IN THE ‘NEW’ BEGINNING
Majengo is synonymous with the history of Islam in Nairobi. From the early 1900s, the majority of African migrants into colonial Nairobi were Muslims--or Muslim converts. They hailed from all over East Africa: coastal Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Majengo's residents were mostly veterans of the First World War: porters, guards, interpreters, servants and soldiers. They created such settlements as Mji wa Mombasa ("Little Mombasa") and Mji wa Unguja ("Little Zanzibar").
Majengo was founded by women who also dominated its nascent property market. …
It was in 1899 that Nairobi was founded with Kenya-Uganda Railway reaching the business centre and it being turned to the headquarters. Thus Masaku (Machakos) gave way to Nairobi as the new Provincial headquarters and Mvita (Mombasa) followed by, ceding its capital status in 1908.
The current city centre was the nucleus of Nairobi. Segregated from the on-set, a number of plagues out-break proved it unhealthy to have residential areas at the city centre. This was effected with such a plaque out-break in the Asians section in 1901. Westlands, Muthaiga, Karen – Ngong was white, Parklands was yellow and blacks in slum villages in the East where the rivers flooded, hence suffering from floods and mosquitoes – a common thing in other colonial cities as Accra - Ghana.
Some of the African slums were; Pangani, Marikini, Kariokor, Kileleshwa and ‘Mombasa’. Lack of water in these villages meant poor sanitation that led to frequent plagues. This forced a 1913 commission under Prof. Simpson to recommend further racial segregation of residential areas. In 1917 saw all those villages cleared and in 1923 Africans were wholesomely bundled at Pumwani.
Scarcity of housing and poor pay meant Africans couldn’t live with their families here in the capital town. Louise White, in her book, Prostitution in Nairobi – Domestic Labour in Colonial Kenya, states that this ancient trade was in fact encouraged by the white administration because it was four-fold; it ensured men appetite were satisfied thus labour was still available, too, labourer had to work to afford these women’s comfort. The women also received income from their services since women then were not employable. Needless to say, venereal diseases were a constant menace then.
In 1950, Nairobi got a city status but a report on African Housing in Townships and Trading Centres, by E.A. Vasey, looked to be endorsing these deplorable housing conditions for the natives. This was so because he stated that, not workers’ companies but ‘in the building by the African of houses for himself or for the accommodation of other Africans.’
World War to rendered Britain weak and broke hence not so great! She survived on U.S.A’s Marshall Plan – an economic aid scheme that benefitted the war weary nations of the west that had been badly bruised by the woes. Strings attached to this aid were amongst other, decolonisation and humane treatment of the colonised. Amongst directions to Britain, was, she increases her capital expenditure on the welfare of the colonised masses. Gimmickry, Britain came up with Colonial Development and Welfare Programme.
Pumwani Memorial Hall – UKUMBUSHO, was erected as a communal building to serve as African social life centre. A library, lecture and dance halls and an adjoining beer-hall were amongst the facilities here-in.
Shauri Moyo, as a Hobson Choice (the choice of taking what is offered or nothing at all) was thereafter built. This was on the former Pangani village site. A hundred plots were here set for more advanced Africans to build their own houses. Indeed this was still a crown land that Africans had only been leased to.
Gorofani Scheme for double storey African housing materialised with the proposals for employers’ housing.
Urbanization in Kenya
As early as 1899 in eastern Kenya, when no legal system actually governed the area, twenty-five Maasai “loose women” built huts and were taxed on them by the Imperial British East Africa Company. A few years later in Nairobi, women built huts, divided them into rooms, and lived in one and let the others at high rents. Within a few years, women were speculating in the city’s burgeoning property market.
. By the mid-1920s, half of Nairobi’s African property owners were women, almost all said to be prostitutes who had bought or built their houses with earnings from such work. Although the colonial state recognized the value of landlords who were also prostitutes—they had every reason to keep the peace, and their acquisitiveness kept labor circulating faster than pass laws did—officials were ambivalent about the social life that had emerged outside of colonial control, and the sense of community and stability it imparted to urban Africans in a city designed for European residence.
The solution, worked out in committees between 1912 and 1915, was to allow Europeans freehold throughout the city and Africans usufruct in one small and poorly drained portion of it. In the official African location, Pumwani, finally established in 1921, plots could be transmitted to heirs but not bought and sold. The creation of one legal settlement made the two remaining African settlements illegal and had the effect of making housing in both places functionally usufruct, as few people were willing to buy houses that could be demolished at a moment’s notice.
The threat of removal in Kileleshwa (demolished in 1926) and Pangani (demolished in 1939) meant that few Africans would be willing to buy houses there. The state’s ambivalence did not stop at usufruct, however: between 1912 and 1939, it made several attempts at landlordism, housing railway and municipal employees on their own estates, which rapidly became slums. Finally, the state borrowed the money to build an extension to Pumwani in 1939.
WAZIMA MOTO
Stories, in which the men of the Nairobi Fire Brigade, black men employed by white men, captured people and removed their blood, were her told.
Stories about the wazima-moto began in Nairobi at the end of World War I. Most people said the practice ceased by the end of World War II. On the whole, men told stories about being captured, or almost captured, when they were out alone, and women told stories about the particular vulnerability they faced when they lived alone. These stories survived thirty and forty years after the events they described; indeed, in the late 1970s, these stories were told with excitement, enthusiasm, and care. Other rumors were not that important, and they did not last.
Most of people said that the wazima-moto stopped taking blood in 1939, when Pangani, the oldest African settlement in Nairobi “was broken.” A few said it continued into the early 1940s and died out by 1942 or 1943. Women who came to Nairobi during World War II heard that the wazima-moto sucked African blood; “but later I learned that they just put out fires,” Sara Waigo said.
When and where were women safe from vampires? Amina Hali, born in what was to become Nairobi in the 1890s, spoke of the time between 1921 and 1926, when the three settlements she names coexisted:
Things were alright here in Pumwani but Pangani and Kileleshwa were dangerous places for a woman to live alone because she was in danger of being attacked by men from the wazimamoto.…they would come to Pangani and Kileleshwa in the afternoon and they would go with a woman, and pay her, and this way they would find out which woman lived alone and which ones did not, and they would come back at night and do their work.…these people carried sort of a rubber sucking tube that they would stick into your hands while you were asleep and draw the blood out of your body and leave you there, and eventually you would die.
Not every woman who lived in the legal location of Pumwani thought it safe, however. Kayaya Thababu came to Pumwani in 1926. She described the skills and strategies of wazima-moto and how defenseless women were:
Question: Did you ever hear stories about wazimamoto?
Answer: Yes, they used to come in the night, they were a special danger to women who stayed alone, they would come into the room very softly and before you knew it they put something on your arm to draw out the blood, and then they would leave you and they would take your blood to the hospital and leave you for dead.
Question: Couldn’t you scream for help?
Answer: They put bandages over your mouth, and also, these people who worked for wazimamoto, they were skilled, so if they found you asleep they could take your blood so quietly that you would not wake up, in fact you would never wake up.
Question: Did this ever happen to you or one of your neighbors?
Answer: No but I heard about it a lot.
Question: When?
Answer: Before the coming of the Italians [i.e., before 1940].
Question: Were you frightened of them? How did you make sure they didn’t come to your room at night?
Answer: I was very frightened and there was no way to be sure they would not come, but when the fighting of the Italians ended they stopped coming for blood. But if you had a boyfriend staying with you at night you were safe, because they were afraid of waking two people.
Other women simply negotiated with the wazima-moto: “They came when I was all alone and I told them there were people outside I lived with. I could not have told them I lived alone, otherwise they would have taken my blood and left me to die,” said Kibibi Ali.
Nevertheless, living alone, especially in the legal location, gave some women some specific advantages. By the 1930s, many childless prostitutes—women who had lived alone—designated heirs to houses they had purchased or built in Pumwani. Usufruct gave to urban mud huts the same qualities as land: access to ownership could be secured through an intimate relationship. But even in Nairobi, women’s property rights were more problematic than men’s.
According to a Muslim woman, Tamima binti Saidi, “It has always been difficult for women to inherit property, even in Pumwani the District Commissioner had to be called in when a woman left everything to her daughter, even if she had no sons.” Nevertheless, women in Nairobi utilized unwieldy state intervention to control their properties. For example, if a childless woman did not formally designate an heir “on the paper that allowed her to own the building,” then the Nairobi Municipal Council would “take over the building” when she died, becoming the owner and letting the rooms. Yet many women did just that, bluntly rejecting kinship ties: it was by careful deliberation that they guaranteed that their property would not go to the families into which they had been born.
Childless women most often designated as their heirs young women they had sheltered in town or brought from their rural homes. They were almost never blood kin, and to the best of my knowledge, the designated heirs were never males. These relationships, between women of different generations, had specified rights and obligations and conferred specified duties and privileges. According to Tabitha Waweru, born in Pumwani in 1925:
Some women were really rich, and when they became old, because they didn’t have any family living around Nairobi, that old woman could choose another woman and tell everyone “This is my heir.” She would have to love you, really, to do that for you, but it happened a lot. To become an old woman’s heir, you would have to cook for her, clean for her, wash her clothes for her, everything. Then one day this old woman will take the young woman to the DC’s office and say, “This is my daughter, I want her to get my property when I die”…and the DC would write it down; that’s how a lot of women got plots in Pumwani. A lot of women in Pumwani did this, they befriended old women, and they got property this way.
Such filiations were as binding as ties of birth. But the various strategies by which such filiations were achieved were as dangerous as they were empowering. In the same interview Tabitha Waweru said that the wazimamoto employed prostitutes to find victims: “They didn’t just take blood from men; sometimes a prostitute would invite another woman to spend the night, and then the wazimamoto would come for her, for her friend.”
How could a young woman know why an older woman befriended her? Would she be made an heir, or would she be sold to wazimamoto? The fact that both kinds of stories coexisted was not a contradiction; it was what was crucially important about them—both sorts of stories, frequently heard, depicted the complications of being female, alone, and propertyless in colonial Nairobi and the contradictory nature of any relationship that could bestow property within the law in the city.
Indeed, these stories also reflected the contradiction by which filiation worked: in rural, patrilineal East Africa, mother-child ties could only be strengthened within the bonds of marriage, not outside them. In Nairobi, mother-child ties were invented and inscribed without matrimony and very often without biological ties. Virtually all of these householders came from patrilineal societies; they were creating new relationships in a hard parody of uterine rights without marriages but with the equivocal support of the colonial state. Stories about the wazima-moto, with their formulaic Nairobi themes of tubes to extract blood, the invasion of space, and betrayal may have been more than cautionary tales of the perils of urban life. These stories may have provided a biological rationale for property inheritance that was not based on birth but superseded kinship ties. Stories about blood and the colonial state’s role in its removal may have made usufruct and the designation of heirs natural and legitimate.
MASHIMONI
Inside the pits, lights were always on whether it was daytime or night.” The Nairobi Fire Station and the Dar es Salaam Fire Station were said have pits: “Whoever was inside the pits was never allowed to see the sun shine.” [54] Between the 1930s and 1960s, white prospectors, surveyors, and geologists—men who dug pits—were accused of being agents of wazimamoto; most were feared and some were attacked.[55] In 1920s Nairobi, pits were a social phenomenon. One part of Pumwani was known as Mashimoni, meaning “many in the pits” from shimo, the Swahili term for pits, hole, or quarry. It was said Mashimoni got its name because so many of the men who went there in the 1920s were never seen again. In a 1976 interview, Zaina Kachui, who arrived in Pumwani in 1930, explained why:
I heard that a long time ago the wazimamoto was in Mashimoni, even those people who were staying there bought plots with the blood of somebody. I heard that in those days they used to dig the floors very deep in the house and they covered the floor with a carpet. Where it was deepest, in the center of the floor, they’d put a chair and the victim would fall and be killed. Most of the women living there were prostitutes and this is how they made extra money, from the wazimamoto. So when a man came for sex, the woman would say, “Karibu, karibu,” and the man would go to the chair, and then he would fall into the hole in the floor, then at night the wazimamoto would come and take that man away. When they fell down they couldn’t get up again.…The wazimamoto were white people, but the people who worked to kill people, these were African, but wazimamoto employed the prostitutes who lived in Mashimoni because it was easy for these women to find blood for the wazimamoto because there were so many men going to Mashimoni for sex. They did this for the money, they needed the money, and they could do this kind of work.
Even if this was a story she told with equal conviction in the 1930s, it is unlikely that she told it to discourage men from frequenting Mashimoni: Kachui made it clear she was repeating hearsay. Besides “after a while men stopped going to Mashimoni because the wazimamoto worked there,” and by 1931 or 1932, Mashimoni had been eclipsed by the new “market for prostitutes” of Danguroni.[56] It seems more likely that this story reveals more about strategies of blood and filiation than it does about prostitutes’ strategies. The carpet—called by the most commonplace word for a woven mat (mkeka, for sleeping or prayer) represents the extent of a woman’s control over space, its possession, and how space is hidden, and privatized. Indeed, the woman who digs a deep hole in a small rented room and covers it with a man-made fiber is literally undermining the limits of rented accommodation; she is subverting her legal relationship to property as she alters it to appropriate men’s blood. The chair on the carpet covering the pit remains suspended, but when the man falls into the hole “he cannot get up again”: women have mastered these spaces and men have not. Indeed, women could do something with this space that men could not do.
Women could dig pits. The holes in prostitutes’ rooms articulate not only the women’s awesome control over their own residences but the fact that the differences between urban men and urban women—or working men and working women—were such that they could not be contained or depicted on one level.
Stories about pits in Mashimoni, where women “bought plots with the blood of somebody,” assert that a woman can be above a man, that menstrual blood does not pollute homesteads, but in fact gives women unique and specific ways to possess real property.
This is more than an account of the alteration of space, however; it depicts the alteration of space for a specific purpose—to drain men’s blood. The context is sexual; indeed, it is the availability of sexual relations for money that brings men to Mashimoni. These particular pits reverse the connotations of sexuality; they make men penetrable and unable to acquire property; pits indicate that in Pumwani inheritance could be separated from biological reproduction. In Mashimoni, property did not pass from males or to males; men passed through property and into the structural oblivion of pits. If blood—male and female—refers to maternal inheritance, then motherhood was redefined in Mashimoni: there, property did not pass through women to men, and women did not protect men’s property. Women used their property to dispossess men.
The pits in small Pumwani rooms, like the pits in colonial buildings and stations, did not exist. It is therefore important to note how differently they are described by men and women. Women described pits as places and sites; men’s descriptions of pits tended to have an extraordinary level of detail and commentary.
These contradictions were lived, and they were remembered with a specificity of names and durations and rewards. Hannah Mwikali, who came to Pumwani in the mid 1920s, identified one Mama Amida, “the first woman to build a brick house in Majengo,” who “sold her sister’s daughter to the wazimamoto for money although later they came for her too.” [67] According to Mwana Himani bint Ramadhani, who came to Nairobi in 1930, prostitutes sold each other:
When I first came to Nairobi…I used to fear to go visit my friend, a woman like me, because the wazimamoto would hire a black woman and when her friend came to visit she would find out if she was married or not, or if her family came to visit her, and then she would tell the wazimamoto when her friend would be coming again, and then, during that visit, maybe after ten minutes, thirty minutes, the wazimamoto would come and kill you.[68]
Muthoni wa Karanja, who lived in an illegal settlement, but who visited Pumwani regularly between 1935 and 1939, said “there was a fat woman named Halima and this woman sold her sister to these people but she was lucky enough to escape…before they finally captured her. They used to sell people for 50/- a person; no wonder these women could afford to build houses in Pumwani.” She claimed that the firemen themselves were very selective about their victims: “At 10 o’clock at night the wazimamoto came and looked for victims. They would throw rocks at doors until someone opened and then they would take whoever opened the door, unless it was a child, because children do not have much blood, not as much as an adult.” [69]
This specificity of detail is more than a devastating critique of the plotholders some of these women despised. These accusations are hurled at women who seemed to commoditize not only sexual relations but kinship relations and, almost as frequently, those of friendship. As such, however, these accusations are also descriptions, however violent and bloody, of the construction of families and the hierarchy of relationships and obligations that families represented. Firemen would not take a child, for example, because that child was evidence that its mother did not live alone. A woman would be called Mama Amida because she was someone’s mother; she would not leave her stone house to her sisters’ daughter.
The abandonment of kin and friends, the failure to animate the new relationships that Nairobi offered, became the focus of women’s disgust and disappointment. Years later, women conflated the disregard for blood ties with the disregard for the proper handling of menstrual blood. According to Zaina Kachui, who so forcefully described the pits in Mashimoni, “In the old days you wouldn’t let anyone see your blood, even if you had a boyfriend living in your room, he could not be allowed to see your blood, or bloody clothes. In these days you see bloody rags everywhere, in the streets and in the toilets; it’s the way I used to see dead babies in the toilets all the time.”
It was not only prostitutes who commoditized kin and discarded children and siblings. Between 1936 and 1939, the colonial state, after much hesitation, demolished Pangani and replaced it with an estate of its own devising: it offered former Pangani landlords lifetime leases on cement-block four- and six-room houses. The conditions of these lifetime leases allowed landlords to select tenants and charge rents competitive with those in Pumwani, but they could not pass on their property when they died, when their houses would revert to the City Council. The Pangani householders’ decision to accept the state’s offer was painful—the estate was called Shauri Moyo, literally “matter of the heart,” before it opened—but 90 percent of Pangani’s woman landlords accepted it, thus ending usufruct in one settlement and leaving landlords in Pumwani decidedly wary.[70] It is altogether possible that more women landlords would have gone to Shauri Moyo, but women who owned property as designated heirs were not eligible for relocation there.[71] Although some women landlords in Shauri Moyo tried to pass their houses on to their daughters or their designated heirs, their wills were rejected by the state, while popular history in Pumwani had it that the “rich women of Pangani” built houses in Shauri Moyo for themselves.[72] This local revisionist history of African housing in Nairobi held that Pangani’s women landlords voluntarily abandoned usufruct, thus abandoning not only their children but sisters, sisters’ daughters, and a whole network of friends and potential friends whose entitlement to property and access to land was all but curtailed in Nairobi after 1939.