Only in a matatu can you find flat-broke ex-government ministers, thieves,
teachers, madmen, school children and nuns sharing the same space. To
understand the matatu is to begin to understand Kenya. Many stories are
performed and told within the experience of a matatu ride– but why are
they enacted? What are they about and whose perspectives inform the
telling? Transgressions in Matatu Culture explores the positioning of
different actors in the collective performance of matatu travel experience,
identifying discussions that take place in and around these vehicles and
linking them to broader discourses on gender, economics, politics and
power in Kenyan society and further afield in global popular culture.
Deployed from multiple perspectives, some depicting clear contradictions
with the lived experiences of the men (mostly) who crew these matatu, the
incessant signification on the vehicles is central to the telling of stories
about Nairobi. Taken together, the loud music, catchy slogans, boisterous
display, and Sheng–the Kiswahili-based urban dialect that constitutes the
predominant register of matatu work–among other aspects, tell us as
much about matatu men as they present ideas about Kenya, and specific
ways of being in Nairobi. These men have over time created and purveyed
what is arguably one of postcolonial Kenya’s most visible, uniquely
defined and vibrant subcultural expressions. In their practices, matatu
men force even the most passive observers to (re-)examine their own
complex relations with them. Trying to apprehend the similarities between
matatu men and their compatriots, who are assumed to be unlike them, is
one way of trying to comprehend some of the workings of contemporary
Kenya and Nairobi is a productive pointer to some of the transgressive
processes at play. This book presents a version of the many possible
stories about matatu men’s resilient occupational subculture, taken as a
sui generis performance, which is considered a crucial strand of Nairobi’s
continuously-evolving popular cultures.

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Transgressions in Matatu Culture- Anxieties and Agency in Nairobi