Mama Ngina Street is one of Nairobi's most recognisable thoroughfares, running through the central business district parallel to Kenyatta Avenue and Muindi Mbingu Street. For decades, it was the only major street in the capital named after a woman. That woman was Mama Ngina Kenyatta, the fourth wife of President Jomo Kenyatta, and the street she received had previously been called Queen's Way, named after Queen Elizabeth II. Kenya swapped one dynastic woman for another and called it decolonisation.
The renaming happened in the wave of post-independence Africanisation that swept Nairobi's street grid in the 1960s and 1970s. Colonial names were replaced with the names of nationalist heroes: Kimathi Street for Dedan Kimathi, Tom Mboya Street for Tom Mboya, Ronald Ngala Street for Ronald Ngala, Muindi Mbingu Street for Muindi Mbingu. In every case but one, the honouree was a man who had fought, organised, or died in the independence struggle. The exception was Mama Ngina, whose claim to public commemoration rested not on political activism but on her marriage to the president. She bore Kenyatta a son, Uhuru, who would himself become president in 2013. The street was a gift from a patriarchal state to its first family.
The story of Mama Ngina Street is really a story about absence. Where is the street for Mekatilili wa Menza, the Giriama woman who led an armed uprising against the British in 1913, six years before Harry Thuku's first political meeting? Where is the street for Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, shot dead by colonial police on Harry Thuku Road in 1922 while the men who had come to protest stood paralysed? Where is the street for Field Marshal Muthoni Kirima, who commanded Mau Mau Uprising fighters in the forests of Mount Kenya? These women risked and often gave their lives. They received nothing from the street grid. See Women in Kenyan Street Names for the full picture.
Mama Ngina herself was a controversial figure. During the 1970s, she was widely known as "the Ivory Queen," linked by journalists, diplomats, and conservationists to ivory and charcoal smuggling networks that operated with impunity under presidential protection. The allegations were never prosecuted. The Kenyatta family's land and business holdings, consolidated during Jomo's presidency and expanded under Daniel arap Moi's rule, made them one of the wealthiest dynasties in East Africa. Mama Ngina Street, in this light, is less a monument to a woman's achievements than a marker of dynastic power embedded in the city's infrastructure.
In 2019, the Nairobi County Government pedestrianised Mama Ngina Street, transforming it into a tree-lined walking boulevard with benches, public art installations, and green spaces. The renovation was widely praised for creating rare public space in the congested city centre. The new street is beautiful, clean, and popular. It is also a reminder that the only woman whose name Nairobi chose to inscribe in concrete for half a century was not a revolutionary, a scholar, or a martyr but a president's wife. It was not until 2016 that Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and one of the most globally recognised Kenyans in history, received a road when Forest Road was renamed Wangari Maathai Road. Even then, the renaming was contested and took years of campaigning.
See Also
Sources
- Charles Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 114-117, 189-191.
- Daniel Branch, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 78-84.
- Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 288-295.
- David Anderson, "Majimboism and the Political Economy of Land in Kenya," in Histories of the Hanged (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), pp. 320-328.