Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi

Amazon.com Price: $30.00 (as of 01/05/2019 18:56 PST- Details)

Description

Drive the streets of Nairobi, and you might be sure to see many matatus—colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people across the city. Once ramshackle affairs held along side duct tape and wire, matatus these days are name-brand vehicles maxed out with aftermarket detailing. They are able to be stately black or extravagantly colored, sporting names, slogans, or entire tableaus, with airbrushed portraits of everyone from Kanye West to Barack Obama. On this richly interdisciplinary book, Kenda Mutongi explores the history of the matatu from the 1960s to the present.
           
As Mutongi shows, matatus offer a window onto the socioeconomic and political conditions of late-twentieth-century Africa. In their diversity of idiosyncratic designs, they reflect more than one and divergent aspects of Kenyan life—including, as an example, rapid urbanization, organized crime, entrepreneurship, social lack of confidence, the transition to democracy, and popular culture—at once embodying Kenya’s staggering social problems in addition to the bright promises of its future. Offering a shining model of interdisciplinary analysis, Mutongi mixes historical, ethnographic, literary, linguistic, and economic approaches to tell the story of the matatu and explore the entrepreneurial aesthetics of the postcolonial world.
 

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