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Two beauty queens, two perspectives on Kenyatta Market

By Natachi Onwuamaegbu

with help from Dianne Saliamo and Carly Steyer

Bonnie (left) on a Zoom call with Sarah (right). Photo by Carly Steyer


There are dozens of instances in which Sarah Kuruswo and Bonnie Achieng could have met.


There were the Miss Kenya training sessions: eight-hour events in hotel ballrooms which required tall heels on taller women. There were the commercial auditions for those who excelled at the training sessions. There were the lines for hair and make-up, the mutual friends they shared over the years. Sarah and Bonnie walked down the same roads, ate on the same street corners, moved to Dubai around the same time, had the same passions for charity work and etiquette. Their friendship was inevitable – but it’s founded on more than just coincidences.


“With Sarah, what you see is what you get and I’m pretty much the same way,” said Bonnie, reflecting on her friendship with Sarah after a moment of silent contemplation. “Being friends with her is like looking in the mirror and seeing yourself. We have a lot of other common friends between myself and Sarah that we are not very close to right now, but myself and Sarah just got closer as the years went by.”


Which is more impressive when you think about their distance – in 2004, Sarah and Bonnie both moved abroad. In 2010, Bonnie moved back to Nairobi to kickoff new business ventures and finish her degree, and Sarah moved to Milan, then back to Nairobi, then Washington D.C.. Sarah and Bonnie are the type of friends who can go months without speaking to one another, then reconnect over a glass of good wine like not a second has passed.



Almost 20 years after their Miss Kenya rise to fame, they both still prioritize quality hair maintenance.


“Being put together is an important part of how people view you,” said Sarah. “Personal image and branding – self-branding – matters to me.”


“There’s something important about putting effort into your appearance,” said Bonnie in another interview. “Looking a certain way can get you far.”


But there’s a big difference between the two, especially in the context of this series.

When Sarah comes to Nairobi, her first and last stop is an uncomfortable plastic chair deep into the alleys of Kenyatta Market.


“That’s where I can get the quality I’m looking for,” said Sarah. “I haven’t found anywhere else in the world like it.”


But Bonnie? The member of the pair who’s based in Nairobi? She's barely set foot in Kenyatta Market in nearly 20 years.



Photo by Carly Steyer


With entrepreneurs in Kenyatta Market struggling to understand why their number of clients have drastically fallen year to year, these two parallel stories may offer an explanation. There were those, like Sarah, who continued going to Kenyatta Market long past their beauty Queen days, and those, like Bonnie, who opted for an alternative. Braiders like Rose and Jemma sit in their empty stall, wondering and wondering why some people come back and some people don’t.


(Next week, we’ll dive further into this phenomenon from the perspective of a former Kenyatta market braider.)


Sarah grew up a few hours outside of Nairobi while Bonnie is a city girl through and through.

Hair wasn’t much of a thought for either woman when they were growing up — it couldn’t be. Attending boarding school meant cutting your hair down to a cropped close buzz. Braids only entered the picture on school breaks, when their hair grew to be just long enough to grasp and manipulate with extensions.


When they both graduated high school around 2002, Sarah and Bonnie were introduced to the freedom of self-expression — and the expectations of beauty. To be Miss Kenya -- which they both did during their first semester of college -- is to be put together. To be put together is to do more to your hair than simply shaving it off. It was around that time that they both took themselves to Kenyatta Market for the first time.


They both have vague memories of potentially going in their childhood: “maybe with my mom or an auntie,” said Bonnie. But when you’re a young adult on your own for the first time, your budget limits you – and Kenyatta Market can meet you where you're at.


Photo courtesy of Sarah Kuruswo


To Bonnie, success is comfort. For a woman who grew up exposed to abuse, being successful means being able to relax. As she got more money and advanced more and more in her career – starting as an Emirates flight attendant before opening a series of successful restaurants, then becoming an etiquette consultant – she could afford to not sit in a cramped market stall.


“I love getting my hair done at home,” said Bonnie. “It’s just much more relaxing. I can do whatever I’m doing at home and my stylist comes to me.”


And she’s not alone – many Kenyan women opt to go to more expensive salons where the chair is padded and pink and they’re offered champagne on arrival. But Bonnie is not necessarily looking for the fanciest option. For her, it’s also about energies.


“I feel like everybody has different touch,” said Bonnie. “It can be a very painful experience.”


Which is criticism braiders in Kenyatta Market have had to contend with for years. Dozens of women recall going to the market in the 90s and early 2000s and experiencing a lack of care, hair pulling, yanking, bruising. And while many customers and braiders cite a change in practices, the memories may not fade at the same pace.


Kenyatta Market reminds Bonnie of the chaos of their childhood. Of different energies attempting to assert influence over her and her body. The quality the market can offer simply isn’t worth it – it’s not worth her losing the peace she’s worked so hard to build.



For Sarah who grew up with the slow pace of the former Rift Valley Province, there’s still something so thrilling about the speed and energy in the salon – the four girls clamouring around her head, the endless conversations, the bargaining – but more than anything else, Sarah loves the quality.


A well-made head of hair opens doors. It doesn’t matter the environment in which you got it done.


When Sarah lived in Dubai a few months after the Miss Kenya competition, it was her first time spending an extended amount of time out of the country – and her first time in a non-Black society. Sarah had experienced colorism, even the occasional bouts of racism from passing tourists, but she had never been looked at like she was looked at in Dubai.


She would walk into rooms and she was looked at like she didn’t belong. Harsh eyes would scan her form, pausing on her dark skin, then on her darker hair.


“Dubai doesn’t have the diversity it does now,” said Sarah. “It was… different back then.”

Sarah was entering rooms with people whose lived realities were so far from her middle-class upbringing in rural Kenya.


“In many spaces where I am, presentation matters and as a person it gives me the confidence to be in some rooms that sometimes I'm intimidated to be,” said Sarah, reflecting on both her time in Dubai and her current job as a Program Officer in Washington D.C.. “Not because I feel insufficient, but because I can be in very powerful spaces. Places that force me to remind myself how I ended up here in the first place.”


Braids make her feel confident enough to take up space – and braids from Kenyatta Market rule above all. For Sarah, success isn’t necessarily the way she feels in the salon chair and much more everything she feels out of it. That’s why the uncomfortable plastic chair is worth a few visits every time she comes to Nairobi. That’s why the loud conversations, the yelling prices over one another, the hair being passed over her head and across her lap, that’s why that orchestra calms her. Because Kenyatta Market leaves her feeling the best version of herself.



Photo by Carly Steyer


Sarah and Bonnie both remember their time as Miss Kenya contestants in the early 2000s fondly. If you get them talking for long enough, there’s an endless treasure trove of stories just waiting to be mined. Like the time Lupita Nyong'o showed up to their first training session in a big black government car with an even bigger smile, or how on the weekends they would stand on live television and pull lottery numbers, then strike a pose. These days, however, life is different.


Sarah has two daughters and Bonnie has one. For most of the year, all three girls carry their hair in beautiful long box braids, framing their round cheeks and ending past their collarbones. All three of the girls are raised in predominately white countries (with Bonnie’s child in Switzerland and Sarah’s children in the U.S.). All three girls have had to navigate a world that often works against Black women — and do it with the confidence and grace their mothers instilled in them.


That’s why Sarah found a salon in D.C. filled with African mamas like the ones in Kenyatta Market. Every two weeks, she drops her daughters off there, allows them to choose their own hairstyle, their own length and color, and picks them up three hours later.


It’s about the independence beauty allows Sarah to feel and the confidence it’s instilled in her — a confidence she hopes to pass down to her daughters.


“I still remember every experience at the barber shop going to cut my hair," said Sarah. "I did not want to expose them to that experience at a younger age. So I wanted them to be at the stage where they understand why they're going to the salon. My daughters are starting to discover the beauty of their hair.”

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(you can also reach us at natachi@ndezacollective.com)

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© 2023 by Natachi Onwuamaegbu

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