In Matatu Work, Meghan Ference traces the complex social and cultural world of transportation in Nairobi. Focusing on the city’s (in)famous matatus, Ference takes seriously the motivations and passions of the drivers that keep the city moving, seeking to understand the challenges of life in the city from their perspective. For a sector that has so often been derided for its criminality and danger, this approach is refreshing and opens up new ways of thinking about the unique forms of sociality and cultural expression present in matatus, from the microdialects of Sheng language, to the political economy of design and operation of vehicles, to the changing gender dynamics of the industry.

The book begins with an extensive introduction that lays out the stakes for matatu drivers and, thus, the stakes for the book in postcolonial Kenya. Part of an ever-growing “informal sector,” matatu drivers have found themselves both applauded for their contributions to Kenya’s economy and attacked for perceived abuses and corruption as they navigate that economy. Matatu drivers’ work is shaped by the same kinds of challenges that shape the lives of the majority of Kenyans—inequality and insecurity, changing gender expectations, unpredictable violence, and urban ingenuity. The particular ways in which they are targeted, Ference argues, reflect scholarly and policy approaches that “begin from a position of what is wrong with those systems or what they need to change in order to improve” (4). Ference, by contrast, seeks to understand “what is generated by these systems and how they work for the people most intimately engaged with them” (4). Her ethnographic approach draws on research collected over nearly twenty years, representing a wide range of research methods in sites ranging from archives to the matatus themselves. Ference also worked on matatus and developed close relationships with both male and female drivers over this period, allowing her to trace changes in their lived experience over several decades.

The first chapter lays out some of the historical background that informs the emergence of matatus. In particular, the chapter argues that contemporary debates about matatus and their role in the city’s public transportation system have their roots in debates over “mobile monopolies” and the “one fare, one class” rule in the 1950s and 1960s. Driven by complaints from white housewives in Nairobi who played on fears about racialized and gendered violence to argue for greater privilege and protection in urban transport systems, Ference argues that the archival files also provide rich evidence of the ways in which Nairobi’s African population—and particularly African women—built community and asserted their rights through the transportation system in ways that shaped the emergence of matatus and their unique, sometimes anarchic but also highly organized culture.

In the chapters that follow, Ference details this culture, focusing on a range of topics from the way that passengers use “joyriding” to generate community, to the redistribution of labor and the political economy of mobility, to the ways in which gender has shaped and reshaped expectations about public transport and community over the last several decades. Ference supports her arguments with richly detailed ethnographic research, drawn from both practical experience and extensive conversation with transport workers and passengers. While she references significant archival research and describes the book as “historical ethnography,” archival evidence from the period before the Moi administration appears only occasionally outside of the first main chapter, which functions more as historical background for the rest of the book. It would have been interesting to see more of the research, which Ference says informed so much of her analysis, interwoven with her rich ethnographic research.

This book builds on and contributes to a growing body of scholarship—now at least ten years old—on public transportation across the African continent. While Ference gestures to some of this scholarship, she engages almost exclusively with work that is focused on Kenya. This focus, in many ways, enhances the deep ethnographic analysis. However, there are moments where comparative reading and engagement would aid analysis, highlighting the ways in which experiences in Kenya were both similar to and different from other parts of the continent, particularly subject to and connected by the experience of British colonial rule. These observations, however, do not detract from the overall quality of the book. Matatu Work is a richly detailed and diligently researched exploration of Nairobi’s matatu culture through the lived experiences of its drivers and passengers.