted. “Since coming here, we’ve been attacked two times by robbers who saw him bring along some of his items that he had salvaged,” she said.
Wambui claims that the self-help group had been issued with a group title by the Nairobi County and the county was even in the process of issuing individual titles. But there were some hitches: The self- help group has been in a tug of war with the Jua Kali Light Industries group over the allotment of plots at the sewerage site, a case that is in court. “It is true we’ve been having a long- running court case with the Jua Kali group,” said Wambui, “but we have the documents and they don’t have them and that is the difference.”
Wambui claims that the self-help group had been issued with a group title by the Nairobi County and the county was even in the process of issuing individual titles.
The sudden turn of events has broken her resolve to have a better life in her sunset years. “At 75, what else do I expect in life? I thought I’d live out the remaining years of my life in peace, but now I’ve been thrown into turmoil. I voted for Uhuru Kenyatta twice, in a very difficult area, where we are surrounded by hostile opposition. Yet at my age I woke up at 2 a.m. to queue for him and this is what I get in return? Is it that Uhuru is not aware of our plight, or now that we’re done with voting, he’s through with us?”
Missing papers
But 70-year-old Nyina wa John (John’s mother), a veteran of the sewerage plots’ acquisition and chairlady of the self-help group, has a slightly different story to tell. “What some of the afflicted families have narrated to you is correct. But as far as I’m concerned, the only incorrect information they did not tell you is that all that documentation and paperwork they are talking about had never been legalised. If it had, I would have been the first one to know and even be in possession of the rightful said documents of the land. As it is, I’m not aware of any [bona fide and legal] title deed issued to Kariobangi Self-Help Farmers Group. I’m aware that the group was even paying land rates to City Hall. That’s okay. You can pay rates. Paying rates doesn’t translate to owning the land.”
The chairlady’s assertions were corroborated by Daniel Kirugo. Kirugo is the senior chief of Muthua village in Uthiru location. I first met him in 2006 at the Kariobangi sewerage area. He was the second chief to have been posted to the area. “I know the history of the sewerage [land] very well. It is unfortunate what happened to the people, but the crux of the matter is, the self-help group’s papers are not legal. I’d know because I’ve kept in touch with some of the people who live there, the self-group’s wrangles with Jua Kali Light Industries group notwithstanding.”
The dispute between the Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-Help and the Jua Kali Light Industries group led by Rashid Kaberere and one Kinyua introduced the dreaded Mungiki in the acquisition of the sewerage land. They both hired the young men to defend and fight off each other. For their work, the proscribed Mungiki group was rewarded with several plots at the sewerage site, which were dished out to them by both parties.
“Many of these Mungiki youth later sold their plots to Somalis,” said Kirugo. “Somali buyers were also involved because they had the money to finance the case in court. Another reason why the Somalis came to own the sewerage land is because they would pay double or even thrice the going market price of the plots.” That is how Isaak Aden became the chairman of the self-help group.
Hence, the majority of the Kikuyus at the site had ceased being landlords; they became tenants. How and why? “Because they sold their pieces of land to Somalis who paid a premium [for the plots],” said mzee Ngugi. “Money is good and anybody who gives you the kind of money you’ve been wishing to have becomes first priority and that’s how Somalis came to be landlords here.”
The Somalis put up semi-permanent houses, which they rented to some of the very Kikuyus who had sold them the plots of land. “The upcoming stone houses were built by Somalis because they were the presumed landowners and because they could afford to put up better structures,” added Ngugi. “I had three plots at the sewerage,” said a man who asked me not to reveal his identity, “and it is my considered opinion the self-help group didn’t have proper documentation. All the papers they claim to have and refer to were issued by the City Council of Nairobi pre-1998, during the reign of Zipporah Wandera, the then town clerk. The subsequent mayors were never involved in the sewerage matters. For such a matter to acquire the seal of authenticity, it should involve the top echelons of the city authorities. As it is, it seems the matter was only discussed by sewerage officials and some partisan people at the City Hall.
“Orders from above”
Whether the self-help group’s papers had been legalised or not notwithstanding, Ngugi told me the self-help group’s leadership had even engaged Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NAWASCO) officials. “They were mum, claiming the demolition orders came from above. Next we visited the District Officer’s office in Kasarani, where the stock-in-trade answer was the same: ‘Orders from above’”.
Pleading for strict anonymity, because he is not authorised to speak to journalists, a top NAWASCO official said that the people had to be booted out ostensibly because the government had been given a Sh3 billion grant by the World Bank to expand and refurbish the sewer and water system of Nairobi county. All the Nairobi wastage used to drain at the Kariobangi sewerage site until Ruai sewerage was built to complement the Kariobangi one. The Kariobangi sewerage has six gargantuan septic tanks, but with the growing city population occasioned by all the real estate developments that have taken place in the last 40 years, the septic tanks became overwhelmed.
The Somalis put up semi-permanent houses, which they rented to some of the very Kikuyus who had sold them the plots of land. “The upcoming stone houses were built by Somalis because they were the presumed landowners and because they could afford to put up better structures,” added Ngugi.
I wound up my visit to Korogocho by visiting Mary Njoroge, a vendor at Korogocho Market. Her stall overlooks the eastern flank of the Kariobangi sewerage. No sooner had the dwellers been ferreted out than a stone wall was erected all around the sewerage land. On that eastern flank, the wall was as high as 12 feet, raised by the heavier nine by nine stone. “My house used to be inside the wall. It’s amazing how life can take a turn for the worse, so suddenly,” she said
Njoroge, who is in her early 50s, had lived in the sewerage area for 10 years. Her last child was born there.
Taking time to talk to me, away from her customers, Njoroge said life that life was cruel and full of contradictions: “Can you believe I was one of Uhuru’s major campaigners in this area? Kariobangi sewerage was a Jubilee zone and we fought tooth and nail to protect his votes. Look now where some of us are languishing – in the cold, with zero prospects.”
Protecting Jubilee votes meant walking the length and breadth of Korogocho and exhorting all the Kikuyus to not sleep on the day of voting, first on August 8, and then on October 26, 2017. “We’d have expected that the government would defend us and not expose us to the vagaries of the weather and coronavirus.”
During the week that their structures were demolished, heavy rain pounded Nairobi County. Many former Kariobangi North Sewerage dwellers, including small children, slept out in the cold. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
“Memory is short-lived/And more important instead/That streets are well-laid/Flowing and uncongested.” — Jonathan Kariara, Naming Streets in Nairobi
The main road that runs through Kisumu is called Jomo Kenyatta Highway. Named after the country’s first president, the road divides the town in a North-South axis that runs from Patel Flats (where it stops being Kakamega Road) to the State Lodge in Milimani. In fact, one might argue that it is the spine of the city, in the sense of it being the central nervous system and the other roads feeding off it. In other words, cut off this road from either end (at Kondele or at the intersection with Busia Road) and you have killed Kisumu.
During the 2017 electoral period, Jomo Kenyatta Highway was the epicentre of several violent clashes between opposition supporters and police officers. A general election had been held on 8 August and the main candidates in the presidential election were the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Party, and Raila Odinga of the NASA coalition. On 9 August, as tallying was ongoing, Odinga announced that the elections database had been hacked and the results were being manipulated in favour of his opponent, and that the hacker had used the credentials of Chris Msando, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ICT manager who had been murdered less than two weeks to the election. Odinga said, “What the IEBC has posted is a complete fraud . . . to give Uhuru Kenyatta votes that were not cast . . . We have uncovered the fraud.”
In the wake of Odinga’s rejection of the poll results, police officers moved onto the streets, and into neighbourhoods, alleging that they were flashing out the rioters who had hidden in residential areas. There were reports of police officers breaking into houses, and beating innocent civilians. Several residential areas in Kisumu remained in the constant haze of teargas that the police had lobbed in their pursuit of “rioters”. At night, when residents had retired to their houses, police officers went door to door, lobbing tear gas canisters into people’s houses, and attacking people in their sleep. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, On the night of 11 to 12 August, as they carried out their house-to-house operations, police officers killed at least 10 people (a low estimate) in Kisumu, one of whom was Samantha Pendo, a six-month-old baby. Witnesses would later tell Human Rights Watch that, “on August 11th, police violently attacked her family, kicking, slapping, and beating with gun butts and batons everyone in the house, including the baby.” This was at 12.30 am.
In the wake of Samantha Pendo’s murder, Kenyans erupted. Numerous commentators on social media condemned the violence and the grotesque murder of a six-month-old baby. However, in a statement given the very day of the attack on Pendo, Interior Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiang’i, denied that the police officers had been using excessive force on civilians. Even as Pendo was in a coma at Aga Khan Hospital in Kisumu, he dismissed claims of violence being meted out on protestors. Instead, Matiang’i claimed that those who had been injured had been in the midst of looting as police officers tried to prevent them from doing so. He said, “Some criminal elements took advantage of the situation to loot property. The police responded and normalcy has returned to the area.”
After three days in a coma arising from a head injury, Pendo succumbed to the trauma. In the wake of her death, an unknown group of people went up and down Jomo Kenyatta Highway defacing all the road signs carrying that name. They scratched out the nameJomo Kenyatta Highway and in its stead wrote, in green ink, “Bi Pendo Road.”
On 14 February 2019, an inquest led by Kisumu Senior Resident Magistrate Beryl Omolo found five police officers culpable of Samantha Pendo’s murder. In her ruling, she also recommended prosecution against eight GSU officers who had been involved in the operation. Less than four months after her ruling, Odinga, who had since stumbled into an alliance with Kenyatta, urged his supporters to move on from the events of August 2017. He declared that it was the moment of healing and that people needed to forget the wounds of the past.
Kisumu refuses to forget. Two and a half years on from that August night, Bi Pendo Road is the main road running through the city. While, on paper, the road still bears its original name, in reality, the green ink on the road signs refuses to forget. Since the time of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime Kisumu has had a violent relationship with the state. When Jomo Kenyatta came to open a hospital in Kisumu In 1969, the crowd erupted in anger at the speech he made, and his security detail opened fire, killing an estimated eleven people on the spot, and injuring hundreds. The cycle of violence continued. In 1982. In 1992. In 1997. In 2002. In 2005. In 2007, after the disputed elections, the police shot dead an estimated 115 people. On 30 March 2013, the day of a Supreme Court ruling on the disputed presidential elections, a police officer shouted at a group of youths, saying, “We forgave you people in Kisumu during the 2007-2008 violence. This time we are going to teach you a lesson”. On that day alone, 5 people were killed and 24 were admitted in hospital with bullet wounds.
Kisumu is not alone in using street names as a way of resistance, as a way of refusing to forget. Derek Alderman, an American historical geographer whose focus is on landscapes of public memory, has written about how naming can be used as a way of symbolic resistance. Michael Hebbert has argued about the existence of a relationship between memory and space. In his view, “a shared space such as a street can be a locus for collective memory and can express group identity through architecture, monuments, and street names.” Further, he posits that street names can indicate a community’s desire to remember certain personalities or events.
Road names in Nairobi exist in similar praxes. When, from 1928 to 1936, the British colonial government moved to change street names in Nairobi; from numbered streets, they renamed the streets after figures who were important in their British imagination. In the wake of independence in 1963, the African government in power saw the need to rename these streets. For instance, Delamere Avenue became Kenyatta Avenue, while the four streets branching out of Kenyatta Avenue had their names changed. Originally named after the first, second, third and fourth colonial commissioners who would later become governors — Arthur Henry Hardinge, Charles Eliot, Donald William Stewart and James Hayes Sadler — they were given names of African personalities: Kimathi Street, Muindi Mbingu Street, Wabera Street, and Koinange Street. College Road was renamed Harry Thuku Road, while the road named after the Queen, Queens Way, was rebaptized Mama Ngina Street. Kenyatta Avenue (formerly known as Delamere Avenue) in the mid-1960s. Photo. Flickr/Michael Jefferies
In Nairobi’s Industrial Area, most of the roads had been named after towns in England. These were localised: Edinburgh Road to Enterprise Road, Aberdeen Road to Addis Ababa Road, Birmingham Road to Bamburi Road, Clifford Road to Changamwe Road, Dublin Road to Dakar Road, London Road to Lusaka Road, and Liverpool Road to Likoni Road.
A similar renaming was attempted in Kileleshwa, a neighbourhood popular with the emergent African elite. As with Industrial Area, roads which bore names that reflected localities in England were renamed to reflect the new reality of independence. According to Peris Teyie, an academic at Maseno University’s School of Planning and Architecture, the initial plan had been to name the roads in alphabetical order, like in Industrial Area. However, the planners got lazy. “They got tired of trying to do them alphabetically, and started naming them randomly.” This is why Siaya Road, Gusii Avenue and Oloitoktok Road are to be found in the same zone.
It must be noted here that not everyone agreed with this process of writing away the colonialists. One James Kangangi Njuguna was reported to have argued for the preservation of history in the renaming process, even though it could remind Kenyans of negative experiences.
In their renaming, the ruling government revealed its politics in the patterns that the new road names followed. First, the road names were predominantly male, and remain so to this day, with Mama Ngina Road and Wangari Maathai Road being the only major roads in the city named after women. (Tubman Road, contrary to popular belief, is named after William Tubman, the 19th President of Liberia, and not Harriet Tubman) This is noteworthy, considering Wangari Maathai Road is a recent addition, and Mama Ngina Road is all about patriarchal patronage. Secondly, as Melissa Wangui Wanjiru and Kosuke Matsubara note, “the naming of streets was biased towards the Kikuyu (the largest community in Kenya),” and there was a dramatic “erasure of Indian street names”.
Walking through Nairobi’s streets, one notices several names that are conspicuous by their absence from the politics of commemoration, names that in other realities would have been present: Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggia, Masinde Muliro, Achieng’ Oneko . . . all of them socialist-leaning politicians. Wanjiru and Matsubara argue that, “Such was the case for many who were considered heroes in Kenya’s fight for freedom, but who were vilified and alienated both in the colonial and post-colonial periods.”
Pio Gama Pinto’s case is an interesting one. After his death, there was a quest to rename Victoria Street after him. Vershi, a resident of Nairobi, suggested that the street be renamed after the Kenyan-Goan politician who had been one of the leading members of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). His request was ignored by the naming authorities, and the street was not renamed after Pinto. Instead, there followed a mass expunging of Indian names from Nairobi’s streets. In 1973, 58 of the streets in the Central Business District bore Indian names. All of these were replaced, with the exception of Aga Khan Walk. For instance, Jeevanjee Street, which had been named after Alibhai Mula Jeevanjee, an Asian-born citizen who owned most of the buildings on that street, was renamed Mfangano Street. Moreover, the 21 streets in Ngara that bore Indian names had their names replaced with African names, as did the 19 streets in South C Estate, despite these areas being occupied mostly by Indian-Kenyan families. Streets whose names were changed include Jamnagar Avenue (to Idado Avenue), Hoshiarpur Road (to Mukarati Road), and Alamgir Avenue (to Muhuti Avenue).
That Aga Khan Walk survives is a testament to the power the Aga Khan wields in this country. Aga Khan is a title held by the Imām of the Nizari Ismaili Shias. Since 1957, the holder of the title has been the 49th Imām, Prince Shah Karim al-Husseini, Aga Khan IV. The Aga Khan’s influence is most felt through his ownership of the Nation Media Group, although he also has interests in, among others, Diamond Trust Bank, Farmer’s Choice Ltd, Jubilee Insurance, The Aga Khan Education Service, and Serena Hotels.
A street in Westlands was later named after Pinto. This is interesting given how Goans have, for the most part, been written out of Kenya’s history. Pinto, Rosendo Ayres Ribeiro and Francis Xavier D’Silva are the only Goans who have places named after them in Nairobi. Ribeiro was the doctor who first diagnosed an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city, while D’Silva, better known as Baba Dogo, earned plaudits for his generosity towards impoverished whites who lived in Murumbi, an area later renamed Baba Dogo.
However, there was an ethnic over-representation of the Kikuyu in the naming of the streets and, on 8 December 1970, in a session titled the “Colonial Names of Nairobi Streets,” Tamason Barmalel, the MP of Chepalungu Constituency, took the government to task over this issue, asking how the government would “ensure that future street names would represent all ethnic groups in the country.” The assistant minister in charge of the naming process, Nathan Munoko, assured him that the street names were mainly based on suggestions from the public, before they were analysed by the street naming sub-committee to ensure equitable distribution, before being forwarded to the minister for approval.
Four years after Pinto’s assassination, Tom Mboya was shot dead on Government Road. After his death, there was a lot of clamour about how to memorialise him.. Since he had been killed on Government Road, it made sense to rename this road after him, and Jaffer, a resident of Mombasa, suggested this. He also suggested that Kilindini Road in Mombasa be named after Mboya, as well as one street in each town in Kenya. James Mbori, the Kasipul-Kabondo MP, led the charge in parliament, and during a parliamentary session titled “Change of name of Government Road to Tom Mboya Road”, he asked the Minister for Local Government, Dr Gikonyo Kiano, whether this would happen. Dr Kiano demurred, saying that government policy was to rename those roads which bore names reminiscent of the colonial era, and Government Road was not one of these roads. In any case, he argued, it was not appropriate to rename Government Road since it was a symbol of the Government of Kenya.
However, it was thrown back at him that Government Road had been named thus by the colonial government, and therefore it was evocative of the British colonial administration. Upon Dr Kiano’s further resistance, Mbori went on the offensive, implying that the road’s name had been reserved for someone else. He asked, “Mr. Speaker Sir, would the minister deny that the name of Government Road is reserved for some future naming?”
Tom Mboya’s supporters were aggrieved, and attempts were made to find another street to bear his name. St. Austin’s Road was proposed, but it was turned down on the grounds that it wasn’t important enough a road to bear the name of a man of Mboya’s stature. This road was later renamed James Gichuru Road. Government Road remained Government Road, and the less important Victoria Street, the same one which had been denied Pinto’s memory, was renamed after Mboya. In 1978, Government Road was renamed Moi Avenue, rendering Mbori’s prediction true.
Then there are the Shifta roads, named after victims of the Shifta War: Wabera Street, formerly Elliot Street, named after Daudi Dabasso Wabera, whose assassination a week after Kenya had been granted independence sparked what became known as the Shifta War; and Lt. Tumbo Avenue, formerly General Smuts Avenue, named after Lt. John Charles Tumbo Kalima, who led the Kenyan military effort against the insurgency and was killed in an ambush between Garissa and Wajir.
Around Kibra (very importantly not Kibera), several streets bear Nubian names. A meeting of the parliamentary street naming sub-committee held on 30 March 1971 suggested ten street names for the Kibera Government Housing Scheme: Ihura Road, Toi Road, Kambui Road, Sara-Ngombe Road, Chief Suleman Road, Lemule Road, Apollo Road, Kambi Muru Road, Laini Saba Road and Adhola Marongo Road (CCN 1971). With the exception of Ihura and Kambui Roads, all the other names are of Nubian origin. The Nubian community is being remembered. Only, Nubian leaders would argue differently, given that the Nubian community occupies only 700 acres of land in Kibra, with the rest of the land, some 3498 acres, having been forcibly taken over by the post-colonial government with no compensation offered. The recognition of the Nubian community is, as Wanjiru and Matsubara state, superficial, since the real demands of the Nubian community were mostly ignored.
Street names in Nairobi, and in Kenya, have also been used as arenas for reputational politics. For instance, going through Kakamega is an immersion into Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, Masinde Muliro Gardens . . . the man from further North in Bungoma, being commemorated in Kakamega. It is the same with Oginga Odinga in Kisumu and Siaya, Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi, and Daniel Moi in Eldoret. In Nairobi, several streets were named after Pan- Africanists, but these were almost all Pan-Africanists with whom Jomo Kenyatta had interacted or personally admired. He and Ralph Bunche in London in 1936, and Bunche had visited Kenya at Kenyatta’s behest two years later; Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Du Bois had also interacted with Kenyatta in London. Dennis Pritt had represented Kenyatta at the Kapenguria Trial in 1952 while William Tubman, Mokhtar Daddah, Albert Luthuli and Haile Selassie were, together with Kenyatta, all part of the Pan-African movement in the 1960s.
The battle of reputations came about with the proposed renaming of Enterprise Road to Kibaki Road. When the proposal was made, it was opposed on the grounds that government policy prohibited naming streets after living personalities except for heads of state. Yet Mama Ngina was, and still is, a living personality, and was not, and still isn’t, a head of state. Still, much can be inferred from the fact that the road given her name was once known as Queens Way.
One of the main roads running through Mombasa is Mama Ngina Drive, which used to be Azania Drive, renamed at independence after a person who again, was, and still is, a living personality, and was not, and still isn’t, a head of state. In 2019, there was a furore over a move to name a recreational park along the road Mama Ngina Waterfront Park. According to Okoa Mombasa, a coalition that led the opposition to the proposed name, this was a “gross deletion and obfuscation” of local history, and an attempt to “inscribe a historical memory alien to the place and local inhabitants”.
All these years later, the big reputation in the landscape of naming remains KANU, chama cha baba na mama. According to David Lowenthal, the landscape is not just a product of human actions in the past, but rather a tangible symbol of people’s attachment to the past. The main road to Eastlands, Jogoo Road, bears the symbol of the long-time ruling party of the country. One might argue that it is a symbol of the cockerel of the national court of arms, but then, one would have to think about why the symbol of KANU is on the national court of arms.
Wandia Njoya has written about how the Kenyatta family has taken control of national symbols, and has argued for the need to delink the family from national symbols and ideals. When Princess Elizabeth Way was renamed Uhuru Highway, the intention had not been to switch the name from the ruler of the Kenyan colony to the ruler of independent Kenya.
In the wake of the farcical 2017 electoral process and the subsequent violence, there was a violent renaming of things in Kisumu. Bi Pendo Road, yes, but also Jomo Kenyatta Sports Ground, where several signs were defaced, and Jubilee Market, which was renamed Orengo Market, and where, as with Jomo Kenyatta Highway, the signs with that name were defaced, and a new name inked over, a name that still stands to this day.
That Bi Pendo Road exists is not merely a monument to Samantha Pendo. Rather, it is an affirmation of Kisumu’s refusal to forget, to move on from the victims of police brutality in 2017, in 2013, in 2007, and in all the other years, as Odinga urged in 2019, and continues to urge through the Building Bridges Initiative.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
More than a century ago, a brash and mostly racist decision created a small tin shack town in the middle of a swamp. Then the town became unstoppable.
The first men and women who landed in Nairobi probably considered the brackish swamp land perfect. The area was picturesque, with hills in the horizon and rivers crisscrossing the plains. While the swampy land was not suitable for farming, and certainly not for settlement, it was perfect for grazing.
For the Maasai and the Kikuyu, the plain was also a meeting ground, cutting between the highland farming community in Central Kenya and the nomadic community in the Rift. For the Kamba and other traders and adventurers, it was the easier part of the journey. The Maasai called it Enkare Nyorobi, ‘the land of cool waters’; other names for the land seems to have evaded history books.
The colony’s vanguard also saw it as one of the easy stretches of a long, much more arduous journey to the Western parts of what would become Kenya. The treeless plain was also curiously empty, particularly on the lush parts towards Central Kenya. They wrote of ‘Nyrobe’ in their letters home, a name which, in a short time, would become the name of the capital of a new country.
It was not empty or deserted though; it was occupied, just not permanently. And even less at that point because smallpox and a few other epidemics had cut down the populations of many Kenyan communities.
In 1896, builders of the Lunatic Line set up a small supply depot and a camp on the plains. The original boundaries of what is now Nairobi were for “the area within a radius of one and a half miles from the offices of the sub-commissioner of the Ukambani Province.” There was no plan beyond that, and Nairobi was merely one in a chain of such supply depots. The railhead reached Nairobi, the small supply depot between Mombasa and Kampala, in 1899.
With it, a new future began.
A cultural melting pot
The railway management picked Nairobi to be their railway headquarters. But this seemingly arbitrary decision that would put the builders at loggerheads with the colonial government did not involve any proper assessment of the site. Public health would be the key issue in those early years, with the lack of proper drainage making the new town the perfect breeding grounds for epidemics.
But the railway engineers did not see Nairobi as becoming anything more than an Indian township which, they argued, could “prosper in spite of unsanitary conditions and chronic plague.”
As more people settled on what had become the railway headquarters, a pattern emerged. Europeans settled to the West, Asians to the Parklands side, and Africans to the East. But segregation laws would not become codified until 1908, after yet another bout of the plague. Within the first five years, what had been a sparsely occupied swampy plain was now home to 10,000 people. After Mombasa, Nairobi was now the cultural melting pot of the young British colony.
The railway management picked Nairobi to be their railway headquarters. But this seemingly arbitrary decision that would put the builders at loggerheads with the colonial government did not involve any proper assessment of the site.
With government funding and rich entrepreneurs like AM Jeevanjee, who had made a fortune supplying material and labour to build the railway, a town sprouted from the swamp. The richest man in Kenya at the start of the 20th century, Jeevanjee would later go on an investment spree, building the first law courts, the original Nairobi Club, the first building that housed the National Museum, and many other buildings.
Before the railhead reached Nairobi, the central economic activity for the young town had been big game hunting. By 1900, the town was a single street, driven by commerce as Asian railway builders settled in tin shacks on the plain. Beyond that street “lay the swamp where frogs lived every night at dusk they used to bark out their vibrant chorus and spread a cloak of deep, incessant sound over the little township” as Elspeth Huxley writes in White Man’s Country. The frogs formed part of the ecosystem, providing a rhythmic croaking during the calm nights of a budding young town. It was free music, if not poetry, but it freaked out public health officials.
A public health hazard
Doctors were particularly concerned about the hazards the soggy grounds carried. At 1,750 metres above sea level, colonialists thought Nairobi’s temperate climate would limit the development of malaria-carrying mosquitos (an oft-repeated myth, most notably in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). It didn’t, and not just because the soggy grounds allowed pools of stagnant water to collect. Malaria would thrive in the new town, with 14,000 new malaria cases reported in Nairobi in 1913 alone. But malaria was just one of many health concerns that made doctors want the small town moved to higher ground. In 1902, the small town faced its first major public health problem. An epidemic of the dreaded bubonic plague erupted along Indian Bazaar. With no sanitation or municipal plans, the main street at the time had played host to rodents, and the animals had in turn brought in the plague, killing several people. The plague was diagnosed by the enigmatic zebra-riding Dr. Rosendo Ribiero. The Medical Officer, Dr. Alfred Spurrier, ordered the entire street burnt. Everyone was evacuated, and Nairobi’s first CBD was torched.
This was probably the point in history when the situation could have been salvaged and the young town moved, but that didn’t happen. Instead, lethargy and bureaucracy resulted in a status quo.
At 1,750 metres above sea level, colonialists thought Nairobi’s temperate climate would limit the development of malaria-carrying mosquitos…It didn’t, and not just because the soggy grounds allowed pools of stagnant water to collect.
In May 1903, Dr. Moffat, a principal medical officer of the East Africa and Uganda Protectorate, called Nairobi dangerous and defective. After another plague in 1904, he recommended relocating residents to modern-day Kikuyu Township. But Moffat left in April 1904, and his successors held the costs of relocation too high.
On 18 May 1906, Sir James Sadler, commissioner for the Protectorate, wrote to Winston Churchill, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, complaining about the emergence of Kenya’s capital: “…at the commencement of the 1902 plague…the then-commissioner, Sir Charles Elliot, was strongly of the opinion that the site, which had been selected three years before by the manager of the Uganda Railway without consulting medical or sanitary authorities, was, with its inadequate drainage, unsuitable for a large and growing population. [It is a] depression with a very thin layer of soil or rock. The soil was water-logged during the greater part of the year.”
The letter further reminds Churchill of the 1902 recommendation to move the city “to some point on the hills.” Sadler told Churchill this was a critical point in Nairobi’s history; that his predecessor had said: “…when the rainy season commenced, the whole town is practically transformed into a swamp.”
But the Board running the city decided instead to try drain the swampy bazaar area.
Six years before, in 1898, a 25-year-old man called John Ainsworth had disembarked from a ship at the Port of Mombasa. He was an employee of the colonising company called the Imperial British East African Company, and was ambitious to make a career for himself. Before that year ended, he travelled from Mombasa up to Machakos, and into the tin shack town called Nyrobe. He built his house at Museum Hill to found the colonial administration, much to the chagrin of influential railway builders. Eager to make the swampy plains work, he planted Eucalyptus trees on the swamp to drain the water. Ainsworth’s legacy remains to date, with most of his efforts being the only reason why more and more parts of the swamp could be occupied.
Nairobi continued to develop quickly and Sadler finally threw in the towel: “It is, I admit, too late to consider the question of moving the town from the plains to the higher position along the line some miles to the north. We had a chance in 1902, and I think it was a pity that we did not do so then as advocated by Sir Charles Elliot.”
But even Sadler did not anticipate the growth – eightfold since 1969, from 500,000 people to 4.4 million today. He said Nairobi would never become “a city like Johannesburg or a large commercial centre, for if there is a rapid development of industries or minerals in any of the new districts, the centres would spring up around them.”
Churchill accepted this idea and made the final decision: “It is now too late to change, and thus lack of foresight and of a comprehensive view leaves its permanent imprint upon the countenance of a new country.”
The colonists had given up, and the town they had once thought would only be occupied by Indians became the centre of the new colony. It would take another six years for the Nairobi Sanitary Commission to be appointed, by which time the city was home to thousands of people. The swampy grounds would pose challenges for builders, medical officers, and town planners.
From tin shack town to city
Settlers like Ewart Grogan believed that the Europeans should have occupied the area from Chiromo up towards and past Westlands. They could then leave the lower plains and its tin shacks to Asians and Kenyan natives. The plan never came to be as the influence of the railway builders carried the day, and by the time it became clear the city would grow, it was too late to move it.
In 1919, Nairobi Township became Nairobi Municipal Council and the boundaries were extended. It would be extended nine years later to cover 30 square miles. Seven years after that, Jim Jameson presented a town planning report with great plans to plant Jacaranda trees. The tin shack town was well on its way to becoming a city, and the future generations of city fathers would have to find a way to deal with the thin layer of soil.
It hired a consultant in the mid-1920s, by which time the town’s economic importance made it a fait accompli. One colonial officer wrote that the new plan was ambitious, but until it bore fruit, “Nairobi must remain what she was then, a slatternly creature, unfit to queen it over so lovely a country.”
More than three decades later, when it became the official capital of a new country, Nairobi still did not have a blueprint.
The initial stubborness of the railway engineers trumped those of the colonial government and its health officials. For that, the latter would pay dearly, facing many epidemics and having to dedicate finances to further drain the swamp. Most of the swamp has now been replaced with skyscrapers and road networks, with insufficient footpaths, drainage and leadership.
The colonists had given up, and the town they had once thought would only be occupied by Indians became the centre of the new colony.
More than a century after its unlikely birth, Nairobi is home to more than 4 million people. The city still reminds that it was once a swamp where rivers criss-crossed at will. One pending idea, which has been revived in the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Taskforce report, is to grant the city special status as a capital city. It would mean Nairobi will not have a governor, but the report hopes that it would not “impede the rights of the Kenyan people to representation at the ward and parliamentary levels.”
In this scenario, only a special status would allow the central government “the means to provide the services and facilitation necessary to maintaining as a capital city and as a diplomatic hub.” Whether that’s likely is a toss-up, but whoever runs it will always face the same problems as its first city fathers. Indeed, the city that was never meant to be, and probably should never have been, is now the epicentre of the Kenyan economy and society. Perhaps the time is ripe to ask ourselves whether Nairobi should be the epicentre of Kenya, because today, amidst the floods raging in the city, poor drainage and the chaotic streets, Nairobi leaves much to be desired as a capital city and is still an unfit slatternly creature to queen over the country, despite what the BBI report claims.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
If you are ever walking or caught in traffic in Nairobi’s central business district, you might notice the yellow school buses. Many of the schools are not based in Nairobi some traveling a fair distance to get to the city. Having attended schools with limited resources for travel, these sightings always remind me about the excitement I felt every time I got to be part of a student group travelling anywhere. These trips made for some of my best school memories. That children from all over Kenya travel to Nairobi, to see monumental places like the National Assembly, the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the Supreme Court, the Nairobi National Park, museums, universities, and historical sites such as Uhuru Park might be a small thing, or it might be significant.
I wonder what the teachers in Uhuru Park, walking alongside their students, say about this place. What makes this park significant enough to warrant these daily visits? Have you ever been to Uhuru Park? People I have asked this question tell me that they’ve only ever been there for organised events – walks, runs, or public protest.
Last year, in 2018, while attending the NaiNiWho tour organised by The Godown Arts Centre, I learnt that this space was at first a waste disposal site for the predecessor of Kenya Railways Corporation. The 12.9-hectares was designated as a recreational park in 1969 and launched by Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta. Uhuru Park is one of few free access recreational green spaces in Nairobi. It has a small and thriving pond with lilies, and a vast manmade lake, where people can enjoy boat rides. The park has a few monuments, the Pope’s pyramid slab installed in 1985, the Nyayo Fountain, one of many monuments Moi monuments installed across the country during President Moi’s 24-year rule. There is plenty of open space to do nothing. It is a place where people could enjoy picnics, take long walks, sleep, play, dance, pray, and rest. Every day there might be approximately 5000 or more people just walking through or relaxing in Uhuru Park.
Nairobi’s other free- green public spaces are Jeevanjee Gardens created by Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee in 1906, Nairobi City Park declared a public park in 1925, Central Park where a monument to President Moi’s Nyayo era stands out prominently.
Green spaces in Nairobi’s colonial physical design were markers of the colour barrier and they continue to serve as indicators of how Nairobi’s physical space – housing, schools and other social amenities, remains segregated along racial and class lines. Uhuru Park borders Kipande House. During colonial times, this building was the place where Africans had to stop and their much-loathed passbooks verified before entering the town. It also borders Nairobi hill, Valley road and Statehouse road which were the locations of the more affluent residential neighbourhoods of Nairobi. Though many of these homes have now been converted into nonresidential commercial buildings, the churches these residents founded and used among them, All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi Central SDA Church, The Holy Family Basilica, St. Paul’s University Chapel, St. Andrews, The First Church of Christ, Scientist and the Lutheran Church close to University of Nairobi continue exist.
Nairobi’s public parks largely stem from Kenya’s colonial legacy before evolving into spaces held for the public in trust post-independence. The John Michuki Memorial Park (named after the late John Michuki) in contrast has a different history. This park was created in 2008 after the state violently evicted mechanics along the Nairobi River adjacent to Kipande Road, and cleared what was an enormous dumpsite behind the buildings on Kijabe Street, away from the view of the uptown publics. This insistence on creating a thing of beauty while simultaneously disenfranchising its purported beneficiaries is best exemplified by this park. The tiny forest with footpaths might have been an attempt to increase access to green spaces for all Nairobi residents. The Michuki Park project was part of a larger goal to rehabilitate the Nairobi River basin. The awful stench from the polluted river remains a major feature of this park. Even here, people find relief resting under the shade of growing trees. Still, Michuki Park – without benches, without public toilets, is far from being whatever ideal recreation space, that was so aggressively restored. Public Green spaces in Nairobi have a littered history of contestation from the state or government agents intent on hiving off chunks and converting them into private and commercial properties. As a result, there is an ever-present paranoia around the threat to civic space alongside the demand for prime real estate. So significant is the threat that a common response to any significant maintenance is viewed with skepticism. For example, at Jeevanjee Gardens, the loud resistance witnessed in 2015 when Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero launched a project to rehabilitate the park can be traced back to the memory of the government’s 1991 and 2007 attempts to convert Jeevanjee Gardens prime green space into commercial property.
For some Nairobi residents and visitors, recreation happens at Uhuru Park despite the present-day deficiencies. There is drinking water close to the lily pond, there’s a foot bridge that looks good in photographs. A section of the park has amusement rides including merry-go-rounds, trains and bouncing castles for those desiring more activity. Though the park’s newest memorial monument has cracked and missing tiles, you’ll see people walking past Greenbelt’s rusty Freedom Corner proclamation sign, straight to this monument dedicated to Kenya’s Mau Mau heroes, to take pictures. Maybe to learn about and to honour Kenya’s freedom fighters. Perhaps to just sit on the benches provided and stare into space, read newspapers, or wait for friends.
If your walk into the park starts at the top of the hill from Cathedral Road, at the flagpole and flag erected to commemorate the Constitution of Kenya 2010, you might wonder about the heaped uncollected rubbish and old tyres at the Ministry of Agriculture offices, so close to the Ministry of Health offices, so close to this flag. Marabou storks. You can’t miss the flag though, you might even dream. Remember where you were, if you existed, when Kenya got this Constitution, and what your part in it was. How you were dreaming. Looking down from the viewing deck that is adjacent to the flag, beyond the terraced field facing the raised podium and the lake reflecting the city’s skyline, Nairobi is tranquil.
I associate Uhuru Park with Wangari Maathai and Greenbelt’s work in securing the park in 1989 against the force of the state, the Release Political Prisoners campaign by the mothers of political prisoners jailed by the Moi government who subsequently staged a mothers’ hunger-strike in 1992. This place is also evangelist Reinhard Bonnke and many more preachers after him always so loud. It holds the memory of my classmates at University of Nairobi escaping dreary study to attend that historical Rainbow Alliance Rally and the free of charge Kool and the Gang concert.
In 1996, during a ceremony at Uhuru Park, the Catholic Church in Kenya presided over the burning of condoms and AIDS-awareness material.
For me, it is a place where teargas has been used in response to peaceful processions. After the General Elections of December 2007 elections, and the disputed presidential election results, there was violence across the country. For a while in 2008, it was an eerie empty inaccessible place guarded by GSU officers. Uhuru Park is a symbolic space, a National centre, with a podium where presidents are sworn in Along with restricting free movement the State did not want to risk ceding control of this space to the opposition movement. Following the 2017 General Elections, in 2018, the same tension was witnessed in the park prior to Opposition leader Raila Odinga’s controversial swearing in ceremony. This time though, security forces stayed away.
It is much easier to associate this park named freedom, with rage, insecurity, tear gas and physical harm. Just recently, in June this year, protesters gathered here in solidarity with the people of Sudan, had their protest disrupted with teargas. In July, the SwitchOffKPLC (Kenya Power and Lighting Company) march was also disrupted with teargas. At the end of July, more people held a memorial for the late Kibra MP, Ken Okoth. A recreational park is a place we visit when we have free time, or a place we might go to get temporary relief from our immediate troubles. Gabriel Omollo’s song Lunch time chronicles the struggles of Nairobi’s workers including not having enough money to buy good food or any food at all…
“wengine wanakwenda kulala uwanjani kumbe ni shida ndugu njaa inamwumiza”
The song refers to workers going to sleep in the park when they have no food to deal with their hunger pangs. Even when one cannot improve a situation, going to a green space can be cathartic. More than any other green space in Kenya, Uhuru Park is a place Kenyans return to, to assert and proclaim freedom whenever it threatened. Uhuru means freedom.
Not just for Kenyans. In July 2011, some of South Sudan’s citizens living in Nairobi, congregated at Uhuru Park to celebrate their independence.
That this park remains open and fairly easy to access suggests that even the most cynical among us agree that everyone, no matter their station in life, deserves to have a beautiful and peaceful place to relax. How is it that many of us, in middle class Kenya, are grateful and even proud to have it at the centre of our city, willing to celebrate it, defend it, but unable to imagine ourselves relaxing here, ever? Who is it for, and why is it not for us? Are free-of-charge places only for people without money?
The sorts of things we do for rest and relaxation often look like crimes in a city that enforces bylaws that punish people for being present in public spaces. A leisurely walk looks a lot like loitering and vagrancy when the walker mets the stereotype of the undesirables. A person using a camera is so easily assumed to be a terrorist. A bulky bag filled with food always looks suspicious. A person standing still for too long can be confused for a hawker. Those who have regular jobs often grapple with the guilt and the discomfort around taking necessary breaks or using up designated breaks to rest. To be seen to be resting in an unmeaningful way can be a problem. To be visible, and to be seen resting in certain places, another problem. We have a situation where it is acceptable only to have our bodies visible during particular respectable or performative acts of civic duty while simultaneously accepting the invisibility of other types of bodies, often the bodies of disenfranchised people, who make full use of Uhuru Park.
Visiting Uhuru Park in its present state means resting with homelessness and destitution, deciding what to feel or not feel about people cleaning themselves and washing their clothes at that stream so close to the big All Saints Cathedral and the Serena Hotel. It is coming to terms with the fact that there are people for whom the minimum charge for a public toilet is too much. You could argue that more ought to be done to make this park friendlier or safer for those who do not feel welcome here. Then you might have to consider what to do about not excluding those whose bodies are presently considered undesirable or even threatening.
There may be comfort in imagining and defending Uhuru Park as a particular type of civic space. For many Uhuru Park is reduced to Freedom Corner and all its accumulated symbolisms and not the rest of the park. Even when we by right occupy these spaces, do we stop to think about those we displace with our proclamations? What use are our victories for those who have to stay behind, make themselves comfortable with the residue of whatever good or bad we leave? Claiming all the things Uhuru Park could be to Nairobi and Kenya by extension would require constant presence. This could ignite the public participation we desire. We would have to imagine that many of the destitute people who use public spaces also need private spaces, roofs over their heads and shelter.
It is better if you have a little money, you can go to Nairobi Arboretum or Karura Forest. Take pictures. It is less work.
I think about the imperative Tembea Kenya which is often interpreted to mean tourism and spending money. Does going or not going to Uhuru Park then signal one’s position in whatever hierarchies we imagine for ourselves?
It forces one to consider again, the students from all over the country stopping at Uhuru Park. What freedom dreams do these visits ignite? What dreams do they transport back to friends and family? What must we do to make Uhuru Park a place where all of us, in our different bodies, Nairobi residents and Nairobi’s visitors, are free.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper There is a 10-floor building under construction about fifty steps away from the 5-floor building where I live. Every day with the exception of some Sundays and some public holidays, a bearded man, maybe in his 60s, sits on a blue plastic chair on the murram road outside the construction site; sometimes waving his stick, supervising, inspecting all deliveries, and watching the workers on the building site. He could be the owner or the one appointed as the foreman.
When I moved into the flat I presently occupy in 2016, the foundation for that site had been dug, but no work was progressing. It resembled an empty swimming pool. Perhaps the owner – who might be this man sitting on the blue chair – had faced financial or legal barriers. I do not know. I was glad that the site itself wasn’t right next to the building I live in. I could see that if and when construction started, the residents in the surrounding flats closest to it would be denied sunlight and their laundry would never dry and they would need to keep the lights on in the house, even during the day.
At the time, this abandoned site was a place that pooled with water on rainy days, but on dry days offered a playing space for children who have nowhere but the murram road on which to play. In the dry season, this was better than them playing football on the oil-stained road that also served as a motor vehicle mechanics’ yard during the day. Sometimes this site served as a garbage sorting area.
Mid 2018, I assume the owner of this site got past whatever barriers had stalled the construction. My mornings have since then been punctuated with the sound of lorries delivering and offloading stones, sand and ballast. Pouring it on the road. Rendering parts of this narrow road unusable. The construction workers often start work before 7am, making a ruckus. Shouting orders. Shoveling. Breaking bricks. Sometimes work on this site continues even after the sun has set. As the floors of this building increased, an extra noisy pulley system was added to the site, which was loaded with bricks and then sent up to the workers. From my kitchen window, it seemed like the sky was disappearing with every additional floor.
In my neighbourhood, apart from this one, there are three other ongoing construction projects. It helps to leave home before sunrise and get back after sunset. One wonders about the babies who have to stay home and sleep through this noise. Few workers at the site next to my flat wear safety helmets or anything that resembles safety gear. I’ve seen construction sites in nicer neighbourhoods with their half-done walls covered netting to keep the dust in (or away?) and the site surrounded by iron sheet walls and barriers t to protect pedestrians. This one only has netting facing the wall that’s flush against the windows of the neighbouring flats. There’s almost constant water flowing from the site, soaking the murram road, leading to another building down slope from this construction site. Grey water.
I could list the illegalities. I’ve seen different government authorities stop by. This is a country of standards. There is a complaints system. For all kinds of things. I know. There is a way to notify the authorities. To do something. I could do something. But I am tired. Defeated even before I start.
***
A group of women set up their temporary cooking area on this same road once construction began. By then, the mechanics and their oily grease had left. When it’s time to take a break, the construction workers sit on the road, on stones that serve as makeshift stools, and have their meal. I’m uncertain about building codes, about construction worker health and safety rules and all of that but I’m certain that many things here are wrong with this project.
I’ve evolved into a person who avoids opening my windows for extended periods of time unless I’m cooking something that’s got a strong aroma, or when the heat in the house is unbearable. If it isn’t the noise from the build, it’s the dust from it. Whenever I mop my floors, the water turns black. On the few occasions I’ve had to travel for a few days or weeks, I always have to make sure to leave dust covers on all my furniture. It makes things easier. When I return I’ve got to clean the entire house before falling asleep otherwise I won’t sleep at all.
Early this year, the air around my neighbourhood got a noticeably worse, more than the usual smell. Every time I stepped out of the house, I had this burning sensation in my eyes and throat, like I’d just walked into a teargas-filled space. Lucky for us, the area MCA took this problem seriously. This action was so unexpected, so unusual, that I could hardly believe it – and this air pollution issue seems to have resolved for now.
There have been a few power outages directly related to the build. One time, a lorry touched a power line and there was a scary explosion. The power was gone for most of the day after that. We’ve gotten used to it. I’ve gotten used to it. This living in Nairobi. This is what you get. You could find a place to move further away from this, a place where there is grass and there are trees and reasonable quiet. I could. But with my budget, such places will invariably be far away from the city centre. I could commit to a 4-hour commute. I could.
I’ve wondered how these toxic living conditions affect me. Last year, I bought a few houseplants and put them in my small balcony. I’ve never been keen on gardening so I cannot say definitively that my plants died because of the limited light or the air pollution. It could just as well have been because of my overzealous watering, or I just got the wrong plants for this strange climate we are now experiencing – that January heat that extended for too long and the unreliable rain.
I notice though, that here, like all places in Nairobi, I’ve been seeing fewer birds. I’m a sort of bird watcher, no expert, but I even own a bird book and make occasional trips to Nairobi’s weekly bird watching expedition. Yes, Nairobi has a weekly bird watching expedition, run by Nature Kenya. So I notice when the birds are disappearing where I am. I’m lucky – I do not work regular office hours. When I go bird watching I’m reminded that there are some parts of Nairobi that are still that Green City in the Sun. Just not where I live.
Of course, the ideal situation would be that I’d find another place to live, one that would be commute-friendly, with no noise and no air pollution. I imagine, it will happen, soon. I dream. But house hunting in Nairobi means that you start with this idea of the sort of standard of housing you want, maybe even deserve or have earned, and then this city batters you into making your peace that all you need is just shelter, a caretaker who minds their own business, and an acceptable, though dubious, source of water.
To live here is to wake up extra early to beat the sunrise, because that’s when I write best, and to have that precious morning lull before the construction noise starts. Raising the volume of the music in the house is only soothing for a while. I’ve always liked the outdoors and hiking but more so in this last year because I’ve needed to get out of the house and find somewhere that’s the complete opposite of the noise which become my constant rhythm, and the headaches, and the constant feeling that I am getting a cold. Sometimes I imagine my lungs filling up with concrete dust. I imagine the strange taste in my water is concrete. I’m always trying to find my way to a forest. It occurs to me that since June 2018, I’ve been signing up for every possible walking or hiking expedition away that I can make time and find the money for. If only this was a job I could get paid for. I also find myself visiting museums and art galleries.
It’s costing me money I don’t have. It’s maybe not the most sensible way to live in Nairobi. Maybe it’s the privileged way to exist in Nairobi. But it’s the way I’ve kept my body from getting accustomed to this. It is how I breathe. At the very least, it’s my way of feeding my dreams. So that when I sleep, my mind can create for me different kinds of dreams. My dreaming cannot be this terrible architecture, these sounds and these smells.
I thought the noisiest part of the construction project was completed until last Monday when they started drilling a borehole, a process that begins every morning at 6:30am and is so disruptive that it feels like the walls of the building I live in are vibrating. Perhaps because of the extensive dust, the exterior walls our building I live were repainted in April 2019. I had this thought in my mind and was amused when I heard my neighbour expressed it to the caretaker, “I hope you don’t use this as an excuse to raise the rent.” The caretaker shrugged and said that wasn’t the case. I hope he was telling the truth.
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Follow us on Twitter. Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper
In March 2018, social media in Kenya was awash with images of old rickety Spanish trains that the Kenyan government was allegedly planning to buy at a rough estimate of between Sh71 million and Sh137 million per train to supplement the need for the Nairobi commuter train demand.
According to a media report, the Kenyan government was planning to import at least 11 diesel multiple units (DMU) of trains from Spain, with some as old as 25 years. The Transport Secretary, Esther Koimett, however, refuted the claims while sharing images on Twitter of what she said were the actual DMUs that government is planning on shipping to minimise the traffic congestion in the city.
“These are the actual DMUs we are getting. Cost for the 11 DMUs is Sh1.5 billion NOT Sh10 billion. They should serve us for another 20-25 years,” said Ms Koimett.
Whether true or not, the demand for commuter trains in the country is ballooning and that Nairobians religiously use the commuter trains to and from work is revealing. In March for instance, tens of thousands of commuters were heavily inconvenienced due to delays on the Nairobi commuter railway service (NCRS) schedule caused by the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron in the country.
“Dear customers, please note that the evening commuter train services will tomorrow (13/03/2019) experience delays. Syokimau 1 will depart at 1845 hours while Embakasi train will leave at 1900 hours. The other evening trains will run as scheduled,” read a notice by the Kenya Railway Corporation (KRC).
It was on the same day that the French President was conducting a station tour of the Nairobi Central Railway Station off Haile Selassie Avenue with commitment of funding the proposed development of a commuter rail service to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. This is aimed at decongesting the city as well as reducing the time taken between the central business district (CBD) and the airport.
The proposed JKIA commuter rail service, which is set to be completed by 2021 is part of a Sh340 billion public and private infrastructure trade deal between Kenya and France.
The Transport Ministry documents that over 13,000 Nairobians use the Nairobi Commuter Rail Service (NCRS), which was unveiled last December, every day. The NCRS is part of the Nairobi Metropolitan Transport Master Plan, which aims at decongesting the city.
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) on the other hand keeps the data of revenues collected from ticket sales. It, however, does not report the number of travellers who use the NCRS in a day.
The data below shows the amount of money in millions that KRA collected from NCRS in terms of number of tickets sold in the period 2013 – 2016. The NCRS operates 20 trips every day as shown in the below schedule, with average fare costs of between Sh30-Sh60. The Nairobi Transport executive Mohamed Dagane said in an interview last December that the commuter trains move over 40,000 different people daily contradicting reports by the Ministry of Transport.
“When the full complement is in they will enable us to transport around 132,000 people a day compared to the 13,000 we do today,” said Ms Koimett.
KRC in December said the NCRS project dubbed Nairobi Railway City (NRC) was part of its efforts to decongest the city roads. It is co-funded by the government and the World Bank. To this effect, 10 new stations were to be completed to facilitate the plan. The Dandora, Mwiki, Githurai, Kahawa, and Ruiru were among the new stations. They complement the existing ones – Kibera, Imara Daima, Syokimau, and Makadara.
But the commuter train services in Nairobi are not a new thing. The services were introduced in the 1980s to provide a low-cost public transport alternative to the urban poor in the city, following the crippling economic inflation the country was experiencing at the time.
The long-distance passenger services had also been in operation between Nairobi and Mombasa, as well as to Kisumu, since the railway service went into operation in 1903 and as a result, the Kenya Railways Corporation did not therefore have to acquire any new passenger wagons for the new services.
Despite the addition of the new wagons, the capacity is still limited as more and more Kenyans choose the trains over matatus, mainly because of time constraints and convenience away from the public service madness on the Kenyan roads.
Commuting to the city centre by train is much faster than by road, and more affordable. The trains carry sitting as well as standing passengers, with some hanging at the doors, and the more daring riding on the roof especially for passengers plying the Kibera route.
Most of the new stations constructed in the 2000s contain parking facilities allowing personal vehicle owners access to the stations. The commuter trains operate on weekdays twice during rush hours in the morning and evening. Some routes like the Nairobi – Syokimau also have afternoon services.
The service is not available on weekends, public holidays, and during certain times of the day mostly non-peak periods.
The train picks up commuters at designated stops and takes approximately 20-30 minutes between stations. This includes a stoppage of two minutes at halts to pick up or drop commuters.
The current commuter rail network is so dilapidated that the average speed on some sections is as low as 15 kilometres per hour due to broken rails, unstable tracks and insufficient ballast.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through Nairobi’s Iconic Neighbourhoods
By Pauline Otieno Skaper Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
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