Visiting Ngara: Capital, Memory and the Right to the City with April Zhu

If you live in Nairobi and are part of the creative scene, you have probably heard the hype around Ngara. A neighbourhood long known for its mix of working-class families and small traders, its Indian spice and textile shops, is now being talked about as one of the city’s new creative destinations, with galleries, studios and plans to turn Ngara into an arts and cultural district. In Visiting Ngara, April Zhu goes into the neighbourhood to understand this change: why Ngara has become attractive to a new group of people, what is driving that interest, and what happens to the people and businesses who have been there all along. She asks whether a place like Ngara was ever really “dead” and in need of reviving, and what it means to push out the very people who make a city work. At the centre of it is a bigger question, one about the right to the city: who gets to decide how a city is built, and for whom? Not those with the most contracts and capital, but the people who clean it, teach its children, feed it, and hold it together. Through the story of Mathare, April asks what it would look like to build a city that belongs to the people. In this episode of Sera na Sauti, host Mwangi Mwaura, a Kenyan Rhodes Scholar and PhD candidate in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, speaks with April Zhu, a freelance journalist who spent about a decade reporting from Nairobi and is now pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Together they trace how Ngara got here, who is behind the redevelopment, and what the neighbourhood’s long history can tell us about the city Nairobi is becoming. At the centre of the story is a real estate developer buying up building after building along Ngara Road, restoring the old Indian storefronts into cafés, galleries and event spaces. The pitch is that they are reviving a forgotten part of town and honouring its history. But the more time April spends in Ngara, the more that story frays. She meets an Indian Kenyan family whose spice shop shutters after their rent is raised, and hears the developer insist that no one is being evicted, even as the map in their pitch deck marks out block after block for future acquisition. To understand the present, April goes back to the founding moment of Ngara, a neighbourhood born in 1917, when a Somali village was demolished to make way for an Asian settlement in a city the colonial administration deliberately zoned by race. The old buildings being restored today still carry the datestones of that founding, while the village that stood there first has been lost to memory. This is the through-line of the episode: Nairobi has always been shaped by capital deciding which places and people count as valuable, and which can be cleared away, and the current wave in Ngara is the newest chapter of a very old story. Against all of this, April holds up Mathare, where after the 2024 floods and the demolitions that followed, residents turned a cleared riverbank into a community park rather than surrender it back to landlords, an act she reads as an answer to the question of who a city is for. It is a different vision of renewal, one led by the people who build and sustain the city rather than those who profit from it. 📌 **Key themes from the conversation:** ✅ How Ngara went from a mixed, working neighbourhood to one of Nairobi’s talked-about creative districts, and who is really driving that shift ✅ What happens to longtime residents and small businesses, like the Indian Kenyan traders, when rents rise and buildings change hands ✅ The difference between reviving a place and quietly pushing people out of it, and why “no one was evicted” can still mean displacement ✅ Ngara’s colonial origins, from the 1917 demolition of a Somali village to a city zoned by race, and how that history still shapes the present ✅ The idea that capital decides what parts of a city are “dead” or “alive,” and who gets to make that call ✅ The right to the city: who gets to shape how a city is built and for whom ✅ Mathare’s community park as a different model of renewal, led by the people who make the city work The point is not that Ngara should be frozen in place; it has never stopped changing. The question the episode sits with is who gets to shape what comes next, and whether the people who have made Ngara what it is will still have a place in it. 📚 **Reading Materials and Other Resources:** Visiting Ngara by April Zhu, *Africa Is a Country*, February 2026 (https://africasacountry.com/2026/02/visiting-ngara) Demolition Colonialism in Nairobi by Mwangi Mwaura, *ROAPE*, 2022 (https://roape.net/2022/11/01/demolition-colonialism-in-nairobi/) Le Droit à la ville (The Right to the City) by Henri Lefebvre, 1968, the text where the idea of the right to the city begins. The Right to the City by David Harvey, *New Left Review*, 2008, which builds on Lefebvre and frames the question the episode turns on. Get full access to Sera na Sauti at seranasauti.substack.com/subscribe