My wife and I met on a matatu in 2008. The Karen route, Nairobi. I was a young man going somewhere I no longer remember. She was going somewhere she still won't fully explain. We ended up talking, lost contact, found each other again.
I spent a year riding matatus again. The 23 route from Westlands. The ones that blast Gengetone music loud enough that the windows vibrate. The drivers who navigate Nairobi traffic with a specific combination of skill and fatalism that has no American equivalent.
American cars are a thing I have written about before: the size, the privacy, the particular relationship between driver and space that makes American cars less vehicles than rooms that move. What the matatu does is the opposite. It insists that your movement is shared. You are going somewhere, yes, but so is everyone else, and the ride is part of the negotiation.
Coming back to American roads feels, after a year of matatus, like a specific kind of silence. Everyone in their own room. Everyone moving separately through the same geography.
I missed it. I also notice it differently now.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.
◆ YEAR IN KENYA SERIES
This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months in Nairobi, April 2025 to April 2026.
The analytical home for the series is gabrielmahia.com, where Gabriel writes on power, institutions, and what holds under pressure. The full reading order — 34 essays across 5 properties — is at the Year in Kenya series page.
◆ Year in Kenya — Field Series 2025–2026
Twelve months in Nairobi waiting on a CR-1 visa, watching Kenya's Gen Z protests, Tanzania's stolen election, and an American political realignment simultaneously — from the position of someone inside neither country and reading both.