Freedom no more in Uhuru Park
Nairobi’s parks, where families used to play, were also political spaces where Kenyans met to challenge a regime – but this had now all changed
When Uhuru Park reopens, at a date that keeps moving further into the future, the concrete hulk of an exit from the Nairobi Expressway will sit at its southern boundary — one of many changes in Nairobi people’s relationship to the historic park.
Before November 2021, when the park was fenced with blue corrugated iron and a green wire fence with sharp spikes, families used to take children to Uhuru Park to row boats on the lake, play on the swings and roll around on the grass to their hearts’ content. Entry was free — a Christmas or Sunday outing that any and all could afford.
Today, there are horses to ride, gokarts, and even merry-go-rounds — but they are crammed into a dusty field next to the closed park. Parents still bring their children to play, but they compete for space with a garbage heap.
For decades, Uhuru Park loomed large in national political life. It was at its podium in 1971 that Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, growled that he would “grind the country’s enemies like flour” after detecting a coup plot. Kenyatta had opened Uhuru Park just a couple of years before. He would not be the last person to bring a fight to the park’s green.
It was here in 1992 that Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prize-winning environmentalist, was beaten while supporting a group of mothers who stripped naked to demand the release of their sons, who were being held by the Arap Moi regime for political dissent.
Uhuru Park was a centrepiece of Wangaari’s environmental activism. Starting in 1989, she led a dogged resistance against plans by the Moi administration to build a 60-storey skyscraper there.
The government relented and in 1995 gazetted Uhuru Park (21 hectares) and Central Park (11 hectares) as monuments, prohibiting any development.
It was in Uhuru Park, in 2010, that Kenya’s new Constitution was held aloft, signalling a new dawn after the bloody election dispute of 2008, in which more than 1 000 people died.
And it was here in 2018 that Raila Odinga staged a swearing-in ceremony to declare himself the “people’s president” after a landmark ruling by Kenya’s supreme court overturned the 2017 presidential election.
Then, in November 2021, photographs emerged of the Uhuru Park stage, and all of its history, crushed to rubble. A shocked Nairobi demanded an explanation.
A few months earlier, complaining that Uhuru Park had become a rundown haven for muggers, the Nairobi County Assembly had passed a resolution allowing the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) to renovate it and the adjacent Central Park.
The NMS, now defunct, was itself a controversial agency through which former president Uhuru Kenyatta
took major chunks of Nairobi’s governance from city authorities to the presidential office. It was led by Mohammed Badi, a major general in the air force, who promised that the park would be “a totally different place”.
The renovations were initially scheduled to last three months. But after nearly a year of missed deadlines and mystery over what these renovations even entailed, Badi told a radio show that parades and political rallies would no longer take place, and Uhuru Park would “totally change ... to be for entertainment, for recreation”.
Exactly when the people of Nairobi had agreed to remove five decades of political history was not clear.
The park was still closed in August 2022 when Nairobi residents voted for Johnson Sakaja as the city’s new governor, and Badi the builder returned to his military role — although the defence ministry remained in charge of the works.
One month after being sworn in, Sakaja announced that the park would be officially opened for the inaugural Nairobi Festival on 12 December 2022 — Kenya’s independence day. But when the festival ended, the park, which admittedly looked a lot better than it had in 2021, closed to the public once again.
When Nairobi hosted the inaugural Africa Climate Summit in September, some of the blue fencing around Uhuru Park came down. Kenyans on social media wondered if the summit had anything to do with it. Environmental activists — and there are many— don’t like their parks fenced off.
But Uhuru Park’s grey gates, now visible after the blue fencing was removed, remain firmly shut, and Central Park is still wrapped in blue sheets.
Occasionally government officials use Uhuru Park to launch programmes such as the “Green Army”, which is meant to clear the city’s drains before the El Niño rains.
Now, however, another formal reopening date has been set — December 2023 — for the second Nairobi Festival.
Nairobi County executive committee member Ibrahim Auma Nyangoya said in a statement that the reopened park would stick to the path plotted by Badi, its purpose limited to “leisure, entertainment, and recreational pursuits”. Significantly, applications “to hold gatherings that will distract from the above-mentioned purpose may not be considered”.
Sakaja, who had previously assured Nairobi’s people that “there will be no entry charges” to the parks, because “sometimes you are stressed and just want to relax and think your thoughts,” said in a June interview that people will be required to show identity documents to enter Uhuru Park. He also suggested that visitors to parts of Central Park might be subjected to entry fees after all.
This increasingly limited access to the city’s parks “is continuing with the trend of privatising the commons”, said Wangui Kimari, an urban anthropologist.
Teresa Mbatia, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi who studies public spaces, said that privatisation does not always require a change in ownership.
“It can be in the hands of the government but everything done around it makes it more exclusive, suitable to only certain people ... and inaccessible to the majority of the urban poor or low income residents.”
Already the Nairobi Arboretum and Karura Forest charge entry fees and such arrangements, said Kimari, have led to a Nairobi status quo where “green space is only for the rich in their homes, at a fee, or at roundabouts and along highways”.
This article first appeared in
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