Outside of the black gate, take a left, walk by the nursery of ferns and every color green, follow the path as it heads to the Adams Arcade roundabout, bumping and dipping, closer to the road at times, spackled with litter. Cross the street to the right, the petrol pump on one corner, the furniture maker on the other. Watch out for stopping matatus – you will probably hear Shakira not lying about her hips before you see the likeness of Wesley Snipes airbrushed on the side door – and the gutter that serves as a latrine. In the cold air of Nairobi’s July winter, shops open later in the morning, women with their over-bundled babies strapped on their backs dust off vegetables to make them look extra fresh for one more day, men gather around one newspaper and read about the latest celebrity scandal out of Hollywood, children on their way to school walk in groups of three or four, their uniforms perfectly assembled, their shoes somehow spotless despite the mud and puddles. Stray dogs that don’t know the difference between Monday and Thursday stay close to the butcher shops, sometimes venturing out to see what they can find but always close enough. The bag seller unpacks his duffels, rucksacks, knapsacks big and large, stuffs them full and hangs them carefully. A stall of hats next to a stall of shoes, then pants, then children’s shirts, then men’s shirts, then a heap of children’s clothes. The big Church on the right side of the street. The homemade church to the left, as big as the one on the right, is forever expanding and the only thing more certain than construction its lumber walls and plastic tarp roof is some sort of witch healing ceremony.
Directly ahead is storage, the safe where everyone’s wares are stored nightly in overstuffed burlap sacks the size of offensive linemen. Each morning the sacks are loaded onto carts and delivered to their owners who carefully unpack the carefully packed goods. At the corner it is more like J walking, a quick left and the next right just as quick, the street straight but snaking momentarily. The first strip is a locksmith on the left and fruit and vegetable sellers – all women – on the right. Red tomatoes, that beautiful purple of eggplant, interior decorated eggshells, parsley, mustard greens, avocados, mangos, bananas, onions, garlic, pineapples, potatoes stacked five and six on top of each other readying for a sharpshooter contest. This stretch of the road gets bumpier. Just past the vegetables starts the coat sellers, and a long stretch of men’s shirts. These shirts take you to the corner capped by a large pile of socks. Rose’s house is in the compound through the gate on the right and the school children file through the gate to the secondary school on the left. Running between the wall of that compound and the retaining wall of the school is the entrance into the heart of the market, as if this street is one finger leading to a forearm, the elbow intersection now towards the core. Now the path is jagged.but mkokotenies push on, hissing from behind, they have the right of way. Often, the stop, look for a smoother path, rock back, redirect and push their wheelbarrow forward. The bicep starts with a shirt seller with shirts on three levels in parallel lines to the ground, as if out to dry. Trees canopy over the path and the light sprinkles through. Cackles from the school yard rain down, shirts now untucked, footballs entertaining by the dozens. Stalls only one the right hand side, next is another locksmith who also sells radios, then a stand for women’s undergarments, a place of necessity and embarrassment, women trying to try on bras over full sets of clothing.
Oily smoke enters your lungs at the shoulder. This corner is mad, an gulf of an intersection, people speeding from the many rivers, tributaries, brooks, and streams that empty there. Bubbling, frying cauldrons and tea stands. A sharp right leads to the most dangerous part of the market, food kiosks, billiards stands, and checkers depots, all made out of wood scraps, tin or plastic bag roofing. There are few colors there and many young men with the stayed look of glue fumes in the eyes. Paths don’t go straight for more than several steps. Music blasts. It is here that salaries are gambled away and drown in alcohol.
If you go straight you head directly into the heart of the market, down a wider row of shops that has constant, surprising, smaller paths emerging where you think they can’t. A left takes you past more vegetable stands, live meat marts, and confusion. A left is alive, churning you through total confusion, spitting you out higher up on Kibera Drive near a popular hang out for drunk matatu drivers, high beggar children, a huge, smoldering garbage pit.
Most days I went straight, right through to the end, a right passed the hotels, empty homemade churches and avocado seller, stepping on the precariously placed piece of wood bridging the latrine trench, and towards what looks like a dead end. There is a blue kiosk there and a path to the left, next to the woman who sells hair brushes and wire sponges for scrubbing. These shops are sad, poorly stocked. At the end, women often sit to have their hair plaited just opposite the woman selling fish. Stepping just beyond her, the market stops but never ends. In Kibera, on Ngong Road, in lots of Nairobi Toi Market is connected to everyone by the goods it supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, the jobs it provided, commerce it facilitated, the institution it was.
Most days, whether it had rained or not, that street had a huge puddle, making it a tip toe on one section of concrete to pass the shop where Tommy would sit chewing miraa. Then Salim’s old house, and right, through the blue gate that advertised the video arcade that doesn’t exist and out to the almost-main road that, down at the bottom of the hill, forms the corner with Kibera Drive.
Sat in piles of three or four empty tires, the Car Wash staff say what’s up. For some reason, this corner also always has someone pissing in the bushes. Up the hill towards the matatu stage. This hill is tough for those same mkokotenies, grueling to get their goods up the hill. Stalls all along the left, groups of men up along the fence behind the bus stop to the right..Left. Straight for a while and either further straight towards Kibera Primary and the path that leads down from Olympic towards the heart of Kibera, or right, past the junkyard and new sparklng, Coke-built, usually locked toilets, and Swahili Dishezz. Straight goes by the travel agent and the man with a copy machine and as you curve to the right you pass MoMos supermarket, the military outpost, some abandoned cars, and the woman making samosas just before reaching the CFK compound. If you go right, there is a barber shop on the right, several general provisions stores, a hair salon or five, furniture maker or three, and then the CFK compound.
No more. Toi Market was burned down in the violence that is corroding Kenya’s core. All of it. Emails tell me: “Toi Market was burned down”; “Toi Market doesn’t exist.” No more socks, squawking chickens, 15-year-old Lacoste polos, avocados, hideous jeans, bootleg sneakers. My memory is erased. Now, in my mind, where to I walk? Those lives, those shopkeepers, that heart of Nairobi.
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Things in Kenya are bad. People are murdering each other for no reason. Both politicians rigged the election, both are corrupt, neither care for the people: they are killing them. Triggered by politics but now largely unrelated, the hate has exploded. This is a festering hatred that rots people’s insides over years, fermented in the toils of poverty, destitution, malnutrition, waiting to explode at the given chance. Raging at the world, at living in their filth, at having no drinking water, of siblings dying of diarrhea, of no electricity, chaos creates someone to blame, someone to kill, someone to, at last, stand over. Mob violence conflagrated.
NGO work is stopped. Adolescent girls’ health takes a back seat to murder, rape, robbery, and burning, erasing years of work, creating a new set of victims and issues. Bed net distribution schemes can’t happen during flaming ethnic violence.
Think of what people carry in their hearts that they can do what they are doing, for how long they were mad at the world, a hatred so pernicious on a low boil. For so many in Nairobi life is a pressure cooker and it is exploding.
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