Unplanned development: 'The place of cool waters' was never meant to be a city but a railway town

Nairobi’s central business district skyline, a growing hub for executive-level corporate networks and regional business leadership in East Africa. File, Standard]

In the beginning, there was the swamp. The Maasai called it enkare nyrobi —“the place of cool waters”, where they brought their cows to drink before retreating to their manyattas beyond the Empakasi plains.

In 1899, Ronald Owen Preston and his gang of plate-layers for the Uganda railway landed on the swamp and decided to set up a depot in the inhospitable spot teeming with wildlife. But Preston was a daring man.

Just a year earlier, he, together with fellow engineer John H Patterson, had come face to face with the ferocious ‘man-eaters of Tsavo’, two lionesses that had a fetish for human flesh and that had managed to put a halt to the railway construction. Preston usually succeeded where others failed.

But Preston was little prepared for the brutal environment around the swamp and said as much with unflattering words in his book, The Genesis of Kenya Colony, published in 1947.

“A bleak, swampy stretch of soggy landscape, windswept, devoid of human habitation of any sort, the resort of thousands of wild animals of every species. The only evidence of the occasional presence of humankind was the old caravan track skirting the bog-like plain,” he wrote.

Still, the Uganda Railway demanded a depot, and the swamp was chosen. Perhaps Nairobi was never meant to be a city.

According to the Uganda railway developers, the relocation of the provincial administration offices under Colonel Ainsworth from Machakos to Nairobi at the end of the 19th Century was not welcomed by the former, who had exclusive right to allocate land around Nairobi.

Later, the protectorate moved the headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi, creating more conflicts between the railway and government administrators.

“The railway authorities did not view this decision kindly. According to the Uganda Railway, Nairobi was to be a railway town and nothing more,” states a document prepared by the municipal council in 1948 titled, Nairobi Master Plan for a Colonial Capital.

“The idea that it would develop into an important city was not entertained by those in authority. Persons with expert knowledge of the subject of the laying out of towns were not available and the result was that development proceeded in haphazard fashion,” stated the document that lay the groundwork for the first major urban plan for Nairobi.

Winston Churchhill, then the undersecretary in the Colonial Office, had stated that though the site lent itself to a railway depot, “it enjoys no advantages as a residential site”.

By 1948, Nairobi had grown to have a population of 100,000 with an average of 2,000 migrants annually, bringing with them attendant problems as a result of this unplanned human settlement.

This presented challenges to the colonial powers who even mulled reducing any settlement here by pushing future developments away from the present-day capital.

“Should Nairobi be allowed to accumulate more industries and more population, or should further enterprise be pushed away into the countryside, leaving Nairobi the far-flung, sparsely populated and open-air place it is at present?” the document states.

This was not the first time for some colonial government officials to clamour for total removal of the fledgling township from the present to another location further up. Between 1902 and 1904, Nairobi was hit by two bubonic plague outbreaks that killed dozens of people. The authorities responded by burning down the Indian bazaar to control the spread of the disease while the then health officer, Dr. W. H Macdonald sent a dispatch to London with recommendations to abandon Nairobi altogether.

J. W. Pringle, a railway engineer put it bluntly: “As a station site, the level ground commend itself to a railway engineer. As the future capital of East Africa and for permanent buildings for Europeans, the sanitary engineer and the medical expert condemn it.”

In London, the unsuitability of the site as the location of a future city created more heat than light with a number of legislators weighing in with their preferences for and against Nairobi.

The issue of poor drainage owing to the presence of black cotton soil that became soggy during the rains and thus difficult to drain and set up permanent structures compounded the site’s suitability as a construction site before the era of heavy machinery that could excavate deeper.

By 1906, London gave up the quest for relocation with leaders urging local authorities to make the best of what was termed as a bad job to begin with. “It is now too late to change, and thus lack of foresight and comprehensive view leaves its permanent imprint upon the countenance of a new country,” said Winston Churchhill.

And so, Nairobi started to grow without a proper plan and with all the inherent problems, especially poor sanitation that saw more plague breakouts. Successive city regimes have tried to tame that which they could not erase with mixed results. In any case, Nairobi was never meant to be a city after all.