Biashara Street cuts through the commercial heart of Nairobi's city centre, a narrow, bustling corridor lined with wholesale shops, fabric stores, and electronics dealers. Its name — Swahili for "business" — replaced the colonial-era designation of Bazaar Street after independence, a linguistic Africanisation of a space whose commercial identity was shaped primarily by Indian merchants.
The street's origins are inseparable from the story of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, a Karachi-born entrepreneur who became one of the most consequential figures in Nairobi's early development. In the 1890s, Jeevanjee won the contract to supply labour for the Uganda Railway, importing approximately 32,000 Indian workers to build the railway that would transform East Africa. When the railway reached Nairobi in 1899, turning a swampy depot into the colonial capital, Jeevanjee pivoted from labour contracting to real estate. At one point, he owned an estimated seventy percent of the land in central Nairobi. In 1903, he established the Indian Bazaar — a planned commercial quarter where Indian traders, or dukawallahs, could set up shop. Bazaar Street was its spine.
The bazaar thrived, but catastrophe struck in 1916 when the bubonic plague devastated the area. Colonial authorities used the outbreak to justify racial zoning, pushing Indian and African residents into segregated quarters while reserving the higher ground for European settlement. The Indian dukawallahs rebuilt their businesses despite these restrictions, and Bazaar Street emerged as the commercial engine of a city whose white settler elite depended on Indian capital and retail networks while simultaneously excluding Indians from political power.
Jeevanjee himself was a figure of contradictions and generosity. In 1906, he donated five acres of prime land in the city centre to the people of Nairobi — the space now known as Jeevanjee Gardens. The donation came with a condition: it was to remain a public park in perpetuity. A statue of Queen Victoria was erected in the gardens, and remarkably, it still stands there today, a monument to an empire that has been gone for over sixty years, in a park donated by a man that same empire classified as a racial subordinate.
After independence, the renaming of Bazaar Street to Biashara Street was part of a broader campaign to Africanise Nairobi's geography, the same impulse that transformed Delamere Avenue into Kenyatta Avenue, Government Road into Moi Avenue, and Victoria Street into Tom Mboya Street. But the renaming of Bazaar Street carried a particular irony: the word changed from English to Swahili, but the commercial character of the street — overwhelmingly Indian-owned — did not. For decades after independence, Indian Kenyan families continued to run the fabric shops, hardware stores, and wholesale businesses that defined the street's identity.
That began to shift in the early 2000s, when Chinese wholesale traders started arriving in Nairobi in significant numbers. Today, Biashara Street's shopfronts increasingly bear Chinese signage alongside Swahili and Gujarati. Chinese-imported goods — textiles, electronics, household items — have displaced much of the Indian wholesale trade that once dominated. The street has become a palimpsest of three commercial empires: Indian traders who built it, African naming that claimed it, and Chinese capital that is reshaping it.
Walk down Biashara Street on any weekday and the layers are visible. A Gujarati-speaking shopkeeper in a store his grandfather opened in the 1940s. A Chinese wholesaler unloading containers of synthetic fabric. Kenyan hawkers selling mobile phone accessories on the pavement outside. Above them all, the street name that declares this space African — Biashara, business — while the business itself tells a more complicated story about who built Nairobi, who profited, and who was written out. Three waves of commerce, three empires, one street.
See Also
- Street Names Kenya
- Colonial Railway Development
- Kenyatta Avenue
- Tom Mboya Street
- Muindi Mbingu Street
Sources
- Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1971).
- Cynthia Salvadori, Through Open Doors: A View of Asian Cultures in Kenya (Kenway Publications, 1989), chapters on Indian commercial networks in Nairobi.
- Andrew Hake, African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City (Sussex University Press, 1977), on racial zoning and the Indian Bazaar.
- Jan Heyman, "Jeevanjee Gardens and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Nairobi," Journal of Eastern African Studies 4, no. 2 (2010).