Twenty years ago when I first came to work in Kenya’s capital, I could drive myself around Nairobi easily. I had the hang of the streets, though many of them were not labelled. I made the city in the sun my own.
About ten years ago, the city started to slip through my fingers. Today, I rarely drive outside of the district where I live. When I have to venture beyond, I get an Uber. Part of the reason for this was that the children had grown and flown the nest. I had mastered the city by driving them around: to see friends, to music class, to birthday parties in far-flung corners, to do charity work or for school projects. Also, though, Nairobi—East Africa’s richest city—exploded into a bigger creature. With new malls, a dramatic gentrification of its outskirts, and a labyrinth of new roads, buildings and people, it outgrew my grasp.
Nairobi is not remarkable for its architecture. Like many of its African peers, most new buildings wear the flashy glass exteriors popular in new-money Gulf states and Asia. With its terracotta cladding and perforated aluminium double-skin, Nairobi’s Britam Towers—East Africa’s tallest building at 195 metres—is rare. But to understand the city, one has to remove one’s gaze from the skyline, and look to the ground.
One of Nairobi’s most defining features is something it is embarrassed about: it is a city ringed on all sides by slums (or “informal settlements”, as more sensitive folks call them). Originally a product of colonial land grabs and racial segregation, in recent decades, Nairobi’s slums have become a “necessary evil” of aggressive Kenyan capitalism and ethnic politics. They are the reservoirs of cheap urban labour, the places where city politicians pack upcountry supporters whom they bring to register to vote, thus winning political seats and getting on the Nairobi gravy train.
There is little agreement about how many slums there are, with estimates ranging from 110 to 200. Remarkably, in a fractious city of 5.3 million where politics are bitterly contested, there is agreement that 60% of slum residents live on just 6% of the city’s land, making this the most unequal distribution of space in East Africa.
Aiming to decongest the city and move housing development from the centre, a dizzying network of hundreds of kilometres of bypasses and ring roads has been built around Nairobi in the last 15 years. Spectacularly successful, this project has had a “contradictory effect” on the slums, as Ms Christine Mungai, a social commentator and curator at Baraza Media Lab (a mixed media innovation hub), puts it. Take the Ngong Road-Langata Link Road, which runs through Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. Displacing many households that had to be broken down to make way for the road, “where it is elevated, it also provides a dramatic view of the slum that had been hidden to most people until now,” Mungai said.
Most of Nairobi’s slums have been reshaped by new roads and bypasses, their residents variously brought into view, crammed deeper into remaining corners, or pushed farther out of sight. The most prominent of these new roads is the Nairobi Expressway, a nearly 30-kilometre elevated stretch that cuts through the middle of Nairobi. Nairobians mock it as the “rich people’s road”, because its one-way toll is equivalent to the daily wage of a lowly city hustler. During cost-of-living protests in early July, the masses clambered onto the eastern end of the expressway, trashing the beautiful flower pots that line it. Environmentalists hate what they say is a large ugly cement edifice that only raises the ambient temperatures alongside it. Built to escape the traffic snarls that would hold up the middle classes and bourgeoisie for hours as they made their way to and from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, it has slashed travel times from two hours to under 15 minutes. Some people have won.
Mr Mutuma Mathiu, a newspaper columnist and former Editor-in-Chief at Nation Media Group and a close observer of Nairobi, argues that all the pulling and pushing constitutes what Nairobi is all about. “Nairobi is a negotiation. The city’s working classes and masses have the political power, and have sometimes exercised that to elect representatives in Parliament and the governor’s office, people whom the city’s middle and upper classes wouldn’t hire to walk their dogs. But in return, the upper classes get to monopolise the economy, and to live on their two and five acre manicured lawns,” Mutuma said.
The bypasses and ring roads have allowed some city communities to secede. Until about 15 years ago, you couldn’t escape going to Nairobi’s central business district (CBD). Not so today. Expatriates and diplomats now can live and work in Nairobi for years, dining at top-end restaurants, watching movies at upmarket cinemas, and leaving the city in the sun without ever stepping foot into the CBD. Even the Nairobi Stock Exchange left the CBD a few years ago.
“The suburbs are parcelled on a logic: the rich and famous black and white Kenyans live in places like Muthaiga, Runda and Karen. The Asians in Westlands and Parklands, which are quite different from the rest. With nice walkways to the temples, the apartments are tasteful and classy, and there are spaces for elderly grandmothers and mothers to park and hand out charity,” he said. “In the rest, places like Kilimani, Ruaka, Eastleigh, new Kenyan money and Somali capital does it’s thing. They build very high apartments, and cram them in as many units as they can. Then they all work out how to get along. That settlement is Nairobi,” he said.
Indeed there is movement from the suburbs and outskirts into the city centre, mainly by Somalis. Whether Kenyan-Somalis, Somalia-Somalis, or diaspora Somalis, they have brought a new flavour and lively culture to the city.
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The suburbs are parcelled on a logic: the rich and famous black and white Kenyans live in places like Muthaiga, Runda and Karen. The Asians in Westlands and Parklands, which are quite different from the rest. With nice walkways to the temples, the apartments are tasteful and classy, and there are spaces for elderly grandmothers and mothers to park and hand out charity.
Historically Somalis were concentrated in northeastern Kenya, where they endured years of persecution and marginalisation. Since Kenya returned to multiparty democracy with the election of Mwai Kibaki as president in late 2002, Somalis have broken out as the country’s most economically successful community.
Mr Yusuf Hassan, former journalist, scholar of Somali society, and current MP, represents the predominantly Somali constituency of Eastleigh in the Kenya parliament. A wild and frenetic place, where the country’s largest number of new buildings is being constructed, Eastleigh is virtually ungovernable, but fabulously rich. Up to 200,000 people from Kenya and other countries in the region (Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Sudan and Rwanda) enter Eastleigh daily to do business and find prices lower than Dubai’s bargain stores and at the same level as Shanghai’s. Eastleigh alone provides 30% of Nairobi County’s revenues. The biggest mall in East and Central Africa recently opened in Eastleigh.
Hassan said the Somalis take to the malls in search of the space that they might not all have at home. The malls have turbo-charged an eating-out culture, which until now had mostly been driven by Nairobi’s Asian and white communities. Many of the new restaurants in Nairobi are Somali-owned. “Probably the bigger reason you see so many young Somalis has to do with what their parents in Europe and North America are doing to try and protect Islamic and Somali culture in their families,” Hassan explained. “There are millions of Somalis in the diaspora now. In the West, many of them feel their children are being corrupted by secularisation, and that they are losing their Somali culture. There is a big movement by parents to send them back to Nairobi, or to Mogadishu and cities like Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland, for re-education,” Hassan said.
The creation of private universities and opening of evening classes at the University of Nairobi saw a record enlistment of Somalis. Most of the new apartments in Nairobi are also Somali owned. “Many of the apartments in Nairobi are taken up by these ‘cultural deportees’. Usually it’s the mother who returns with the children. They have money, and time on their hands, so they go out, many to the malls,” Hassan noted.
As more malls have opened in the city, they are flooded by young Somalis. It is something of a youth rebellion. Many young Somali women arrive at the malls in their hijabs, disappear into the washrooms, and emerge without their modest clothing. In the evening, they jump back into their hijabs and return to conservative homes. They are the soul of a new mall culture. Two Rivers, one of the biggest malls in the region, even has a Somali week. Only the Somali get a week.
The Somalis are also one of the reasons cinemas are booming in Nairobi. The malls have all upgraded and pimped up their theatres. Two Rivers mall recently opened a theatre that boasts the biggest cinema screen in the region, measuring 19.5 by 8.7 metres. Sometimes well past midnight, the malls are still busy, with moviegoers and young Somalis taking selfies and photographs for their social media pages.
The cinemas are also part of the “Nairobi negotiation”. Earlier in the day, the shows are cheaper. They occasionally throw in a hot dog with the ticket. Most of the audience is young, with a sprinkling of the humble. As the day wears on, tickets get pricier, and there is both a racial and class change. The day audiences are thin. The evening audiences have bigger waistlines, are better dressed, older and arrive in expensive cars. They also get browner and whiter. It is part of the unwritten Nairobi colour code.
It’s midnight outside the upmarket Westgate Mall, which on September 21, 2013, was besieged by Al-Shabaab Islamist militants in a horrific attack that ended with 71 people dead and 200 injured. But all that seems long forgotten on this chilly evening when dozens of young Somalis are milling around. Outside opposite the taxi drop-off area, vendors are doing a brisk business selling flowers. Every night throughout the year they are here, selling flowers.
In fact a lot of flowers are sold in Nairobi these days. There seems to be plenty of love in the city. About 50 metres from the flower vendors at Westgate Mall, a group of the city’s less glamorous citizens huddle, shivering on the sidewalk. They are not feeling the love. They live about two kilometres away, in a slum incongruently named “Deep Sea”. It is not in a sea, but partly hidden in a forest overlooked by highrises. Deep Sea used to be bigger. Few people knew that it even existed until a new bypass came along and residents, fighting for their piece of slum, appeared on TV battling armed police. The bypass won. What Nairobi wants, Nairobi usually gets.
