RUPI MANGAT: The garden that grows amongst concrete

Al fresco dining place at Amani Gardens Inn in Westlands, Nairobi. PHOTO| RUPI MANGAT

What you need to know:

  • According to the records of the Eastern Mennonite Missions, Amani Inn was once St Mawe’s Hotel’.

  • It housed members of the British colonial army, and the grounds included an underground passage to the fortified bunker.

It’s with great curiosity that I look through the hole in the bunker. It is impenetrable darkness inside, giving nothing away, its secrets gone with those who held the stories.

What I can fathom, standing beside the decades-old dome submerged in the grounds of what is today Amani Garden Inn on Church Road in Westlands, is that it was most likely built by the King’s African Rifles (KAR) around the time of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s or even earlier.

SHROUDED IN MYSTERY

According to the records of the Eastern Mennonite Missions, Amani Inn was once St Mawe’s Hotel’. It housed members of the British colonial army, and the grounds included an underground passage

to the fortified bunker.

“No one has ever found the opening to the bunker or the underground passage,” says Debbi DiGennaro of the inn.

It’s a beautiful clear blue sky day. Towering trees that have stood since the first guests walked into Mennonite Guest House – now Amani Garden Inn – in 1964 are in blossom in the late year.

It’s a beautiful, mature garden tended with love and care, awash with colourful shrubs and flowers – surrounded by a fast-rising vertical city amidst vanishing gardens.

“This is one of the last green spaces left in Westlands,” Debbi tells me. “When kids come here, all they want to do is just run,” she continues as we munch on a starter – Mexihili nachos.

It’s a break away from the traditional menu. With the new Amani, the garden restaurant offers a a-la-carte menu with an assortment of old favourites like burgers and chips, and innovations like the

Mexihili (Mexican-Swahili) nachos with cassava chips. “The tables are made from the old wooden tiles retrieved from the floors of the missionary houses,” Debbi continues.

With external funding dwindling and moving with the times, two of the missionary houses that were in the neighbouring garden were pulled down to make way for a block of high-rise apartments to generate the needed funding for the work of the Mennonites in the region.

“As with everything, when it’s time to pull things down there’s a lot of opposition. Many missionary kids who are adults now lived in those houses but they haven’t been back for years. They are the ones who want to hold on to memories.

“The wooden beams above the garden walkways and the columns are from the bricks of those old houses,” she points out. They’re cast in memories of the past.

 

FACT FILE

Amani Gardens Inn has family rooms with bunk beds and connecting rooms in the old block. The new block by the basketball and tennis courts has modern en-suite rooms with a veranda, giving views

of the garden with a playground for kids, including a climbing wall and a swing hung on the branches of a gigantic tree.

‘Amani’ means ‘peace’ in Swahili – an important distinctive of Mennonites.  Mennonites first came to Eastern Africa as missionaries in 1934, working around Lake Victoria.

Today there are several national churches along with schools, hospitals, and development projects.

           

The King’s African Rifles was an offshoot of regiments formed by the Imperial British East Africa Company in the 1890s to fight the slave traders.

It was a conglomeration of the Uganda Rifles, the Central African Regiment and the East African Rifles. On January 1,1902 these were renamed the King’s African Rifles – to defend the Empire in its

colonies of Rhodesia (Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), Kenya and Uganda – until the African colonies gained independence in the 1960s. In the 1950s, KAR fought against the Mau Mau insurgence in

Kenya.