ABSTRACT
In 1939, Okwatoya Anjili arrived in Nairobi for the first time and was held in awe by what he saw. He was only a teenager and was persuaded that colonial buildings and other developments in Nairobi were fascinating. He recalled how the buildings were monstrous in size and looked a lot different from anything he had seen before. “Those gigantic buildings and else that omusungu (white man, plural abasungu) had built in Nairobi made us to look at them with a lot of admiration. By looking at these buildings, we thought that there was nothing that abasungu could not do”.1 Although Anjili was obviously overwhelmed by what he saw, that type of response might have been typical. That is perhaps what the British wanted to hear, that their presence was intimidating and frightening Africans, through buildings and other structures, into submission.2 Besides architecture, the colonial project moved fast and instituted other structures to dominate Africans mentally and physically.
