1960s
20th century
A01=Kenda Mutongi
africa
aftermarket detailing
Author_Kenda Mutongi
barack obama
Category=KCM
Category=KJH
Category=KNG
Category=NHTR
colorful minibus
diversity
east african history
entrepreneurship
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnic studies
idiosyncratic designs
interdisciplinary research
kanye west
kenya
kenyan life
mass transit
matatu
matatus
Nairobi
organized crime
political conditions
popular culture
public transportation
ramshackle
rapid urbanization
social insecurity
society
socioeconomic
taxis
transition to democracy
vehicles
Product details
- ISBN 9780226471396
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jun 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Drive the streets of Nairobi and you are sure to see many matatus colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people around the city. Once ramshackle affairs held together with duct tape and wire, matatus today are name-brand vehicles maxed out with aftermarket detailing. They can be stately black or come in extravagant colors, sporting names, slogans, or entire tableaus, with airbrushed portraits of everyone from Kanye West to Barack Obama, of athletes, movie stars, or the most famous face of all: Jesus Christ. In this richly interdisciplinary book, Kenda Mutongi explores the history of the matatu from the 1960s to the present. As Mutongi shows, matatus offer a window onto many socioeconomic and political facets of late-twentieth-century Africa. In their diversity of idiosyncratic designs they express multiple and divergent aspects of Kenyan life including rapid urbanization, organized crime, entrepreneurship, social insecurity, the transition to democracy, chaos and congestion, popular culture, and many others at once embodying both Kenya's staggering social problems and the bright promises of its future.
Offering a shining model of interdisciplinary analysis, Mutongi mixes historical, ethnographic, literary, linguistic, and economic approaches to tell the story of the matatu as a powerful expression of the entrepreneurial aesthetics of the postcolonial world.
Kenda Mutongi is professor of history at Williams College and author of Worries of the Heart, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
