Nairobi  ^{[ Go to: List of Nairobi Pages]}
Private appendix to Wikipedia

Everything you always wanted to know about anything is of course in Wikipedia, just type "Nairobi". But here's my personal appendix. Dom had invited me to travel with him to Nairobi. He would be busy, there, but I would have time to look around and visit Annemarie, a friend from Holland who had recently moved there. The start would be a party in Kampala's tourist lodge Red Chili. Dom anticipated a difficult wake up at 5:30 AM, and before taking even his first drink there had bought bus tickets, hired a taxi, prepared his bag of stand by travel items, including water and sandwiches for him and me. At five, I heard him stumbling in our room. He fell on his bed, even managed to get his shoes and socks out, and had half an hour's sleep.

Photo left: departure Kampala: Dom 5:30 AM after heavy party and half an hour sleep trying to open his number lock
Photo right: departure Kisumu 18:00 PM: That's better!

He can hardly have any memories of our 6 hours bus trip to Kisumu, where, at six PM, we mounted a private 2^nd class Rift Valley Railways sleeper cabin with beds and room service. A hour before Nairobi, Dom went off for his Nairobi suburb Karen (after Karen Blixen), where his parents live. The train went on. Suddenly, at my South side, I saw this:

View from train window entering Nairobi (1). Photo Southward over Kibera slum. Horizon: Nairobi National Park

Train enters Nairobi (2). Rail in use as shopping mall corridor

The train drove through a shopping street where the items on display actually reached the rail. Shoppers must be using the railway itself for walking, and be chased off by passing trains.
Arrival at Nairobi Railway Station. I cut myself a way through the taxi drivers to have my first walk through the town centre, which is like that any other modern western town. Wide lanes, sky scrapers, shiny office buildings, new cars neatly lined up in huge traffic jams, its drivers avoiding eye contact with each other, no smoking everywhere (including your own car!), no bikes, well paved pedestrian road sides. Unpaved areas green, seldom muddy or dusty. Hardly any whites though. They prefer to live and locate their businesses outside the town centre.

Nairobi centre: spacey lanes, close to (?) a million good cars, posh office buildings, Obama everywhere, hopeless traffic jams, conspicuous integrity, no smoking, whites stay out.

The favourite rich man's shop is Nakomatt, a dense supermarket chain - ran by Indians of course - with shops that come in different sizes. Guarded parking, shiny malls and prices at least 200% of Kampala. The cheaper shops of small Indians are more difficult to find. Clothes I would buy in the slums. People are excellently dressed there and the stalls are cheap. The 20 dollar Nakomatt "Nike" polo hangs there for one and you get your trendy shorts for two. I did not get the impression that the range of products for sale in Nairobi is wider than in Kampala. A Nakomatt mall burnt down during my stay. The radio urged people to stay away. Dano, Annemarie's friend, photographer, was there, I later heard, without camera, so he could not take pictures of the two streams of public: running out for the fire and in for the looting. I waited for sunset because I was told you have to get out of Nairobi's city centre at 4 PM, which turned out to be exaggerated. Yes, unlike in Kampala where everything stays open until late, shops close sunset or slightly after. But hotels and restaurants are open in the evening. At sunset the city is still totally clogged with traffic, and is is hard to believe they could be out before 8:30. Anyway, no fearsome atmosphere at all.
How to find Annemarie's home from the city centre? I had street name and a map. In Kampala the street name would be enough: a bodobodo (moped taxi) would know, and take you for half a dollar per kilometer along the jams. You would sit back and look around. In Nairobi, no bodobodo. Private hire car taxis charge double for blacks and triple for whites (for double they take the black and refuse the white), and then take you for an indefinite period in the traffic jam. So, I decided to walk in the right direction, even though I had 10 km to go, until the car traffic would exceed my walking speed. This happened only 5 km later, after having enjoyed all those irritated faces of those whose corruption had yielded them a shiny Mercedes, Land Cruiser or Prado, and were now condemned to life in the jam. I had left the centre, crossing the Uhuru (independence) park, with its famous paved smoking zone (see picture above). There, indeed taxis refused me for the black tariff, so I looked for a bus. A bus costs 10% of  taxi, but you need to know the route number system used by large buses and small "12" (but really 24) person bus taxis alike. A girl told me it was 62 and after strictly following our route on my map I stepped out where I should.
Like everywhere in Nairobi, Annemarie's side street is locked with a gate attended by two armed guards with a visitor's book. I have to call her and let her talk to the street guards. Her street features two-story single family houses with a garden in front and at the back. Many such fenced compounds in Nairobi have three or four five story buildings containing a number of apartments on each level. In the suburbs where compounds are larger, you see several quick response vehicles (from different security companies) with up to four armed guards on every street. Everybody there has a "safe room" where you lock yourself in and call. 4 minutes is the standard, everybody does one trial alarm per month. There are heavy fines if guards turn up late. The typical robbery assault is by people armed with spears and pangas, inexperienced and unaware of all these measures taken against them. Few days go by without such easy prey for the guards.
Time for more study of yet another Nairobi map. I had thought of neatly cutting out the map of my hotel's yellow pages, but this had already been done before me, and I fell back on using the highly defective one in my free hotel guide. Curiously enough, maps of Nairobi do not feature the slums - not even their main streets - though 55% of the 3 million of its inhabitants live there.

Nairobi. In orange the two main slums, Kibera and Mathare (5% of N'bi-surface, 55% of its inhabitants).

Where there were no Arabs or whites, there were no towns in Africa. With very few exceptions, a town (a non agricultural settlement that needs food supply from outside) is not an African thing. Nairobi started as a railroad terminal after the rail reached there from Mombassa in 1899. The town was planned by the English, divided in white, Indian and black sections. 8 years later, the Nairobi golf club was founded. At the time Nairobi had 11.500 inhabitants. It became royal in 1936, when Nairobi had 60.000. Now there are over 3 million. Reckoned from 1907, that is an average annual growth rate of almost 6%, more than 3 times the world's average.
I did play my golf with Annemarie. Fortunately I am a good looser (she has handicap 7). But I had my share of pride because she was very happy to beat me!

Royal Nairobi Golf Club, founded 1907: changed colour but royal ever since 15th July 1936.

The Royal Nairobi Golf Club borders with the Kibera slums (see Google Earth picture below but also map). The border is a 2.5 m high wall, but it has a small gate that opens during day time. Most staff and caddies live in Kibera, and in the morning, they enter through this gate (see arrow) - my caddy not excluded, so I offered to hire him as a caddy, for the next day, through Kibera..

Up: RNGC golf course, down: Kibera slums, railroad clearly visible. At the arrow: THE gate (sorry, I now realize a ground picture of THE gate should be here on this page, and will be after my next visit).

The next day we strolled through the lush meadows of the course, passed through THE gate, and entered a different world. housing, patched corrugated iron roofs on walls made of clay filled, cement plastered plaited branches, is normal to African standards. The difference is in scale. A million people together here, narrow pass ways between houses, were there are a rush hours (most work outside the slum) resembling soccer stadium entry times in the morning and evening. In day time, local shopkeepers, child watchers and other old people stay behind. Most people have a cemented toilet pit and shower, or share it with some neighbours. Sewage and drainage is done by digging trenches in the ground, that erode during heavy rains. Road side structures, like platforms for sewing clothes or selling products, are often laid over the sewage-drainage trenches. Inside, houses have solid dry clay or cement with floor covering, beds, TV, and a wood stove with chimney leading through wall or roof. The metal roofs render the houses hot in the afternoon. And indeed the Kisumu train rail is one long shopping street. Kibera is car-free! If I were invited by someone to stay there for a week, I would have no reason of discomfort to refuse. A week.
We went back though the golf club gate. Strolling again between the courses we discussed the civil war after the elections of 2008. This was mainly between Luo and Kikuyu. Both tribes occupy large parts of the slums. The city buses are ran by Kikuyus. The Kikuyu thought it wise not to have their tribesmen fight and intimidate neighbour-Luo. They used their city buses to bring Kikuyus to other places to fight the Luos. Thus the Kibera adult male Kikuyus were "on duty" elsewhere and replaced by adult male Kikuyus unknown in Kibera. My caddy is of neither tribes thus threatened from both sides. He fled with wife and 8 children, and a few bags. His house got burnt and looted. Meanwhile, his family stayed elsewhere and he was earning frantically for his reinvestment, caddying on the Royal Nairobi golf course. Smoke rose at the other side of THE gate. More than once, golfers had to line up for a second time because they had their concentration disturbed by a gunshot. "But now it is all over and we are all friends again".

Watching a shop's TV (Kibera)

Time to go back to Uganda. Departure at Nairobi railway station. The train will leave from platform 3. There is a pedestrian tunnel but it is not very popular. You simply cross the two railways in between the platforms. If trains are standing, you pass through or under. In the middle of your crossing is a water tap to fill the trains. Comes in handy to have a drink and wash yourself after your stay in a crowded 3^rd class couch. As for departures: if you can run you can arrive half a minute after your train starts moving. You will need another half minute of running to reach the first train door, and if you are a true Kenyan runner, you easily reach the second or third, less crowded, before or slightly after the end of the platform, surely before your train starts outdoing your running speed.