I’ve long struggled with what to say about Nairobi’s walls and what they mean for the city. I’ve been chipping away at these photos since I first arrived, the newest ones are from the last few weeks.
I like Nairobi and don’t want to do a negative post and this is really not meant as one.
But we need to talk about the walls.
Not just walls. High ones. Everywhere. I learned early on that anything resembling first-world prosperity is behind walls. Topped with barbed wire and/or electric fencing. Beautiful garden restaurant? Plenty of them, but you breach the walls through a security gate. Posh housing? Same. Shopping mall? Same, and your car gets searched going in, every time. Pretty much any new development includes a wall.
They are pervasive but generally not spoken about. The walls are just accepted as a part of the disjointed urban fabric. And they are not going away.
To me, more than anything they are a clear and obvious symptom of Nairobi’s income inequality. Even as wealth has increased here, it’s all for the upper (and sometimes middle) class, plus of course the sizable international community. A statistical majority of Nairobians are poor, with informal settlements (aka slums) throughout the city, often in close proximity to affluent housing and development. How do you think that’s going to go? Especially in a city where public policing technically exists but is unlikely to help you in an emergency. In a city that is more like Dickens’ two cities, the ultimate crime deterrent - and social insulator - for the well-off is a big, nasty wall.
I would even say it’s a cautionary tale for a world with increasing wealth disparities pretty much everywhere. This is where it leads when you don’t invest in the well-being of ordinary people.
Still, proper stats are slippery and the actual need for walls varies depending on who you ask:
A middle-aged Kenyan guy tells you how bad crime used to be but how much better things are now. Over dinner at a comfortable Indian restaurant in a colonial-era estate, a Canadian expat - who came from a stint in Lagos, where she said everyone had a crime story - says no one she knows after eight years here has a crime story.
Then she told me not to walk around with my camera.
There’s definitely a tension between perception and reality. The US embassy sends out mildly alarming alerts sometimes about worst-case scenario safety precautions. When you live in the expat bubble of areas like Westlands, Gigiri, or Karen, driving from gated housing to gated shopping and gated events, such alerts can feel abstract. Crime rates are generally negligible.
A young Kenyan photographer friend, who shoots all over the city, tells me he’s had to fend off potential camera-snatchers several times. But then again he’s on the streets everyday - both in chaotic central Nairobi and Kibera, the largest slum - so relatively speaking is that a good or bad anecdotal stat? And still he loves Nairobi.
Another Kenyan photographer shrugs and tells me the walls are simply for ‘controlling the space’, preventing squatters and such. It’s true that it’s not just about crime. Due to rapid development and weak zoning enforcement, sometimes a wall is the only thing stopping informal structures from popping up on your land overnight.
The walls also create the zone where the two cities meet - in a city that has been described as ‘fortress urbanism’, the rough, liminal space in the setback between wall and street is some of the only usable common space. The informal economy often sets up shop hard against the fortress. A zone of contradiction in a city of contradiction.
Apparently the walls began emerging at pace about 25 years ago in a city that was then more open but becoming more dangerous. People here will tell you, oh yeah crime used to be pretty bad. Like what we sometimes associate with Johannesburg. Maybe worse. Then they say how much better it has gotten. Is it better because of the walls?
Nairobi is one of the fastest growing cities on the continent. At the moment, all that development has walls baked into it for the foreseeable future. What kind of city will that be? Who will ever be the first to take them down?