Nairobi, like all large cities, is both familiar and unfamiliar. It has Dublin levels of friendliness, bad traffic, one of the world’s largest urban forests and a remarkable national park where giraffe roam against a backdrop of the city skyline.

It is also a city characterised by a high concentration of shopping malls. Generally, I find malls uninspiring places. But I recently spent the guts of a week in one of Nairobi’s, bluntly named The Mall, in the Westlands area of the city. This is the setting for Kilele, a brilliant festival showcasing East Africa’s experimental music and music technology scene. The festival is now in its third year. Here, you can clearly see how an urban post-retail context can be transformed into something to benefit young and creative people.

One of Kilele’s founders, David Tinning, also cofounded Santuri East Africa, a community-driven music innovation hub based in The Mall. The Mall was built in 1990, “but it had kind of lost its lustre,” he told me. “A lot of the brands moved out. Then Covid hit and even more of the tenants left. So there were all these empty spaces.”

Tinning praised the vision of the owner of the shopping centre, Biki Kangwana, who decided to offer space to arts collectives for cheap rent. They came: a VR studio, BlackRhino, and a basement club called The Mist, focused........

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