In the Nairobi of the 1950s, the question of who could move—and how—was never just a matter of infrastructure. It was a question of power. Like many other colonial cities, Nairobi’s transport system was built to carry some and constrain others. Buses moved bodies, yes, but more importantly, they reinforced the borders of race, class, and citizenship. In a city spatially segregated by design, transport was not just a logistical concern. It was political.
This is the story of the Nairobi bus system in the decade before independence. It is a story of frustrated African workers, of scarce buses and long treks on foot, of colonial planners designing roads that didn’t lead to African homes, and of a city slowly slipping out of the hands of its British architects.
The Bus That Wasn’t for Everyone
By the 1950s, Nairobi’s formal bus system was run by the Kenya Bus Service (KBS), a subsidiary of the London-based Overseas Transport Company (OTC), which had begun operations in 1934. What began as a small white-serving operation quickly grew to become the only licensed bus operator in the city. But “public” was a misnomer. The system was built for settlers and administrators, not for the majority population.
There were only around 30 buses in operation across Nairobi in the late 1950s. This figure would be comical were it not so devastating. Nairobi, even then, had a significant African population concentrated in areas like Pumwani, Kaloleni, and the growing informal settlements on the outskirts. Yet the buses did not service these areas adequately. If they came at all, they came late, overcrowded, and infrequently. The African poor were left to their own feet.
The colonial state expected Africans to walk. It was part of a broader logic that combined racial segregation with the moral policing of black mobility. The city’s urban planning physically and ideologically distanced the African workforce from white spaces. Residential areas for Africans were placed far from the Central Business District. Buses were neither available nor affordable for many.
A testimony from Priscilla Atieno, cited in the oral histories collected in Parsons et al. (2010), captures the pain of this policy: “We would walk long distances, me and the children, sometimes 15 miles with luggage. There were no buses for us. The buses were for others.”
Colonial Logic: Walk or Obey
Transport was just one arm of a larger control machine. Nairobi’s by-laws regulated who could be in town and when. Africans had to carry passes to live in the city. Their movement, even when it involved no motor, was policed. Bus stops and route planning followed this logic. A bus route to a white suburb? Essential. A stop near a black settlement? Optional.
In 1952, the State of Emergency was declared, intensifying surveillance and containment. Roads became more militarized. The few African bus users were exposed to more stop-and-search routines, especially near security checkpoints. In such a climate, many preferred walking, not as a choice but as a survival strategy.
Taxis and the Non-Public Public Transport
There were taxis in Nairobi, and some were even technically available to Africans. But these were expensive and unreliable. Many were owned by Indian traders, and due to their cost, were mostly used by middle-class Asians and the few elite Africans who had been allowed to accumulate some wealth.
Informal transport existed in scattered forms. Some used lorries and pick-ups to ferry workers from distant estates to construction sites. These were sometimes illegal, sometimes overlooked. What they were not was safe or scalable.
Still, these informal services hinted at what would explode a decade later: the matatu. The very conditions that denied Africans public transport created a vacuum for entrepreneurial solutions. The seeds of the matatu industry were planted here, in the long, dusty walks and crowded pick-up beds of 1950s Nairobi.
Gendered Burdens of the Commute
The failure of the bus system had especially harsh consequences for African women. Many were domestic workers expected to report to white homes before dawn and return late at night. Without reliable transport, they often left home while it was still dark and walked alone through hostile streets.
Mary Mweneka recalled in an interview how she “carried water and clothes on [her] head, from Kaloleni to Muthaiga,” a journey of over 10 kilometers. Women made these treks with children strapped to their backs, exposing them to harassment and arrest. The bus system’s indifference compounded their exploitation.
Public vs. Private: A False Choice?
The phrase “public vs. private transport” assumes that there was a choice at all. For most Africans in the 1950s, neither option served them well. KBS was nominally public but structurally exclusive. Taxis were technically private but practically inaccessible. Informal transport was a lifeline, but inconsistent.
The colonial government had little incentive to improve African mobility. Movement meant political consciousness. Gathering meant organizing. Better transport meant more visibility. In many ways, denying buses to Africans was an act of counterinsurgency. It was a way to keep laborers useful, but not powerful.
Ruark’s Nairobi: Observing the Divide
American journalist Robert Ruark, visiting Nairobi in the 1950s, wrote in Something of Value about the contrast between the European parts of the city and the African districts. He noted the plodding foot traffic of African laborers—”beasts of burden,” he called them—who moved across the city not as passengers but as shadows.
Ruark’s racism is plain, but his descriptions unintentionally testify to the unequal landscape of movement. The few buses he describes are full, erratic, and tightly regulated. The streets belong to cars and feet—but only some cars, and only some feet.
The Road to the Matatu
By the late 1950s, cracks were forming. Nairobi’s African population was growing. So was its political consciousness. The bus system’s failures became part of a larger indictment of colonial rule. In the 1960s, independence would usher in new experiments in transport, including licensing the informal minibuses that had quietly served the people the buses ignored.
But even then, the system inherited the inequalities of its forerunner. The matatu may have replaced the lorry and the trek, but the map was still colonial. Roads still led outward, not inward. Stops were still optional.
Conclusion: Transit as Apartheid
The Nairobi bus system in the 1950s was never about efficiency. It was about exclusion. It moved the right people to the right places and left everyone else behind.
When African workers walked miles to jobs they could never aspire to hold, that was transport policy. When women rose before dawn to carry laundry and children across the city, that was logistics. When lorries became lifelines and walking became the only guarantee, that was design.
To understand Nairobi’s transport legacy is to understand how a city was structured not just by roads, but by the refusal to connect them. And in that refusal, we find not just the roots of the matatu, but the architecture of inequality that outlived the empire.