Matatu Culture: A Street Car Named Desire

Kenya Wed 11-11-2009

Matatu Culture: A Street Car Named Desire
By David Kaiza/Africancolours.com

It is getting dark already on a cold Nairobi Friday evening and the curve at the end of Fire Station Lane is choking in traffic; four lanes have formed on a street two vehicles can barely squeeze through.

A sharp, snapping sound draws passengers’ heads left. A Nissan Caravan passenger minivan has its back wheels spinning in a rut. Like a beast heaving violently to free itself from a trap, it jerks back and forth. The word - a loud exclamation - emblazoned on its windscreen “Cheerz”, seems to bob up and down on this miserable, urban scene.

Then heads veer right: We watch in envious frustration as the fourth lane lurches forward, the somber face of Jay-Z going past. Just for the four or so meters that opened at the head of the lane, they raised a deafening roar of engines only to stop abruptly. Another matatu is now stuck in our face: “Exotic”, it says of this gloomy, cold air filled with acrid smoke and grey walls with the smell of human waste hemming us in.

Ten minutes later, we crawl out of Fire Station Lane towards River Road only to meet an impregnable wall of matatu - big Isuzu beasts, with the forbidding face of the Notorious B.I.G in bling bling, the smiling Nelson Mandela and a rather lifeless Emperor Haille Selasie lined there on their sides. Then the wall moves forward and as our matatu rushes to claim the gap, lurching on the pavement, we reach for handholds as if taking a cue from the writing on another matatu which says “Hold me tight”.

Colourful: One of the many Matatu vans en route in Nairobi

We hold tight as we are propelled towards Tom Mboya Street. Amidst riotous wheels and revving engines, scurrying, scared pedestrians scatter over the pavement to give us way. Amidst the deafening beat of Hip Hop, I fail to know how we managed to get out of the city.

If as they say Nairobi is a city on the move, then its uncontested prime mover is the matatu:

Colourful, intrepid, loud and proud, they give the city the riotous and gay air of a Brazilian carnival without the bonhomie; part celebration, part masculine bravado, they communicate a sense of pace and impatience, a virility that is simultaneously impressive and repulsive.

“If you really want to understand what goes on in Kenya, you must understand what goes on with the matatu,” Prof. Mbugua wa Mungai, a social scientist at the University of Nairobi says.

“The matatu reproduce the structures of power that are used to oppress them,” he says, making other observations that present the matatu men – driver and tout – as contradicted vehicles who figure as freedom fighters but end up transmitting oppression downwards.

Sole commute for working and lower middle-class Nairobi, the matatu literally moves millions to and from work daily.

If you have just come into the city from the south, where the airport and all that glitter are, what you see as you enter the CBD is a cluster of high rises towering over prim and proper sedans with a smattering of plain white minivans with yellow lines. Across Kenyatta Avenue this remains the case, staying so when you cross Kimathi Street and even Moi Avenue – a proper international city of the be-suited and the well-heeled.

Kenya, more Westernised than much of Africa, can afford a sizeable chunk of its citizens the money to buy the newest model of car and hence a certain air of progressive orderliness line these three thoroughfares – which ill-prepares you for what happens once you cross into Tom Mboya Street.

The polite, regulated pace of Kenyatta Avenue is here replaced by the gutsy and the untamed and when you crash into it, it is difficult to know what to take in first:

There is the pace at which they drive, which is unhinged. There is the sheer number of minivans and buses – which is too much. There is the din and roar they produce which disorients. The brightly coloured bodies of the minivans attack you visually with iconic images and texts from nearly the whole world – but retaining a local flavour, leaving you uncertain where you are.

On first contact, they appear too colourful – bright reds and yellows flashing from the distance, scrawled about in cartoon figures and graphics, unserious, a little childish even. Add that to the reckless driving and you are put off by this permissive anarchy. Rather than art appreciation, you are too busy trying not to get knocked down.

It is all of the above and more: matatu don’t give pedestrians right of way and when the streamlined private cars of middle and upper class life come into view, they often go out of the way to bully them:

At stops in Westland, Buruburu, Eastleigh, Kasarani and elsewhere, they take command of the road, honking and touting beyond what the law allows; antithesis to the polite and the settled.

Whatever understanding comes, takes a while. Very few ever really like the matatu and those who don’t mind them, grow older and wiser and want a gentler means of transport. But should you have an artistic, social-scientific slant, you are doomed to be seduced by the matatu:

Deceptively repulsive at first sight, the matatu world deepens the closer you get to it and at core, coheres into an immensely complex culture.

It is the words and catchphrases on these minivans and buses that are likely to provide the first window into their world

“Déjà vu”, “Crème de la crème,” “We still lovin’ it”, “No one like U”; these immediately strike up a cadence – words and expressions you have met somewhere given here without context, growing on, and filling you with curiosity by seeming to gesture at something significant not in sight – interesting, clever, hinting that they know more than their rebellious appearance suggests.

“Truss Blaque tattoos”, “Hold me tight” - they run on and once you start collecting these phrases, you can’t stop.

“Desire”, “Ecstasy”, “Stunner”, "Contagious”, "Exotic” – the single word variants lull and pull you in. It’s as though the matatu were in such a thrall of – well – ecstasy, that they can only utter one word at a time.

The tempo ratchets up, gets frontal, direct: “Blackalicious,”, “Black sugar”, “Hotshorts” (certainly not a misspelling), “Backlash” and “Blacklash”.

Something is going on. These deliberate misspellings and coinages veer from the scholarly to the avant-garde, a knowing air struck up – sensuous, critical, teasing, running in short punches the entire gamut in so much of cultural-literary movements, condensing the lofty meat and potatoes of academia. Within a few weeks, you realise that the operative description is “Matatu culture”.
What first appeared as chaotic, does have a pattern.

Professor Mungai has spent years researching this phenomenon so that he is known in the city as “Prof. Matatu”. He has studied and written extensively about what may be termed loosely as a global, matatu culture, like the Manila Jeepneys which are as colourful, although carrying mostly devotional, religious images; the Nigerian Mummy Wagons, Dakar taxis, Pakistan trucks, to name a few.

“What we have in Nairobi is part of a larger phenomenon,” he says. “It is part of a global discourse that has been going on.”

He says the practice of writing slogans and painting on vehicular objects, is an old one – names and declarations on boats, push-carts, shark-mouths on the noses of fighter planes and bombers of WWII; closer in our times, Virgin Airlines with provocative statements; slogans on bicycles.

He calls these “appropriation of larger narratives”, power contestation for cultural space, often the underdog fighting against established power structures (Virgin Atlantic against British Airways). Closer home, like in American Hip Hop, there was always a racial/colonial history of suppression.

“We see an interesting pattern whereby through satire, self-allusion, mimicry, the people who engage in this discourse are affirming black identities.”

A naming process, he also says they are subversive attempts to both attack and influence mainstream discourse. Calling it a “semiotic process” – the science of signs – and as signs, can apply to anything so that the face of Jay-Z, the Notorious B.I.G. both looking slightly pained, sexualized, are as important as the word “Exotic” or “Contagious” in alluding to marginalization (exoticising and othering other races), the use of black masculinity in the Black panther movement. As signs, they are open to varying interpretation.

Mungai has studied the history of matatu in Kenya from its inception and says the field has varied since the 60s and 70s, from when religion was a constant theme on the matatu and Reggae – music of resistance – was played and permutations through the years; the Roots Reggae of the early ‘80s, Disco in the later ‘80s and the complex mix as the 90s dawned and droned on with Lingala, Soukous, Techno-Soukous and Hip Hop.

With the 90s came the predominance of youth culture, caps worn visor backwards, sagging pants, jeans worn backwards, French-cut hair. In all, was communication of the culture of the marginalized, the suppressed and the oppressed.

Perception of the matatu men changed from the 70s when they were seen as hardworking businessmen, to begin in the 80s to be seen as thugs, an image that has stuck since. But spare a thought for these men who work up to 17 hours a day; 5 to 10 o’clock and will drive as much as 300 kilometers around town.

It is not unusual to use drugs, amphetamines (miraa) or worse, to stay focused. Pay will be as low as $10 for the driver a day for all the labour he puts in.“Matatu men are besieged men,” Mungai says. “They will always want to question their place within society.”
With these perspectives, definite patterns arise: interesting and easy to miss is the fact that none of the texts are written in Times New Roman, or in Arial – the fonts of mainstream society. But that’s a detail. The use of text more often than not, is a tearing apart and rearrangement of established spellings and grammar – like a call to revolution:

“Laxical” calls to mind Relax and Lax, but clearly is a vandalisation of Lexical. Why write Serendipity as “Serendimpity?” – is it a caricature of Meru pronunciation, a sense of humor or appropriation of English? More humorous than anything else is writing “Roaf of Blead” – but as Mungai explains, they are also acts of rebellion against a coloniser’s language used to make natives hate their own languages.

Deeper still is the interplay of class structures in society. Kenya more than its East African neighbours is a country deeply marked by income inequalities - with social science explaining that when established structures don’t make it possible for social mobility, then those very structures become a target.

The breaking of grammatical and spelling rules syncs with the breaking of traffic rules:

“There is that aspect of rebellion towards traffic police and city council,” explains Wycliff (Swift9) Elegwa, matatu and graphic artist. “You cannot find a matatu with graphics whose driver is obedient. They drive over pavements. If it has taken a wrong turn and you stand up and complain, you will be the only one. If you are old and complain, you look stupid.

“If you find someone wearing a suit in a matatu, it will not be a formal suit – it will be Sean Jean jackets. You can’t find him in a van Heusen.”

Inevitably, how much and what art and graphics the matatu carry, will depend on which part of the city they drive to. Matatu with the least graphics, with the more polite “Thames,” “Cheerz”, “Mamacita”, are number 48 and 46 that ply the Kileleshwa, Lavington routes, posh neighbourhoods with residents interested in seeing the social structures maintained.

At the extreme opposite the matatu that go to Eastleigh, Buruburu, are the loudest, most garishly and flashily painted. Often the music on the Kileleshwa-Lavington matatu are classic R&B; Hop, Hop, Ragga for the Buruburu matatu. One matatu, referred to as Roots, best exemplifies matatu culture. Elegwa mentioned it to me, explaining it does not obey traffic rules, drives at 60Kph through thick traffic and charges sometimes as much as Ksh50 over the normal fee.

We walk over to Tom Mboya Street. “Pimpin’ n lovin’ it”, one matatu flashes past. Out there at lunch time, the street is clogged. Private cars can hardly move, not even matatu …oh but that’s a thought too early: elephantine in dimension yet swinging with the agility of a sports car, an Isuzu truck-converted-into-bus comes cavalier. Like an over-active preteen, it goes over the pavement – almost jumping – and drives against on-coming traffic.

I stand stunned. “Laffy Taffy”, I see the wordage emblazoned on the side, and when it has driven past, I see “Street Bangerz” painted at the back. He means what he says - a toughie who is no laughing matter.

“Welcome to the good life,” another matatu goes past, offering scant consolation.

“Wrong number” another seems to answer the questions as to whether you have come to the right place.

Interpolation and skullduggery combine to form a rogue-humor which never lets up. Then I am disproved by another matatu that goes past: “Someone said life is a series of decisions. I have made up my mind to be yours for ever darling,” it says. “Sitting here eating my heart out and waiting for some lover”.

It gets raunchy: “I need hot stuff baby tonight”.

“With me you have a home”.

“Hold me tight”.

“Drifter”.

“Drive it like you stole it”.

“If we can’t do it, it can’t be done”

“Buy it, burn it, dream it”.

“Bin it or spin it.

“Sluggard, how do you make your bread?”

We found Roots at the far end of Tom Mboya Street, an Isuzu truck converted into a bus. Jungle green, Elegwa tells me it is painted in Glow-in-the-dark spray – this glints in the sun and once it has absorbed sunlight, will glow at night. We board it and before it’s full, it has set off. We get into it to the sound of Habibi and Aisha.

We are constantly vaulting back and forth on our seats. Past Luthuli Avenue, we join Race Course Road by driving on the wrong side of the road. Elegwa warned me they go over pavements. He did not tell me this would fling us out of our seats. We did not reach the roof, but it was enough to bring your lunch out. As we went up, I grazed my calf against the metal-work and nearly bled

Inside, Roots is Reggae themed, with Bob Marley all over, pictures of hemp leaves, mostly black American musicians. There is a one-by-one meter plasma TV screen with smaller screens along the wall. The windows are greened out and we can’t see what’s outside. We can’t hear what we are saying because they are playing Echo Dida’s track Reason ya ku Smile on mega-woofer speakers that rattle the seats.

Buruburu comes and in the dust and treeless expanse, you see how this matatu fits in. We drive back and I realise we went and returned in under 20 minutes on a route that would normally be a one-hour round-trip. I notice passengers ignore other matatu, aiming for Roots.

“In a contradictory way, the matatu men are promising a better future,” Mungai says, in what he refers to as a “transcendentalist ethic”. “What I cannot have now, I can have later. They are very insistent on marking out an elsewhere – a longed for elsewhere. The here and the now is unbearable.”

Verses from the Bible, like lyrics from R Kelly “I believe I can fly”, point to this critical longing.

The damning irony then, is that matatu are often owned by the well-to-do who use this intense cultural intercourse to appeal to the youth segment of the commuting public; more damning, not all matatu drivers and touts decide what is painting on their charge. It is then down to the Elegwa’s to decide what gets painted on the minivans.

If a matatu is plain, it does not fill up fast,” Elegwa says. “If it is well-pimped up, guys jump in before it even reaches the stage.”

A business savvy culture then. Elegwa says most matatu owners are not much into the culture they commission artists like him to produce; men in their 40s and 50s, they are out to turn a fast buck and will pay as much as Ksh50,000 ($650) to Ksh100,000 ($1300) for a paint job.

The work is often going to be carefully themed to reflect a music genre, a movie, or religion. Not all the art is balanced and the graphics is often poorly composed while images downloaded from the internet and printed on stickers, is becoming predominant.

The now notoriorus Michuki (transport minister) rule of 2003 led to a decline in matatu art as all minivans were required to be white with yellow lines. Not all minivans were buffed. The law was not entirely enforced and today there is resurgence in the genre.

It looks enchanting, but the reality of where it comes from, is all too real. The day we visited Buruburu, a shooting in the night left thugs dead. Mungai says there will always be a matatu painted gaily as long as social inequalities persist. Playing heroic figures, does not mean the matatu man is a hero:

They are doing things differently from what we perceive culture to be. Does that delegitimise their claim? I have no doubt that the matatu man given the chance would be worse than the man he is riling against.”

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