Is Halloween a Nairobi thing now?

By the time you read this, the kids at Village Market will be handing the night over to the grown-ups. The Gigiri mall's Halloween Fright Night runs a Little Monsters party from 2pm and a Villain party from 6pm, at KES 2,000 at the gate. An hour later and across town, Sarakasi Dome in Ngara opens its doors for Rock Riot's Halloween edition, with Rash Band, Keni and Nessa Dove on stage and DJ Orts and DJ Edygrim on the decks.

None of this is ours, strictly speaking. Halloween grew out of Samhain, an old Celtic festival, and reached Kenya the long way round: through America, through film and, lately, through the For You page. Which makes the question worth asking. Is Halloween a Nairobi thing now?

2016When it was a hard sell

Ten years ago, the honest answer was no. In October 2016, Business Daily described a holiday that had meant very little to Kenyans only a few years earlier, and a city's worth of hotels, bars, pastry chefs and costume designers working hard to change that. Nairobi's entrepreneurs, it reported, were competing to throw the scariest party.

Not everyone was charmed. That December, the economist XN Iraki used his column in The Standard to puzzle over the new imports, Halloween and baby showers among them. “It was mesmerising to see banners advertising Halloween in October,” he wrote.

2024When it became a circuit

Eight years later the conversation had moved on. In 2024, KBC was reporting on young Kenyans hosting and attending costume parties, and Pulse Kenya was listing nine venues marking what it called the city's unofficial holiday. SK8City put up to KSh 20,000 on the best costume. Rock Riot took its Halloween night to Nairobi Street Kitchen. This year it has moved to Sarakasi Dome, and it now bills itself as an annual celebration.

What changed wasn't so much Nairobi's nightlife as Nairobi's phones. As K24 put it this week, young Kenyans pick Halloween up through social media and pop culture, with TikTok and Instagram doing much of the heavy lifting: costume ideas, makeup tutorials, themed shoots. KBC's 2024 report had a viral example of its own, three creators in horror make-up walking through the CBD while passers-by and security guards stared.

And where people go, business follows. Malls, bars, restaurants and makeup artists now plan October around a holiday that, a decade ago, they were pushing uphill.

The other sideNot in this house

It would be wrong to call it a city-wide party. For plenty of Kenyan families, Halloween is a firm no. A Parents Africa look at the debate last year found parents split between those who see harmless dress-up and those who see the ghosts and demons as spiritually unsafe. Others object for the reason Iraki raised in 2016: it simply isn't ours. K24 found the same split this year, with fun and creativity on one side and unease about adopting a foreign celebration on the other.

The verdictSo, is it ours now?

Partly. For one slice of Nairobi, young, online and out on a Saturday night, Halloween is already on the calendar. For much of the city it's still somebody else's holiday, and it's nowhere near the size of the celebrations we grew up with.

But it's starting to sound like Nairobi: Kenyan DJs, a Swahili rock band, Kenyan costumes. That's usually how it goes here. We don't adopt things so much as remix them.

Will you be dressing up tonight? Tell us on Instagram, @flavor.africacorp.