There is a kind of urban road race that takes place on the streets of Kanairo every day. It is called getting from here to there. No one follows rules here, or there. People in nganyas are on the wrong lane, people on bicycles with Glovo food deliveries almost knock you down, people with trolleys will push you out of the way, people on nduthis want your head on a platter, people on foot will step on you, and not in the name of love. No one wins.
Nobody is on the same side. It is every man for himself, and every woman, too, and every car, and every bike and every trolley. Nairobi is a city that in dreams or donor funded NGOs works beautifully, and in daily life is a brutal gantlet. You can be a resident of Nairobi for years, and yet be an outsider.
Nothing makes you feel more of a you-can-visit-but-not-stay outsider more than the Hilton Hotel—a dilettante that posseses neither the cocky arrogance of the Villa Rosa nor the street-smart shadiness of The Ambasseduer. I have passed by the Hilton numerous times, always at the periphery, never inside. That this is the nerve centre of Nairobi makes it even more damning, the G-Spot of CBD, but somehow, something feels off and you just can’t put a finger on it.
It’s a shame then, never having been inside the Hilton, except its arcade, that muhindi shop where they sell gifts at throwaway prices. But I heard that despite kanjo water problems, Hilton had pressure for all its twenty-something floors; and that Nairobi dandies would bring in yellow yellow babes with flat bellies like an African python for tabia mbaya—but sshhh, me I don’t know, I just heard.
Nairobi is loud but when you enter the Hilton, everything went silent, they said. This city can be noisy, especially if you don’t have money. For the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—you contend with imagining how the Hilton is from the inside. The rich love serenity. The rest love sherehe.
Now that the Hilton is closing (closed?) I can’t help but feel nothing, like an ex after an amicable parting, it’s nice to see them on the rare occasions we cross paths, albeit with a slight sense of wistfulness at what might have been.
But this is what Nairobi does best—tear down its past leaving no trace of its history. Nairobi is the home of the throwaway—buildings, appliances and people. Because Nairobi is a penal colony. Box on box, beside box. Part Troy, part mall. The buildings and offices are natural moats keeping the maniacs in, and the rest of the country relatively safe.
Despite the Hilton Nairobi opening here on December 17th, 1969, I have only ever been to their spa area—to pick up a voucher.
With its soupçon of eccentricity; it’s a shame that an iconic building’s absence will be its biggest presence. That’s how this city recreates itself: Some things we save, but most we do not, with this generation leaving to the future what past generations left to us: the question, never satisfactorily answered, of what the street I am walking on was like 20 years ago, 50, 100.
Now I pass there with compunction, and everything falls silent for a moment, or maybe you just do not hear for a moment. Then the sounds return: the angry words croaked into a cellphone by a man who has just received that Friday “Leo sikuji” text; the footsteps of a paunched man carrying a brown envelope—the dealmakers of Nairobi; and as you jump over a pothole, the sound of a trolley almost scissoring your legs off.
#chinedutales
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