Every street name in Kenya is a political act. When independence came in 1963, the new government faced a choice about what to do with the colonial names painted on Nairobi's street signs. Delamere Avenue, Government Road, Hardinge Street, Victoria Street: the roads read like a roll call of British administrators and settlers who had carved up the highlands. The renamings that followed were not administrative housekeeping. They were acts of assertion, each one a deliberate choice about whose memory would be embedded in the daily life of the capital.
This trail walks you through sixteen streets and landmarks, from the flagship renaming of Kenyatta Avenue to the uncomfortable survival of Grogan Road, from the assassination sites that became memorials to the systematic erasure of women from Kenya's streetscape. Along the way, you will encounter the stories the street grid was built to tell and the stories it was built to suppress.
The streets are not neutral. They never were.