When I first embarked on the project to write about the encounters between Chinese digital capital and Nairobi’s booming innovation scene, I imagined myself rubbing shoulders with software developers, venture capitalists, coworking hosts, and business analysts. That happened, eventually. But my first encounter with digital Global China in Kenya was of a completely different kind. I had just landed in Nairobi, in fall 2021, when I realized that I needed a burner phone to use mobile money. I was already familiar with the fact that Chinese manufacturers of affordable handsets dominated smartphone sales in Kenya — and in Africa at large. But I had not realized how crucial cheap Chinese mobiles were to the multiple value chains that linked Kenya’s Silicon Savannah and China’s going-out digital capital. It was when I found myself on Moi Avenue, looking for a burner phone, that I understood how the ubiquity of affordable Chinese hardware was my first glimpse into the story.
Busy and loud, Moi Avenue separated quieter, leafy uptown Nairobi, with its highly guarded government buildings and brutalist corporate offices, from the hustle and bustle of downtown. A colleague and friend had told me to notice how even the two sides of the avenue itself felt different. The uptown side, with its grander and better-kept buildings and more airy awnings, seemed spacious and neat. The downtown side, with its smaller arcades cluttered with all sorts of signs, appeared crowded and rowdy. Both sides of the avenue, in the section that leads to the statue of Tom Mboya, one of the revolutionary founding fathers of postcolonial Kenya, are dotted with dozens of electronics stores. Some of these are branded with global corporate logos, like those of Samsung, LG, Sony, Oppo, Nokia, XiaomiiXiaomiXiaomi is a Chinese consumer electronics company that leads the country in smartphone manufacturing and sales.READ MORE, and Huawei. Others bear the logos of China’s best-selling manufacturers of affordable hardware that only exist in Africa and Southeast Asia: Infinix, Tecno, Itel, Realme, Oraimo, and Zanco. Most shops, however, boisterously combine multiple labels — their windows covered with stickers and decorated by custom-printed packaging tape featuring various technology manufacturers.
