The watembezi and wazi-wazi: Nairobi had prostitutes in the 1880s as well

Prostitutes park along a street to search for customer

Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. But that’s not the reason why prostitutes were the earliest black Kenyans settlers in Nairobi.

The city began to take shape around the late 1890s with the coming of the Uganda Railway to Nairobi. And as Luise White informs us in her 1990 effort, ‘The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Kenya,’ there was an outbreak of famine due to rain failure in most parts of Central and Eastern Kenya. A locust attack on crops led to hunger. Livestock was depleted.