You will be amused to learn how Nairobi estates acquired their names

What started off as one name sometimes became twisted or lost in translation. But soon, as the town’s population grew, so did the names stick till the post-independence era

Here are some of them:

1. Roysambu – Roysambu is a estate located along the Thika Superhighway. It was known as Royal Suburbs during the colonial times. However this morphed to Roy-Sabu and eventually got the current name Roysambu.

2. Kariakor – During the first World War, a contingent of Kenyan soldiers served in the British army as luggage carriers. The Carrier Corps, as they were known, carried everything the soldiers needed to survive during the East African campaign of the war.

Their base in Nairobi was around the present day Kariakor area. The name Carrier Corps eventually got twisted and ended up as Kariakor by which it is known today.

3. Donholm – Though now a residential area, Donholm was previously a dairy farm known still as Donholm Estate, and named after Glasgow’s Donholm Estate where its previous owner, J.K. Watson hailed from.

Mr J.K. Watson was a farmer, but very little is known about him. Libraries have since discarded his pictures and mementos.

What is known however is that he helped in the construction of early churches in East Africa, the most notable being the Namirembe Hill Church in Uganda.

The former Donholm Constituency (Watson’s Farm) was once represented by Mwai Kibaki, before it was renamed as Bahati. Donholm Road was also renamed as Jogoo Road shortly after independence.

4. Kibra – Kibra is a word from the Nubian tribe that means ‘forest’. The area acquired  the name by virtue of its initial proximity to the Ngong forest.

At the end of the World War I, the British Government gazetted over 4000 acres of land in the area as a military reserve for decommissioned Nubian soldiers who had given military service to the colonial government.

The first Nubian settlement in the area was around 1904.

The Nubians of Kibra are among the earliest African residents of what eventually became Nairobi City.

Apart from service as soldiers in the King’s African Rifles, Nubians were some of the first employees of the Kenya Bus Service in the 1930’s and also worked in the Kenya Police.

After Independence, one of the most prominent Nubians was Yunus Ali, who became the first Nubian Member of Parliament, (there hasn’t been another Nubian in such a high position ever since).

Today, there still are names in the area that denote the time when the Nubian population formed the majority Kibra.

Laini Saba means ‘firing range’, the location of a shooting range used by the King’s African Rifles during the two World Wars.

Toi, where Toi market is presently located, means open space.

5. Zimmerman – Tim Zimmermann was a German taxidermist (the art of stuffing and mounting the skins of dead animals in lifelike form) who had followed the trail of big game hunters to east Africa, the largest big game attraction in the world.

Originally, according to some records, Zimmermann or Bwana Simama to his workers, had come to research for a German University. He fell in love with Kenya and started Zimmermann’s Limited (Taxidermy) in 1929.

By then, Kenya boasted the largest game safaris in the world, attracting hunters including former US President Theodore Roosevelt.

The famous Ahmed, the Marsabit elephant, at the Nairobi National Museum was done at Zimmermann’s.

Zimmermann Ltd rose to become the second largest taxidermy company in the World, which until 1977, was located on the plains of Kamiti.  It was pushed out of business after Kenya banned hunting in 1977.

6. Embakasi – It first started of as Embakasi Village in the 1950s as the location of the infamous Embakasi Prison, nicknamed “Satan’s Paradise”, one of the most notorious prisons during the State of Emergency imposed by the British Colonial government at the time.

The Mau Mau suspects detained in the prison were forced to construct Embakasi Airport between 1954 and 1958. The airport was later renamed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

7. Nyayo Estate – This small subdivision of Embakasi was built near Embakasi Village during the Moi era in the late 1990s to cater for middle class homeowners. It is believed that the estate coined its name from the then President Moi’s catchphrase “Harambee… Nyayo!” hence the name Nyayo estate.

8. Eastleigh – Commonly known as the little Mogadishu, Eastleigh started out as the residential area for Asians and elite Africans at the time. Eastleigh has since evolved into a major commercial hub, a city within a city.

The Moi Air Base, formerly known as RAF Eastleigh, a military base with a small airport, is located in Eastleigh. The name “RAF Eastleigh” was also used during 1935 for the airfield in England that became RAF Southampton in 1936.

Due to Kenyans colonization by the British some of its official are said to have been using the airstrip coming from England Eastleigh in Hampshire – hence the name Eastleigh was easily coined to refer to the neighbourhood.

Eastleigh was the primary RAF station for East Africa, and home to Air Headquarters East Africa after force reductions in the 1950s.

Eastleigh also operated as a civilian airport with airlines such as BOAC, EAA, etc operating flights until the opening of Embakasi Airport (now Jomo Kenyatta International) nearby in 1958.

However, because of its high elevation and short runways (which could not be extended because of its location close to the city), from the arrival of No. 208 Squadron RAF in the late 1950s with its Hawker Hunters, jet fighters and bombers had to operate from the nearby Embakasi Airport (the present day JKIA).

9. Karen – Is an affluent suburb of Nairobi, lying south west of the city centre. It is generally believed that the suburb is named after Karen Blixen, the Danish author of the colonial memoir Out of Africa. Her farm occupied the land where the suburb now stands.

Blixen herself declared in her later writings that “the residential district of Karen” was “named after me”. And Remy Martin, the developer who bought the farm in 1931 and converted it into residential plots for Nairobi’s fast-growing population, confirmed that he named the neighborhood after Blixen.

10. Ofafa Jericho – The “estate where the devil lives” is one of the various names that Ofafa Jericho has been nicknamed over the years. But its real name is in reference to the city of Jericho whose Biblical meaning is the moon city. However, it is not clear why an estate that is infamous for crime and other social ills ended up being called Jericho.