Parijat Chakrabarti

1. A view over Westlands, a commercial and cultural hub of Nairobi. Nairobi Expressway cuts through the frame with Nairobi’s notorious traffic below. The Nairobi Expressway connects Jomo Kenyatta Airport with Westlands, smoothing travel for diplomats, professionals, and business people. A sometimes two-hour trip along Mombasa Road, snarled in traffic, is cut to twenty minutes. A signature project of Kenya Vision 2030, the expressway has become symbolic of a stark class divide in Nairobi, and Kenya more broadly. The expressway was financed and built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC). CRBC will retain ownership over the expressway and charge toll fees for 27 years to recoup costs before returning control to the Kenyan government. Tolls can go up to 300 Ksh, 3 to 6 times the cost of a standard matatu ride, thus excluding the vast majority of Nairobi’s population from being able to use it. While easing traffic for a select group of Nairobians, it has done little to ease traffic or even worsened traffic in some sections for most others. At some crossing points beneath the expressway where there is heavy foot traffic, unlicensed vendors have set up shop selling goods such as socks and roasted maize.

2. Freddy roasts mutura. Freddy starts his day at 7 am to go to Dagoretti meat market where he buys intestine and minced meat. He spends his day stuffing intestine to make muturaand begins selling in the early evening as people are walking home from work. Mutura is an iconic street food of Nairobi. Originally a food of the Kikuyu people, mutura was adopted as a Nairobi street food as different African communities intermingled in cramped and segregated estates under the colonial government’s apartheid housing policy. Today, mutura’s murky reputation as unhygienic and as a ‘poor-persons food’ means that it is rarely sold in wealthier neighborhoods. A friend who took me to eat mutura joked with evident pleasure, “Darkness is the key ingredient… it is made in darkness and you eat in darkness.” For many, mutura arouses strong feelings. It is seen as more than food. Making mutura is an art (so different from the industrial mini-sausages, ‘smokies,’ that otherwise pervade Nairobi). Eating it demands great trust in your mutura guy (and it is almost always a man). And there is a communal element to mutura; it is chopped and eaten off shared cutting boards, often outside bars or ‘bases’ where people gather in the evenings. [1]

3. A group of children pose for a photo. On the right, Charity lets a calf suckle after she has first milked the cow. Charity and the children are part of a Maasai community living on a plot of land just behind a neighborhood in largely upscale Lang’ata. (The houses can just be seen in the upper left of the photo.) Despite appearing to live a pastoralist lifestyle, the community is deeply imbricated in Nairobi’s urban economy. These linkages to the urban economy are often patterned by gender. Charity and her neighbor manage the homestead (manyatta) and milk the cows and goats. They, along with the older girls, will spend their morning hours selling milk to the neighboring community as a source of income for their families. During the day the men and boys will take the cows and goats to graze in open fields, on the roadsides, and sometimes near open markets where produce cuttings are dumped. At night, many of the men take second jobs as night watchmen in the neighboring estates.

4. At the same manyatta, a young man corrals his goats and cows having brought them back from the field.

5. Young teens out of school walk about in Eastleigh, a predominantly Somali neighborhood. In the background can be seen a new mall with a high-end fashion store. Notably absent from the mall are major global brands; instead mostly small and medium-size retailers sell imported clothing, often routed through Dubai. In recent decades, Eastleigh has become home to a vibrant Somali business community, many of whom were displaced during the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s. Despite accusations of financing terrorism and piracy, Eastleigh today is a key hub along a transnational Somali trade network that ranges from Minneapolis to London to Dubai and to Guangzhou. These networks transfer remittances from the diaspora to Nairobi, and money flows out from Nairobi as Somali traders import goods. [1] As wealth has concentrated in Nairobi’s Somali community, they have also cultivated their own financial institutions and real estate investments. As Neil Carrier writes, “the vast networks that displacement often generates can breathe new life into the places in which they are woven: hubs forged out of migration become sites of innovation, and often sites of commerce” (Carrier 2017:6). More recently, Arab-speaking migrants displaced by conflicts in Yemen and Sudan have moved to Eastleigh and the surrounding areas. Yet others move simply to start a new life.

6, 7. A man leans on a table decorated with cowrie shells in his stall in the West African market. His bed can be seen on the right of the frame, and a football match plays on the TV in the back. The market is hidden up the stairs and in the inner courtyard of an unmarked building in downtown Nairobi. Traders live, work, and cook together in the building. Families of cats have also taken up residence with the traders in the courtyard. The traders are migrants from various parts of Francophone West Africa— Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Mali among others. They have cultivated trade networks back home for West African masks, cloth, and other cultural artifacts that they bring to Nairobi and sell at wholesale prices. These same goods can be found in tourist-facing souvenir shops being resold at 3-4x the price. The souvenir shops leverage their location, connections to tourism companies, ability to navigate regulatory and licensing bureaucracies, language abilities, and understanding of ‘tourist’ tastes to engage tourists. Through such networks, money, artifacts, and people flow between West Africa, Nairobi, and countries such as the US, UK, Germany, Japan, and, increasingly, India and China which send large numbers of tourists to Kenya.

8. Brian sits outside his favorite barber shop wearing a LA-branded hat and a Korean baseball jersey. For Brian, LA means Lang’ata, the constituency where he lives. Brian’s eclectic fashion reflects the transnational networks that sell secondhand and donated clothing from international markets in countries such as Kenya. Goods donated to Goodwill in the US, for example, are typically sold to exporters who then sell to Kenyan importers. Clothes are packaged in bales standardized by weight and type of clothing and sold to warehouses. Wholesalers bid on bales at semi-open auctions— typically, one needs an invite or a connection to attend these auctions. The secondhand clothing, known as mitumba, makes its way down through chains of retailers and sub-retailers as it disperses across the city and country. One of the largest mitumba markets in Africa is Gikomba market near Nairobi’s downtown. While the mitumba industry is a major source of employment in Nairobi, the mass importation of mitumba, starting in the 1980s, devastated the local cotton and textiles industry. In recent years, local designers have started to make a comeback selling boutique designs to a rising upper and upper-middle class.

9. A man carries a mitumba bale through Toi Market, a popular clothes market in Nairobi.

10, 11. Tina shows us a QR code which can be used to send money via WeChat Pay. Tina works at a shop selling various kinds of cooked meat and specialty items such as duck head and chicken feet in Nairobi’s Chinatown. Some Chinese customers prefer to pay via WeChat. Tina says a cook in the back can convert between WeChat and M-Pesa. [1] Nairobi’s original Chinatown was located in Hurlingham, but it has since largely shut down in the wake of the pandemic. Nairobi’s second Chinatown— now just identified as Chinatown— sits off Ngong Road in Kilimani. The Chinatown was born barely seven years ago and has since expanded substantially. Across the street is Eastlands Hotel, a Chinese hotel which caters to Chinese business travelers. The Chinatown holds a number of eateries, grocery shops, two supermarkets, electronics and general goods stores, a casino, and a karaoke club which allegedly doubles as an escort house where business deals are sealed.

12. Refuse pickers, seen in the background, glean through a dumping ground next to Othaya Market. Here, a very different kind of commercial circuit to that in Chinatown can be seen. Refuse pickers, among Nairobi’s poorest residents, search for discarded food that can still be eaten as well as discarded goods which can be cleaned and resold in other markets. Nairobi’s principal dumping site is Dandora. It sprawls across 70 acres with trash fires releasing toxic fumes to the surrounding slum communities and posing a major hazard to the thousands of refuse pickers who sort through Dandora’s trash. School benches in neighboring Korogocho are regularly covered in a thin layer of ash and need to be wiped down before sitting. Entry to Dandora is controlled by cartels who charge pickers a fee to access different parts of the dump site, each holding different kinds of refuse. Refuse pickers lay out their wares— spoons, plates, wires, discarded electronics, among other assorted goods— on tarps in the streets of Korogocho. These recycled goods are sold to others in the community (who themselves make little money) or to aggregators who resell to industrial recyclers. Some in Korogocho are tenuously connected to economies in the urban center, perhaps as domestic workers or micro-retailers.

13. Revelers go out at the Alchemist, a bar and nightclub near Nairobi’s “Electric Avenue,” a major nightlife thoroughfare in Westlands. The Alchemist caters to Nairobi’s upper class and aspiring social climbers— a place to go out, be seen, mingle with Nairobi’s well-to-do, and perhaps find a romantic partner. [1] Nairobi’s upper class, despite being relatively small, is split into a number of different communities. The Alchemist, regularly playing electronic music, Afrobeats, and popular American party songs, caters heavily to Nairobi’s itinerant expat crowd, wazungu, often working in the humanitarian and development sector. (The Alchemist and the space around it is owned and operated by a Californian transplant to Nairobi.) Other communities include Anglo-Kenyans (descendants of British colonists and sometimes called Kenya Cowboys or KCs), various business communities including the Kenyan Indian community and the Somali community, Kenya’s political elite, and a rising white collar class often working in finance or high technology. These communities intermingle in settings such as malls, cafes, bars, art galleries, sports groups, and house gatherings. Class, while racialized in Nairobi, does not on its own form the basis of community. But it does divide access to the spaces where communities and personal networks are forged.

14. A group of friends share a pizza at a popular pizza chain. Certain foods mark socio-economic class and a cosmopolitan outlook in Nairobi— pizza, sushi, and KFC among them. Indeed, KFC is a popular date spot for middle class and upper-middle class Kenyans. Though only just visible on the edges of the photo, the group's style of dress also marks them as upwardly mobile. It would easily blend in in almost any major global city— a cosmopolitan fashion.

15. A Chicago-Bulls-themed matatu waits to fill up with passengers before continuing on its route. Matatus are cheap forms of mass transit within Nairobi. Walking, i.e. taking your “footsubishi,” is also common, particularly for lower-income populations. Matatus are owned by SACCOs, savings and credit cooperative organizations, which pool money to finance matatu operations. While central to mobility in Nairobi, residents complain of their reckless driving and disregard for rules of the road. They are regular sources of income for traffic police taking small bribes. Beyond a mode of transport, the visual design of matatus reflect and themselves contribute to the influence of globalization in Nairobi’s commercial culture. [1] Pop culture references are most common including those for video games (e.g. FIFA), Netflix series (e.g. Money Heist), rappers and music artists (e.g. Tupac), political figures (e.g. Queen Elizabeth), and sports teams (typically football teams). Some themes are creatively recombined such as an American themed matatu with cartoonish drawings of bald eagles, 100 dollar bills, and Ronald Reagan on the side and a Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas (a video game) themed matatu with Rihanna reimagined as a central character. Some matatus are “tricked-out,” modified with flashing lights, booming speakers, and plasma TVs to play music videos on the ride. Many young people prefer to take such matatus (and are willing to pay more) as they move about the city. Matatus also play local music, introducing new Sheng words— a creole often hyper-localized to specific neighborhoods— to the vernacular. Other matatus cater to “working-class” (i.e. salaried) or older clientele, sometimes playing gospel music or simply prioritizing a clean, quiet commute.

16. A view from my balcony over leafy Kileleshwa, a relatively upscale neighborhood in Nairobi. Nairobi was once known as the “Green City in the Sun” reflecting its temperate climate, ample sunshine, and abundant greenery. Looking at a satellite view of Nairobi, however, it becomes clear that the green parts of the city— Karen, Kileleshwa, Spring Valley, Loresho, Muthaiga, Nyari, and Runda among other estates— are the wealthy parts of town. While they take up substantial space in Nairobi, they are also the least densely populated neighborhoods. [1] On the other hand, UN Habitat estimates that informal settlements cover only 5% of the land area but house over 50% of the city. In these parts of town, the landscape is grey and trees are scarcely found. [2] However, as the colonial logics that used to govern space give way to landowner capitalism, high-occupancy buildings are now being erected all over Kileleshwa. One can still find many of the one and two story houses that dotted Kileleshwa 30 years ago tucked between high-rise apartments and mini-malls. Along Githunguri Road just out front of the building in frame, several mama mbogas, kiosks, and ‘hotels’ (i.e. informal eateries) serve the gate watchmen, day laborers constructing buildings, domestic workers, and, of course, the local residents. At the bottom of Githunguri Road, a family still keeps several large, healthy horses which are regularly brought out to graze along the street and then onto the grasses along the main Ring Road in Kileleshwa.

[2] To confront this environmental injustice and raise awareness of it, the Mathare Green Movement operates a community tree-planting program in the Mathare informal settlement. It is one of the few such initiatives in Nairobi.

REFERENCES

Baraka, Carey. 2020. “The Joy of Eating Mutura, Nairobi’s Blood Sausage of Ill-Repute.” Serious Eats. Retrieved (https://www.seriouseats.com/mutura).

Carrier, Neil. 2017. Little Mogadishu: Eastleigh, Nairobi’s Global Somali Hub. Illustrated edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ese, Anders, and Kristin Ese. 2020. The City Makers of Nairobi: An African Urban History. 1st edition. London: Routledge.

Guyer, Jane I., and Samuel M. Eno Belinga. 1995. “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa*.” The Journal of African History 36(1):91–120. doi: 10.1017/S0021853700026992.

Meiu, George Paul. 2017. Ethno-Erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya. Illustrated edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mojola, Sanyu A. 2014. Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS. First Edition, 1 edition. Oakland, California: University of California Press.