Matatu Culture: A Bane or Beautiful?

Kenya Wed 04-11-2009

Matatu Culture: A Bane or Beautiful?
By Margaretta wa Gacheru

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is the old adage referring to the pure subjectivity of people’s taste. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist wrote a whole 600 page tome called Distinctions about the nature of people’s taste and how it is shaped by so many factors, including class, social upbringing, education and even race and ethnicity.

But when it comes to Kenyan culture, beauty isn’t always a term that applies to matatus, those infamous mini-vans that enable ordinary people to travel all around our cities and even deep into the Kenyan countryside at affordable fares.

More often than not, matatus are in the news when one is in a horrific accident or when a government official decides to curtail their activities. Most recently, it was the new Chief of Police who decided the so-called Michuki’s rules had to be reinstituted, meaning seat belts were a must; so were yellow stripes rounding the body of every mini-van, and a maximum of two colors allowed painted on these notorious modes of public transit.

Those were the original rules instituted in 2005 when John Michuki was the Minister of Transport; but according to matatu designer Chalo Muia, those rules reigned on the Kenyan roads for no more than two to three months.

“It was an attempt to sabotage the matatu industry, but it didn’t work in 2005 and it didn’t work the other day when the new police chief tried to reinstitute Michuki’s rules,” Chalo said.

Ironically, in the short term, Michuki’s rules were good for matatu artists and designers as well as their assistants, who according to Willie Wambugu, a one-time matatu art apprentice, number in the hundreds.

“The two-color rule was good for business only in the sense that many matatu drivers came to my garage to paint over their vehicles,” Chalo said. The pay wasn’t very good however, and the artistic incentive that inspired a number of local matatu artists clearly was also not there.

Fortunately, said Wambugu, the Michuki rules only lasted a short time, and then, like cockroaches, multi-colored vehicles began to reappear on the scene. According to Dr. Joyce Nyairo, Ford Foundation regional program officer, they initially began reappearing in the most densely populated areas of Nairobi where the transit routes were least policed.

After that, as matatu artists came out from under the woodwork, it didn’t take long before graphic designers like Chalo, Hassan Rastaman, Jeff Mutungi, Dave X and Elijah were back in business.

Today, according to Wambugu, the two finest matatu designers in Kenya are Chalo and Hassan. Both are prolific and professional, spray painting matatus and manyangas that can be seen traversing nearly every public transit route in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

Their flamboyant and flashy matatus are particularly visible on the routes that circulate all around Eastlands, which is that part of town where, during colonial times, the British allocated land for Africans to stay. And even now, Eastlands is where the vast majority of urbanized Kenyans reside.

Then again, one’s aesthetic taste is very personal. And the field of matatu artistry is so fluid and dynamic that one might hesitate to say which vehicle is most beautiful and which designer most talented artistically, particularly as one can find this controversial public mode of transport in practically every town and urban centre of Kenya.

But if one wanted to select Kenya’s best gifted matatu artist, Chalo Muia has some advice for how to do it. In the first place, he or she would have to prove their originality, confirming they were not copying more original designers. Second, they would have had to design and paint at least one manyanga, the Sheng [Kiswahili slang] term for the 29-seat matatus that are smartly decorated inside and out, and deemed most popular by the public.

The trick would be to discern which matatus are the most popular in the eyes of the public. Only by getting down on the ground and observing people’s taste in action, that is, seeing how many people quickly run to get on which matatu after 4:30pm, one could easily assess that ordinary Kenyans, particularly those under 30, are daily voting for their favorites with their feet.

If you watch the way young people run for the beautified matatu while leaving the unpainted [ugly] one behind, you’ll see how matatu owners have realized that it makes good business sense to paint your matatu,” said Geoffrey Gacheru Karanja, Deputy Principal of the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art (BIFA).

Karanja further noted that the youth don’t mind paying more for the chance to ride on an upgraded and beautified matatu, which is usually well equipped with the latest hip hop or raga music, be it 50 cent, Lil Wayne or Beanie Man. What’s more, music videos have become a regular feature on most inner city routes in Nairobi. The video screens have only been introduced in the last two years however, according to Autozine reporter Peter Choge, but they have proved to be one more feature that enhances the marketability of matatus among the youth.

^{An artist painting a}^matatu^van

Matatus, which came into being shortly after Independence, were so named because initially, they literally cost no more than three [tatu] shillings. Providing a public service to poor people and members of the middle class alike, matatus have always generated controversy, either for their outrageous driving styles or for the musical taste of the conductors and drivers, which got louder and more attuned to African American sounds by the day.

But matatus have always been favored by the young, particularly when matatu operators began teaming up with local DJs who had access to the latest styles of music from the States. In fact, matatus have featured everything from country music to R & B to reggae, hip hop and raga. Often described as a kind of mobile disco, young people have been attracted to matatus for many years.

At the same time, adults have been disapproving of matatus for just as long, which is one reason why there emerged a market for buses that either reduced the volume of the music played or cancelled the sound systems altogether.

But the elders’ disapproval and the government’s attempts to constrain matatu culture over the years has never succeeded, despite incessant attempts to curtail or even kill the industry. Facing the threat of police fines (and/or bribes) on the one hand, the Mafia-like tactics of the notorious renegade gang Mungiki on the other, has strained and stressed the entrepreneurial spirit under-girding the industry. Instead, matatu culture has designers like Chalo who gave up corporate branding and sign writing for the full time work of spray-painting and beautifying matatus with their mobile art.

MAT-ART HISTORY

Observing that matatu art actually didn’t take off until the 1980s, Chalo claims Mutungi and Hassan were the ‘founding fathers’ of the mobile art form. “It was in the mid-eighties that designers started painting matatus with simple lines and multi-colors,” he recalled.

It was Mutungi’s sketching of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War that roused Chalo’s awareness of the potential for painting matatus as a professional prospect. Prior to that time, Chalo had been painting since primary school where art was still part of the national syllabus. He then took fine art as an examinable subject in secondary school at Machakos Boys.

It was painting that earned him his pocket money in high school. “Every weekend, the nation’s leading Sunday newspaper ran an art competition paying KSh200 (the equivalent of US$3.50 or l.5 Euros) to the winning painter. The contest consisted of a simple outlined image on a blank background that you had to paint and then send in your work for consideration,” he recalled.

Chalo in front of a souped-up Matatu in his Nairobi studio

Invariably, his water colored art would win the competition. “So almost every week, I would go to the local post office bank and collect my cash.”

Those winnings are what Chalo lived on as a student since his father had retired and shifted to the family’s rural farm, where drought made farming less than lucrative. “I survived on that money,” said Chalo who admits he used to borrow friends’ Sunday paper and surreptitiously cut out that contest column.

That early discovery -- that art could serve as a means of economic survival – is a lesson that most likely enabled him to shift straight from the Kenya Polytechnic [where he got a diploma in Graphic Arts] into self employment. Working as a free lance sign writer for several years, Chalo survived doing corporate branding, painting walls for companies such as Kiwi, Cussions and Kenya Breweries all over the Kenyan countryside.

But once he got married and wanted to stick around Nairobi more regularly, he remembered Mutungi’s inspiration and teamed up with Eastland’s leading matatu artist. “I worked as Jeff’s assistant from 2000 to 2004,” he said. Unfortunately, Mutungi like a number of matatu artists wasn’t consistent, keeping erratic working hours. And so, Chalo had no choice but to branch out on his own.

Willie Wambugu had a similar challenge apprenticing with another matatu artist named Jayma, whose undisciplined style of working made it difficult for him to develop skills as a matatu artist. “I basically had to teach myself,” he recalled. And after a while, his mentor’s absence became so frustrating that he finally chose to shift from painting matatus to doing fine art.

Meanwhile, Chalo’s choice to go out on his own proved to be the wisest move he ever made. Certainly, his work with Mutungi meant he learned the ropes of matatu artistry. It showed him that the best contacts and clients he could get would come from working out of sites in Nairobi’s Industrial areas renowned for painting manyangas and matatus.

Briefly, Chalo sent up a garage for himself at the Kenya Coast, 500 kilometres east of Kenya’s capital on the Indian Ocean at Mombasa. But after getting incessant calls from established matatu artists like Mutungi and another man known as Masha [short for Macharia], he decided it was time to head back to Nairobi.

Chalo has never regretted coming back to Eastlands. “I have not been idle for a single day,” he said. Mostly rehabbing second hand matatus and manyangas whose owners want to remain fashionable and attuned to youth trends, Chalo says the subject matter of his matatu art is often drawn from hip hop music magazines such as Vibe and XXL.

But he’s also aware of how attuned Kenyans are to international sports. Over the years, he’s painted matatus with portraits of everyone from NBA star athlete Michael Jordan and Arsenal’s Terry Henry to the world record breaking runner Usain Bolt!

With his matatu art zooming all around the city and countryside, Chalo never works alone. Like Mutungi before him, he also takes on apprentices and assistants, sometimes having as many as 14 guys working with him either in industrial warehouses where he rehabs and spray-paints manyangas, making them like shiny and brand new or at his own open-air garage, which is often jam packed with mostly second-hand mini-vans waiting for a glamourous Chalo make-over.

An exterior view of a matatu mini van

“You know, the connotation of the term manyanga is flashy, dazzling, fresh and simply cute,” said Richard Musembi, one of Chalo’s satisfied clients whose Toyota 14-seat matatu runs the route from Nairobi to the Coast and back regularly.

Noting that he has trained scores of young school leavers—and BIFA graduates—Chalo doesn’t begrudge any of the younger matatu artists coming up. What he does disapprove of is would-be matatu artists copying his designs without crediting him as he often sees them do. Which is why he says if there is ever a Matatu Artist competition, it needs to address the issue of originality to ensure that those who win are truly the originators of the designs seen on the prize-worthy matatus.

Assured that matatu culture, including matatu art, is unlikely to be quashed in the near or distant future, Chalo acknowledges he is one of many matatu artists at work in Kenya today. But as Willie Wambugu observes, the market for matatu artists is currently saturated with school leavers yearning to get employment but who may not have the talent or skill to create the most attractive matatu art.

“To me, none of the younger guys can hold a candle to Chalo,” Wambugu said.

But then, matatu culture is so dynamic, innovative and mobile that who can tell what amazing talents will emerge in the days ahead. For now, if you see a life-like portrait of Lil Wayne or Beanie Man or Usain Bolt on the side or back of a Nairobi matatu, you can be pretty sure it was spray-painted by Chalo Muia and his hefty crew of matatu artists in the making.

Chalo Muia the Matatu artist can be contacted on e mail c.nolimit@yahoo.com

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