Nairobi's Bookshops: A History of Tenacity

If you live in Nairobi, or ever passed through, Dana April Seidenberg's historical sketch of Nairobi's familiar bookshops (published in The East African of August 3-9, 2013) will fill many surprising gaps.

She narrates the story of Gujarati trading families, whose genealogical trees and ties we, long-term Nairobians, were plainly unaware of; and of the place-names and shifting places they made familiar over the years and decades to anyone with an urge to buy a text book, magazine, bible, novel, thriller, greeting/success cards (how Kenyans pursue success!) -- or some sort of run-of-the-mill stationery.

And so it is that we encounter River Road as a hermeneutically evolved character in a gripping narrative. It is how we read of  a 'petty' trade (SME-startup in today's lingo) which Jethalal Shah started there in 1938, and moved to Ngara by 1948 (Indians called it Nagara and made Africans laugh, as they still do). I didn't know any of that River Road and Jethalal raga. Or that JS's heirs now run Book Point on Moi Avenue -- which I have visited many times (oblivious though I was of the managers' pedigree), but less frequently in the last decade and a half.

Seidenberg tells of the house of books that Vanmali D. Savani built downtown in 1952, and how that became the foundation of Savani's Bookshop, whose flagship, managed by his son, is now at Westgate Shopping Mall in Westlands. And she tells of Chan Bahal's Book Stop at Yaya Centre, which, as I know, has always been well-stocked with the more scholarly fare.

Curiously, though, the biggest story by far, that of Text Book Centre, gets conspicuously cursory attention in Seidenberg's account. Thus, the reader misses the chance to see how TBC launched and thrived on Kijabe Street and expanded to Westlands (becoming the very 'foundation stone' of Sarit Centre Mall) and, more recently, to elitist Junction Mall on Ngong Road.

All in all, one can imagine, Seidenberg tells a story of stressful adaptation to changing and periodically hostile times and climes; of the resilience of immigrant families intuitively sold on their own business visions and missions and models -- which were, how else?, home-made long before such memes became a part of everyday conversation and business-school chatter. Read More>>