Greater Westlands is Nairobi’s most affluent district, in a city of stark and growing inequality. It is also, unsurprisingly, the most globally connected. But it is also where electronic music first took root, driving a narrative that the music is only for the wealthy and connected. However, this narrative does not capture the actual reality of a rich, pulsating scene that’s opening up new musical frontiers. This is a personal encounter with Westlands by DJ and music producer Raphael Kariuki.

I’m listening to the spacey, ambient waves and deep, dark drones that I want to play tomorrow evening as I open for my friend, the experimental techno DJ/producer Monrhea, who’s headlining tomorrow’s show at The Mist, our two-month old venue in Westlands. Honesty and courtesy demand that I declare my baggage upfront, not least for how time-consuming our new event has been to organize – every Friday and the days before and after – while trying to keep tabs on all the different bits of this #NairobiConscious project. But we are not complaining, Kamwangi Njue and I, as both curators of this Norient City Sounds special and resident DJs of our new venue, because after years of hoping and dreaming, we finally found a space in Nairobi for our music and its people. It was almost always going to be in Westlands.

From Backyard Base to Backyard Bass

Westlands is many things. To me and here, it is the first home of electronic music in Nairobi.

It started with the house and EDM events of the early 2000s (this article by Chia Kiyanda captures it, pretty much), which made inroads for more diverse electronic sounds that in turn fed the current situation of effervescent experimentation all over the city. My personal favorites in the story were Backyard Bass, which was an easy monthly event where people wanting something more/other than the untz-untz-untz could hang out in a dark corner behind The Alchemist bar. After passing by a small hole-in-the-wall liquor store, coincidentally known as Backyard Base, you went to Backyard Bass to hear (or play) stuff that you couldn’t easily hear or play anywhere else even in a district of Nairobi known for its diversity – nothing too crazy, mostly techno, dub, «future» bass. Most importantly to me, at Backyard Bass, local producers/DJs got the chance to play, and many of Nairobi’s non-mainstream DJ/producers played a set or smoked a clandestine spliff under the shadows of the jacaranda trees behind the main bar.

Backyard Bass evolved into MUZE, now an internationally acclaimed Westlands-based nightclub whose recent line-up included South African house music superstar Black Coffee in December 2021, while its co-founder Matt Swallow, aka DJ Lasta, is a leading festival organizer and electronic music promoter between Nairobi and Kilifi on the coast. Long-running venues and events in the district continue to play electronic nights, now venturing into even more uncharted (speaking for Nairobi) musical territory, all within walking distance of each other in the main Westlands center.

The Elephant in the Room

But Westlands is many things. Greater Westlands is, by far and away, the rich side of town.

This matters because poverty is the inescapable reality for most Nairobians, despite all the hype about our city’s perks and attractions for the expatriate, the Afropolitan, the global. I’d feel unclean if I did not bring this up here, that this fact about the Westlands district of Nairobi – home to the embassies and diplomats, the wealthy, the educated, the traveled – has long cast this shade on the electronic music scene here. The conversation about wealth and well-being, about the currents and dynamics of power, privilege, poverty, opportunity, and humanity, are real and must be amplified in more meaningful and purposeful ways. To frame everything about Westlands within only this topic, however, reduces it and the city at large to a single story.

Musical and Digital Connections

Westlands is the most cosmopolitan area of Nairobi – the city itself already one of the most connected on the global maps. Of course it is. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, or whatever. What’s more important is that it leads to the inevitable situation that Westie has become the de facto home for the music most global in its making and listening. Perhaps more than other genres, electronic music (admittedly a large blanket of a term) happens in the crossing, crisscrossing, and eventual altogether disregarding of boundaries and borders. I mean this mostly musically and digitally, for it is certainly not the literal reality of most of us musicians and music-lovers on this side of the city, and our music is hardly the exclusive domain of holders of well-stamped passports, despite the dominant script.

But wherever we’ll gather, this or the next weekend in the city, we have Westlands to thank for giving the music a place to start. No other part of the city would have given it the chance.