Is Nairobi's Storied History Quietly Disappearing?

If distinctive architecture marks a great city, then, Nairobi, chief among the great capitals of the continent, has plenty to appreciate. Unfortunately, faced with the urgent needs of development, the preservation of its historical buildings has often been overlooked.

- Marie Shabaya

Nairobi, as some may know it, presents a bewildering range of architectural styles. Influences conflict from religion and the decadence of imperial culture to the studied modernism of post-independence and the synthesized futurism of late.

Yet, even in this dazzling array of constructed expression, the city’s architecture will not be recommended by many, if any, of its locals.

One might notice that a lot of the older buildings, some survived from the colonial era and others erected in the fleeting euphoria of post-independence, are taken for granted. Their relevance now narrowly defined by current occupants and not by what they were and how they came to be.

The more anonymous international style towers made of glass and steel that define the city skyline enjoy more frequent limelight, locating the ambitions of a modern African city in an increasingly globalized world.

This attitude has been explained by a popular theory frequently offered in the niche but studied debate within Kenyan architecture. One that often dominates any headline to do with the designs of the capital.

Evelyne Wanjiku, an aficionado of African architecture and co-author of a book on the history of Nairobi’s buildings, lambasted the tastes of her fellow countrymen as a crisis in the city’s property fashions.

“Buildings in Nairobi are a testimony to the influences of various industrialized countries. A walk around the city reveals buildings of British, Indian, and even Dutch influence,” she notes in a particularly disgruntled article in one of the papers of record, Daily Nation.

Beyond the alien persuasions of the Nairobi skyline, she says that even the well-to-do homeowners in the country reinforce this pattern through the “Victorian houses or fancy Tuscany structures” that they have built for themselves.