Kenda Mutongi is a master storyteller who keeps the lives and labors of ordinary Kenyans front and center. In this regard, Matatu does not disappoint. Firing on all cylinders, Mutongi speeds us through political and cultural histories of post-independence Nairobi. Matatu is both an accessible story that will delight a curious, general audience and a complicated analysis crammed, like the backseats of a Toyota Hiace, with new ideas and directions for scholars of Africa. Drawn almost entirely from interviews, newspapers, and social media, Matatu is a history of the privately-owned minibuses that fill Kenya's city streets and rural roadways. Mutongi uses the matatu to write a broader history of public transport in Nairobi and creative, homegrown African urban entrepreneurship. This book reveals how Kenyans hot-wire responses to the logistical nightmares of urban life, the politics of corruption, and the uncertainties of capitalism. Mutongi examines this informal African-owned, operated, and consumed business over the course of a hundred years, and traces its gradual transformation into a ubiquitous, semi-regulated part of everyday economic and cultural life.
But Mutongi is also careful not to lionize the matatu industry. It was and remains a profoundly exploitative business, preying on the desperation of consumers trying to get back and forth from home and work, quickly and cheaply. Matatus lay at the intersection of criminality, violence, corruption, and an intensely masculine subculture. Mutongi's deft analysis captures, in effect, the fraught and ambiguous ways ordinary Kenyans feel about matatus, urban life, and national politics.
On this century-long journey, Mutongi makes a brief stop in the colonial period to offer an origin story for the city of Nairobi and its public transportation system — both of which are steeped in the racism and inequalities of settler colonialism. For Mutongi, the history of the matatu truly begins after independence, in the 1960s, as entrepreneurs, mechanics, and drivers respond to citizens’ need for cheaper, more accessible transportation. During Jomo Kenyatta's presidency, from 1963–78, the matatu industry enjoyed increased ridership but also endured frequent state harassment. Pushing back against the state, owners justified their business as part and parcel of Kenyatta's spirit of harambee, or self-help. In that rendering, the matatu was distinctly Kenyan and nationalistic (when it needed to be), and deserving of its hard-fought place in Nairobi's streets. Mutongi then examines Kenyatta's 1973 decree to deregulate the industry, which flooded the city's thoroughfares with rickety, ramshackle matatus operated by relative newcomers, who drove up the number of fatal accidents. Throughout the 1980s, Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, tried to rein in and regulate the matatu industry. In doing so, the state pushed matatu owners to organize and self-regulate — as well as to, occasionally, organize mass strikes against government overreach. In the 1980s and 1990s, public transport increasingly became a site for political activism and protest against Moi's authoritarian rule.
In the second half of the book, Mutongi sheds light on Nairobi's criminal underworld in the early 2000s. She is particularly attentive to the capture and exploitation of the matatu industry by Mungiki, a massive organization akin to a criminal gang that still defies scholarly definition. Mutongi also explores in vivid detail the intense, very masculine subculture of matatus. Public transportation has become a site of rich self-expression through music, art, and language that is pieced together — like the matatus themselves — with cultural parts made locally and globally. Mutongi argues that Kenyans reimagine themselves inside matatus. Drivers and touts outfit their interiors with bright, neon lighting, high definition flat-screen televisions, and pounding speaker systems to make statements about themselves and attract commuters with the latest trends and amenities.
Mutongi layers together several important scholarly contributions as her history of the matatu unfolds. First, she argues that public transportation in Nairobi is an African response to African needs. Scholarship on Africa is awash in studies of Africans’ relationships with foreign aid and Western and Chinese models for development. In Matatu, Mutongi shifts to locally-inspired development. On the streets and in the mechanics’ shop of River Road, she finds a history of African ‘creativity, resilience, and self-sufficiency’ (11). The matatu industry is a business model assembled from Kenyan resourcefulness in spite of state interference and the boom and bust cycles of late twentieth century capitalism. Second, the book offers a sweeping century-long history of one of Africa's largest cities. Not since Andrew Hake's 1977 African Metropolis has a scholarly monograph so clearly recounted Nairobi's dynamism — one that acknowledges but is not centrally preoccupied with ethnicity and ethnic violence. In Mutongi's account, Nairobi is a bustling hub where all Kenyans access, consume, and reimagine the commodities and culture spread through urbanization, empire, and globalization. The Nairobi in Matatu is also a battlefield on which generations of Kenyan citizens have eked out their livelihoods while authoritarian regimes have tried to police them. Finally, Matatu does not just show how Nairobi has changed over time, but in many ways how it has not. The many issues that Kenyans and their matatu drivers and touts wrestle with today would seem very familiar to generations past. Mutongi thus pushes historians to historicize the late twentieth century, as well as to uncover its connections to and deviations from earlier periods of colonialism and decolonization.
Of course, Matatu cannot answer all the many questions it raises, and as a result it opens up new lines of historical inquiry. Mutongi purposely focuses on the postcolonial period. It will be fascinating for future work to linger longer on the colonial period. Mutongi is right that for the vast majority of Kenyans the only way to get to colonial Nairobi was on foot. But mechanized transportation still captured Kenyans’ imaginations, especially since so many were denied the right to use it by the colonial state. Young migrant laborers often travelled gruelling distances by train and lorry and then used their earnings to buy bicycles, which they proudly showed off to jealous age-mates and skeptical fathers. What kinds of cultural meanings did Kenyans ascribe to mechanized transportation during colonial rule and how might those have carried over after independence? Moreover, where did the mechanics who maintained and resuscitated the earliest matatus learn their craft? Had they been apprentices at the colonial government-run Kabete Technical Training School or Christian missions like Tumutumu, or were they self-taught? Where did the first generation of owners get the money to invest in matatus? Were they tea and coffee planters or former colonial administration employees? In other words, the keys to matatus’ contemporary success might be found further back in the colonial past.
Mutongi also opens up tantalizing questions about the cultures surrounding work, time, respectability, and corruption. The book showcases a recurring theme: tolerance by ordinary Kenyans of often intolerable conditions. ‘All that mattered’, one of Mutongi's interviewees explained, ‘was that you got to the place of work on time’ (42). Safety, comfort, and mistreatment mattered less than timely mobility and the earnings that it helped to facilitate. Furthermore, for all the tension between matatu owners and Kenya's political elite, why were wealthy entrepreneurs or politicians seemingly unable to capture the industry? So much of Kenyan economic life has come to be controlled by a small cadre of business and political interests, but matatu owners have managed to maintain their autonomy and independence. Lastly, the next stop in the history of public transport lies not in Nairobi, but out in the countryside. As Mutongi shows, matatus are everywhere in Kenya today, and we need historians to listen to the stories told by rural and small-town matatu owners, drivers, and customers. Have matatus reconnected the nation economically and culturally or have they fractured Kenya into short-distance, regional routes? These are topics for further research. For now, Kenda Mutongi's Matatu has given us a riveting account of late twentieth century political and cultural life in Nairobi through the eyes of Kenyan passengers and the home-grown industry on which their hopes and dreams depend.
