Segregationist town planning and the emergence of African political protest in colonial Nairobi, 1899--1939

Abstract

This study discusses contestations over segregationist town planning in Nairobi. It argues that the built environment this form of planning gave rise to largely influenced the patterns of African nationalist protest in the inter-war period. Segregation and the establishment of African locations at a distance from European residences and commercial areas, backed up by neglect in service provision to these areas and by a laissez-faire administrative approach to implementing important decisions relating to Africans, all facilitated a convergence of African political protests outside the purview of effective colonial surveillance. In part, this explains why Mau Mau was a surprise in some quarters of the colonial system. To facilitate this analysis, I use the sanitary factor to explain how the built environment and spatial organization of the town took their specific forms. At the center of segregationist town planning were European concerns about disease, sanitation and public health. The study highlights the role of plague in the settler rhetoric about sanitation and how the practice of town planning was influenced by fears of plague by the settler population in the town. This therefore is as much a study in the social implications of medical policy as it is about the spatial consequences of colonial town planning. It concludes that the residential makeup of Nairobi encouraged interactions among Africans and Asians that largely took place outside the framework of colonial control thereby allowing new forms of collective action that benefited principally from the towns' spatial organization.