Kibera Awoke the Msanii in Me | nirmalasankaran.com

From a One-Week Plan to Hakuna Matata

Street art has always pulled me in. I’m drawn to its boldness, to the way a single wall can hold emotions and social realities that pages of text can’t quite capture. I’ve been captivated by social murals in Bogotá, surreal creatures in Barcelona, protest art in São Paulo, syncretic imagery in Kochi, sharp slogans in Berlin, cheeky cartoons in London, warehouse scrawls in San Francisco, cine-graffiti in Chennai, and hall of fame walls in Zagreb.
In most cities, street art lives in neighbourhoods that tend to be rough around the edges. But in Nairobi, it runs through Kibera, the city’s largest slum - cutting along its spine, clinging to walls and railway tracks. In Kibera, concrete surfaces become galleries. A rusted gate holds a whole story. Here, art is not a side activity. It is survival, expression, protest, therapy, community building - all at once.

Earlier this week, Saviour, a 20-year-old Msanii accompanied me on a walking tour in Kibera - to showcase local artists, inviting visitors to see Kibera as a creative force, not just a slum. Saviour spoke, quietly but clearly, about why he does what he does: to help kids wrestle with depressive thoughts, helplessness, and the temptations that sit too close - drugs, crime, the feeling that nothing will ever change. For him, art is a way of giving children a chance to dream about their own lives.

There was a maturity and a keen sense of purpose about Saviour that stayed with me. He has curated Airbnb experiences for tourists, set up an art collective, raised funds through workshops, and collaborated with global and African artists. Saviour is sharp and as plugged-in as any Gen Z founder in a big-city co-working space - only his boardroom is an alley, and his pitch deck is sprayed on corrugated metal. Standing there, I realised that art can live anywhere, even in the roughest corners.

At one point, we found ourselves balancing along railway lines, children orbiting us as if this was the most natural playground. Long concrete walls ran parallel to the tracks - some bare, others carrying layers of colour and words. One mural, painted by a Japanese artist, spoke starkly of the urgency of climate action.

Between the metal and the dust, we began visualising an artwork that would bear witness to the Indian men who laid the tracks in brutal heat, through disease, accidents and exhaustion - many never making it home. It felt befitting to create a continuous mural that fused Indian and Kenyan motifs: turbans and kangas, Maasai beadwork and Gurmukhi script, pickaxes and prayer cloths, chapati pans and sufurias, railway tools and kiondo baskets, tent camps and unmarked graves.

Right there on the tracks, the Msanii in me had surfaced!

I was excited by the transformative power of art and the possibilities it offers to make sense of the world. From then on, I could see Msanii energy everywhere in Nairobi - in the impossible-to-ignore matatus that roar past carrying pop culture, politics, faith and humour on their sides; in kibandas where women and men arrange tomatoes, greens and mangoes in almost sculptural patterns; in the cafés that double up as studios, where people across ages write, sketch, edit, dream between sips of coffee.

That’s its gift to me: a place that whispers, “You’re msanii too. Usiruhusu chochote kikuzuie kuumba” (Swahili for “don’t let anything stop you from creating”). As an entrepreneur and an educator, I’m holding on to that – in Kibera’s lanes and in HeyMath! Classrooms alike, the work is the same: to create with courage and imagination, and to give children the confidence to do the same.

I told Saviour about an article I’d stumbled upon recently: how 35,000 Punjabi labourers were brought by the British from India to build this very railway line (called the ‘Lunatic Line’) that ran through Kibera – connecting Uganda to Mombasa.

It pained me that this piece of history isn’t spoken of - not here in Kibera, not even in Nairobi’s Railway Museum. I felt a strong urge to name it, to honour the fact that the sweat and struggle of Indian labourers, and a significant strand of my own country’s past, are embedded in these tracks.

"If Kibera stirred something in me, the Kuona Art Collective took it to another level – a free-thinking space where curiosity is the only entry ticket. You don’t need credentials to belong; you just need to be willing to experiment, to talk and to listen. It’s the kind of place where you can exhale and just start from where you are."