Advanced Seminar: Whose Nairobi? Opportunity and Inequality in a Twentieth Century African City

3 units

Visitors to East Africa often hear the cautionary refrain, Nairobi is not Kenya. But over the past century, Kenya's largest city has meant distinctly different things to distinctly different people. Starting as a simple railway camp in the late nineteenth century, and shaped by decades of colonial racial and ethnic segregation, it has grown into a global mega-city, where Kenyans from every background and every corner of the country interact with an equally diverse cast of foreigners. Focusing on the realities of the day-to-day, this research seminar deploys a wide variety of historical evidence to better understand how ordinary people experienced, and were shaped by, Nairobi during the long and turbulent twentieth century. This seminar's centerpiece is an extensive and original research paper that offers students the opportunity to work a wide variety of primary sources including archives, city planning reports, maps, images of the built environment, music, material culture, memoirs and narrative fiction.