Rockin' the Suburbs

Yesterday morning, I moved out of Nairobi city center into the Guesthouse of Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood, a lodging run by a German Catholic Religious Order in the Nairobi suburb of Westlands. Its somewhere in quality between a hostel and a hotel, and for 1800 Kenyan shillings (approximately 25 US Dollars) a night, is definitely the best value of the three places I’ve stayed so far. Unfortunately they’re already completely booked up when the high tourist season picks up in a few weeks, meaning that I can’t make it my long term home, but with its beautiful gardens, friendly staff, and good hearty German-style meals (taking me back to my days as an exchange student in Altoetting) its going to be a pleasant base of operations as I look for a more permanent place to stay in this area.

When I say suburbs, those of you reading from the States probably think of images of sprawled sub-developments, strip malls, and SUV’s. While these photos definitely hint at the fact that “suburban” in Africa means something different than it does America, they hardly can convey just how big that difference is. Let me try to illustrate with an anecdote; the headquarters of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which has been kind enough to give me a desk and some logistical support here, is situated about 10 km outside of the city center, meaning it definitely falls within what should easily be called “suburban-Nairobi”. However, the area around ILRI is covered with rolling, grass covered hills that remind me strongly of the less residential areas of Lancaster County. At one point, I remarked to David, a graduate-affiliate at ILRI that I’ll be working with while I’m here, that seeing the countryside was pleasant relief from downtown Nairobi; he gave me a quizzical look and then smiled broadly and said, “You haven’t seen the countryside yet”. (In related news, on Saturday, I’m going to visit David in Kitengela, a Maasai community about an hour southwest of Nairobi where he does his primary field work; my sense is that even that may not qualify as countryside).

While I can’t quite put my finger on it just yet, my intuition is that the major difference between “classic” suburbanization in the U.S. and what is called by the same name here has to do with the relative lack of a middle class in Kenya. There is a massive slum about halfway between Westlands and the ILRI campus. The first time I drove past it, I saw what seemed like miles of corrugated steel shanties, cobbled together market kiosks, and thousands of people milling about on both sides of (and across) a four lane highway, and I thought to myself, “This must be that big, famous slum that I’ve heard about that’s so terrible”. As I passed it again, later that day, when one of the ILRI researchers was giving me a ride back into town, she remarked, “So, this is Kangemi- its one of the middle class slums”. When you’re in a place where “middle class slum” isn’t an oxymoron, you know that there’s a damn good chance that many words that you assumed to have completely unproblematic definitions in fact don’t mean anything near what you think they mean.