Self-Help City

The Colonial Squatter

The building of colonial economic and political power in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Kenya included allowing African Kenyans to “squat” on land on which they had previously resided, including, in large majority, Kikuyu people. A Kenyan friend once remarked on this, to explain how Kikuyu people came to the Rift Valley in the first place (where the artificially designated capital of Nairobi was then built), by reflecting on his own family’s story:

Historically, the Kikuyu resided in the Central Province and moved to the Rift Valley. My family moved from Kiambu District, from their land, to Njoro, in the Rift Valley. My father was actually born on a white farmer’s land in Njoro in 1935. (WhatsApp communication, March 2024)

A complex relationship formed between Kikuyu squatters and the colonial administration over the first half of the twentieth century, involving at first land “alienation,” followed by diverse labor recruitment arrangements with European settlers, and ending with the “Mau Mau” politics of protest in the years following World War II and leading up to independence in 1963 (Anderson 2005; Berman and Lonsdale 1992; Kanogo 1987). By the end of World War I, “the squatter system had become an established part of the socio-economic structure of European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations” (Kanogo 1987, 8).

The story of the Kikuyu squatter laborers and their role in both the events that led to independence and the politics of postcolonial Kenya highlight two key points: First, the conflict between two agrarian systems (settler plantation economy and the squatter peasant economy) exemplified a persistent tension between the colonial system (both government and the settlers) and the African response of active resistance to “coercion and subordination as they struggled to carve out a living for themselves and their families” (Kanogo 1987, 1–2). Second, the story of Kikuyu social economic organization showed how both among ethnic groups and between them, “social division and the corruption of authority were the essential foundations of state power” (Lonsdale 1992b, 37) throughout colonial rule, a dynamic that persisted in the years that followed political decolonization (Leys 1975). These social divisions were manifested through the formation of particular socioeconomic classes that were informed by the cultural economies of ethnic affiliation. As Berman (1992, 199) explains, “class and ethnicity are not mutually exclusive processes and identities.” They were constantly being “revised and fought over in the continuing and unfinished encounter of capitalism with African societies.”

By the 1940s, Kikuyu people made up 50 percent of Nairobi’s population (Huchzermeyer 2011, 127). Given Kikuyu predominance among the Africans of the Nairobi area, some would eventually become landlords of housing structures (within both popular neighborhoods and low-income multistory tenement buildings); others would become part of an emerging Kikuyu middle class that established a foothold in local politics and acquired a considerable advantage over the landless and wageless “African under-class” (Burton 2005). Some of these would become the political elite of the postcolonial state following decades of “politics of collaboration” with the colonial administration (Berman and Lonsdale 1992, 83) and by means of a strategic “moderate stance” vis-à-vis the militant Mau Mau “freedom fighters” (Kanogo 1987, 163). In turn, this emergent African elite would benefit from the Mau Mau struggle for independence and subsequent political decolonization, but Britain would also benefit from these “moderate” African politicians whose new position of power and independence allowed the former colonial metropole to retain an influence on the newly independent state (163).

Some have argued that the long-term goal of African nationalists, including complete “Africanization” of the country’s political, economic, and cultural systems (Ochieng’ and Atieno-Odhiambo 1995, xiii), was surrendered to a “neocolonial” relationship (Kanogo 1987, 164; Leys 1975). Specifically, the neocolonial state was reflected in the “institutional continuities” (Ochieng’ and Atieno-Odhiambo 1995, xiii) that followed independence and the persistence of a state that protected a dominant elite class at the expense of “non-possessing classes” (xiv). For the “non-possessing classes,” the landless and wageless Nairobi residents, the state was neither regarded nor actively presenting itself as a source of provision and care. Provision and care would have to be sought “from below” and from the “surrounds” (Simone 2022) where things happen otherwise, not only outside the purview of the state (G. Myers 2005) but also outside what is institutionally legible (Scott 1998).

The Urban Form(s) of Nairobi’s Popular Neighborhood

The magnifying glass of urban poverty debates in Nairobi is often placed on the “horizontal” single-story “squatter settlement” (UN-Habitat 2003, 82) composed of makeshift shacks, open sewers, an absence of public services, and insecure tenure. Another kind of contemporary urban poverty and housing phenomenon has tended to elicit less attention—that of multi-story private rental or “tenement” housing. The imaginary of the East African “horizontal slum” has been epitomized by regular forms of “slum tourism,” including dramatized portrayals of Nairobi’s Kibera featuring in a series of early twenty-first-century popular media: BBC4 documentaries, the 2005 film The Constant Gardener, and the 2011 reality show cum fundraiser Famous, Rich and in the Slums, which shadowed British celebrities “roughing it” among locals (see Warah 2011). Conversely, other “vertical” or mixed tenancy housing that has mushroomed in unregulated ways across African cities create, as Maria Huchzermeyer (2011, 6) argues, a “largely ignored and undebated” urban housing reality. Owner occupation across income groups in Nairobi is rare. In mabati (shanty) and tenement neighborhoods, it is largely absent (14). According to Huchzermeyer’s (2011, 3) detailed study of tenement housing in the early 2000s, multistory tenements comprised an estimated 23 percent of Nairobi’s population. Less than 20 percent lived in suburban or gated communities, and more than 60 percent lived in horizontal “slums.” Most “slum” evictions or other forms of urban displacement that have occurred over these past decades have taken place in order to accommodate the unregulated, rapidly growing tenement-housing market.

Since the 1980s, Mathare Valley’s housing combined horizontal and vertical structures, with “dense multi-story tenement districts” interspersed with “single-story slums” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 5). Its deep history of “private tenancy” or “lucrative landlordism” had roots in the “land dispossessions and neglect of housing by the colonial rulers” (2) and took shape especially during the 1970s. In particular, the leaders following political decolonization, Jomo Kenyatta (1963–78) followed by Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002), established decades of autocratic rule, single-party systems, and corrupt practices “at all levels of government” that generated a culture of land grabs and the formation of an unregulated housing market that privileged “large scale tenement construction” for those with enough political leverage and capital to control, while an “urban vision” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 132) or plans for social housing were completely sidelined.

While tenement and mabati housing structures and practices were connected to Nairobi’s colonial legacy, the 1980s local and global forces shaped a pivotal period of increasingly rapid urbanization and global economic liberalization and exacerbated the conditions of urban poverty (Ferguson 2006), which persisted through the presidency of Kenya’s leader in the early days of my fieldwork, Mwai Kibaki. Therefore, throughout Kenya’s colonial and postcolonial history, unregulated tenement housing markets persisted, with landlords bypassing legal restrictions on modern building and zoning regulations, which also deepened the continuation of the social and racial segregation of the city (Huchzermeyer 2011, 6–7).

Yet, inherent in any unregulated market lie particular “pragmatic” practices, and in Nairobi, multiple actors benefited from tenement housing (Huchzermeyer 2011, 3–4). Landlords sought a return on their investment and had to deal with the risks of high tenant turnover, mobility, and rent default because these tenants were working outside the waged economy and could not always predict their monthly earnings, balancing poorly paid jobs and/or irregular earnings in the informal economy. Tenants were always on the lookout for a more affordable deal and had to adapt quickly to sudden economic losses. Finding the affordable deal meant navigating the unregulated tenement housing market because there was a lack of government-subsidized, public housing for low-income residents. For rural-urban migrants, life in the city’s popular neighborhoods was a better alternative to rural poverty, especially given the proximity to diverse income opportunities and community networks that would facilitate access to “mobility and convenience” (7). This meant accepting the exploitative practices of the wakubwa (big men) who invested in unregulated tenement housing and dealing with substandard housing because that was the price and risk tenants were prepared to pay in order to reside less than seven kilometers from the CBD (213).

For some tenants, the city was a place of “transience” (Leys 1975, 181) and circular migration; for others it was the “arrival city” (Saunders 2010). But even for those who have made Nairobi, in neighborhoods like Mathare, their place of residence, it was common for families to move multiple times within the same area, depending on what they could afford that year or that month, upgrading or downgrading their living conditions accordingly, while continuously evoking the imaginary of their rural home up-country.3 Ultimately, the disputed postelection violence of 1992, 1997, and especially 2007–8, and any subsequent ethnic clashes and periods of political and social unrest (including the 2022–23 maanda mano riots protesting the rising costs of living), have always influenced people’s decisions to stay or move away.4 There are internal and external structural, social, and economic factors influencing the dynamics of unregulated housing development, shifting tenancy, and the persistent demand for substandard cheap housing in the absence of planned public housing.

To the east of Mathare Valley, Huruma ward has possibly the highest population density on the African continent, with more than 1,500 dwelling units on each hectare (approximately 5,000 people) (Huchzermeyer 2011, 4). Because of the volatility of income among low-income residents and perceived “under-utilized land” of “informal settlements,” it is not uncommon to find in Nairobi dense multistory tenement districts existing “alongside single story ‘slums’” (5), with residents moving from one part of the neighborhood to another for their daily purchases, domestic tasks, and business undertakings. And while most household members may be unemployed, at least one member of each household is “economically active,” some making a living within the neighborhood, while others take part in the daily exodus to the industrial area for on-demand manual labor or get hired in middle- and upper-class suburbs as askaris (watchmen), maids, ayas (nannies), and gardeners.

What residents refer to as the mtaa (hood) is often interchangeably the horizontal and vertical settlement, although at a granular level, the characteristics of its urban built form particularly concerning waste and sanitation, feature some important differences. “Horizontal slum” areas have historically relied on public toilet and ablution blocks in the absence of such facilities in makeshift residential compounds built by structure owners. Conversely, vertical structures include toilet and bathing stalls on each floor of the building. Although these facilities are also subject to disrepair and shared across multiple households, they are semiprivate and provide a relatively safer option than the public community toilet available to “horizontal slum” dwellers whose continuous growth in numbers across Mathare Valley has, decades ago already, largely outgrown the trifling number of facilities built by municipal government in the early years following independence.

In 2004, the Central Bureau of Statistics stated that 64.4 percent of households in Nairobi share a toilet with another household (Huchzermeyer 2011, 146). This includes both horizontal and vertical habitations. Between 1969 and 1971, the Nairobi City Council (NCC) acknowledged the need for some form of planning in areas such as Mathare Valley, administering the building of 156 public toilets.5 An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people live in Mathare today, and the NCC has not completed a single public toilet since the early 1970s. The local Constituency Development Fund (CDF) attempted to fill this gap in the early 2000s as part of the Minister of Parliament Margaret Wanjiru’s political platform.6 MP Wanjiru politicized sanitation to affirm her empathetic stance toward the urban poor, with whom (she reminded people often) she shared past experiential knowledge of economic hardship. But despite these efforts to rehabilitate, upgrade, and construct public toilets in her constituency, by the time I first left Nairobi following twelve months of fieldwork (August 2010), the CDF’s dozen toilets remained unfinished and nonoperational.

There is an important distinction between tenement cities that were also “industrial cities,” where the need for housing paralleled the rapidly growing urban labor force, compared with tenement cities such as Nairobi where urban migration and the need for low-income housing was not concomitant with formal wage employment (Davis 2006; Huchzermeyer 2011). The “industrial cities” had urban-planning rationalities woven into industrial growth and development. In Nairobi, there was a 1948 Master Plan, but it was not implemented (Huchzermeyer 2011, 8). There was a vicious circle of unregulated construction and informality, fostered by a perpetual tension between the municipal officials and central government. Unlike the “rationality of the state” in nineteenth-century France (Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 1991) or the strategic “oppression of the ruling class over the working class” (Engels 1952) in early twentieth-century Germany, Kenya’s context demonstrated, if not an omission of state rationality, a veiled rationality of passive exploitation and oppression. As described in Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower (2009, xii), looking out from one of the government buildings above Uhuru Park, “from up here, the park seemed the green and pleasant public garden its planners had originally envisaged, rather than what it had become in the intervening years: open-air toilets, haunt of roaming muggers, resting spot for the homeless and exhausted.”

In Mathare Valley, landlords themselves rarely live in their own rental blocks, which is one of the many reasons why negotiating infrastructural improvements is such a challenge. Although the unregulated tenement market ensures a level of strategic discretion, these “absentee” landlords are rumored to be government officials, lawyers, pastors, and university professors, deeming these tenements safe retirement investments (in the absence of secure pension plans for most salaried professionals) (Huchzermeyer 2011, 7), and they have little to no direct contact or interest with the tenants who live in these four- to eight-story walk-ups. The primary motive is a familiar capitalistic logic: “maximization of capacity” in order to yield as much profit as possible. As one multistory block is built after the next, with no formal regard for urban-planning requirements, an unregulated, densely populated city within the city has been built, with dramatic health and safety implications on tenants.

The tensions between central government and the Nairobi City Council (later called Nairobi City County from 2010) date back to the origins of the municipal authority in 1919 (Huchzermeyer 2011, 124), whose powers and responsibilities were founded on the basis of serving the interests of European settlers seeking a say in local matters (Lonsdale 1992b). Central government has persisted in limiting the powers of municipal government, while at the same time refraining from putting forward and helping implement comprehensive urban planning to accommodate rapid urban growth and expansion of the city’s boundaries. While the municipal authorities have historically, and still are, vilified for underserving the majority of low-income neighborhoods and ignoring a decaying urban infrastructure, it is also clear that the Nairobi City Council has never been adequately funded, resourced, or managed to assume its role and address citywide municipal services and planning regulation. Municipal councilors are known for turning a blind eye to unregulated construction and informality, accepting bribes, or even inserting themselves into the tenement market to supplement their modest wages. As a result, the tenement “typology,” alongside the horizontal makeshift auto-construction, have become the status quo and growing “urban form” of rapidly growing cities in the Majority World, especially across the African continent, in “defiance of modern planning” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 8; Potts 2008).

Alternative to Modernist Planning: Kenyan Informalization

In response to attempts by the state to establish formal economic and political institutions to impose regulatory regimes, African households disrupted the locus of political power through various small-scale economic transactions and “novel forms of association” (Lonsdale 1992b, 37) that subverted state and chief control. Importantly, the encounter between the colonial state and its “conquered” people was a continuous process of negotiation marked by tensions that effectively “forced changes in the forms that states take” (39). Nairobi’s colonial and postcolonial history was marked by the tectonic forces of oppressive, “autocratic,” top-down politics and subversive, evasive, bottom-up informalization. The climate of unregulated practices appeared at every level of social, economic, and political life, giving way to various forms of structural and experienced exploitation, resistance, and opportunism. This was also reflected in the growing informal sector, which was hailed in the 1980s as reflecting “high levels of competitiveness as compared to the widely criticized monopolies associated with the state sector” (King 1996, xiii) but experienced in many postcolonial states as serving the interests of the political elite. In a way, the informalization that occurred at every level provided an avenue for unregulated, corrupt, and exploitative practices, while at the same time “exemplified for many of its admirers the benefits of the market” (xiii) because it could have democratizing effects on marginalized groups, including allowing Indigenous economies to form under their own logics in their own right (Kinyanjui 2019; Varley 2013).7

In exploring the diverse African working class, W. R. Ochieng’ and Eisha Stephen Atieno-Odhiambo (1995) describe the occupations of skilled and educated workers who had a degree of security of employment and income—the petite bourgeoisie that would later become critical in questioning the legality of colonialism and be instrumental in leading Kenya to independence. In contrast to this emerging middle class of Africans, there was a “semi-proletariat class of poorly paid, ill-fed and badly housed manual workers and farm labourers” (Ochieng’ and Atieno-Odhiambo 1995, xvi). Several historians have argued that independent Kenya inherited the colonial structures and class formations of colonialism (Kanogo 1987; Leys 1975; Ochieng’ and Atieno-Odhiambo 1995). As such, the social, infrastructural, and economic structures of low-income neighborhoods in Nairobi reflect the inequalities and disparate sources of accumulation between the African bourgeoisie and what economic anthropologist Keith Hart termed the African “sub-proletariat.” As Hart (2009) has argued, the informal sector opens up spaces for working with and in opposition to both the bureaucracy of the state and the rigidity of formal markets. The research of Margaret Macharia exemplifies this mode of “working with and opposition to” both the state and formal markets. Highlighting the ways in which informality in Nairobi requires historical, spatial, and cultural contextualization, Macharia’s doctoral research focused on the critical role of Somali Kenyans and their role in gradually “Africanising” urban street trade in the area of Eastleigh (which neighbors Mathare). This exemplified the modes in which different African groups have continuously countered social and spatial polarization in the city, from the colonial to the postcolonial period (Macharia and Van den Broeck 2016).

Despite expansion of Nairobi’s urban periphery in the early colonial era, “the emerging town did not welcome African urbanization” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 124). The “Native Pass Law” enacted in 1920 prohibited any African not formally employed from residing in Nairobi (124). Yet colonial rural policy, namely fertile “land alienation” from rural communities, pushed people, especially Kikuyu, into the city as their rural livelihoods were increasingly jeopardized. As such, the first “African hut settlements” or “villages” (later called “slums”) emerged to the north and northeast and to the west of the town center. “Landlordlism” and the consequences of unregulated urbanization grew concomitantly with the mushrooming of these “segregated communities” (125). The confluence of “inadequacies and positive qualities” that emerged in Mathare Valley during the early years following independence shaped the trajectory of urban development that went from community-led solidarity and mobilization protecting the interests of the urban poor to out-of-control exploitation of the poorest Mathare residents and of the “underutilized” land.

In the early 1970s, Nairobi became an oft-quoted example of African postcolonial urban economic transition. The 1972 International Labour Organization (ILO) report on the “informal sector” (ILO 1972) put a magnifying glass (and a label) on Kenya’s vibrant though unregulated urban economic sector a decade following colonial independence, borrowing from Keith Hart’s (1973) anthropological work on informal economic practices in Accra, Ghana. Yet despite these “transition” narratives (Ferguson and Li 2018) and their inference that informal economies were only viable if transient, Kenya’s economic activity that falls outside wage labor has comprised the majority of urban labor (Lindell 2010). Urban labor largely classified as “informal” became known locally as the jua kali sector (King 1996), a symbolic reference to the propensity of informal sector workers to operate outdoors and in ad hoc conditions (jua kali literally means “hot sun”) and the official recognition of Moi (second Kenyan president) in 1984 to deem these workers as important contributors to the Kenyan economy. Decades following the early debates about informal economies and how to describe them, let alone valorize them, informality has been conceptualized as a mode of practice and urban logics in their own right (McFarlane 2011; Roy and Alsayyad 2004), ranging from infrastructures that are centrally unplanned but locally cobbled together into makeshift arrangements of provisioning (Vasudevan 2015), to the diversification of income opportunities being a matter of everyday common sense and risk mitigation.

The characteristics of the jua kali sector have been shaped by the particular urban form of the Kenyan tenement and mabati city described in the previous section. The jua kali workers, historically comprising clusters of manufacturing and trading activities, illustrate the paradox of informality in Kenya. Exemplified during Moi’s presidency, the expansion of “corruption and lawlessness” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 141) influenced structural social and economic inequalities through the growth of the tenement market and land grabs, but it also accorded official support for the then thriving jua kali sector (King 1996). Moi became a contradictory political figure, heralded on the one hand as even more corrupt and autocratic than his predecessor and first Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, and yet demonstrative of a “human face” toward the poor.8

Moi was known, among the urban poor especially, for his “highly symbolic act” (King 1996, 1) during a visit to one of the lower-middle-income districts in 1985 when he promised all workers under the “hot sun” (jua kali) a piece of shade. Moi encouraged informal sector workers to form groups in order to apply for various forms of assistance. This was both a way of legitimizing the growing informal sector (while formal employment in the 1980s was estimated at 12.6 percent [Huchzermeyer 2011, 143]) and setting up measures to govern an otherwise variegated and unregulated economy. While Moi, like Kenyatta, encouraged entrepreneurialism and the spirit of “self-help,” they both (especially Moi) “stripped” municipal councilors and local government of power and resources, leaving behind “hampered municipal service delivery” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 143) and little control over shady land allocation and authorization of construction across the city’s low-income neighborhoods. In subsequent years, the absence of urban reform policies at the level of central government was concomitant to the inability of the municipal government to implement any meaningful infrastructural improvement in these neighborhoods. And while state-led investment and provision was patchy at best in the 1980s, the 1990s saw growth in the heavy influence and involvement of international donors, aid organizations, and consultants who came on the scene. These powerful funding bodies even started dictating the kinds of research projects local university researchers would conduct, focusing especially on “slums” without differentiating between horizontal (single story) and vertical (multistory tenement) housing structures (146), or indeed the interconnections between them.

The “Self-Help” Spirit of Mathare

In 1978, a UNICEF report, authored by Wanjiku Chiuri, set out to examine the scantly documented social and historical background of Mathare’s “squatter settlement” and considered the educational, marital, and economic status of Mathare “squatters.” In a summary of the main findings based on household interviews, the report stated that 55 percent of interviewees had received no schooling, while 84 percent had not finished primary school. The author noted a trend of single mothers who had migrated to the city from the rural areas after having children out of wedlock, in search of anonymity and a chance to raise their children away from the disapproving gaze of their kin and community. Chiuri (1978, 9) wrote, “They drifted into the city as there was no real place for them in the rural society.” Chiuri went on to specify that there were generally “very few nuclear families living together in Mathare” and that “many of these people were landless.”

The report noted that despite low levels of formal education, the prevalence of “broken homes,” and the lack of land and housing tenure, there was a strong fabric of “existing community organisation” in each of the villages of Mathare. These local organizations served as a way “to try to convince the authorities against bulldozing the community” as well as campaign for the party candidates (Kenya African National Union, KANU) of the upcoming elections following independence. According to the report, the first institution developed in Mathare, following the successful KANU elections and the local MP’s suggestion, was a nursery school admitting children from all over the valley (Chiuri 1978, 11). Every four years, village chairmen were elected, and a village committee was formed. These committees met regularly to address needs iteratively. The committee even appointed “health inspectors” whose responsibility it was to patrol the village and “order people to clean around their homes” (11).

The report described a strong “self-help spirit” that combined a sense of collective organization and mobilization toward initiatives including requesting access to the city water pipeline, collective fundraising schemes to pay for such installations and their management, and facing local authorities as a collective. Notably, the request to access the city water pipeline was “held up as it took the City Council Water Department several months to decide that ‘illegal squatters’ should not be permitted to use clean water” (Chiuri 1978, 12; Etherton 1976).

These descriptions foreshadowed the persistent strained relationship between the Nairobi City Council (later Nairobi City County) and Mathare residents who, despite continuous attempts to mobilize in an organized manner to request certain basic services or legitimize their settlement, have throughout postcolonial history been treated as unlawful residents by the local authorities, with no right to access basic municipal services. The lack of reliable basic services and infrastructure thus animated diverse coping strategies, including collective saving schemes and mobilization, and shaped alternative income opportunities particularly among formally unemployed youth. The report stated that “young boys made wheeled carts which they used to bring water down the valley, and by doing so raised some income” (Chiuri 1978, 13).

Beyond the provision of basic needs, there were also sophisticated arrangements made for the provision and funding of social amenities. By the late 1960s, one of the villages in Mathare had established a “co-operative savings and loan association” that helped construct a social hall and fund such projects as a local school, hiring educated unemployed youth as teachers, providing emergency medical funds, or other miscellaneous community expenses. The “self-help spirit” shaped a grassroots safety net that provided assistance to those most in need. As Chiuri (1978, 16) observed in her report, by 1969 “Mathare Valley had developed a community-wide institutional structure capable of mobilising relatively large resources in a short period of time to solve a myriad of problems that evolved within the community.”

The self-help spirit and necessary resourcefulness soon went beyond the provision of basic and social amenities. Many became part of cooperative networks and saving schemes, aiming to purchase the land they were “squatting” on and legitimize their tenure. Yet these community-based cooperatives faced a harsh reality: legal tenure of land did not assume legal building rights. Their mabati (shack) homes would therefore still be subject to potential demolition. In order to expand their buying power, cooperatives did two things: they accepted members from outside Mathare Valley, opting to change their status from cooperatives to “limited liability companies”; and after continuous disillusionment with their ability to negotiate with city officials, they decided to go ahead and develop as much of the open space remaining in Mathare as possible. This marked a shift in the power dynamics of Mathare Valley: the “companies” were no longer democratic community formations but rather represented the “better-off squatters and outsiders who looked at the companies as purely business enterprises” (Chiuri 1978, 17), and it marked the beginning of rapid low-income housing development that bypassed formal planning regulation. By the end of the 1960s, Mathare Valley was officially recognized as a “legal squatting area” (1978, 16), where Mathare residents would experience a paradoxical position of claim making. On the one hand, their place of residence within the squatting area was recognized; on the other hand, their housing within “illegal structures” was insecure and subject to potential evictions and unforeseen changes in rent. Additionally, the landlords’ investments in the construction of these illegal structures were equally precarious, which diminished any incentive to provide households and shared compounds with adequate basic infrastructure such as water points and toilet facilities. The form of secure housing development and investment thus became the “tenement” form, which stood alongside the mabati (shack) form. Together, these housing typologies made up the popular neighborhood.

The Kadogo Economy

In Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods, the kadogo (small) economy has come to create a pattern of daily consumption in the form of single-unit packaging when it comes to consumer goods such as food, soaps, and other daily requirements. Inherent in the meanings and practices of the kadogo economy are a set of codes that determine what benefits are valued by venders, service providers, artisans, customers, and residents. These codes can include informal arrangements such as alternative payment schemes, administering small loans, buying on credit, and bartering. They form part of what Kinyanjui (2014, 2) calls “pursuits of livelihood negotiation,” which can sometimes be embedded in local trust networks but can also “bridge socioeconomic gaps” if vendors and customers live in different communities. The logics of reciprocity and mutuality that Kinyanjui (2019) describe in her writing on Nairobi’s informal markets form systems of value exchange that enable people not just to buy and sell their goods and services but also to borrow and lend to one another—with the understanding that no matter what, negotiating the price is integral to any respectful transaction where both parties can benefit. The kadogo economy does not so much operate outside formal market economies as much as it finds ways to weave in and out of its capture. It is informal but locally regulated, inextricably linked to collective survivalism in the face of structural and intercommunity pressures, and grounded in a paradoxical logic of solidarity and tension, depending on the context.

Amid the indigenous kadogo economies of popular neighborhoods lies a vibrant economy of circulation and repair that reinserts new life in various repurposed objects and materials of all kinds—from clothing to shoes to plastic containers to all sorts of metals. This all starts from residential garbage collection. The “unruly” (Archer 2015) presence of residential garbage in popular neighborhoods is at first glance the visible proof of both municipal neglect and the contested treatment of the “brown” commons. Especially since the years of the “sachet” economy and the introduction of polythene packaging, waste has literally become part of the urban ecology of popular neighborhoods. It is woven into the tapestry of unpaved dirt paths and roads, skipped over by agile pedestrians, left to be washed away during the rains, attracts flies, and emits putrid smells during dry season or when left uncollected. Waste moves around, sometimes to ad hoc transit “dumping” sites that somehow inevitably end up near homes, schools, rivers, and footpaths.

In the 1990s, the rise of nonbiodegradable waste and continued demographic growth across Nairobi meant that demand for basic services completely outpaced the ability of the municipality to provide for the city’s residents, especially those living in popular neighborhoods (Parnell and Pieterse 2014). This propelled two parallel phenomena: the privatization of basic services in the higher-income neighborhoods and the privatization “from below” of basic services in the popular neighborhoods. In light of the increasing number of people competing for market share in the informal sector, young people whose possibilities of acquiring even modest amounts of seed capital were limited, so they carved out their own niche businesses unoccupied by elders and other established informal traders and workers. Hence, unregulated dumping of household waste provided the available resource for unemployed but opportunistic youth to render discarded materials a valuable commodity from which they could generate income, especially since no one (municipal or local residents) was really prepared to deal with the “problem” of garbage, let alone perceive its potential value. Waste therefore became a niche resource and business opportunity, such that diversifying income-generation activities around the management of waste became a widely practiced neighborhood-based, youth-led enterprise across Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods.

An important aspect of the colonial project, later echoed in the organizational logic of popular economies, was that African political and social forces were “fragmented, isolated and contained within the framework of local administrative units,” with specific efforts to prevent “horizontal linkages that could generate African opposition” (Berman 1992, 162). In the twenty-first century “slum,” the “self-help” spirit and encouragement to form civic associations (e.g., community-based organizations [CBOs]) dating back to Kenyatta’s and Moi’s eras combined with the colonial legacy of “fragmentation and isolation” has made it difficult, if not impossible to date, for community organizations to mobilize and scale their efforts. Platforms for horizontal engagement and wider network building are still a challenge and have kept even the most meaningful efforts for transformative change highly localized, small in scale, and grounded in hard-earned social ties and personality politics. It is all the more pressing, then, to better understand the significance of the small-scale initiatives that are youth-led and address the neglect of the state.

Kenyan Youth Navigating and Shaping the Self-Help City

One of the most vulnerable demographics in African cities today are young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. In Kenya, young people between ages ten and thirty-five comprise approximately half the population.9 A quarter of the population is between eighteen and thirty-five, technically of working age, although many who are younger are economically active in some way. In the decades following independence and the reclaiming of Nairobi as an African city, rural to urban migration accelerated, especially among young people in search of urban livelihoods. But given the lack of employment opportunities in the formal sector, most young migrants made their way into popular neighborhoods from where housing, income opportunities, and social networks were more accessible, albeit precarious (Huchzermeyer 2011; Saunders 2010; Yaqub 2009). As a result, youth under the age of thirty-five comprise a large majority of the urban population living in densely populated neighborhoods.

Today, residents in popular neighborhoods make a distinction between those in the hood “who came” from rural areas (watu wamecome) and those “who were born” here (watu wamezaliwa). Those who were born here feel a more emphatic sense of belonging to the mtaa. They might go “up-country” (referred to as shago in Sheng) during holidays to see elders and family relations, but they don’t necessarily spend extensive amounts of time there. For those who came to the city, many feel less rooted in the mtaa and are less likely to hang out in the streets with other age-mates. But both the youth who have come and those who were born in the mtaa find ways to form livelihood strategies outside waged employment and develop their own networks outside formal institutions.

The category of “youth” in Kenya has undergone a highly politicized history. The notion of youth has, across different cultural groups in Kenya, traditionally been associated with a time of ambition and disciplining practices, including “dramatized” enactments of the three main stages of a man’s life, from “gallant youth to mature family headship and awesome old age” (Lonsdale 1992b, 21). The transition from one stage to another assumed not only culturally contingent rites of passage (Turner 1969) but also specific accomplishments related to land, marriage, and civic life.

The economic liberalization policies of the 1990s prompted accelerated urban migration into Nairobi (Huchzermeyer 2011, 148). Among these migrants seeking opportunity and new beginnings in the city were countless young men who were either or both school dropouts and/or unable to earn a living from agricultural work alone. This created a generation of disaffected youth whose energies and aspirations informed an urban youth subculture where gang life and entrepreneurial niches overlapped considerably. Perhaps the most infamous group reflecting this nexus is the Mungiki, meaning “a united people” in Kikuyu. The Mungiki is a Kikuyu youth movement that originally emerged in the early 1990s and was motivated by principles of liberation, “defending the dispossessed: women, migrants, and landless youth” (Frederiksen 2010). Over time, members of Mungiki were seen as agitators of violence, reflecting the dangerous combination of rising discontentment among marginalized youth and politicians willing to exploit youth disaffection to spark havoc during key flash points of political tension (e.g., the 2007/8 contested presidential elections).

Research focusing on Nairobi urban youth culture and its intersection with “gang” formations includes Musambayi Katumanga’s (2005) study of what he calls the “bandit economy,” referring to Mungiki and rival gangs. Susanne Mueller’s work (2008, 192) on urban gangs expands the analysis beyond banditry by describing Mungiki as a “shadow state in some of Nairobi’s slums” providing basic security and services in the absence of state-led provisions, and a “classic capitalist operation” (193) carving out its own niche for economic advancement and recognition. Mungiki represented, therefore, an underground youth-led movement grounded in a politics of opposition that is considered today a “banned” organization, though it has been known to retain punctuated connections to both political elites and capitalist economies.

If, in other words, youth living in urban poverty could not get a “job” or secure housing, they could at least seek out modes of asserting their power, control, and creativity to shape alternative economies that bordered on licit and illicit, legal and illegal activities. These various income-generating activities would in turn serve two main purposes: an implicit critique of the state’s corrupt practices and failed municipal services; and the generation of youth-led mixed livelihoods, enabling vulnerable youth to renegotiate their terms of work, belonging, and place within the neighborhood and the city.

While the violence of Mungiki gang culture of the 1990s was quelled under Kibaki’s presidency, the Mungiki became an important symbolic reference, echoing ideologies of the Mau Mau and providing unemployed youth and school leavers with an agency and voice that could, at least in spirit, combat as well as participate in a system where power, money, and fear were critical means to advancement. Though this book does not focus on youth gang culture per se, it acknowledges that youth-led social and economic lives in popular neighborhoods are always intimately entangled with diverse youth lifeworlds and subjectivities that shape an array of street-oriented learning and knowledge. Crucially, as activist scholars Wangui Kimari (2022b) and Naomi Van Stapele (2019) argue in their own work focusing on Mathare youth, in some way whatever youth do, they are constant targets of stigma and extrajudicial violence. As a result, Kimari (2020) argues, Mathare has become stigmatized as a kind of “outlaw” settlement. Kimari (2022a) conceptualizes what she calls “outlaw spaces” as systematically criminalized and peripheralized spaces where the most marginalized (youth especially) generate novel forms of knowledge and practices, particularly around ecological justice. Whether some youth engage in activities that would be deemed “illegal” under one light or residential services under another depends on whose perspective is vocalized. Either way, these are all part of a community-based portfolio of livelihood activities, and there is a spectrum of moral codes that shape how youth get things done, get around, get by, and get ahead.

Alternative Political Language

John Lonsdale (1992a, 204) writes about the importance of identifying a usable “political language,” one that “unites people over what to argue about.” This political language not only “provides the images on which they can base their ideologies”; as researchers it also gives us a crucial window into expressions and perceptions of ideas we seek to understand and practices we seek to study. As Atieno-Odhiambo argues, Kenya’s postcolonial history has had to be

invented, assembled together, arranged around the metaphor of struggle. This metaphor entails seeking our history of the past fifty or so years as moral enterprise: against the injustice that is colonialism; against poverty, ignorance and disease; against the drudgery of rural life; against the foreignization of the cultural ecology, against the intervention of alien ideas in the indigenous discourses on nation-building. (1995, 2)

As Atieno-Odhiambo recalls, the “struggle” has been a dominant theme throughout various stages of colonial and postcolonial life, acquiring a politicized status of collective pride, especially during Kenyatta’s rule, and pertaining to various issues spanning struggles for “land for health, for housing, for water, for the environment” (2).

Inherent in youth “struggle” is their place within the working life of the city and the constant judgment concerning the legality or licit nature of their labors. Notably, although the diverse occupations of youth living in the city’s popular neighborhoods might be classified as “informal” by development economists or government officials remarking on employment statistics, most youth groups in popular neighborhoods are registered CBOs, paying dues to the Nairobi City Council (Nairobi City County from 2010). It is therefore worth questioning what constitutes “becoming legal” (Chant 2009, 174). Most youth enterprises in popular neighborhoods operate in relation to or within a youth group, and their liminal status has offered opportune entry points for organizations (NGO or private) who want to “partner” with local “entrepreneurs.” These same “entrepreneurs” might under another light become targets of harassment and stigma for local or national authorities deeming youth in the popular neighborhoods “troublemakers.” Against this backdrop where youth are hailed at different moments as either entrepreneurial “makers” or unruly “breakers” (Honwana and De Boeck 2005), narrations of hustling have become a contemporary alternative “political language” (Lonsdale 1992b) that affirms youth-led struggles and ingenuity as they endeavor to make a life, make a living, and make a mark in the city.

Contradictions of Modernity

Nairobi exemplifies the political economy of a rapidly changing landscape of twenty-first-century urbanism in all its contradictions. Its urban infrastructures have struggled to cope with rapid demographic growth over the past forty years, and in response a multitude of makeshift infrastructures and diverse economies have formed side by side. The pace of ICT innovations, speculative urban development, and international development interventions are set in sharp contrast with the uneven development experienced by the majority of off-grid residential areas cut off from reliable basic services, educational resources, and tenure security (Huchzermeyer 2011; Van den Broeck 2017; Watson 2013). Inequalities across all domains of urban life have persisted despite the transition between British colonial rule (1899–1963) and Kenyan independence (Wrong 2009). Today, the city persists with a perverse combination of unrealized master plans, techno-optimistic future urban visions (Pollio 2021), and accelerated private investment in middle- and upper-class enclaves and shopping malls, in contrast to a continually under-resourced municipality struggling to provide reliable basic services to the majority of citizens living in densely populated underserved neighborhoods like Mathare.

Against the odds, Nairobians across precarious neighborhoods have developed diverse economies alongside the more mainstream East African “success stories” of the mobile banking sector and other tech innovation. Nairobi’s vibrant entrepreneurial urbanism “from below” includes its jua kali sector of self-made welders, carpenters, and fundi (repairmen). In Kariobangi South, otherwise known as Nairobi’s “light industries,” and around the market in the area of Kamukunji, east of the CBD, there are hubs of artisanal manufacturing (especially metal and repair work) that have formed and grown since the 1970s (King 1996). As Neil Carrier’s work describes, Kenya is also home to a vibrant (albeit illicit) economy of the plant (and so-called drug) khat or miraa (Carrier 2007) and the economic trading hub of “Little Mogadishu” (Carrier 2017) in Eastleigh, Nairobi. In addition, homegrown popular cultural mediums including street art, hip-hop, and a constellation of street economies and so-called informal sector services are what make the city move and provide a crucial counternarrative to the “future city.” The “real city” (Pieterse 2011) and the “real economy” (MacGaffey 1991) of Nairobi are occupied by those who simultaneously speak of their hustle, who say they’re “around” while never standing still, and who may be formally un(der)employed but who are active in a variety of ways.

Consider the following contradictions of the postcolonial city in relation to the “petty enterprises and services” that have shaped homegrown economies in Mathare. First, there has been since independence a continuous tension between the anti-poor policies (including failure to provide public or low-income housing in the 1960s and 1970s, and the “slum demolitions” and evictions common throughout the 1980s) and the increasing recognition since the 1972 ILO mission and Moi’s symbolic recognition of the jua kali sector in the mid-1980s that despite the absence of government support, Kenya’s informal sector had become the “provider of employment, goods and services for lower-income groups, for which there was no alternative source of supply” (King 1996, 12). It was not only a thriving part of the Kenyan economy but also a much cheaper source of job creation than what the Kenyan government’s 1986 report Economic Management for Renewed Growth then called the “modern sector.” This recognition, it has been argued, might have excused and later perpetuated the “total neglect” (King 1996, 12) of the state in providing basic services in lower-income neighborhoods or formal employment opportunities, while at the same time encouraging jua kali workers to form associations of various types in order to “qualify for assistance,” including access to land, sheds, and loans (13). This also provided the state with the possibility of extracting some remuneration from these “registered” groups.

Second, the composition and evolution of the so-called informal economy, a diverse sector composed of micro-industrial enterprise, cottage industries, and various forms of self-employed work, was intimately linked to the lack of tenure security and lack of formal employment opportunities in the “modern” industrial sector. Additionally, the “non-formal education” (King 1996, 8) that provided de facto forms of training and the eventual formation of “associations” encouraged by Moi’s government shaped particular coping strategies and modalities of labor, provisioning, and self-help. The businesses of “African entrepreneurs” was also, as Kenneth King (1996, 6) describes, influenced by the “Asian businessmen” (known among my interlocutors as Wahindi) and the “small-scale India factory sector,” with a combination of “animosity towards Asian business practices” (as primary competitors and/or harsh employers) and respect for their business shrewdness. Alongside the Wahindi, the Kikuyu community became known as having a “distinctive trading culture and a business ethic,” an enterprise culture that was apparent among jua kali workers but also among matatu workers, landlords of structures in popular neighborhoods (some of whom actually lived in these neighborhoods themselves), and the wakubwa absentee landlords who were never seen around.

Third, the improvised urbanization and inadequate basic infrastructure of popular neighborhoods combined with both the “total neglect” of government and the culture of “rugged self-reliance” (King 1996, 12) shaped yet another kind of informal-sector entrepreneurship: the urban waste and sanitation sector. While the jua kali sector has been recognized by government and received some form of official support since the 1980s, it is primarily a micro-industry of blacksmiths, metalworks, and mechanics (King 1996, 22), and has become part of what is called a “site and service” industry where the business premise is as crucial to the trade itself. Indeed, Moi’s symbolic promise of “shade” inferred that these informal traders and metal workers would be accorded a space within particular estates, encouraged to register as a cooperative, and some even afforded an official PO box address. What has been less documented, however, are the “mobile” entrepreneurs of the informal sector, often composed of youth whose negotiation and boundaries of workspace are different from jua kali entrepreneurs. These youth have the freedom and inclination to roam but are bound to particular demarcations within their popular neighborhoods, where establishing social spaces for collective gathering often become crucial sites where those who work and those waiting for work coincide, scheme, and mark their place within the neighborhood.10

Life in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods has long been grounded in an “accepted informality” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 6–7) and an “incompleteness” (Guma 2020), which generate diverse infrastructural forms that pose a certain paradox: given the lack of formal regulatory measures and layers of auto-construction and improvised urbanization, there are aspects of everyday street life that continuously contend with the visible manifestation of unmetabolized waste. The piles of residential garbage and the sewage spilling from “overburdened pipes” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 5) literally infiltrate the ground on which people walk. At the same time, street life is animated with “the varied use of street facing ground floor units” (5), which are highly social and dynamic spaces of commerce, banter, and mutual aid. In a way, the decentralized basic services in these popular neighborhoods, including solid waste management, reflect Henri Lefebvre’s (2009) concept of auto-gestion, a system of self-management that was articulated as profoundly collective and always unfinished—or again, to echo Prince Guma, “incomplete,” in the generative sense, or “always in the making” (Guma 2020, 729).11 And because it is always in the making, on some days, the garbage sits in place, piling up, until it is taken away.

In the social economy of popular neighborhoods where survival either depended on or defied communal solidarity, in the absence of formal social safety nets or legal structures, any aspect of life that could be deemed shared civic responsibility or voluntary action underwent at best communal deliberation and collective mobilization (community cleanups, harambee fundraisers following tragedies, or social theme-based community events), and at worst potential neglect or violent disputes.12 The social economy of Mathare, therefore, could teeter between “cosmopolitan urbanism” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 6) and violent outbreak in the space of little time, sparked by the manipulative public rhetoric of political leadership (see Anderson 2002). On a day-to-day basis, there was a constant interplay between the vulnerabilities and socialities of life.

The next chapters build on the scholarship concerned with Nairobi’s political economy, informal economies, housing struggles, and criminalization of youth by focusing on the mixed-livelihood strategies of youth in Mathare and the multiple ways in which they make work, meaning, and place in the self-help, “outlaw” city within the city. As chapter 3 explains, this started with the shared understanding that individual youth in popular neighborhoods had little power, but as collectives, youth groups had a powerful voice. With a space from which to organize as well as spend time, they devised plans and made deals. One notable example of this has been how youth have turned trash into cash.