Some street art from Nairobi

Somewhere in the Parklands district of Nairobi, I came across a wall with beautiful street art. Markets in Kenya are full of beautifully executed art, sold at heart-breakingly low prices. I’d been surprised at the relative lack of street art, so this discovery was very pleasant. The Swahili word Jamuri means room, and that puts the piece in the featured photo in context. Imaginative, along with the graffiti inside graffiti.

This beautifully flowing piece on the same wall has the inscription Haki iwe ngao, which is Swahili for “Righteousness be the shield”. I like this East African “idiom” which avoids large areas of single colour, but uses stippling and stripes very extensively. On this large scale it makes for an extremely bright effect, somewhat in the way the pointillist experiments of Seurat did.

This superbly painted clubhouse gate more or less explained why this wall was full of street art. The logo of the clubhouse is rather cool I think. That background pink is really lovely.

This last one requires little explanation if you know a bit of Kenyan history. 1963 was the year Kenya became independent.