The audacity of freedom after jailbreak from cages of Nairobi's old estates in Eastlands

I recently returned to my boyhood haunt in Nairobi’s Eastlands, before it is knocked down under the suspicious project known as Affordable Housing. The modest dwellings, constructed under a proper affordable housing project in the 1960s housed junior cadre of civil servants, but now will be torn down to accommodate newer houses projected to rise many floors up.

Old occupants have since emptied out, so we had the space to ourselves. The oldest man in my household, the Gen-Z, filmed as I conducted him around the place I called home a generation ago. I could touch the two walls of my old bedroom, hived off a kitchenette.

“Why does it look like a jail,” his brother, a Gen-Alpha, chuckled when we returned home in the evening. This was a prescient analysis, for those were prisons hemmed in by invisible barriers that we broke down using the most potent tool ever invented: education. Consequently, we detoured through my old school, also in the neighbourhood.

The headteacher, a Mrs Kimani, said student enrolment numbers keep dwindling. From the four streams in our time, now she has a single classroom for each grade. Where did the students go, she posed?

I have some idea where the students went, and the so-called Affordable Housing is an extension of the problem.

Communities function where social structures like schools, shopping malls, places of worship and social halls are built in. That’s something tenderprenuers, even those with PhDs, real and imagined, don’t understand.

This has given rise to private academies like the one the Gen-Alpha is attending. On a trip there, he beckoned to another parent and asked me to get his phone number. He wanted to use the man’s phone to speak to his daughter, who was in his class!

I don’t think our generation would have been that audacious, but I obliged and made the request. The other parent laughed and offered his contact.

It was the beginning of a friendship. Last weekend, we attended the girl’s birthday celebration where, inevitably, conversations veered to our own modest beginnings that our offspring will never comprehend.