Overview

Drive the streets of Nairobi, and you are sure to see many matatus—colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people around the city. Once ramshackle affairs held together with duct tape and wire, matatus today are name-brand vehicles maxed out with aftermarket detailing. They can be stately black or extravagantly colored, sporting names, slogans, or entire tableaus, with airbrushed portraits of everyone from Kanye West to Barack Obama. In this richly interdisciplinary book, Kenda Mutongi explores the history of the matatu from the 1960s to the present.             As Mutongi shows, matatus offer a window onto the socioeconomic and political conditions of late-twentieth-century Africa. In their diversity of idiosyncratic designs, they reflect multiple and divergent aspects of Kenyan life—including, for example, rapid urbanization, organized crime, entrepreneurship, social insecurity, the transition to democracy, and popular culture—at once embodying Kenya’s staggering social problems as well as the bright promises of its future. Offering a shining model of interdisciplinary analysis, Mutongi mixes historical, ethnographic, literary, linguistic, and economic approaches to tell the story of the matatu and explore the entrepreneurial aesthetics of the postcolonial world.  

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Reviews

Not only is this a fascinating, multidimensional piece of scholarship, it focuses our attention on an industry that is distinctively homegrown and locally-owned. These remarkable vehicles are the veins and arteries of Nairobi, just as their counterparts are in cities throughout the rest of Africa and much of the world's South. Yet I have never seen them, their drivers, their passengers, and the culture around them written about in such a clear and thoughtful way. --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa -Not only is this a fascinating, multidimensional piece of scholarship, it focuses our attention on an industry that is distinctively home-grown and locally-owned. These remarkable vehicles are the veins and arteries of Nairobi, just as their counterparts are in cities throughout the rest of Africa and much of the world's South. Yet I have never seen them, their drivers, their passengers, and the culture around them written about in such a clear and thoughtful way.- --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Not only is this a fascinating, multidimensional piece of scholarship, it focuses our attention on an industry that is distinctively home-grown and locally-owned. These remarkable vehicles are the veins and arteries of Nairobi, just as their counterparts are in cities throughout the rest of Africa and much of the world's South. Yet I have never seen them, their drivers, their passengers, and the culture around them written about in such a clear and thoughtful way. --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

-Not only is this a fascinating, multidimensional piece of scholarship, it focuses our attention on an industry that is distinctively home-grown and locally-owned. These remarkable vehicles are the veins and arteries of Nairobi, just as their counterparts are in cities throughout the rest of Africa and much of the world's South. Yet I have never seen them, their drivers, their passengers, and the culture around them written about in such a clear and thoughtful way.- --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Not only is this a fascinating, multidimensional piece of scholarship, it focuses our attention on an industry that is distinctively homegrown and locally-owned. These remarkable vehicles are the veins and arteries of Nairobi, just as their counterparts are in cities throughout the rest of Africa and much of the world's South. Yet I have never seen them, their drivers, their passengers, and the culture around them written about in such a clear and thoughtful way. --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Mutongi offers a nuanced and rigorously researched analysis that will serve as an excellent model for the study of both history and culture in Africa. . . . A magnificent book that challenges the conventional view of the matatu. --Daily Nation This book does for Matatus what David Landes did for clocks--it uses them as a mirror to see the world in a different way. It will change the way you think about Africa. --James A. Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Kenda Mutongi has written a lively, meticulously researched history of the matatu industry in Nairobi. Incorporating an array of ethnographic, documentary and archival sources, Mutongi vividly illustrates how matatus, those raucous, crowded, colorful van taxis that ply the city's thoroughfares, are not merely an indispensable means of transport for the wanainchi (everyday Kenyans), but also significant, highly charged sites of expansive entrepreneurship, economic nationalism, political critique, cultural innovation, gender and generational contests, and common corruption. --International Journal of African Historical Studies Africa's social histories too often exist through anecdote and the oral--Mutongi addresses this by providing a systematic narrative of one of Kenya's most enduring post-independence symbols. Matatu is a must read for all those who are especially curious about the contemporary African city. --Billy Kahora, author of The True Story of David Munyakei [Matatu] offers important contributions to the literature on African cities, informal economies, mobility, regulatory landscapes, and urban infrastructures... [by] using the matatu sector to highlight the success of African-run business without assistance from government or development agencies... Although laudatory and ultimately hopeful, Mutongi's Matatu does not overlook the darker elements of the sector... [and] will be of great interest to all scholars in disciplines spanning African history, urban studies, anthropology, and geography, as well as scholars of mobility, infrastructures, and the regulatory environment of neoliberalism at work and on the road. --African Studies Review The published history of urban transport in Africa has just had an enormous boost. Mutongi's marvellous analysis of postcolonial minibus taxi transport in Nairobi is such a welcome record and such a remarkable injection of insight. . . . Mutongi's authoritative deconstruction and story-telling dazzles. Her Matatu becomes the baseline and re-entry point for African minibus research. Her antenna are acutely sensitive. Her phrasings are a treat. Not least, her gorgeously written and accessible presentation is testimony to the enduring value of books as vehicles for argument, learning and pleasure. This book glows with stamina, patient inquiry and careful thought. Its coherence, layering and depth far surpass online capsule histories. Matatu slices with diamond-tipped tools. May there be more such glinting dissections of urban transport history in Africa. --Journal of Transport History

Author Information

Kenda Mutongi is professor of history at Williams College and author of Worries of the Heart, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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