Nairobi's DIY Public Transport
The best and the worst part of Kenya’s sprawling capital, Nairobi, are one and the same: transportation.
It’s three p.m. and I have an appointment downtown. Let’s just say I live in Bel Air, since Nairobi is exactly like Los Angeles. My hill in Nairobi is cut through with a verdant canyon of eucalyptus and pepper trees, palms, psychedelic bougainvillea, and it’s nearly impossible to get in and out of without a car. Add a distinctly African army commander with camouflaged tanks of soldiers going in and out of his gate, several exiled African leaders, every ambassador in Kenya, bush babies, monkeys, snakes (“they could devour you!” warned my Spanish expatriate neighbor), a cow I hear but never see, and the musty smell of burning trash. I am not a member of the leisure class like most of my neighbors, and must go into town every day to work. Today, how will I get there? And how will I return? Nairobi is a place where a young woman should not walk at night, where people of all stripes try to get home by dark, lest they taste the city’s alternative namesake: Nairobbery. Due to the great distances between hubs, walking is more like a pilgrimage than a method of transportation. A taxi is $30 roundtrip.
“Don’t they have any public transportation in this city?” I asked everyone. “Yes, just learn the routes,” they said. “You’ll save a lot of money.” I assumed they meant a municipal bus service. But there are no buses. The routes are for matatus — flamboyant, private minibuses that move the majority of Nairobi’s residents. These routes, however, were initially anathema. Unlike the public buses I am used to in the States, there are no formal stops with schedules printed on posts. It’s a very good thing that this transport is private because if it were public it would not work.
Like Los Angeles or Bangkok, the dearth of public transport options and the vast urban geography of Nairobi has a way of diluting local culture and isolating residents in their microcommunities. For miles you can walk or drive past nothing but hidden, gated homes or drab, 1970s office blocks. Sometimes you’ll be on the freeway for 20 minutes en route to a simple appointment, an experience as uninspiring here as it is everywhere else on earth. As Dorothy Parker would say, there’s no there there. I was starting to get depressed and ever more broke after a week of cabbing it. I felt like an outsider who couldn’t crack the nut of Kenya’s culture.
At last I stood next to the corn cart at the bottom of my hill with some locals and waited for the matatu. After five minutes a white, battered, clanking minibus emitting profuse exhaust veered off the road onto the dirt shoulder and I jumped in like the others while it continued to move at about 7 miles per hour. The 14 seats were all taken and more so – children with backpacks sat on their parents’ laps and a man with a horn of some agricultural product was perched in the aisle. I half perched on someone’s thigh and nearly dislocated my neck in order to tilt my head away from the metal roof. The man who slid open the van door at the shoulder hung out the open door with his feet planted inside as the van picked up speed and then closed the door behind him to lean on me, the last one in, with much of his weight, holding the rest up by clutching a hand rail for dear life. We each paid him 10 KSh, about 16 cents. The street we drove twists and turns through enough picturesque canyons to qualify for a James Bond film location. With each turn and each pothole I slammed helplessly into metal, heads, children, and soft body parts of the conductor. But despite these bumps and the reek of body odor from some fertile laborers on board, I enjoyed riding the matatu. It felt like an amusement park ride, and I liked being among the locals. I was hooked. And it only gets better.
Getting to downtown Nairobi from any other district during traffic is nothing less than an odyssey. Gridlock. Fumes. Heat. Potholes large enough to lose a baby in. Matatu drivers don’t hesitate to drive on the sidewalk or create a third lane of traffic. The only mercy is the throbbing music inside. It might cry “Babylon!”, “I just called, to say, I love you,” or “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me, revenge is like the sweetest joy next to gittin pussy.” No matter what style of music, it always seems to me that heads are bobbing to the beat, in tune with the vibe, grooving with it – kids’ heads, moms’ heads, grandpas’ heads.
The white matatu I rode was a sterile version of most, which are painted wild purples, oranges, and greens and adorned with graffiti, airbrushed paintings of Barack Obama, the Rwandan president, or Tupac. Words or matatu names are artfully inscribed on windshields and everywhere else, from “SKILLET” to “BONES” to “HUSTLARZ AMBITION.”
Hustlarz Ambition is the name of my roommate Dan’s matatu. He has two. The other is called “The Tiger: Straight Outta the Jungle.” Like most of the matatu ilk, he is in his mid twenties. He relaxes by watching hard-core hip hop videos or performing himself, in an R&B group. His favorite artist is Tupac. “I always wanted to have a big company,” he says. “I’m a hustler, and now I’m just comin up. With the matatu you have to create a style, pick the music, the paintings, for your passengers. You have to know what they like on your route. If you choose Tupac maybe you fill the 12 magazine changer with his albums, from earliest Tupac when he was just a child of 12 to the last album from him. You choose the music videos. You choose the lights, the color of the seats. It’s like you are creating a place for people.” A good portion of these badass minibuses play Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, Nelly, Mace, Naz. And on weekend nights they are truly the club before the club, strobe lights flashing, dressed up passengers, base bumping. The conductors and drivers are hyper agressive and tough, and many chew khat, a local plant stimulant. Apparently teenage girls would die to date one, sort of like how I used to feel about skateboarders.
Matatus are the poetry of Nairobi. Last night I noticed that one had written on the back the words: “I feel nothing.” Below that it said, “Established, such and such date.” As in, the matatu is the business of the human soul, set up whenever the owner realized he felt emotionally numb? What’s your interpretation?