The following extract comes from One Day I Will Write About This Place, the autobiography of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. The taxi drops me off near the Stanley Hotel. I look abroad enough for them to let me store my bags in the lobby. I walk. I don't know if everything looks drab and dirty because I have been somewhere cleaner, or if it has always been that way. To look down that tunnel of buildings: lower Moi Avenue; Moi, the president who oversaw the fall of the colonial city and opened up the informal sector for growth by inadvertently breaking the grip of the politically connected Kiambu Gikuyu and Asian business mafias. Moi Avenue, the street that marks the end of Nairobi the international city and begins the undocumented sprawl of an African city. To look down this tunnel one sees swarms—people and small stubborn constructions climbing up the skyscrapers like termite mounds on a tree. Secondhand clothes shacks, vegetables, wooden cabinets, behind which whispered watch repairs take place in Dholuo¹; soft cracking KTN news on a muffled radio; Dubai product exhibitions thrust out of storefronts and into the street. Shoe shiners and shoe fixers telling improbable political tales that later turn out to be true; both solicit work by keeping eyes on feet, and you start guiltily when you are summoned for repair or shine. Gospel books and tapes spread on plastic sheets on the pavement, next to secondhand international magazines—NBA! GQ! FHM! Bright bold matatus², trilling like warring species of tropical birds, jerking forward and back, revving forward, purple lights flashing urgently, to try to catch passengers in a hurry to go home, who discover too late that this urgency is fake: the matatu will wait until it is full, then overfull, then move only when bodies are hanging outside the door, toes barely in the vehicle... In the distance, the sheets of iron and slum, stretching beyond Machakos bus station. A matatu swerves past my feet, almost crashing into me. The driver winks, hoots, reverses back, a short funky beep beep; the conductor slaps the side, throws his eyebrows about in my direction, swinging his head to the door. I shake my head and laugh. The car swings past me again, teasing, nearly hits me, and zooms away, its fat buttocks bouncing suggestively on the potholes, Oriental back lights blinking suggestively, words flashing—Just Do It—above a painted snarl. Another one swerves past—this one candy-floss pink, with speed-blown wings of metallic blue on each hip. It blinks, lights cartwheel around the roof like dominoes, and a ghostly purple light shines inside. This is Nairobi. This is what you do to get ahead: make yourself boneless, and treat your straitjacket as if it were a game, a challenge. The city is now all on the streets, sweet talk and hustle. Our worst recession ever has just produced brighter, more creative matatus. It is good to be home. There are potholes everywhere. Even the city center, once slick and international looking, is full of grime. People avoid each other’s eyes. River Road is part of the main artery of movement to and from the main bus ranks. It is ruled by manambas³, and their image is cynical, every laugh a sneer, the city a war or a game. It is a useful face to carry, here where humanity invades all the space you do not claim with conviction. In this squeeze, people move fast and frenziedly. And behind all the frenzy there is weariness—nothing is coming. After the strikes and battles in South Africa, which involved everybody, this defeated place is hard to take. Some people look at my budding dreadlocks and hurry away. I spell trouble: too loud looking and visible. A street kid gives me a rasta salute, and I grin back at him as he disappears between people’s legs, a bottle of glue in his mouth, his feet bare and bleeding. ¹ Dholuo: one of the Kenyan languages. ² matatus: small taxi-buses, painted in bright colours. ³ manamba: someone who tries to get customers to board a matatu.