Open Access Edition of "Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi" by Kenda Mutongi

FAIN: DR-272611-20

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Alan Thomas (Project Director: March 2020 to October 2022)

This project will publish the book "Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi," written by Kenda Mutongi (NEH grant number FB-56100-12), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi
Year: 2022
ISBN: 9780226471426
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Author: Kenda Mutongi
Editor: David Brent
Editor: David Brent/Priya S. Nelson
Abstract: 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 extravagantly colored, sporting names, slogans, or entire tableaus, with airbrushed portraits of everyone from Kanye West to Barack Obama. 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 the socioeconomic and political conditions of late-twentieth-century Africa. In their diversity of idiosyncratic designs, they reflect multiple and divergent aspects of Kenyan life—including, for example, rapid urbanization, organized crime, entrepreneurship, social insecurity, the transition to democracy, and popular culture—at once embodying Kenya’s staggering social problems as well as 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 and explore the entrepreneurial aesthetics of the postcolonial world.
Primary URL: http://bibliopen.org/p/bopen/9780226471426
Primary URL Description: Bibliopen
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63441
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
Type: Single author monograph

Prizes

Hagley Prize
Date: 3/16/2018
Organization: Business History Conference
Abstract: Best book in business history (broadly defined).

Martin A. Klein Prize
Date: 10/10/2018
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: The most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English.

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