Gikosh
Many of us Nairobians are familiar with Gikomba, to some extent. Some of us have a knowledge that runs deep, because our parents introduced us to it, taking us through the gigantic maze that it is, and showing us hacks like how to dress when you’re headed there. They’d insist that we don’t use it as an arena to showcase the English we learnt in school (you’d immediately be overcharged if you try and bargain in English), they’d show us where to eat in case your shopping day was long, have us memorise all the entrances and exits, and emphasise that you’d rather get lost than ask for directions.
We transferred that knowledge into our adulthood, getting all the designer brands at affordable prices so that you weren’t left behind with the campus trends. And in this, some saw a business opportunity, waking up early in the morning to get stock from Gikomba, and selling them on Instagram or hawking them around hostels and by the roadside for a markup – in that way both earning an income and saving a lot of people the trip and hassle.
Gikomba. Gikosh. Wadhii. Soko.
Here, we meet Johnte, a young man who has his business in a side of Gikosh a lot of us don’t get to interact with, unless you have business that takes you there.
The ironing section. This is a section of Gikomba you walk into and immediately get hit by a wave of heat.
Here, there’s whole rows of people at different stages of ironing. To start, you scrub the bottom of the charcoal iron you’ve rented for 20 bob a day with a stone till its surface is smooth, which reduces friction.
Charcoal is preferred as a heat source for the iron because you can iron more clothes for less, because on average you might use between KES 200-400 worth of charcoal, which would be much higher if you iron with electricity as your power source.
You set the charcoal inside the iron and then use denim or pure cotton to light the coals quickly, you can use a makeshift metallic boiler to heat the iron faster on the outside. As you can already tell, time is of the essence here.
Those manning the irons offer traders and buyers an essential service in Gikomba, because they get clothes from traders who’ve bought them in bulk to resell in the retail market. The purpose of ironing the clothes is to make them more presentable to the final buyer, wrinkle free and thus more appealing.
It’s an intense process to watch, with people flipping around 10 clothes at a go, interchanging the one at the top so each item gets equal heat distribution, a damp cotton cloth placed at the top so the heat doesn’t burn through the clothes. Some of them have earphones on, others exchanging stories and laughing loudly with each other.
Johnte has spent 5 years as a trader in Gikomba, and he’s what we’d call a master of all trades, because he doesn’t just iron, although that’s what his older brother introduced him to when he first came here. He’s also a retail trader. He buys clothes, then gives them to his brother to sell on Ngong Road. In the evening, he goes and joins him. On some weekends he goes home to Homa Bay and sells clothes there too.
As with any other business, and not only in Nairobi but around the country, a lot of the problems Johnte experiences can be directly linked to government negligence, or government interference.
Ever since William Ruto’s government came into power, they pay 20 shillings per day, per stall to the County government; Kanjo. In the past, they only paid this fee three times a week, but now, it’s a daily price.
There’s also been multiple attempts to evict them from the market, with ‘strange’ fires starting in the wee hours of the night, razing through innocent traders’ stock and stalls, causing losses amounting to millions.
To a majority of Kenyans, nothing about this is strange, because we’ve seen this script play out too many times to count. Instead of working to improve conditions for the traders, by doing things like fixing roads and footpaths in the market so that people don’t have to wade through mud and mush to get to their destination, or building better, more permanent stalls and a semblance of order to the market, they work against them – it seems obvious that the state that Gikomba is in, is a deliberate choice by those in authority.
Still, isn’t it interesting to find out what processes your clothes have gone through before getting to your wardrobe?
Written by: Makena Ngito
Photos by: Edwin Ndeke