A Brief Reflection on My Time in Nairobi

Some level of taking stock is inevitable upon closing a chapter of one’s life, and now, sitting on my bed on the night of my final departure from Nairobi, I have been overwhelmed by a desire to reflect – not so much on the impact of Nairobi on my life trajectory, but on the colourful details that have made up my day to day life, which will, from as early as tomorrow morning, begin to recede into ever darker recesses of my memory.

One thing people often ask about when they contemplate moving to Nairobi is safety. Many still have a vivid memory of the 2013 massacre by al-Shabaab in Westgate Shopping Mall and their 2019 attack on the DusitD2 complex. While al-Shabaab is now mostly confined to Kenya’s border with Somalia, images of dying civilians still send shockwaves throughout the world. Dozens of people were killed in anti-government protests both in 2024 and 2025. In neighbouring Tanzania, hundreds to thousands were killed in the 2025 Election Crisis, numbers that put this event in the same league as the crisis that followed Mwai Kibaki’s election as President of Kenya in 2007.

Expatriates in Kenya are little touched by recent episodes of violence. During the protests, many of us were simply told to work from home while the city centre became a battleground. My neighbours and I heard some scattered gunshots as far north as Runda at the time, but few felt any sense of real, imminent danger. If expatriates in Nairobi live with any fear for their safety, it is the fear of their house being robbed or of their being kidnapped by a rideshare driver. I have heard a few stories about both, including one in which robbers tied up a family at knifepoint. At the same time, I never met anyone who personally knew a person kidnapped by a driver, and personally, I lived in Nairobi with no fear at all. If burglars did try to rob the compound where I stayed, they would target the big family mansion in the middle of the garden much sooner than my one-storey outhouse that could barely fit a closet.

Speaking of transport, a major fixture of my life in Kenya was my complete reliance on rideshare apps. I am told Nairobi used to have reliable public transport decades ago, but cronyism and the city’s rapid expansion decimated it. Nowadays, many people rely on private matatus, which range from the size of a large van or minibus to a regular bus, and which are known for their reckless driving. It is said that one reason why public transport has been left to decay is the powerful matatu lobby. It seems to me that corruption and the oligopolisation of the transportation system would explain its inefficiency: every single workday, the city centre fills with massive, slow-moving queues for these mid-distance services.

Matatus are uncommon if non-existent in some of Nairobi’s more residential areas, where many people either drive or employ their own drivers. Junior-level and short-term expatriates tend to use rideshare apps, while many an adventurous intern will buy a helmet and become a regular client of a boda – a motorcycle taxi. I took a motorcycle on my first day when I simply could not catch a car ride from my accommodation in Ruaka, and I promptly decided never to do it again. Nevertheless, the experience did provide me with an early opportunity to show off some rudimentary Swahili as I told my driver “Pole, pole, naogopa,” which means, “Slowly, slowly, I am scared.”

The rideshare experience in Kenya is quite different from other countries. When a driver accepts a ride, he (and it is generally a he) does not see where his customer wants to go; he only sees how much money he will receive. Thus, it often happens that upon arriving, a driver may ask a customer where he wants to go, and if the answer does not satisfy him, he refuses the ride. Generally, however, this conversation happens by chat on the app or by phone call. Drivers love to make phone calls, often just to announce that they are on their way, which is why throughout my entire stay in Kenya, I kept my overseas number on all the rideshare apps. Of course, because of the rules of Kenyan politesse, even a conversation by chat never gets straight to the point. The driver first says hello and inquires how their customer is doing before proceeding to ask what they want to know.

If the driver has the radio on, there is about a one in five chance that it will be playing gospel music or some kind of Christian talk show. The hosts offer a range of advice – some good, some questionable. One memorable radio host, for instance, encouraged boundless forgiveness no matter the circumstance while also encouraging gay people to pray that God will set them on the right path. My favourite piece of advice actually came from a morning talk show on a political radio, which made a very empowering point: “Ladies, why do you wait for your man to get out of jail, when he would not even wait for you to return from a business trip?”

I suspect that these kinds of programmes find a wide-open niche in Kenyan culture, as people love giving advice and offering unsolicited observations. Sometimes, these observations border on what one might consider rude in another culture – even in the culture of a neighbouring country. Indeed, one of the more surprising things I have observed during my travels is just how different these cultures are. Around the Great Lakes, politeness involves speaking at a very low volume and, in some places, giving things with the right hand while holding the elbow with the left. I was taught that this gesture was common in Swahili countries as well, but Kenya seems to have mostly lost that degree of formality. Still, people are not as laid back as they are in, say, Mozambique. If anything, people in the slightest position of authority can be quite happy to flex it.

In contrast to some of its neighbours, Kenya has a relatively numerous middle class that likes to spend money. Higher-end restaurants are not just full of tourists and expatriates, and the restaurants themselves are generally of very solid quality. Indeed, it is hard to come across such good Indian food in the UK, where Indian restaurants are numerous but cater to rather undiscerning and unadventurous tastes. Unfortunately, food is not as cheap as it is in, say, Southeast Asia, so eating out daily is unfeasible.

With regards to food, Kenya’s major boon is its abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables. Never again will I buy as many mangoes and avocadoes as cheaply as I used to in Kenya – even though I did my shopping at the local Naivas or Carrefour rather than from the wooden stalls along the roads. Driving through the more densely populated parts of Nairobi, one is bound to come across these stalls: bananas hang in bunches from their roofs, and their displays overflow with tomatoes, onions, watermelons and cartons of eggs, which are often left out in the sun. One thing that shocked me when I returned to Kenya from the UK was how battered the bananas seemed in Kenyan supermarkets in comparison to those in Europe. I imagine it might be because many fruits in Europe come from Kenya, and those that are destined for export tend to be better looking and better kept.

With such an abundance of fruits and vegetables, it comes as no surprise that Nairobi is such a green city. Kenya may be a land known for its savannahs, but swathes of the country – especially around the Great Lakes, are incredibly lush and fertile. Nairobi itself benefits from its high altitude, which makes the weather pleasant year-round, perhaps with the exception of the European summer months, when it becomes quite dreary and the houses without adequate insulation turn bone-chillingly cold.

Kenya has two rainy seasons, which are typified by expensive taxis and rampant power cuts. The year before I came, the rain was so bad that major roads got completely flooded, and only cars with a high clearance could wade their way through parts of the city. The rains are also the reason why many foreign employers require employees to install an alternative power source in their homes, which usually means either a generator or a relatively less expensive inverter hooked up to a battery. With a limit to how much I could get for my reimbursement, I naturally decided for an inverter. What it does is still a bit of a mystery to me. There are two types of electric current: alternating and direct, and an inverter changes one to the other while a converter does the opposite. I always forget which is which. Anyway, during this process, the inverter can store some extra power when hooked up to a battery, so while it does not create power per se, it helps keep the essentials running during a blackout.

I had received my landlady’s permission to install an inverter without really understanding what the process entailed. I remained calm as the technician fiddled around in the electric box while sparks kept flying out in bursts, and only became properly consternated when the power went off and we had to go ask where the mains were. As soon as the technician started hammering nails into the wall, I grew pale and began to wonder whether all I would gain in my housing subsidy would be swallowed by repairs. Fortunately, this did not happen. Upon leaving Nairobi, I decided to leave the inverter behind to the utmost joy of my landlady, who wrote to me several times afterwards to thank me for it.

The relationship between me and my landlady was another strange Nairobi phenomenon. The first day of every month, I would invariably wake up to no Wi-fi, as my landlady would always forget to renew the subscription. I also never saw her the entire time I was there. All my communication with my landlady was by WhatsApp, and when anything was broken, she asked the one-man show of a guard, gardener, and handyman to fix it. The only thing this man did not do was the cleaning and washing. That was done by a lady who seemed to never know the day of the week, or else used it as an excuse to show up whenever she wanted – and not to show up when I most needed it.

I once returned home early from work and I found the cleaning lady’s child sleeping by my desk. I figured I would wait outside and wait for her to return with the laundry, but as she was leading her boy out the door, she casually remarked, “there’s another one in there.” I peered inside again and indeed, sleeping on the carpet in the corner of the room was an even smaller child. This child, as I continued working outside, eventually woke up, and once it staggered up to the door frame, it began to cry while peeing on the floor. Fortunately, the battery stood on a platform made of Styrofoam.

The one other responsibility the cleaning lady had was to eliminate the cockroaches in my outhouse. I had complained about them a few times, and my landlady said she would have someone take care of them for me. It took me a few weeks to realise what this really meant: every time she stopped by, the cleaning lady would spray a few whiffs of bug repellent behind the couch and call it a day. Thus, I had to become a cockroach hunter myself. Every few days, I would spot a cockroach and clobber it to death with a flip flop, after which I would flush it down the toilet. I disposed of cockroaches on non-flat surfaces with bug spray, which made them run around frantically for a while before expiring under furniture that I would then have to move. Not a single cockroach escaped me.

Eventually, the cockroaches disappeared, though I suspect this might have been more related to the weather turning colder rather than to my extermination skills. The colder weather also meant that I would have to deal with fewer mosquitoes at night. Many houses in Nairobi are built with shoddy insulation, which poses a problem not just for keeping a place warm during the winter, but also for keeping mosquitoes out when the lights are turned on. Over time, I developed several stratagems for eliminating them. One was to simply lie in bed for a few minutes and wait for a mosquito to start circling around my head. I would then get up, turn the lights on, and usually find the mosquito right on my bedpost.

There were a few times, however, when this simple stratagem did not work, and I could not find the mosquito after turning on the light. This was when I developed two further variants of the trap: the first was to lie awake with the computer turned on, which invariably ended up attracting the mosquito straight onto the screen. The second was to sleep hugging a can of bug spray and to whip it out as soon as the discordant buzzing drew close to my ear. Though I can boast of a very high success rate with these ploys, I am still very glad that Nairobi’s altitude keeps malaria at bay.

The last type of insect life with whom I had to contend was the humble ant. I found out the hard way that leaving any sweets, biscuits, or indeed, any sugar in the pantry meant that sooner or later, a long line of ants would form across the counter leading straight towards it. Killing ants, of course, is not easy. The easiest solution I found to the ant problem was to take all my things – biscuits, sugar, and even the trash (this last one being more attractive to cockroaches) – and sticking them all in the fridge. It felt like hiding bottles from an alcoholic but I could not argue with the results: the ants grew convinced that I had no food and left.