When the British railway contractors arrived at Kenya's future capital in 1899, they were not impressed by what they saw. The swamp that local Maasai herdsmen called uaso nyrobi, or ‘place of cool waters’, was only good as a watering spot for their cattle.
Ronald Preston, an engineer, described it as “a bleak, swampy stretch of soggy landscape, windswept, devoid of human habitation of any sort, the resort of thousands of wild animals. The only evidence of the occasional presence of humankind was the old caravan track skirting the bog-like plain”.
But Nairobi was set to change, beginning with the arrival of more than 5000 railway workers who needed accommodation and other social amenities. Tents and shanties slowly morphed into an urban sprawl, “a labyrinth place in which people and rats lived together in common squalor”.
All that may sound like a fairytale
