Death of a newsstand, and the birth of a post-Covid Nairobi

Tuesday’s World Press Freedom Day was the last of the Uhuru Kenyatta presidency.

This time next year, a new government will have just been sworn in, following the upcoming August election. This World Press Freedom Day, coming at a time that what looks like the tail end of the first-generation Covid-19 pandemic, begs the question of freedoms we have lost in the ravages, and which ones have been born.

The reflection came through the fate of a newsstand. There used to be a popular newsstand in Village Market, in Gigiri. It (and another at the corner of The Sarova Stanley, along Kimathi Street, in downtown Nairobi, and inside Monty’s in Sarit Centre) was unique for the times because you couldn’t find anything like it in other East African capitals.

Years back, the Village Market newsstand carried all sorts of international newspapers, magazines and current affairs journals (The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Harpers, The Atlantic, Africa Report, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and more). You could buy the Financial Times, Mail & Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, The (London) Times, the Financial Times, the leading major Ugandan papers, and occasionally Tanzanian titles. Then there were the National Geographic, photography and gardening journals, motoring, and an array of fashion and lifestyle material.

At its height, I remember going there to buy Foreign Affairs for a project we were working on. I found it once, then the next two times they had sold out when I arrived. I headed to the Sarova Stanley newsstand, and was lucky once, but missed on the second. I was puzzled why a current affairs magazine that by that time cost over Ksh1,000 (Tsh20,000)could be so hard to find. That is when I was told that the bulk of copies that shipped to Nairobi came to subscribers. There were more than 2,000 subscriptions in Nairobi! Two thousand!

That these newsstands thrived, was an indicator of just how much Nairobi was growing as a centre of globalisation on the continent. It was the time when it took on the moniker “Silicon Savannah”, the frantic economic expansion phase and digital innovation headiness of the last years of the Mwai Kibaki years.

It was a happy season for Kenya Airways, which was going through a growth spurt, and it seemed like the skies were no longer its limit. It was bringing travellers to the region in mouth-watering numbers.

Some of the downmarket newsstands in the Nairobi central business district were supplied this way. There were so many travellers coming to and through Kenya, and leaving the magazines they had bought fresh off the presses in the world’s duty-free shops, in their Nairobi hotel rooms when they checked out. A system had built up that funnelled them into newsstands and second-hand resellers downtown, ensuring they were available at reasonable prices within days of issue.

Standing back and looking at the Village Market newsstand, the whole world looked back at you. Then at the start of 2020, the pandemic crashed the party. We took frightened refuge in our homes; lockdown arrived; likewise everyone else, we cut ourselves from the rest of the world for many months. The people disappeared, malls went quiet, and businesses shuttered. Temperature guns, face masks, hand sanitiser, and gloves came out.

It took 18 months, accompanied by desperate clutches at Covid vaccination and hysterical conspiracies about how it was all a plot to finish us off before some lights of hope started to flicker in the middle of 2021. However, the aftershocks of disrupted global trade, and now the Russian invasion, lingered heavily.

Today, as predicted, there has been an incredible burst of life. What is happening in Nairobi malls is almost incomprehensible. Amidst the sharp increase in the cost of living, people are nevertheless thronging malls in record numbers. On weekends, there is virtually only standing room. I left a mall at 11pm early in the week, and there were dozens of young people still taking photographs, presumably for their Instagram and other social media pages.

Tuesday was the Muslim holiday of Idd ul Fitr. The faithful invaded the malls for the lights and delights in droves. I don’t remember ever seeing that many people in Village Market in over 15 years. There was a lot of begging and saying of “please” to make way through the multitude. Queues formed outside restaurants.

The traffic jam inside the mall was maddening, but it was delightful to see such a burst of life after two gloomy years. The shops have re-opened. New brands have moved into the place of the ones that died in the pandemic. These are the festivals of the survivors.

There are empty racks where the newsstand used to be. These happy people pass by, laughing and embracing life. None of them even look at the empty space.

I do, and a sense of sadness fills me. Something special once stood there. It died and didn’t even get a small obituary. Hopefully a few souls will remain thankful for the world it brought us, as long as it did.