The Uber driver tonight, Patrick, is ignoring me until I prod and prod, from the back seat, dropping strong hints that this customer is in a chatty mood. I’m on a mission, and I need his help.
The mission being, to find as many dancefloors as I can pack in one night. Or rather, a few hours within a single Friday night. The goal is a good night out – to have a good time, I tell Patrick. To wake tomorrow with tired bones, hopefully not with a hangover and no injuries. But the main goal is tired bones.
“Since you are always out here,” I ask as he watches a bus in the other lane. He’s wise to be wary of bus drivers in this city. “Do you know any night club with a dancefloor?”
But Nairobi’s dancefloors are a dying breed, so I can already guess his answer.
One way to tell a city is in decline is if its nightclubs don’t have dancefloors.
The sun is still in the sky 12 hours a day here, and this is the City in the Sun. There are more bars, nightclubs, joints and bistros here than ever before – perhaps more than churches even – including some you might get scammed in.
Patrick doesn’t go out, he says, but he hopes I get to experience some luck on my mission tonight. I hope so too.
At some point in the recent decades, Nairobi’s nightlife became focused on hedonism purely for capitalists. At that point, it became more important to the men and women who run our nightlife that you sit down and order things.
Everything was increasingly designed for that, from the lighting behind the barman, the location of the washrooms, and because most revellers (and frequent spenders, I suspect) are men, young female waitresses in skimpy uniforms.
In this new night-time world, as I’ve discovered, it is frowned upon to move tables out of the way to make your own dancefloor. Before you know it, the waitress has asked the bouncer, a mean-looking thuggish man in combat pants who turns out to be quite nice, whether it’s permitted. He’s not sure, so it’s the manager who walks over to advise, strongly, against it.
We were sitting with one of these capitalists in his relatively new establishment, with two regulars who happened to be friends of his. I was whining to him about the vanishing dancefloor problem and he responded by ordering a refill for my rum.
“So, what do you think of the place?” Everyone said they thought it was good. There were comments, over the noise of the Afrobeats, about the all-black facade, the raised VIP section, the waitresses in skimpy dresses that looked too uncomfortable for long work hours, and even the prices.
“But where is the dancefloor?”
He looked confused.
“You can dance anywhere you want,” he said, pointing all over the place, “and even here,” and he waved in the general area just next to me.
“But that’s just between tables, there’s no space, even in front of the DJ,” I said, looking up at the barely visible entertainer hidden behind a raised MacBook, not letting any specific song play for too long.
So I told him a story about how once, in the middle of a very packed nightclub on Thika Road, we’d had to negotiate a friend’s girlfriend’s release after she chose to create her own dancefloor on top of a massive speaker set in a corner.
He didn’t answer, and looked glad when one of his friends changed the subject.
Morris Kiruga is the editor-in-chief of the Kenyan Wall Street
