June 10, 2013

FINEST HOUR 134, SPRING 2007

BY JOHN KAMAU

Reprinted by kind permission of Chaacha Mwita, editor, Weekend Editions, The East African Standard, Nairobi, 28 January 2006. Photo From Kenya, The Magic Land, by Mohamed Amin, Duncan Willetts, Brian Tetley © 1988. Map © Magellan Geographies, 1992.

ABSTRACT
YOUNG WINSTON’S hasty 1906 decision may return to haunt Kenya’s capital.

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Kenya’s capital is a disaster waiting to happen. Its four million residents are living on the edge. The problem has increased over the years, though it was first brought to the attention of Winston Churchill, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, one hundred years ago last year.

The East African Standard has unearthed archives showing that Nairobi was built on a site condemned by engineers as it emerged as a township in early 1900. Searching for open space, major institutions have recently been moving out of the Nairobi plain to the more “secure” Upper Hill, where most buildings rest on rock. But with almost half of today’s mostly residential buildings constructed without standards, experts fear the possibilities suggested by January’s collapse of a building in River Road. “If a major earthquake occurred,” says Dr. Kamau Gachigi, a material scientist at the University of Nairobi, “it would be a major catastrophe….what we saw in River Road would be child’s play.” But some geologists say that the terrain poses no problems if proper advice is sought and followed from engineers.

The original city fathers wanted the place moved. Shortly after the swampy conditions induced a plague breakout out in 1901, colonial medical officer Dr. W.H. MacDonald worried that the city was in the wrong place. In May 1903 Dr. Moffat, principal medical officer of the East Africa and Uganda Protectorate, called Nairobi dangerous and defective. After another plague in 1904, he recommended relocating residents to modern-day Kikuyu Township. But Moffat left in April 1904, and his successors held the costs of relocation too high.

On 18 May 1906, Sir James Sadler, commissioner for the Protectorate, wrote to Churchill, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, complaining about the emergence of Kenya’s capital: “…at the commencement of the 1902 plague…the then-commissioner, Sir Charles Elliot, was strongly of the opinion that the site, which had been selected three years before by the manager of the Uganda Railway without consulting medical or sanitary authorities, was, with its inadequate drainage, unsuitable for a large and growing population. [It is a] depression with a very thin layer of soil or rock. The soil was water-logged during the greater part of the year.”

Churchill was reminded that four years previously, it had been recommended that the town be moved “to some point on the hills.” But railway engineers did not see Nairobi as becoming anything more than an Indian township—which, they argued, could “prosper in spite of unsanitary conditions and chronic plague.”

Sadler told Churchill this was a critical point in Nairobi’s history; that his predecessor had said: “…when the rainy season commenced, the whole town is practically transformed into a swamp.” But the Board decided instead only to try to drain the swampy bazaar area.

Nairobi continued to develop quickly and Sadler finally threw in the towel: “It is, I admit, too late to consider the question of moving the town from the plains to the higher position along the line some miles to the north. We had a chance in 1902, and I think it was a pity that we did not do so then as advocated by Sir Charles Elliot.” But even Sadler did not anticipate the growth, saying Nairobi would never become “a city like Johannesburg or a large commercial centre, for if there is a rapid development of industries or minerals in any of the new districts, the centres would spring up around them.”

Churchill accepted this idea and made the final decision: “It is now too late to change, and thus lack of foresight and of a comprehensive view leaves its permanent imprint upon the countenance of a new country.”

By the time the Nairobi Sanitary Commission was appointed in 1913, to enquire and report upon the sanitation and drainage of the township, the town had taken shape. It was now left to the engineers to build a city with the challenges that soggy ground presented. Many years later, failure to consult experts could make many buildings in the city uninhabitable in a few years’ time. 

 

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