Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
then being constructed to connect Lake Victoria with the Indian Ocean. The depot soon be-
came the railway's headquarters and a township grew up around it. The slow transformation
of Nairobi into a city began in 1905 when the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate
(as Kenya was then called) was moved there from the port of Mombasa. This colourful map
was created as part of the scheme devised by the British to expand the township.
Officials in Nairobi were deeply concerned about public health, particularly the risks
presented by diseases such as malaria and bubonic plague. Professor William Simpson, of the
London School of Tropical Medicine, was asked to advise the British on health and sanitary
matters in East Africa in 1913. Like many medical experts of his time, he firmly believed that
creating racially segregated residential districts within colonial towns was both natural and
healthy. The early development of Nairobi reflected this - to modern minds very odd - as-
sumption. Separate districts were planned to accommodate the city's three ethnic groups: the
indigenous black Africans (many of whom were bitterly opposed to the creation of Nairobi),
the white European colonists, and migrants from British India. The latter group consisted
chiefly of men who had originally come to East Africa to help build the railway and then
settled in the colony with their families.
Papers sent from the Protectorate government to the Colonial Office in London in 1914
discuss how Professor Simpson's ideas were to be translated into reality. To illustrate this,
coloured ink annotations were added to an outline plan reproduced by dyeline printing, a rel-
atively cheap method of mechanical copying then quite commonly used for maps of this kind.
According to these proposals, African residents would live to the south-east of the city centre
(beyond the black outline) and Indians to the north-east (in the areas outlined in blue and
brown). The largest area, to the west, would be reserved for the British community. Many of
the green-edged protected areas were intended for European leisure activities, such as horse
racing. Government-owned land shaded yellow could be sold or exchanged with other plots
as necessary to encourage residents to follow the intended scheme.
The map captures the beginning of British policies in East Africa that were to create a
three-tier society, in which European, Asian and African people formed the upper, middle and
lower classes. Relations between the three ethnic groups were often tense, and the divisive
effects of decades of inequality lasted long after Kenya became an independent country in
1963. Thankfully, enforced racial segregation is now no longer a fact of life in Nairobi. This
map, however, remains a stark reminder of how colonial British ideas about urban planning
were imposed onto an African landscape.