Kipande House

This guide to Kipande House in Nairobi opens with a line from Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai about the passbook system that grew out of this exact corner. Built in nineteen thirteen as the tallest building in the city, the warehouse became a colonial registration hall in nineteen nineteen, where African men queued to be issued a metal box called a kipande, carrying fingerprints, tribal details and an employer's private notes. Some men wore the box openly around their necks as ordered; others hid it beneath their shirts instead, a small act of defiance repeated thousands of times a day on this street.