In February 2021, Kenyan television channels, radios, and newspapers broadcast news about the death of Njenga Mwenda Kariuki. Njenga was among the first migrants to come to the area surrounding Pipeline in the 1950s and gave the informal settlement Mukuru Kwa Njenga (Gĩkũyũ, ‘Valley of Njenga’) its name. After the colonial government had forcefully removed him from his ancestral lands near Limuru (Ondieki 2021), Njenga tried his luck on the outskirts of Nairobi. Aware of opportunities for menial labour close to a stone quarry, he settled along the Ngong river and opened a bar, where he sold food and chang’aa (Kiswahili, ‘illegally brewed liquor’) to quarry workers (Odenyo and Njoroge 2021). Over the next decades, the settlement attracted more and more migrant labourers seeking work in one of the quarries or the growing informal economy that served the workers. These migrants constructed the shacks that would later form the informal settlements of Mukuru Kwa Njenga and Kware, where Patrick Ouko, one of the founding members of the investment group HoMiSiKi, lived with his parents and his grandparents in the 1990s.
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Figure 4 Muddy road in Kware ward. Photograph by the author, 2 June 2022.
Patrick’s family hailed from the area around Sondu, a market centre less than 30 minutes from Kaleko. Although he spent most of his childhood and adult life in Pipeline, Patrick had been schooled in the village for his last primary and first secondary school years, a common practice among migrants aimed at helping children to get to know their ancestral homes and rural relatives. When we met for the first time in August 2019, Patrick was a 29-year-old father of two young children. Working for a dairy company’s logistics section, he also owned a barber shop, a regular meeting point for migrants from western Kenya situated on the first floor of one of Pipeline’s plots opposite the plot I would move into in November 2020. Patrick agreed to take me through Pipeline and tell me about the estate’s history:
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Figure 5 Kenya Pipeline Company housing estate next to Outer Ring Road, established at the end of the twentieth century. Photograph by the author, 2 July 2022.
When I was young, we walked through high grass to get to our school in Imara Daima. There were no high-rise buildings, just mabati houses everywhere. This was just a slum built on a swamp, and most of the people who lived here were Kamba. It is close to their home in Machakos. People now call this whole area Pipeline. Some don’t even know that they are living in Kware ward. Others think that when they call the place Pipeline, people will forget about the slum Kware.
During our walk, Patrick greeted people at every corner and I wondered how the estate could have developed from a sparsely populated informal settlement into Nairobi’s most densely populated high-rise estate in less than twenty years. Having lived in the area for so long, Patrick navigated the bypasses with ease and directed my attention to important landmarks, such as the Kenya Pipeline Company housing estate situated along Outer Ring Road that had been built at the end of the twentieth century (see figure 5). When I asked him about a mabati structure where fundi (Kiswahili, ‘craftsmen’) repaired beds and socialized, Patrick began to narrate the story of how Pipeline became the high-rise estate of today. It was a story of loss and violence.
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Figure 6 Spared mabati structure. Photograph by the author, 19 February 2022.
Ten years prior, Patrick and his grandmother were among thousands of residents in the informal settlement who were informed that their homes would be demolished unless they purchased the land on which they stood. Patrick and his grandmother were unable to raise the funds needed to buy the plot and so bulldozers destroyed their house a few weeks later. As a result, they were forced to relocate to Tassia, on the other side of Outer Ring Road. The mabati structure where fundi socialized was spared only because the bulldozer had broken down right in front of it, leading to rumours of witchcraft. Thereafter, nobody dared to continue with the destruction (see figure 6).
Patrick and Njenga’s life stories exemplify the extent to which Pipeline has transformed over the last 75 years. In the 1950s, on what was once bare and uninhabited land where lions and hyenas roamed, migrants who had been forcefully evicted from their agriculturally fertile ancestral homes in Kenya’s central highlands constructed their shacks and thereby laid the ground for the informal settlements that came to be known as Kware, Mukuru Kwa Njenga, and Viwandani. These informal settlements grew through the constant influx of migrants from nearby Ukambani and elsewhere until, from the early 2000s, private investors started to transform them into the high-rise settlements of today, aided by youth groups ready to defend the land using violence, and by politicians who turned a blind eye to illegal land grabbing (chapter 4, see also Obala 2011).
When I first came to Pipeline, there were few empty plots and the remaining mabati structures were being replaced high-rise blocks. Since then, investors have started to build high-rise buildings at the edge of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, where over 13,000 homes were destroyed at the end of 2021 (Ashly 2022, see also Macharia 1992). The forceful demolition of parts of Mukuru Kwa Njenga in 2021, and of Kware in 2009, which was home to over 5,000 residents at that time (Metcalfe and Pavanello 2011), illustrates that the ongoing transformation of Nairobi’s slums into privately owned high-rise tenement settlements cannot be understood without considering the city’s violent colonial and postcolonial history, one characterized by repetitions of structurally similar and ultimately ineffective attempts to solve the city’s housing crisis.