Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence through which NPR’s worldwide staff shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.
The second you board the Onyx bus, the music grabs you.
Gospel, Gengetone, Afrobeats — competing at volumes that make dialog pointless. Eight TV screens flash music movies across the cockpit alone. 16 in complete. Blue LEDs chase one another throughout the ceiling. Each floor is painted: footballers, rappers, politicians in wild chromatic element.
I rating the entrance seat, using for about half-hour with Henry Muindi, the proprietor, from Nairobi’s Central Business District out to Dandora in Eastlands. Onyx is new, and at present the preferred bus on the route due to its graffiti, music alternative and the younger crew. It’s totally lavish. Exterior, a child spots the bus and shouts. Henry beams.
“There is no Nairobi without nganya,” he says, utilizing Swahili slang for these blinged-out automobiles. “If you have not experienced this matatu culture — you should never say you are in Nairobi.”
These privately owned minibuses are legally public transport. However over the previous decade, they’ve grow to be one thing else solely — shifting canvases, cellular sound methods, rolling declarations of what younger Nairobi finds cool proper now.
Using one is not commuting. It is being inside the town’s pulse.
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