The ‘Nairobi hangover’ under arrest by Gloria Mwivanda.
For the past three weekends now, I have been engaging with what I call “The Nairobi hangover”.
This is where I move around the Nairobi central business district early Sunday Morning capturing and witnessing the hangover. Mostly, it's families dressed up going to church, county government workers sweeping the streets, revellers going home from last night’s party, street food vendors and hawkers setting up shop etc.
I got inspired to capture Nairobi’s hangover, on my trip to Cape Town. I experienced an exhibition by South African photographer, Nqaba “Shakes” Mbolekwana, titled ‘The Hangover’. The exhibition was displayed at the entrance of the Waterfront in Cape Town and showed a documentation of ‘what has been left behind’ by apartheid. Shakes’ work had a particular impact on me that I vowed to document my own Nairobi hangover when I got back.
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On 15th October, Sunday morning. I woke up and headed to downtown Nairobi to see what hangover stories exist there and maybe capture a few. It was a cold and gloomy morning and the streets were empty, which is not unusual for Sunday mornings in Nairobi, add a little drizzle and you have a dead town. I was optimistic still and walked around capturing random happenings and simply experiencing most because I was too afraid to take out my camera and point and shoot at the interesting strangers I encountered. Also, downtown Nairobi is not the place you want to be flashing your camera, cheap or expensive.
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When I’m doing my street photography, sometimes, I like to pick an interesting subject and follow them until I find the perfect composition or place to shoot (this is how I ended up following a stray cat into a dark alley just a week before). On this particular Sunday, I spotted two Catholic nuns walking to church, I immediately took a photo before following them to ask if I could capture their faces right In front of the church. They declined the request sweetly and gave me a Mother Theresa postcard instead and asked me to google her if I needed more photos of nuns.
Right opposite the church was a mosque, and I thought that was the perfect contrast. I walked to the roundabout to capture the sea of people heading to church in contrast with the empty mosque. In the middle of the road between the church and the mosque was a traffic policeman. I took my camera out and captured the scene. As I looked up from my camera, I saw two other policemen walking towards me, I waited for them to approach me, now apprehensive. The policeman and woman before me asked why I was standing in the street taking photos, to which I explained I was working on capturing the ‘Nairobi Hangover’. They were less than amused and asked to see the photos I had taken so far.
From this, the police concluded I must be capturing the city as a terrorist informant
The first photo on the camera roll was the one with the church, the mosque and the traffic policeman. From this, the police concluded I must be capturing the city as a terrorist informant on sensitive areas like the church/mosque and how dare I capture the police in uniform?
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Long story short I got escorted to the police station in Kamukunji. It was a long walk full of bombastic side eyes left right and centre. The police confiscated my camera as evidence and asked me to call my folks and inform them of my arrest. I called my father who happened to be having a great Sunday morning until my phone call. He asked to speak to the police officers to fully understand the grounds of my arrest. I don’t know everything he said to the police, but he explained to them that I had been a practising journalist for a while and was indeed a photographer documenting Nairobi and not a terrorist informant. After the call the police let me off with a warning, they said that next time I should keep my photography license on me.
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While I do understand that these are sensitive times in Nairobi, with a terror alert out an occurrence such as this is quite common for Nairobi Street photographers. Even after the County Governor gave an exemption to freelance photographers and freelance filmmakers from payment of single business permit as charged under the Nairobi City County Trade Licensing Act, 2019.
It's all part of the Nairobi Hangover experience. If you don’t rub shoulders with county ‘askaris’, did you even do any street photography in Nairobi?
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