Nairobi The First 50 Years.

My short documentary film is part of a long form documentary that I have envisioned making for quite some time. It is a stills picture story about the city of Nairobi where I was born and live. A lot of my fellow citizens walk the streets of Nairobi and have no idea how or why the city was laid out the way it is or even why certain streets carry names of individuals who passed on years ago. Most 'Nairobians' don't even know whether the streets are named after people or random British objects. When the British came to colonize Kenya, they came with cameras. When the British left Kenya (at least the ones that left)... they left with their cameras and everything they'd recorded therein. So very little is available about the real story of the beginnings of the city of Nairobi and most of the early photographic material is locked up in old cabinets somewhere in private homes. I managed to come across a few well maintained websites holding half decent photographs about the city of Nairobi and this material is what I combined into a five minute documentary about the first fifty years of the city I call home. My vision is to make a longer version of the same encompassing interviews of the last remaining denizens of that time gone by. Many of the individuals I would like to interview were children in the 1930s and 40s when Nairobi was a young town. My long form version would also document the pit falls of the city from a once glamorous 'City in the Sun' to a now jaded and corruption beaten shame it has become today; slowly rising from ashes with a brand billion dollar train launched by President Uhuru Kenyatta on 31st May 2017. A new train to replace the Lunatic Express left behind by the British. So my short film is about colonial Nairobi as it was laid out by the British settlers and the buildings plus a few important events of the time.