After bulldozers started demolishing parts of Makongeni estate , I asked myself a simple question: should Nairobi preserve a handful of Eastlands houses as heritage markers or as physical reminders of the city’s earlier life even as the affordable housing programme remakes its landscape?
Demolition, done at speed and without sentiment, has a way of erasing more than walls. It erases evidence. A city that keeps only its newest apartment blocks ends up telling a convenient lie: that Nairobi rose smoothly and neatly, without friction or sacrifice, without the improvisations that made urban life possible for most Africans.
We will soon be left with a skyline that looks like it arrived fully formed – clean lines, fresh paint, repeatable units – and a memory that forgets how contested this city has been.
That is why Nairobi should preserve a handful of Eastlands housing structures as heritage markers: not to freeze poverty or romanticise hardship, but to keep physical reminders of where the city is coming from.
A bulldozer demolishes old houses in Makongeni estate in Nairobi on November 23, 2025 after the residents were evicted by the government to pave way for the affordable housing project.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
This is not an abstract worry. We are already witnessing bulldozers approach places tied to national figures and neighbourhood memory: Tom Mboya’s home in Ziwani (Blocks 37 and 38), Mwai Kibaki’s in Bahati, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s in Jerusalem Estate. Whether one agrees with every political legacy is beside the point. These are sites public history can be touched, not merely narrated.
Yet the city’s recent pattern has been consistent: demolish first, argue later; rebuild quickly, remember vaguely – if at all. That is how early villages of Kileleshwa, Pangani, Mji wa Mombasa, Masikini and Kaburini were wiped out so thoroughly that we can barely picture what they were. We risk becoming a city with no living landmarks of heritage.
Heritage in Nairobi is often treated as a colonial museum: railway artefacts, settler-era architecture and a handful of monuments that confirm power rather than explain struggle. Yet the city’s most important story is not only European planning. It is African residence – how Africans made a home in a town that repeatedly tried to keep them temporary. If we are serious about heritage, we have to preserve evidence of that battle.
Some of the houses that were demolished at Makadara NCC RH1 Estate in Maringo, Makadara sub-county, Nairobi, last week.
Photo credit: Collins Omulo | Nation Media Group
Consider Pumwani. When Kileleshwa was demolished in 1926 to make way for European housing, some of those evicted were taken to Pumwani, whose construction had begun in 1918 amid opposition from a medical officer who argued that many inhabitants of existing villages were “undesirables” who should not be permitted to reside in the township.
The “undesirables” were largely women, perhaps the prostitutes described by scholar Luise White in Comforts of Home. The language was ugly, but it matters, as it shows what early municipal power wanted – regulation, removal, distance.
Pumwani emerged as a planned “location” meant to organise African residence, restrict night-time movement and keep labour available to the town. Yet life there was never only regulation. By 1923, its social infrastructure was established, including a beer hall and dance space that pulled residents into a new urban rhythm of leisure and nightlife. One landmark from that world still stands: Pumwani Social Hall. Buildings like this are evidence and proof that even when policy sought to confine, residents created social institutions, cultural routines and shared spaces that made the city liveable. The Social Hall should be preserved not as nostalgia, but as testimony.
If Pumwani reveals an urge to regulate African life, Pangani shows Nairobi’s dependence on African labour – and the limits of demolition when people refuse to vanish. Pangani began as a late-1890s caravan stopover and grew into a mudwalled settlement that served as a workers’ dormitory. When demolition was proposed in 1919, it was halted because destroying Pangani would have interfered with housing Nairobi’s labour. The contradiction is instructive: the town needed African workers but resisted African permanence.
Pangani was demolished in 1939, but squatters moved back. The settlement regained life and grew to about 6,000 residents. For years it was described as the oldest “uncontrolled” African settlement and, intriguingly, the richest.
After Pangani’s demolition, the town was not sure what to do with displaced householders. It chose to develop an extension of Pangani, but landlords protested new leases. Forced to accept, they nicknamed the place Shauri Moyo – meaning matters of the heart. Some 175 landlords moved to Shauri Moyo. This location mattered not only as relocation but as planning. It marked an early break from the older Muthurwa “housing” concept that treated African shelter as minimal, bachelor-oriented accommodation. Shauri Moyo incorporated facilities such as shops and schools. By 1941, contemporary accounts described it as the best public housing “for natives” yet erected in Nairobi. In the city’s housing history, Shauri Moyo is a turning point: an estate begins to look less like containment and more like a neighbourhood.
A resident of Dagoretti estate, Nairobi, salvaging his property on October 1, 2020, after Kenya Railways demolished their houses.
Photo credit: Dennis Onsongo | Nation Media Group
Then came the city’s most ambitious attempt to build African housing “on garden city lines”: Ziwani, Starehe and Kaloleni. Their relevance is not only historical; it is architectural and social, written into how the estates look and how they were meant to work.
Ziwani, built between 1939 and 1942 and designed by municipal engineer G. Fletcher, was conceived as a “collection of homes”. It was the first acknowledgement that Africans were starting urban families and required one-family dwellings. Its houses had indoor kitchens and fireplaces expressed through white plastered chimneys that still characterise the appearance of the estate.
Starehe, designed by government architect Peter Dangerfield and built between 1942 and 1946, extended the family-housing model but included dormitories for bachelor workers, reflecting the city’s split reality: families taking root alongside a migrant workforce. Kaloleni (1943-1948), designed by A.J.S. Hutton, largely consisted of one-family dwellings and was treated as the final, polished outcome of the sequence. In 1948, Kaloleni was still praised as a model village. But the mood shifted quickly.
A few years later, the garden city model was discarded by South African planners who worked on Nairobi’s first masterplan (produced in 1948). Yet even in dismissal, they conceded something crucial: Nairobi’s adaptation of the model had promoted a “sense of community” . That sentence matters now, as the city races towards repetitive high-rise solutions. It reminds us that design choices – shared space, nearby services, coherent neighbourhood layout – shape belonging. When we demolish these estates without preserving specimens, we lose a look and an argument about what makes urban life humane.
Then 1953 arrived and the State of Emergency changed Nairobi as African locations were fenced with barbed wire. Mathare, Buru Buru and Kariobangi were demolished. The residents – those not detained – were taken to crowded spaces they called Bahati. Makadara was then opened as a place Kikuyus screened and declared “White” or loyal could build houses on government-owned plots using government-approved materials. Housing became reward, punishment and classification. Towards independence, the city was reorganised not merely by planning, but by political suspicion. If you want to understand Nairobi’s present – its inequalities, distrust of authority, fierce attachment to neighbourhood – you cannot treat that period as an archive-only event. You must see its traces on the ground.
Preserving a few structures is about refusing amnesia. This is the bruised history against which today’s housing drive should be understood. While Nairobi has always built, demolished and rebuilt – but too often by erasing the evidence of how Africans made the city possible, the answer is to preserve a small number of specimens – respectfully conserved, intelligently repurposed – so that Nairobi can remember the texture of its becoming: the 10-by-10 rooms of Kariakor, dense courtyards of Pumwani, surviving patterns of Shauri Moyo, neighbourhood memory of Majengo, the stories embedded in places like Pangani and Kileleshwa that taught the city how to endure.
The affordable housing programme can designate a limited set of structures to be retained and restored within new estates. This is not a call to stop building. It is a call to build with memory. The county should undertake proper documentation before demolition: measured drawings, photographic archives, oral histories with residents and a publicly accessible record of what was removed and why.
Finally, Nairobi needs the courage to value African-built urban life as heritage, not merely as “old housing”. Heritage is not only grandeur. It is evidence of contest, compromise, survival and creativity.
Kamau is a PhD candidate in History, University of Toronto. Email: [email protected] X: johnkamau1
