Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy 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 foreverhome. Because we remember how far we have gone.And no matter what trauma and hardships we suffered – we remember this time through rose tintedglasses.

What? Going back home, home I saidYes, won’t be there for long but we can meet after. No way! I am coming with you. I am going hometoo. 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 andmassage 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 boughtus.

I am 7 years old – waiting for the medicine man to bring a variety of roots that need to be boiled andme washed with it. You see at age 7 I have terrible eczema and the many trips to Aga Khan courtesyof 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. MyMama loved orange.Mothers are precious and I do miss my own Mama, so I channel that love to any mother I comeacross – especially my friends Mums.

These houses looked much bigger when I was 7. They seem shrunken – but we have grown. Thistakes 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. Walkingdistance 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 yearsold, 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 thingschange, 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. NextEvelyn 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 samebus…

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 MallI ate mtura there and ferried metal birikas of soup from there to neighbours’ homes. I got my shoesmended 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 Iwonder 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, Actifedcame 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 towhen 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 wastapo…or blada…or cha mkebe…AnywayI 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! ‘nuffsaid!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 Standard8…Clearly, I knew nothing!

Wiki’s house – Wycliff – his full name was too long for us kids. First boy and last male who everslapped 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…theaverage 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 MamiePure blissThem Mushrooms are having a jam/rehearsal session. The drums sound good, I fall in love with theguitar We eat and listen…

Thoma’s house.First real rejection. I am 15 going on 16Standing 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 somewhatfragile when not in control.Years later – we are back in the kitchen. Him from Sweden, me from my new hood. He has lost hisDad; 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 musthave been a good year for Peugeot…everyone seemed to own one…or so it seemed. There was theoccasional 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 drinkingand 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 – mwizicomes 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 tomake 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, LeonardMambo Mbotela asking us je, huu ni ungwana.The only time I think Luo men my Dad’s age attempted to understand Swahili.

The Bus StopMy 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. Gofigure!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 itmade.

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 goodkedi.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 wrathreigning 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! Heraises 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 levelNo pretence. No explaining. No pity. No judgement Just simple memories…The medicine man The bus ride Sunday football Them MushroomsThe Weeping Willow – which caused a lot of weeping Love – young unrequited loveFriends – rest in peace Mamie Tracy ChapmanOld Spice.

I am 45.Standing in an empty car park Facing owanjo soThe bougainvillea is long goneThere is a stone wall instead – protecting the space from land grabbers…Kenya! The grass and redsoil are now gone…It is astro turfKids play in their bright yellow jerseys…dreaming… Oti Papa would be proud.I wonder about Celestine, Wiki and Hillary…

Me at 45Standing in the car park Old spice in my memoryBut now not quite Old Spice but an expensive scent Tracy in my memory…Nvirri the Storyteller on my mindFootball in the backgroundAnd in front of me… Home.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

In June 2002, veteran Kenyan chef Ms Alice Taabu bagged the prestigious Gourmand-WorldCookbook Award in recognition of her two-decade-long career on the famed KBC TV cookery showMke Nyumbani. Founded in 1995 by Chef Edouard Cointreau, the Gourmand Award marked acritical turning point in Kenya’s food conversation as historical dishes found their place on the globalstage, 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 foodtastes, in an event that’s dubbed “the Oscars” or “the Olympics” for food enthusiasts, and one thathas been increasingly dominated by chefs from the South and East, notably the Chinese. AliceTaabu’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 ofcooking shows, online recipes, and marketing of new social trends in food consumption in theinternet streets. With their origins in broadcast television in Kenya, they have evolved tremendouslywith the growth and uptake of Instagram and YouTube.

This includes the adaptation of television food show formats onto multi-platform content channelssuch 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 fromthe mainstream into newer spaces, including setting up the famed Psys, first on Langata Road andlater in Westlands.

Since the mid-2000s the online food culture has evolved and birthed offshoots of Mke Nyumbaniwith varying shelf lives and scope. Buoyed by both the growing ease of content creation, falling costof internet connectivity, and increasing demand for more local content and local delicacies, recipesincreasingly 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 theirinfluence, 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-pageFlavours from Kenya cookbook. Then there’s The Great Kenyan Bake Off which is based on theBritish Version The Great British Bake Off, Ali Mandhry’s Tamu Tamu, and Martin Munyua of DadsCan 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 TVstations, and that a majority of local TV viewers preferred local content to foreign programmes. Sostarting in mid-2016 onwards, the state agency mandated all local broadcasters to start airing 40per 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 onlineshopping 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 andtechniques, dancing classes, learning languages, and mastering DIY projects. That number hasinched even higher as COVID-19 restrictions closed down brick and mortar outlets across thecountry.

The music/movies segment tops the list of online search content, followed by electronics with fashionin third position. But the food segment is growing rapidly; online food stockists and delivery firmsincluding E-Mart, Glovo, Chandarana FoodPlus, UberEats, Yum Deliveries, as well as Green Spoonand Jumia Food have recorded spikes in their online demand.

Twiga, Kalimoni Greens, Kibanda Online, Gobeba, and a host of other online platforms haveembraced digitisation and online payment systems to cater to the expanding palate of a tech-savvysociety. As online food shopping gains traction, the numbers are bound to surge forward asconsumers develop trust and make buying decisions based on the online visual displays, coupledwith a seamless product and user interaction.

The influencer culture covers both cooking shows, shopping, dishes, recipes, and food markets inshort simple, accessible TikTok and YouTube clips, and often highlights both exotic and localingredients.

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 blursthe lines between the food reality TV show and the everyday feeding choices of people and familiesat home.

Then there is the rise of “Indomie Twitter”, a subculture on Twitter which promotes the growth inthe 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 marketingwork? What makes Mke Nyumbani, or Dads Who Cook, Shoba’s Cookouts or Indomie Twitter such asocial phenomenon. The short answer is that influencer marketing plays directly into the humandesire 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 elsebeing equal, the more we’re exposed to something that’s relatable, the more we like it. Andfascinatingly, 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, ourbrain is wired to respond to stimulation from influencer marketers whom we already trust at avirtual interaction level. We find their persuasion more authentic, more fun, and more attractivethan other types of persuasions. The link is optimised when the awareness and affinity of theconsumer 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 agilechefs who’re good at their craft.

The psychological terrain of the food influencer market is what happens when social users followfriends and famous users rather than corporate brands. These consumers turn to social platforms toconnect and find out how people they look up to build their lifestyles and to look for relatable figuresto help them filter through the hundreds of choices in the online markets. In turn they consume lotsof visual content which food influencers are primed to optimise.

Research shows that well thought-out visual influencer marketing in the food industry incentivisesan engagement rate of 7 per cent and can imply conversion rates of up to Ksh7 for every shillingspent. Ultimately, the partnership between brands and influencers is built on the social ingredientthat their personas brings, while building up significant returns on investment (ROI).

To understand the psychology of persuasion, author Robert Cialdini places the construction ofinfluence under six metrics: Reciprocation – the internal pull to repay what another person hasprovided 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 agreewith people we like and the desire for others to agree with us if we like them. Authority – we aremore likely to say “yes” to others who are authorities. Scarcity – we want more of what is lessavailable or dwindling in availability.

The overall group psychology that happens ends up creating consumer tribes in which the pursuit ofconsumption of certain meals or dishes built into our ethnic, class, religious or moral influence isreinforced. This isn’t hard given that the need for social conformity is already hardwired into ourbrain’s reward system.

The evolution of the kitchen influence

An even bigger influence in group-wide food tastes and preferences among Kenyans stems fromsocial 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 thereforecomes 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 reorientsand 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, theconsumer 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 rolesthat defined kitchen life were often assigned to the women in the community. This lent the home lifeto critical contestation at the dawn of modernity as family life shifted away from those two domainsand into the urban environment.

The traditional designation of the kitchen as a place for mothers and women in general waschallenged 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 gainedfreedoms 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, crowdedout by commerce. Local bakers could now supply our bread. The spiritual center, the home, had tocompete with a material culture, capable of satisfying needs the home once met, and of creating newneeds as well.”

What we are seeing at the tail end of capitalism as we know it, is a major shift in food cultures andthe nuances built around them. Male chefs grace our TV shows and Instagram food influencersrepresent 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 asa genuine and critical concern about what someone eats. This could range from giving up sugars oroils or meat as a matter of preference. It can also be seen in veganism, vegetarianism orpescatarianism, diets that are adopted either because of health concerns, ecological issues, religiousbeliefs, 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 givespreference 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 dawnof 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 likablechefs on TV, but our mothers and fathers, their recipes, the dinner table, and the food rituals in ourfamily kitchen.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to FoodInitiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy 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 therecently 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, andMaskini villages were demolished a century earlier, 8,000 residents of Kariobangi and Ruai wereevicted—their settlements deemed illegal—despite a court order halting such action. Both the Ruaiand 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 apandemic and the rainy season, and despite the fact that many residents had various forms oflegitimate claims to this land.

In their recent book The City Makers of Nairobi, the urbanists Anders and Kristin Ese drawconnections between such colonial and postcolonial incidences when they write: “in creating thisimage,” one of illegality and unwanted informality and people, “the city turns its back on its actualcentre.” 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 toNairobi’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 constructand 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 thelargest imprint on the city, while the lives, work, and everyday practices of Africans who have livedhere 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, theirconcern is not just the spectacular; they paint portraits of mundane African “city making” in thisperiod: 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 fluidaxes: between conformity and nonconformity, between structure and agency, between disruptionand continuity, and between acceptance and resistance. In bringing forth these orientingcontinuums, they highlight the varied positions that Africans embodied throughout Nairobi, thathave rendered its particular forms, and, ultimately, assert black residents’ prominence as importantto 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 thatfocus on the early colonial period, The City Makers of Nairobi is an important complement to thislimited 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 structuralviolence 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-spatialerasure. 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. Thisacademic work is expanded by the more accessible and much loved brash and often irreverentcultural offerings of writers such as Meja Mwangi, of “Going Down River Road” fame, and the musicofferings of youth from former native cities, such as the recent Genje style that can only come fromthe 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 Iagree that the perpetuation of Nairobi as a “colonial construct” endures, this does not mean that thisone 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, asmany do, does not mean that we do not recognize and live the reality that it did and does not havetotal power in the landscape. The city sentiences described within the works of the authors listedabove—from housing to kinships to languages to activisms—certainly do not ignore the vitality ofAfrican lives, and their primary role in shaping this city’s varied horizons, even if they highlight theenduring hegemony of colonial constructs.

Kariobangi and Ruai evictees in 2020, as their predecessors, will continue to find ways to makehome within or without the vicinity of their demolished houses. And the presence of the oppressivecolonial surveillance practices and ordinances, past and present, implicitly and explicitly recognize/dthis power: that African forms of life and urbanism could not be suffocated, that there was andwould never be an African city without them, even if the director of Public Works, from 1900 to1922, 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 andEse have given themselves; that of highlighting African life by detailing housing patterns, culturallives, and everyday practices in ways intended to decenter the colonizer. Ultimately, the authorshave managed to “encourage people to reflect on the fact that this is indeed their city, and hasalways been so;” a supportive endorsement of Nairobi’s primary city making communities who, from1920 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 publishinga series of posts from their site once a week.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

At a time when “social distancing” is becoming the norm due to the coronavirus pandemic, it mayappear self-indulgent to reminisce about a period when going to the cinema was a regular feature ofEast African Asians’ lives. But perhaps now that the world is changing – and many more people arewatching movies at home on Netflix and other channels – it is important to document the things thathave been lost in the war against COVID-19 and with the advent of technology. One of these thingsis 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 successfulminority.

Those who pass the notorious Globe Cinema roundabout, which is often associated with pickpocketsand street children, might be surprised to learn that the Globe Cinema (which no longer shows filmsbut is used for other purposes, such as church prayer meetings) was once the place to be seen on aSunday evening among Nairobi’s Asian community. I remember that cinema well because in the1970s my family used to go there to watch the latest Indian – or to be more specific, Hindi (Indiaalso produces films in regional languages like Telegu, Bengali and Punjabi) blockbuster at 6 p.m. onSundays. Sunday was movie day in my family, and going to the cinema was a ritual we all lookedforward to. The Globe Cinema was considered one of the more “posh” cinemas in Nairobi; not onlywas 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 dedicatedentirely to Indian cinema in East Africa from the early 1900s to the 1980s), “Perched on a hillockoverlooking 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 EastAfrica’s Asian community. The early Indian migrants had little contact with the motherland, as tripsback home were not only expensive but the sea voyage from Mombasa to Bombay or Karachi tookweeks. (At independence in 1947, the Indian subcontinent became two countries – India andPakistan – hence the reference to Indians in East Africa as “Asians”.) So they relied on Indian filmsto 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 thediaspora retained their identity and got to learn about their traditions and customs. I got to learnabout the spring festival of Holi and goddesses such as Durga from watching Indian films. I alsolearnt Hindi, or rather Hindustani – a mix of Hindi (which is Sanskrit-based) and Urdu (which is alsoSanskrit-based but which borrows heavily from Persian and Arabic) – which is the lingua franca ofNorthern India and Pakistan, and which is the language most commonly used in the so-called Hindicinema.

On the other hand, the sexist culture portrayed in the majority of Indian films also reinforced sexualdiscrimination among East African Asians. The idea that women are subservient to men, and that itis the woman who must sacrifice her own needs and desires for the “greater good” of thefamily/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 – werenot supposed to be emulated; they were considered pure entertainment and not reflective of asociety where arranged marriages were and still are the norm. I heard many stories of how if anAsian woman dared to cross racial, religious or caste barriers she was severely reprimanded orstigmatised.

Watching Indian movies was also one way of keeping up with the latest fashions. Men and womenoften tried to copy the hairstyles and clothes of their favourite movie stars. When the hugelysuccessful 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 thattime that was a replica of the one the actress wore in the film.) When the famous film star SharmilaTagore dared to wear a revealing swimsuit in the 1967 film An Evening in Paris, she opened the doorfor 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 theirlive 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 devotedto showing films made in Bombay (now Mumbai) – often referred to as Bollywood. This was the timewhen actors and actresses like Rajesh Khanna, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi becamesuperstars.

Cinemas in Nairobi were always full, especially on weekends when Asian families flocked to thedome-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; itis now used for cultural activities.) Over the years, an increasing number of Africans began watchingIndian films. Oyunga Pala, the chief curator at The Elephant, recalls going to the Tivoli cinema inKisumu, 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,” recallsNeera Kapur-Dromson in an article published in the Indian cinema edition of Awaaz. “The smallwaiting room was always crammed with patients. But that never deterred him from taking amplebreaks 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 theBelle Vue Drive-In cinema on Mombasa Road. Young Asian men would show off their (fathers’) carsand young women would display the latest fashions – all in the hope of catching the attention of apotential mate. Food was shared – and sometimes even cooked – on the gentle slopes of the parkingspots. Going to the Drive-In was like going for a picnic. And as the lights dimmed, the large bulkyspeakers were put on full volume so that everyone (usually father, mother, and three or four kids inthe back seat) in the car – and beside it – could hear the dialogues. Fox Drive-In cinema on ThikaRoad was also a popular joint, but mainly with the younger crowd who preferred watching theHollywood 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 thatthe Sunday outing to the Drive-In was the only time there was a traffic jam in Kampala. “Idi Amingot caught in one of them, driving back to Entebbe with his foreign minister Wanume Kibedi,” hewrites. “‘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 Sundaysaccompanied by their notions of exclusion, and let us not forget that those two variables – incomeinequality 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 UrbanTanzania, Laura Fair describes how the Sunday evening shows became a focal point of urbanconversations among Tanzania’s Asian community. They were meeting points, like temples, mosquesor churches, where people sought affirmation.

As in Kenya, Sunday shows in Tanzania were family and community bonding events. “Cinema hallswere 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 anintegral 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-crankedprojector and began showing silent Indian films in a rented warehouse in the coastal town ofMombasa. In 1931, when two brothers, Janmohamed Hasham and Valli Hasham, built the RegalCinema, he began renting the venue to show Hindi films. Two years later, he built his own 700-seatMajestic 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 chroniclinghow his father expanded movie-viewing in East Africa. “As time progressed Majestic became anestablished cinema on the Kenyan coast. The owners of Majestic also became fully fledged filmdistributors 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 jiltedlovers set many a heart fluttering, and Asha Parekh, who made her name in tragic love stories suchas Kati Patang.

Indian cinema had wide appeal not just in Kenya, but also in neighbouring Zanzibar, where theurban night life was dominated by Indian movies. Many a taraab tune came directly from the hitsongs of Indian movies. As opposed to Western movies (often referred to as English movies), Indianfilms appealed to Swahili sensibilities, with their focus on values such as modesty, respect for eldersand morality.

In Zanzibar, Lamu and other coastal areas where segregation between the sexes was strictlyobserved, there were special zenana (women-only) shows, where women dressed up in their finest tojoin other women in watching Indian and Egyptian films. For many Asian and Swahili women, thezenana afternoon show was a rare opportunity to leave their cloistered existence and let their hairdown, 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 wasabout eight or nine years old and I can tell you there was less movie-watching and more talking andgossiping going on during the show.)

Unfortunately, the old cinemas in Zanzibar are no more, which is surprising because the island ishost to the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Cine Afrique, the only standing cinema in Zanzibarwhen I visited the island in 2003, was a pale shadow of its former shelf, with its cracked ceiling andbroken seats. I believe it has now been demolished to pave way for a mall. The Empire, anotherfamous cinema on the island, is now a supermarket and the once impressive Royal Cinema is in anadvanced 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 thecomfort of their homes. The introduction of multiplex cinemas in shopping malls has also lessenedthe appeal of a stand-alone cinemas, and made movie-going less of an “event” and more ofsomething 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 filmsof the 70s and 80s – have been replaced by more sophisticated and nuanced plots, perhaps inresponse to a large Indian diaspora in the West which is more interested in plots that are morerealistic and reflective of their own lives. The escapism of the Indian cinema of yesteryear has givenway to realism, which makes cinema-going less “entertaining”.

Indian actors and actresses are also getting more roles in films made in Hollywood, and Americanand British films are increasingly finding India to be an interesting backdrop or subject for theirmovies, as evidenced by the huge success of films like Slumdog Millionaire. This has expanded thescope 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 distinctlyfeminist films like Parama (directed by Aparna Sen), which explores the inner worlds of Indianwomen, are few and far between.

But as any Indian movie buff will tell you (and I include myself in this group), the experience ofwatching an Indian film in a cinema cannot be matched on a TV or computer screen. Indian cinemain 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 sawIndian films in a movie theatre.

Alas, those days are fast disappearing thanks to terrorism, technology and now COVID-19. And alongwith this, a distinctly East African urban culture has been lost forever.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk Through

Nairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy 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 thedemand for physical connection.” – Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011)

In February this year, just before the coronavirus pandemic forced the Kenyan government toimpose a partial lockdown in the country, I moved to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a city with apopulation of 4.4 million, from Malindi, a small town along Kenya’s coast with a population of just120,000. I had been intending to move back home for several years but 2020 seemed an opportunetime to do it. I had spent ten long years in Malindi and was ready to get back to the thick of thingswhere the action was.

Now I know, for most people who live in Nairobi, the city is not “home” – the “true north” of mostNairobians, as Alexander Ikawah pointed out in a recent article, is their rural home, the place theyidentify most with. Ikawah says that Nairobi is just a place where “city villagers” work; where theyhave “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 inrural or agricultural land both before and after independence and so are concentrated mainly inurban areas). And even if they have an ancestral home in India or Pakistan, they don’t tend to referto it as “home”, nor does this ancestral home loom large in their imagination. In fact, many KenyanAsians have never visited their “motherland”.

I have lived in London in the UK and Boston in the USA, and have travelled to many, many, citiesaround the world – New York (my favourite city), Istanbul (a cultural delight where East meetsWest), Mogadishu (a wounded city with nice beaches), Kabul (wounded but with majestic snowypeak backdrops), Havana (a salsa-lover’s dream, arguably the world’s most egalitarian city), Paris (aromantic 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 esSalaam (a friendly coastal city with huge potential), to name a few – but for me, Nairobi is not onlyhome, 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 todo with trying to regain some perspective on life after having led a busy treadmill-like workexistence where career success depended so much on pleasing a boss and undermining colleaguesto move up the career ladder. I was hoping that a break would allow me to do things I hadn’t hadtime for before, like writing and spending more time with my husband. I dreamed of looking out ofthe window and seeing palm trees swaying in the wind, and breathing in the salty Indian Oceanbreeze. Oh what bliss (and it was)…until I discovered that meaningful social interaction was muchmore important to me than the sounds and smells of nature. Voluntary self-isolation, I discovered, isneither natural nor healthy. Human beings are wired to be social animals – that is how they survivedas a species.

While living in a small sleepy town where nothing much happens gave me the freedom to pursuewriting (I ended up writing three books during my self-imposed “exile”) and other interests, I had agnawing sense that I was in danger of disconnecting and self-isolating myself from all that wasmeaningful in my life. I yearned for intellectual stimulation and missed cultural and literary events. Ilonged to go to the cinema and hang out with my family. My social interactions in Malindi weresuperficial; I was in danger of becoming like the many expatriate (mostly Italian and British) retireesin the town, whose lives revolve around bridge parties and afternoon siestas induced by copiousamounts 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-dawncurfew and partial lockdown, so my intentions of absorbing myself into city life have once again havebeen 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, andwhether people will look to leading simpler rural or small town lives. The fact that the virusemanated from the city of Wuhan in China and spread across the world through networks of citiesand transport hubs is making people wonder whether we should be seeking more dispersed and lessdense forms of settlement.

However, Tomasz Sudra, a former colleague who is now retired from the United Nations HumanSettlements Programme (UN-Habitat), told me that it was unfair to blame cities for COVID-19because the virus could have been contained early if the Chinese government had not decided tosuppress “bad news”.

“The medical doctor who blew the whistle on the virus and died from it was forced to confess that hewas spreading false news and was arrested,” he said. “The epidemic [in China] became a pandemicbecause the government suppressed the free flow of information.”

Cities have not only been associated with the rapid spread of diseases, but environmentaldegradation 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 somany 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) havebeen circulating on social media. People are asking whether the climate crisis could be blamed oncities, 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 onworldwide 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 morephysically 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 shoreor trading route to another – losing its attraction? Will there be a return to the nostalgic longing forrural life popularised by people like Mahatma Gandhi, who said that “true India” could only be foundin the country’s villages? I don’t think so. The world, including India, is more urban than it was inGandhi’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 changedaround 2007 when the world’s urban population equaled the world’s rural population for the firsttime. Though some regions of the world, notably Europe, North America and Latin America, becamepredominantly urban much earlier (around the 1950s), the rapid urban growth rates in poorer partsof 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 citiesand 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 (alsoknown as slums). In 2006, UN-Habitat declared that one out of every three city dwellers lives in aslum, with sub-Saharan Africa having the largest proportion of its urban population living in slumconditions, with little or no access to water, sanitation, electricity and adequate housing. Asia hostedthe largest number of slum dwellers, though some sub-regions in the continent were doing betterthan others. Slums, warned UN-Habitat, were threatening to become a “dominant and distinct typeof settlement in cities of the developing world”.

This grim assessment was followed by another one in 2008, when UN-Habitat sounded the alarm onrising inequalities in cities, and warned that economic and social inequalities in urban areas had thepotential 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, andsocial unrest disrupts economic activities, went the argument. UN-Habitat stated that pro-poor andinclusive urban development could significantly decrease these inequalities and make cities moresustainable. While the UN agency acknowledged that energy consumption in cities was impactingnegatively on the environment, it made a case for mitigating the impact of carbon emissions throughsolutions 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. Citiesare not just places where economic activities are concentrated, they are also crucibles of innovationand 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 2006State of the World’s Cities report, which focused almost entirely on the gloomy topic of slums. Thethinking was that there was a danger that in highlighting the problems in cities and slums, we mightinadvertently throw the baby out with the bath water and that as the UN’s “City Agency”, it wouldbe counterproductive to focus only on the negative aspects of urban life. In other words, bypresenting cities as places where nasty things happen, we might actually be sending an anti-urbanmessage to the general public and to policymakers.

Because cities were – and still are – viewed as the engines of economic development, and economicgrowth is generally credited for reducing poverty levels (though this has not been the case in somecountries), I had to make an argument that made economic sense to governments and the public atlarge. 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 andenterprises 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 replicablein small, less dense human settlements. Building a hospital or a road in a town or village with apopulation of just 50,000 is far less efficient per capita than building a hospital or road in a largeurban 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 ofrural-to-urban migration is economic opportunities and the chance to lead a better quality of life. Inalmost all countries, rural poverty levels are higher than urban poverty levels. (For instance, thepoverty rate in rural Kenya is about 40 per cent, compared to around 28 per cent in peri-urban andurban areas.) Indeed, the data showed that despite the pathetic and hazardous living conditions inslums, people who lived in slums often viewed them as a “first step” out of rural poverty. As EdwardGlaeser, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, says in his book, Triumph of the City: HowOur Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, “Cities don’tmake people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rioto Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.”

However, villages are not stagnant places either; some, like Mumbai, which was once a fishingvillage, 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 nothingexcept a railway depot built at the beginning of the 20th century. The world’s great cities did not onlygrow 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 – peopleto them.

Many rural people move to cities because they believe that they and their families will have betteraccess to health and education. Cities also offer women more opportunities for social and economicmobility. Unrestrained by discriminatory customs and traditions, urban women are more likely thantheir rural counterparts to have access to property and other assets. Child and maternal mortalityrates 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 canbe incubators of disease, crime and other vices; but these disadvantages have never stopped citiesfrom growing, even when plagues and other health hazards infest cities and kill populations. The1665 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 areunlikely to deter people from moving there.

Safety nets are also weaker in cities, which is one reason why so many people in the developingworld (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 (thoughassociational life in slums, through cooperatives and self-help groups, have helped reduce some ofthis deficit).

Cities have also been derided for promoting mindless consumerism. They have been accused ofdriving a type of capitalism that encourages people to go on endless shopping expeditions to buythings they might never use or need. Large shopping malls – a distinct feature of modern cities – arefilled with products that keep the wheels of capitalism moving. Alain Kamal Martial Henry predictsthat the coronavirus will overthrow this “Western bourgeois model” imposed by capitalism. And thismay 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-Habitatfrom 1998 to 2005, whether we could from henceforth witness a decline in urban growth levels, andwhether people will now seek to move out of large cities to places that are less dense andconcentrated.

Biau was not convinced that the coronavirus pandemic will change the way people view cities. “Asusual, a few journalists will write about risky cities but their alarming views will be completelyignored 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 fasterthan big metropolises because teleworking will become the norm. “Already in France 40 per cent ofthe working population is currently teleworking,” he said.

“History has shown that some cities could shrink due to economic or environmental reasons. Butcities have never disappeared due to health reasons. This is why the UN should provide guidelinesfor the promotion of safer and healthier cities as part of the wider sustainable cities developmentparadigm,” 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 fromhuman collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason whycities exist. We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication willreduce our desire and need to be near one another. Above all, we must free ourselves from thetendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, notconcrete.”

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 apartmentblocks in big cities or in suburbs on the periphery of cities often report not knowing their neighboursand lacking a sense of “community”.

Some believe that rapid suburbanisation since the 1950s, especially in the United States, led toincreasing 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, TheFeminine Mystique) sowed the seeds of the American women’s movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, andled many women to seek careers outside the home.

Some cities are better at fostering human interaction than others through carefully planned urbandesigns, and more people-friendly infrastructure, such as parks and other public spaces, includingpedestrian-only streets. Recently, after a wave of rape cases in India, urban planners have also beenthinking about how cities can be made more woman-friendly, with more street lighting and moregender-sensitive public transport. The designers of these cities understand one basic fact: cities arenot about buildings and infrastructure; they are about people and communities.

The COVID-19 lockdowns have demonstrated how abnormal and disturbing self-isolation and socialdistancing can be. The pandemic has underscored the fact that human beings have an inherent needto interact with other human beings, even if it is at a cursory level. This physical connection with adiverse range of people from different backgrounds is what makes cities attractive, and is the reasonwhy 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 ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

I went to Kariobangi North Sewerage settlement on 4 June, exactly a month after the dawndemolitions took place, and long after the tell-tale signs of the raid had been erased. On 4 May, atthe height of a dusk-to-dawn curfew across the country, 8,000 people had been evicted from thissettlement. The eviction was widely condemned but the authorities seemed unmoved by the plight ofthe evictees.

The chaos and commotion had ebbed away and life in Korogocho slum, one of the more than 200informal 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 tosocial 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-oldinterlocutor, a Kenyatta University Bachelor of Education student who grew up in Grogan, one of thenine villages that make up Korogocho, but who now resides at Korogocho B. “Grogan, where myparents 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 bythe colonial forces of the tumultuous 1950s) have always remained squatters after having beenuprooted from their ancestral homes.

“The market breathes life into Korogocho area. “You can practically find anything you want at themarket. It attracts customers from far and wide,” said Mwaura. The market has been embedded intothe Korogocho peoples’ lives: Korogocho slum was the market and the market was Korogocho. “Themarket defines the Korogocho people – the best and the worst of the Korogocho people are foundhere – 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 cupof morning tea when his mobile phone rang. It was from his friend, who told him to quickly get out ofthe 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 onsite.

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 itsbrutal 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 thesurprise 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 thetime they were waking up to the day’s realities, local hoodlums had also moved in to help themselvesto 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: “Myiron sheets, steel doors and metal windows were stolen by thugs. I couldn’t restrain them; I was allalone 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 infamousfor 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 withminimal interruption.”

Despite his age, Ngugi’s body is still strong. “I’m used to walking a lot. I’d walk from here toAllsopps,” he said. Allsopps area is at the junction between Outer Ring Road and Thika superhighway. The distance between Kariobangi North and Allsopps is about seven kilometres. The latteris called Allsopps because East African Breweries Limited (EABL) used to have a plant at the cornerof where these two roads meet, separate from the main beer plant in the Ruaraka area thatmanufactured 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 fromnow?” The old man said he had sunk his meagre savings and pension into buying four plots in thearea through the Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-help Group. “I’d hoped my sunset years wouldbe 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 ofDaniel Comboni Primary School. He told me that after the eviction, he sent his wife to a familyfriend’s home in Grogan village. “The demolition separated families. I’ve not seen my wife for threeweeks, even though we speak on phone. I couldn’t immediately get someone who would house thetwo of us together.”

The self-help group

The Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-Help Group was formed in the mid-1990s and given thename farmers because the first people who started frequenting the sewerage plant were women whowould 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 thesewerage area in the evenings, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m,” said Mary Wambui Kamau. “The women werethe first people to be allocated plots at the sewerage by the City Council officials who worked at thesite 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. Aformer employee of the defunct City Council of Nairobi, she had acquired two plots at the seweragesite 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 ashouse rent. With her seven children (three later died) and a husband who did not have a permanentjob and was landless, she believed that buying the sewerage plot was the wisest decision she hadever made.

Wambui grew up in Ndondori in what is today Nakuru County. “I was a little girl during the state ofemergency period of the 1950s. [The British colonial government instituted the emergency between1952 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 livingand start a family. “Rift Valley had been always a volatile region and so my hubby said we try ourluck 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 officialsasked them to form a group, explained Wambui. This way it would be easier to engage in, mobilisefor and push their agenda. To give weight to their agenda, they decided to buy plots of land withinthe sewerage area. They approached Adolf Muchiri, then the MP for Kasarani. Until 2012, theKariobangi sewerage area was in Kasarani constituency; today, it is in Embakasi North, butgovernment 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 movedthose meetings elsewhere,” said Wambui. “Even as Muchiru backed our idea and said he would lendus political support, we continued to engage the sewerage officials, since, anyway, they were ourgateway 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 sitein 2004, Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-help Group was already in existence and allocated landadjacent to the Kariobangi light industries.

“The self-help group already had 370 members by the time the Nairobi County provided a surveyorto demarcate the land about two years ago,” said Ngugi. The 370-member group was settled on 11acres of the 25-acre sewerage land. Of these 370 members, “Kikuyus formed the largest chunk ofthe group. They possibly constituted about 70 per cent of the members, followed by Somalis, thenKambas, then a small group of Luos,” said Ngugi. The mzee said the plots were divided into 24 by 50sizes 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, whoworked at the nearby Kariobangi light industries, started living at the sewerage area with his familyof four. Wambui then moved to Kariobangi A village, where I found her and some of hergrandchildren. She told me that her son and grandchildren had moved in with her after beingevicted. “Since coming here, we’ve been attacked two times by robbers who saw him bring alongsome 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 andthe 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 courtcase with the Jua Kali group,” said Wambui, “but we have the documents and they don’t have themand that is the difference.”

Wambui claims that the self-help group had been issued with a group title by the NairobiCounty 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 nowI’ve been thrown into turmoil. I voted for Uhuru Kenyatta twice, in a very difficult area, where weare surrounded by hostile opposition. Yet at my age I woke up at 2 a.m. to queue for him and this iswhat 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 andchairlady of the self-help group, has a slightly different story to tell. “What some of the afflictedfamilies have narrated to you is correct. But as far as I’m concerned, the only incorrect informationthey did not tell you is that all that documentation and paperwork they are talking about had neverbeen legalised. If it had, I would have been the first one to know and even be in possession of therightful said documents of the land. As it is, I’m not aware of any [bona fide and legal] title deedissued to Kariobangi Self-Help Farmers Group. I’m aware that the group was even paying land ratesto 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 Muthuavillage in Uthiru location. I first met him in 2006 at the Kariobangi sewerage area. He was thesecond chief to have been posted to the area. “I know the history of the sewerage [land] very well. Itis unfortunate what happened to the people, but the crux of the matter is, the self-help group’spapers are not legal. I’d know because I’ve kept in touch with some of the people who live there, theself-group’s wrangles with Jua Kali Light Industries group notwithstanding.”

The dispute between the Kariobangi Sewerage Farmers Self-Help and the Jua Kali Light Industriesgroup led by Rashid Kaberere and one Kinyua introduced the dreaded Mungiki in the acquisition ofthe sewerage land. They both hired the young men to defend and fight off each other. For theirwork, the proscribed Mungiki group was rewarded with several plots at the sewerage site, whichwere dished out to them by both parties.

“Many of these Mungiki youth later sold their plots to Somalis,” said Kirugo. “Somali buyers werealso involved because they had the money to finance the case in court. Another reason why theSomalis came to own the sewerage land is because they would pay double or even thrice the goingmarket 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. Howand 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 wishingto 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 hadsold them the plots of land. “The upcoming stone houses were built by Somalis because they werethe 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 myconsidered opinion the self-help group didn’t have proper documentation. All the papers they claimto have and refer to were issued by the City Council of Nairobi pre-1998, during the reign ofZipporah Wandera, the then town clerk. The subsequent mayors were never involved in thesewerage matters. For such a matter to acquire the seal of authenticity, it should involve the topechelons of the city authorities. As it is, it seems the matter was only discussed by sewerage officialsand 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 theself-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 theDistrict Officer’s office in Kasarani, where the stock-in-trade answer was the same: ‘Orders fromabove’”.

Pleading for strict anonymity, because he is not authorised to speak to journalists, a top NAWASCOofficial said that the people had to be booted out ostensibly because the government had been givena Sh3 billion grant by the World Bank to expand and refurbish the sewer and water system ofNairobi county. All the Nairobi wastage used to drain at the Kariobangi sewerage site until Ruaisewerage was built to complement the Kariobangi one. The Kariobangi sewerage has six gargantuanseptic tanks, but with the growing city population occasioned by all the real estate developmentsthat 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 veryKikuyus who had sold them the plots of land. “The upcoming stone houses were built bySomalis because they were the presumed landowners and because they could afford toput up better structures,” added Ngugi.

I wound up my visit to Korogocho by visiting Mary Njoroge, a vendor at Korogocho Market. Her stalloverlooks the eastern flank of the Kariobangi sewerage. No sooner had the dwellers been ferretedout than a stone wall was erected all around the sewerage land. On that eastern flank, the wall wasas high as 12 feet, raised by the heavier nine by nine stone. “My house used to be inside the wall. It’samazing 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 bornthere.

Taking time to talk to me, away from her customers, Njoroge said life that life was cruel and full ofcontradictions: “Can you believe I was one of Uhuru’s major campaigners in this area? Kariobangisewerage was a Jubilee zone and we fought tooth and nail to protect his votes. Look now wheresome of us are languishing – in the cold, with zero prospects.”

Protecting Jubilee votes meant walking the length and breadth of Korogocho and exhorting all theKikuyus to not sleep on the day of voting, first on August 8, and then on October 26, 2017. “We’dhave expected that the government would defend us and not expose us to the vagaries of theweather and coronavirus.”

During the week that their structures were demolished, heavy rain pounded Nairobi County. Manyformer Kariobangi North Sewerage dwellers, including small children, slept out in the cold.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

“Memory is short-lived/And more important instead/That streets are well-laid/Flowing anduncongested.” — Jonathan Kariara, Naming Streets in Nairobi

The main road that runs through Kisumu is called Jomo Kenyatta Highway. Named after thecountry’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 roadsfeeding off it. In other words, cut off this road from either end (at Kondele or at the intersection withBusia Road) and you have killed Kisumu.

During the 2017 electoral period, Jomo Kenyatta Highway was the epicentre of several violentclashes between opposition supporters and police officers. A general election had been held on 8August and the main candidates in the presidential election were the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta ofthe 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 beingmanipulated in favour of his opponent, and that the hacker had used the credentials of ChrisMsando, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ICT manager who had beenmurdered less than two weeks to the election. Odinga said, “What the IEBC has posted is a completefraud . . . 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 intoneighbourhoods, 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. Severalresidential areas in Kisumu remained in the constant haze of teargas that the police had lobbed intheir pursuit of “rioters”. At night, when residents had retired to their houses, police officers wentdoor 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 outtheir 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 RightsWatch that, “on August 11th, police violently attacked her family, kicking, slapping, and beating withgun 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 socialmedia condemned the violence and the grotesque murder of a six-month-old baby. However, in astatement 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 acoma at Aga Khan Hospital in Kisumu, he dismissed claims of violence being meted out onprotestors. Instead, Matiang’i claimed that those who had been injured had been in the midst oflooting as police officers tried to prevent them from doing so. He said, “Some criminal elements tookadvantage of the situation to loot property. The police responded and normalcy has returned to thearea.”

After three days in a coma arising from a head injury, Pendo succumbed to the trauma. In the wakeof her death, an unknown group of people went up and down Jomo Kenyatta Highway defacing allthe road signs carrying that name. They scratched out the nameJomo Kenyatta Highway and in itsstead wrote, in green ink, “Bi Pendo Road.”

On 14 February 2019, an inquest led by Kisumu Senior Resident Magistrate Beryl Omolo found fivepolice officers culpable of Samantha Pendo’s murder. In her ruling, she also recommendedprosecution against eight GSU officers who had been involved in the operation. Less than fourmonths after her ruling, Odinga, who had since stumbled into an alliance with Kenyatta, urged hissupporters to move on from the events of August 2017. He declared that it was the moment ofhealing 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 mainroad running through the city. While, on paper, the road still bears its original name, in reality, thegreen ink on the road signs refuses to forget. Since the time of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime Kisumu hashad 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, killingan estimated eleven people on the spot, and injuring hundreds. The cycle of violence continued. In1982. In 1992. In 1997. In 2002. In 2005. In 2007, after the disputed elections, the police shot deadan estimated 115 people. On 30 March 2013, the day of a Supreme Court ruling on the disputedpresidential elections, a police officer shouted at a group of youths, saying, “We forgave you peoplein Kisumu during the 2007-2008 violence. This time we are going to teach you a lesson”. On that dayalone, 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 hasargued about the existence of a relationship between memory and space. In his view, “a sharedspace such as a street can be a locus for collective memory and can express group identity througharchitecture, monuments, and street names.” Further, he posits that street names can indicate acommunity’s desire to remember certain personalities or events.

Road names in Nairobi exist in similar praxes. When, from 1928 to 1936, the British colonialgovernment moved to change street names in Nairobi; from numbered streets, they renamed thestreets after figures who were important in their British imagination. In the wake of independence in1963, 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 Avenuehad their names changed. Originally named after the first, second, third and fourth colonialcommissioners who would later become governors — Arthur Henry Hardinge, Charles Eliot, DonaldWilliam Stewart and James Hayes Sadler — they were given names of African personalities: KimathiStreet, Muindi Mbingu Street, Wabera Street, and Koinange Street. College Road was renamedHarry Thuku Road, while the road named after the Queen, Queens Way, was rebaptized MamaNgina Street.

Kenyatta Avenue (formerly known as Delamere Avenue) in the mid-1960s. Photo. Flickr/MichaelJefferies

In Nairobi’s Industrial Area, most of the roads had been named after towns in England. These werelocalised: Edinburgh Road to Enterprise Road, Aberdeen Road to Addis Ababa Road, BirminghamRoad to Bamburi Road, Clifford Road to Changamwe Road, Dublin Road to Dakar Road, LondonRoad to Lusaka Road, and Liverpool Road to Likoni Road.

A similar renaming was attempted in Kileleshwa, a neighbourhood popular with the emergentAfrican elite. As with Industrial Area, roads which bore names that reflected localities in Englandwere renamed to reflect the new reality of independence. According to Peris Teyie, an academic atMaseno University’s School of Planning and Architecture, the initial plan had been to name theroads in alphabetical order, like in Industrial Area. However, the planners got lazy. “They got tiredof 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 therenaming 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 roadnames followed. First, the road names were predominantly male, and remain so to this day, withMama Ngina Road and Wangari Maathai Road being the only major roads in the city named afterwomen. (Tubman Road, contrary to popular belief, is named after William Tubman, the 19thPresident of Liberia, and not Harriet Tubman) This is noteworthy, considering Wangari MaathaiRoad 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 theKikuyu (the largest community in Kenya),” and there was a dramatic “erasure of Indian streetnames”.

Walking through Nairobi’s streets, one notices several names that are conspicuous by their absencefrom the politics of commemoration, names that in other realities would have been present: OgingaOdinga, 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 inKenya’s fight for freedom, but who were vilified and alienated both in the colonial and post-colonialperiods.”

Pio Gama Pinto’s case is an interesting one. After his death, there was a quest to rename VictoriaStreet after him. Vershi, a resident of Nairobi, suggested that the street be renamed after theKenyan-Goan politician who had been one of the leading members of the Kenya African NationalUnion (KANU). His request was ignored by the naming authorities, and the street was not renamedafter Pinto. Instead, there followed a mass expunging of Indian names from Nairobi’s streets. In1973, 58 of the streets in the Central Business District bore Indian names. All of these werereplaced, with the exception of Aga Khan Walk. For instance, Jeevanjee Street, which had beennamed after Alibhai Mula Jeevanjee, an Asian-born citizen who owned most of the buildings on thatstreet, was renamed Mfangano Street. Moreover, the 21 streets in Ngara that bore Indian nameshad their names replaced with African names, as did the 19 streets in South C Estate, despite theseareas being occupied mostly by Indian-Kenyan families. Streets whose names were changed includeJamnagar Avenue (to Idado Avenue), Hoshiarpur Road (to Mukarati Road), and Alamgir Avenue (toMuhuti Avenue).

That Aga Khan Walk survives is a testament to the power the Aga Khan wields in this country. AgaKhan is a title held by the Imām of the Nizari Ismaili Shias. Since 1957, the holder of the title hasbeen the 49th Imām, Prince Shah Karim al-Husseini, Aga Khan IV. The Aga Khan’s influence is mostfelt through his ownership of the Nation Media Group, although he also has interests in, amongothers, Diamond Trust Bank, Farmer’s Choice Ltd, Jubilee Insurance, The Aga Khan EducationService, and Serena Hotels.

A street in Westlands was later named after Pinto. This is interesting given how Goans have, for themost part, been written out of Kenya’s history. Pinto, Rosendo Ayres Ribeiro and Francis XavierD’Silva are the only Goans who have places named after them in Nairobi. Ribeiro was the doctorwho first diagnosed an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city, while D’Silva, better known as BabaDogo, earned plaudits for his generosity towards impoverished whites who lived in Murumbi, anarea later renamed Baba Dogo.

However, there was an ethnic over-representation of the Kikuyu in the naming of the streets and, on8 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 thegovernment would “ensure that future street names would represent all ethnic groups in thecountry.” The assistant minister in charge of the naming process, Nathan Munoko, assured him thatthe street names were mainly based on suggestions from the public, before they were analysed bythe street naming sub-committee to ensure equitable distribution, before being forwarded to theminister for approval.

Four years after Pinto’s assassination, Tom Mboya was shot dead on Government Road. After hisdeath, there was a lot of clamour about how to memorialise him.. Since he had been killed onGovernment 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 inparliament, and during a parliamentary session titled “Change of name of Government Road to TomMboya Road”, he asked the Minister for Local Government, Dr Gikonyo Kiano, whether this wouldhappen. Dr Kiano demurred, saying that government policy was to rename those roads which borenames reminiscent of the colonial era, and Government Road was not one of these roads. In anycase, he argued, it was not appropriate to rename Government Road since it was a symbol of theGovernment of Kenya.

However, it was thrown back at him that Government Road had been named thus by the colonialgovernment, and therefore it was evocative of the British colonial administration. Upon Dr Kiano’sfurther resistance, Mbori went on the offensive, implying that the road’s name had been reserved forsomeone else. He asked, “Mr. Speaker Sir, would the minister deny that the name of GovernmentRoad is reserved for some future naming?”

Tom Mboya’s supporters were aggrieved, and attempts were made to find another street to bear hisname. St. Austin’s Road was proposed, but it was turned down on the grounds that it wasn’timportant enough a road to bear the name of a man of Mboya’s stature. This road was later renamedJames Gichuru Road. Government Road remained Government Road, and the less important VictoriaStreet, 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, formerlyElliot Street, named after Daudi Dabasso Wabera, whose assassination a week after Kenya had beengranted 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 Kenyanmilitary 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 theparliamentary street naming sub-committee held on 30 March 1971 suggested ten street names forthe 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 AdholaMarongo Road (CCN 1971). With the exception of Ihura and Kambui Roads, all the other names areof Nubian origin. The Nubian community is being remembered. Only, Nubian leaders would arguedifferently, given that the Nubian community occupies only 700 acres of land in Kibra, with the restof the land, some 3498 acres, having been forcibly taken over by the post-colonial government withno compensation offered. The recognition of the Nubian community is, as Wanjiru and Matsubarastate, 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. Forinstance, going through Kakamega is an immersion into Masinde Muliro University of Science andTechnology, Masinde Muliro Gardens . . . the man from further North in Bungoma, beingcommemorated in Kakamega. It is the same with Oginga Odinga in Kisumu and Siaya, JomoKenyatta 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 orpersonally admired. He and Ralph Bunche in London in 1936, and Bunche had visited Kenya atKenyatta’s behest two years later; Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Du Bois had alsointeracted with Kenyatta in London. Dennis Pritt had represented Kenyatta at the Kapenguria Trialin 1952 while William Tubman, Mokhtar Daddah, Albert Luthuli and Haile Selassie were, togetherwith 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 thefact 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 AzaniaDrive, renamed at independence after a person who again, was, and still is, a living personality, andwas not, and still isn’t, a head of state. In 2019, there was a furore over a move to name arecreational park along the road Mama Ngina Waterfront Park. According to Okoa Mombasa, acoalition that led the opposition to the proposed name, this was a “gross deletion and obfuscation” oflocal history, and an attempt to “inscribe a historical memory alien to the place and localinhabitants”.

All these years later, the big reputation in the landscape of naming remains KANU, chama cha babana mama. According to David Lowenthal, the landscape is not just a product of human actions in thepast, 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 isa symbol of the cockerel of the national court of arms, but then, one would have to think about whythe 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, andhas argued for the need to delink the family from national symbols and ideals. When PrincessElizabeth Way was renamed Uhuru Highway, the intention had not been to switch the name from theruler 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 violentrenaming of things in Kisumu. Bi Pendo Road, yes, but also Jomo Kenyatta Sports Ground, whereseveral signs were defaced, and Jubilee Market, which was renamed Orengo Market, and where, aswith Jomo Kenyatta Highway, the signs with that name were defaced, and a new name inked over, aname that still stands to this day.

That Bi Pendo Road exists is not merely a monument to Samantha Pendo. Rather, it is an affirmationof Kisumu’s refusal to forget, to move on from the victims of police brutality in 2017, in 2013, in2007, and in all the other years, as Odinga urged in 2019, and continues to urge through theBuilding Bridges Initiative.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

More than a century ago, a brash and mostly racist decision created a small tin shack town in themiddle of a swamp. Then the town became unstoppable.

The first men and women who landed in Nairobi probably considered the brackish swamp landperfect. The area was picturesque, with hills in the horizon and rivers crisscrossing the plains. Whilethe swampy land was not suitable for farming, and certainly not for settlement, it was perfect forgrazing.

For the Maasai and the Kikuyu, the plain was also a meeting ground, cutting between the highlandfarming community in Central Kenya and the nomadic community in the Rift. For the Kamba andother traders and adventurers, it was the easier part of the journey. The Maasai called it EnkareNyorobi, ‘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 journeyto 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, aname 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 thatpoint because smallpox and a few other epidemics had cut down the populations of many Kenyancommunities.

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 milesfrom 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, thesmall 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 seeminglyarbitrary decision that would put the builders at loggerheads with the colonial government did notinvolve 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 townshipwhich, 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. Butsegregation laws would not become codified until 1908, after yet another bout of the plague. Withinthe first five years, what had been a sparsely occupied swampy plain was now home to 10,000people. 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 thisseemingly arbitrary decision that would put the builders at loggerheads with the colonialgovernment did not involve any proper assessment of the site.

With government funding and rich entrepreneurs like AM Jeevanjee, who had made a fortunesupplying material and labour to build the railway, a town sprouted from the swamp. The richestman 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 NationalMuseum, and many other buildings.

Before the railhead reached Nairobi, the central economic activity for the young town had been biggame hunting. By 1900, the town was a single street, driven by commerce as Asian railway builderssettled in tin shacks on the plain. Beyond that street “lay the swamp where frogs lived every night atdusk they used to bark out their vibrant chorus and spread a cloak of deep, incessant sound over thelittle township” as Elspeth Huxley writes in White Man’s Country. The frogs formed part of theecosystem, providing a rhythmic croaking during the calm nights of a budding young town. It wasfree 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 metresabove sea level, colonialists thought Nairobi’s temperate climate would limit the development ofmalaria-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. Malariawould thrive in the new town, with 14,000 new malaria cases reported in Nairobi in 1913 alone. Butmalaria was just one of many health concerns that made doctors want the small town moved tohigher ground.

In 1902, the small town faced its first major public health problem. An epidemic of the dreadedbubonic plague erupted along Indian Bazaar. With no sanitation or municipal plans, the main streetat the time had played host to rodents, and the animals had in turn brought in the plague, killingseveral people. The plague was diagnosed by the enigmatic zebra-riding Dr. Rosendo Ribiero. TheMedical Officer, Dr. Alfred Spurrier, ordered the entire street burnt. Everyone was evacuated, andNairobi’s first CBD was torched.

This was probably the point in history when the situation could have been salvaged and the youngtown 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 wouldlimit the development of malaria-carrying mosquitos…It didn’t, and not just because thesoggy 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 relocatingresidents to modern-day Kikuyu Township. But Moffat left in April 1904, and his successors held thecosts 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: “…atthe commencement of the 1902 plague…the then-commissioner, Sir Charles Elliot, was strongly ofthe opinion that the site, which had been selected three years before by the manager of the UgandaRailway 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 orrock. 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 onthe hills.” Sadler told Churchill this was a critical point in Nairobi’s history; that his predecessor hadsaid: “…when the rainy season commenced, the whole town is practically transformed into aswamp.”

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 atthe Port of Mombasa. He was an employee of the colonising company called the Imperial British EastAfrican Company, and was ambitious to make a career for himself. Before that year ended, hetravelled from Mombasa up to Machakos, and into the tin shack town called Nyrobe. He built hishouse at Museum Hill to found the colonial administration, much to the chagrin of influential railwaybuilders. Eager to make the swampy plains work, he planted Eucalyptus trees on the swamp to drainthe water. Ainsworth’s legacy remains to date, with most of his efforts being the only reason whymore 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 toconsider the question of moving the town from the plains to the higher position along the line somemiles to the north. We had a chance in 1902, and I think it was a pity that we did not do so then asadvocated by Sir Charles Elliot.”

But even Sadler did not anticipate the growth – eightfold since 1969, from 500,000 people to 4.4million today. He said Nairobi would never become “a city like Johannesburg or a large commercialcentre, 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 lackof foresight and of a comprehensive view leaves its permanent imprint upon the countenance of anew country.”

The colonists had given up, and the town they had once thought would only be occupied by Indiansbecame the centre of the new colony. It would take another six years for the Nairobi SanitaryCommission to be appointed, by which time the city was home to thousands of people. The swampygrounds 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 Chiromoup towards and past Westlands. They could then leave the lower plains and its tin shacks to Asiansand Kenyan natives. The plan never came to be as the influence of the railway builders carried theday, 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. Itwould be extended nine years later to cover 30 square miles. Seven years after that, Jim Jamesonpresented a town planning report with great plans to plant Jacaranda trees. The tin shack town waswell on its way to becoming a city, and the future generations of city fathers would have to find away 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 faitaccompli. One colonial officer wrote that the new plan was ambitious, but until it bore fruit, “Nairobimust 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 didnot have a blueprint.

The initial stubborness of the railway engineers trumped those of the colonial government and itshealth officials. For that, the latter would pay dearly, facing many epidemics and having to dedicatefinances to further drain the swamp. Most of the swamp has now been replaced with skyscrapersand road networks, with insufficient footpaths, drainage and leadership.

The colonists had given up, and the town they had once thought would only be occupiedby 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 citystill reminds that it was once a swamp where rivers criss-crossed at will. One pending idea, whichhas been revived in the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Taskforce report, is to grant the city specialstatus as a capital city. It would mean Nairobi will not have a governor, but the report hopes that itwould not “impede the rights of the Kenyan people to representation at the ward and parliamentarylevels.”

In this scenario, only a special status would allow the central government “the means to provide theservices and facilitation necessary to maintaining as a capital city and as a diplomatic hub.” Whetherthat’s likely is a toss-up, but whoever runs it will always face the same problems as its first cityfathers. Indeed, the city that was never meant to be, and probably should never have been, is nowthe epicentre of the Kenyan economy and society.

Perhaps the time is ripe to ask ourselves whether Nairobi should be the epicentre of Kenya, becausetoday, amidst the floods raging in the city, poor drainage and the chaotic streets, Nairobi leavesmuch 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 ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy 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 toget to the city. Having attended schools with limited resources for travel, these sightings alwaysremind me about the excitement I felt every time I got to be part of a student group travellinganywhere. These trips made for some of my best school memories. That children from all over Kenyatravel 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 asUhuru 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 UhuruPark? People I have asked this question tell me that they’ve only ever been there for organisedevents – walks, runs, or public protest.

Last year, in 2018, while attending the NaiNiWho tour organised by The Godown Arts Centre, Ilearnt that this space was at first a waste disposal site for the predecessor of Kenya RailwaysCorporation. The 12.9-hectares was designated as a recreational park in 1969 and launched byKenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta. Uhuru Park is one of few free access recreational greenspaces in Nairobi. It has a small and thriving pond with lilies, and a vast manmade lake, wherepeople can enjoy boat rides. The park has a few monuments, the Pope’s pyramid slab installed in1985, the Nyayo Fountain, one of many monuments Moi monuments installed across the countryduring President Moi’s 24-year rule. There is plenty of open space to do nothing. It is a place wherepeople could enjoy picnics, take long walks, sleep, play, dance, pray, and rest. Every day there mightbe 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 Jeevanjeein 1906, Nairobi City Park declared a public park in 1925, Central Park where a monument toPresident Moi’s Nyayo era stands out prominently.

Green spaces in Nairobi’s colonial physical design were markers of the colour barrier and theycontinue to serve as indicators of how Nairobi’s physical space – housing, schools and other socialamenities, 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-loathedpassbooks verified before entering the town. It also borders Nairobi hill, Valley road and Statehouseroad which were the locations of the more affluent residential neighbourhoods of Nairobi. Thoughmany of these homes have now been converted into nonresidential commercial buildings, thechurches these residents founded and used among them, All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi Central SDAChurch, The Holy Family Basilica, St. Paul’s University Chapel, St. Andrews, The First Church ofChrist, 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 forthe public in trust post-independence. The John Michuki Memorial Park (named after the late JohnMichuki) in contrast has a different history. This park was created in 2008 after the state violentlyevicted mechanics along the Nairobi River adjacent to Kipande Road, and cleared what was anenormous 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 purportedbeneficiaries is best exemplified by this park. The tiny forest with footpaths might have been anattempt to increase access to green spaces for all Nairobi residents. The Michuki Park project waspart of a larger goal to rehabilitate the Nairobi River basin. The awful stench from the polluted riverremains a major feature of this park. Even here, people find relief resting under the shade ofgrowing trees. Still, Michuki Park – without benches, without public toilets, is far from beingwhatever ideal recreation space, that was so aggressively restored.

Public Green spaces in Nairobi have a littered history of contestation from the state or governmentagents intent on hiving off chunks and converting them into private and commercial properties. As aresult, there is an ever-present paranoia around the threat to civic space alongside the demand forprime real estate. So significant is the threat that a common response to any significant maintenanceis viewed with skepticism. For example, at Jeevanjee Gardens, the loud resistance witnessed in 2015when Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero launched a project to rehabilitate the park can be traced backto the memory of the government’s 1991 and 2007 attempts to convert Jeevanjee Gardens primegreen space into commercial property.

For some Nairobi residents and visitors, recreation happens at Uhuru Park despite the present-daydeficiencies. There is drinking water close to the lily pond, there’s a foot bridge that looks good inphotographs. A section of the park has amusement rides including merry-go-rounds, trains andbouncing castles for those desiring more activity. Though the park’s newest memorial monument hascracked and missing tiles, you’ll see people walking past Greenbelt’s rusty Freedom Cornerproclamation sign, straight to this monument dedicated to Kenya’s Mau Mau heroes, to takepictures. Maybe to learn about and to honour Kenya’s freedom fighters. Perhaps to just sit on thebenches 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 flagerected to commemorate the Constitution of Kenya 2010, you might wonder about the heapeduncollected rubbish and old tyres at the Ministry of Agriculture offices, so close to the Ministry ofHealth offices, so close to this flag. Marabou storks. You can’t miss the flag though, you might evendream. Remember where you were, if you existed, when Kenya got this Constitution, and what yourpart in it was. How you were dreaming. Looking down from the viewing deck that is adjacent to theflag, 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 1989against the force of the state, the Release Political Prisoners campaign by the mothers of politicalprisoners 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. Itholds the memory of my classmates at University of Nairobi escaping dreary study to attend thathistorical 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 burningof condoms and AIDS-awareness material.

For me, it is a place where teargas has been used in response to peaceful processions. After theGeneral Elections of December 2007 elections, and the disputed presidential election results, therewas violence across the country. For a while in 2008, it was an eerie empty inaccessible placeguarded by GSU officers. Uhuru Park is a symbolic space, a National centre, with a podium wherepresidents are sworn in Along with restricting free movement the State did not want to risk cedingcontrol of this space to the opposition movement. Following the 2017 General Elections, in 2018, thesame tension was witnessed in the park prior to Opposition leader Raila Odinga’s controversialswearing 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 physicalharm. Just recently, in June this year, protesters gathered here in solidarity with the people ofSudan, had their protest disrupted with teargas. In July, the SwitchOffKPLC (Kenya Power andLighting Company) march was also disrupted with teargas. At the end of July, more people held amemorial 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 gettemporary relief from our immediate troubles. Gabriel Omollo’s song Lunch time chronicles thestruggles of Nairobi’s workers including not having enough money to buy good food or any food atall…

“wengine wanakwendakulala uwanjanikumbe ni shida ndugunjaa inamwumiza”

The song refers to workers going to sleep in the park when they have no food to deal with theirhunger 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 andproclaim freedom whenever it threatened. Uhuru means freedom.

Not just for Kenyans. In July 2011, some of South Sudan’s citizens living in Nairobi, congregated atUhuru Park to celebrate their independence.

That this park remains open and fairly easy to access suggests that even the most cynical among usagree that everyone, no matter their station in life, deserves to have a beautiful and peaceful placeto relax. How is it that many of us, in middle class Kenya, are grateful and even proud to have it atthe centre of our city, willing to celebrate it, defend it, but unable to imagine ourselves relaxinghere, ever? Who is it for, and why is it not for us? Are free-of-charge places only for people withoutmoney?

The sorts of things we do for rest and relaxation often look like crimes in a city that enforces bylawsthat punish people for being present in public spaces. A leisurely walk looks a lot like loitering andvagrancy when the walker mets the stereotype of the undesirables. A person using a camera is soeasily assumed to be a terrorist. A bulky bag filled with food always looks suspicious. A personstanding still for too long can be confused for a hawker. Those who have regular jobs often grapplewith the guilt and the discomfort around taking necessary breaks or using up designated breaks torest. To be seen to be resting in an unmeaningful way can be a problem. To be visible, and to beseen resting in certain places, another problem. We have a situation where it is acceptable only tohave our bodies visible during particular respectable or performative acts of civic duty whilesimultaneously accepting the invisibility of other types of bodies, often the bodies of disenfranchisedpeople, who make full use of Uhuru Park.

Visiting Uhuru Park in its present state means resting with homelessness and destitution, decidingwhat to feel or not feel about people cleaning themselves and washing their clothes at that stream soclose to the big All Saints Cathedral and the Serena Hotel. It is coming to terms with the fact thatthere are people for whom the minimum charge for a public toilet is too much. You could argue thatmore 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 presentlyconsidered undesirable or even threatening.

There may be comfort in imagining and defending Uhuru Park as a particular type of civic space. Formany Uhuru Park is reduced to Freedom Corner and all its accumulated symbolisms and not the restof the park. Even when we by right occupy these spaces, do we stop to think about those we displacewith our proclamations? What use are our victories for those who have to stay behind, makethemselves comfortable with the residue of whatever good or bad we leave? Claiming all the thingsUhuru Park could be to Nairobi and Kenya by extension would require constant presence. This couldignite 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. Takepictures. It is less work.

I think about the imperative Tembea Kenya which is often interpreted to mean tourism and spendingmoney. Does going or not going to Uhuru Park then signal one’s position in whatever hierarchies weimagine for ourselves?

It forces one to consider again, the students from all over the country stopping at Uhuru Park. Whatfreedom 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, Nairobiresidents and Nairobi’s visitors, are free.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

There is a 10-floor building under construction about fifty steps away from the 5-floor buildingwhere I live. Every day with the exception of some Sundays and some public holidays, a beardedman, 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 thebuilding 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, butno work was progressing. It resembled an empty swimming pool. Perhaps the owner – who might bethis man sitting on the blue chair – had faced financial or legal barriers. I do not know. I was gladthat the site itself wasn’t right next to the building I live in. I could see that if and when constructionstarted, the residents in the surrounding flats closest to it would be denied sunlight and theirlaundry would never dry and they would need to keep the lights on in the house, even during theday.

At the time, this abandoned site was a place that pooled with water on rainy days, but on dry daysoffered a playing space for children who have nowhere but the murram road on which to play. In thedry season, this was better than them playing football on the oil-stained road that also served as amotor 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 offloadingstones, sand and ballast. Pouring it on the road. Rendering parts of this narrow road unusable. Theconstruction 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 ofthis building increased, an extra noisy pulley system was added to the site, which was loaded withbricks and then sent up to the workers. From my kitchen window, it seemed like the sky wasdisappearing with every additional floor.

In my neighbourhood, apart from this one, there are three other ongoing construction projects. Ithelps to leave home before sunrise and get back after sunset. One wonders about the babies whohave to stay home and sleep through this noise. Few workers at the site next to my flat wear safetyhelmets 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 byiron sheet walls and barriers t to protect pedestrians. This one only has netting facing the wall that’sflush against the windows of the neighbouring flats. There’s almost constant water flowing from thesite, 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 ofstandards. There is a complaints system. For all kinds of things. I know. There is a way to notify theauthorities. 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, theconstruction 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 thatbut 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’mcooking something that’s got a strong aroma, or when the heat in the house is unbearable. If it isn’tthe noise from the build, it’s the dust from it. Whenever I mop my floors, the water turns black. Onthe few occasions I’ve had to travel for a few days or weeks, I always have to make sure to leave dustcovers on all my furniture. It makes things easier. When I return I’ve got to clean the entire housebefore 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’djust walked into a teargas-filled space. Lucky for us, the area MCA took this problem seriously. Thisaction was so unexpected, so unusual, that I could hardly believe it – and this air pollution issueseems to have resolved for now.

There have been a few power outages directly related to the build. One time, a lorry touched apower 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 couldfind a place to move further away from this, a place where there is grass and there are trees andreasonable quiet. I could. But with my budget, such places will invariably be far away from the citycentre. 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 andput them in my small balcony. I’ve never been keen on gardening so I cannot say definitively that myplants died because of the limited light or the air pollution. It could just as well have been because ofmy overzealous watering, or I just got the wrong plants for this strange climate we are nowexperiencing – 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 birdwatcher, no expert, but I even own a bird book and make occasional trips to Nairobi’s weekly birdwatching expedition. Yes, Nairobi has a weekly bird watching expedition, run by Nature Kenya. So Inotice 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 GreenCity 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. Buthouse hunting in Nairobi means that you start with this idea of the sort of standard of housing youwant, maybe even deserve or have earned, and then this city batters you into making your peacethat 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 tohave that precious morning lull before the construction noise starts. Raising the volume of the musicin the house is only soothing for a while. I’ve always liked the outdoors and hiking but more so inthis last year because I’ve needed to get out of the house and find somewhere that’s the completeopposite of the noise which become my constant rhythm, and the headaches, and the constantfeeling that I am getting a cold. Sometimes I imagine my lungs filling up with concrete dust. Iimagine the strange taste in my water is concrete. I’m always trying to find my way to a forest. Itoccurs to me that since June 2018, I’ve been signing up for every possible walking or hikingexpedition away that I can make time and find the money for. If only this was a job I could get paidfor. 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. Maybeit’s the privileged way to exist in Nairobi. But it’s the way I’ve kept my body from gettingaccustomed to this. It is how I breathe. At the very least, it’s my way of feeding my dreams. So thatwhen I sleep, my mind can create for me different kinds of dreams. My dreaming cannot be thisterrible architecture, these sounds and these smells.

I thought the noisiest part of the construction project was completed until last Monday when theystarted drilling a borehole, a process that begins every morning at 6:30am and is so disruptive that itfeels like the walls of the building I live in are vibrating. Perhaps because of the extensive dust, theexterior walls our building I live were repainted in April 2019. I had this thought in my mind and wasamused when I heard my neighbour expressed it to the caretaker, “I hope you don’t use this as anexcuse to raise the rent.” The caretaker shrugged and said that wasn’t the case. I hope he wastelling the truth.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

In March 2018, social media in Kenya was awash with images of old rickety Spanish trains that theKenyan government was allegedly planning to buy at a rough estimate of between Sh71 million andSh137 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 dieselmultiple 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 werethe actual DMUs that government is planning on shipping to minimise the traffic congestion in thecity.

“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 thatNairobians 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 commuterrailway service (NCRS) schedule caused by the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron inthe 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 1900hours. The other evening trains will run as scheduled,” read a notice by the Kenya RailwayCorporation (KRC).

It was on the same day that the French President was conducting a station tour of the NairobiCentral 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 atdecongesting 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 Sh340billion public and private infrastructure trade deal between Kenya and France.

The Transport Ministry documents that over 13,000 Nairobians use the Nairobi Commuter RailService (NCRS), which was unveiled last December, every day. The NCRS is part of the NairobiMetropolitan Transport Master Plan, which aims at decongesting the city.

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) on the other hand keeps the data of revenues collected fromticket 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 ofnumber 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 ofbetween Sh30-Sh60. The Nairobi Transport executive Mohamed Dagane said in an interview lastDecember that the commuter trains move over 40,000 different people daily contradicting reports bythe Ministry of Transport.

“When the full complement is in they will enable us to transport around 132,000 people a daycompared 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 effortsto 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 the1980s to provide a low-cost public transport alternative to the urban poor in the city, following thecrippling economic inflation the country was experiencing at the time.

The long-distance passenger services had also been in operation between Nairobi and Mombasa, aswell 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 newservices.

Despite the addition of the new wagons, the capacity is still limited as more and more Kenyanschoose the trains over matatus, mainly because of time constraints and convenience away from thepublic service madness on the Kenyan roads.

Commuting to the city centre by train is much faster than by road, and more affordable. The trainscarry sitting as well as standing passengers, with some hanging at the doors, and the more daringriding on the roof especially for passengers plying the Kibera route.

Most of the new stations constructed in the 2000s contain parking facilities allowing personalvehicle 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 daymostly non-peak periods.

The train picks up commuters at designated stops and takes approximately 20-30 minutes betweenstations. 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 aslow as 15 kilometres per hour due to broken rails, unstable tracks and insufficient ballast.

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Surviving the Hood: A Walk ThroughNairobi’s Iconic NeighbourhoodsBy Pauline Otieno Skaper

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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