Nairobi Stories: The arboretum returns to life - which is more than you can say for the zebras

The monkeys in Nairobi's arboretum are beginning to find their breakfasts disturbed by the soft patter of joggers on the red earth paths below.

The monkeys in Nairobi's arboretum are beginning to find their breakfasts disturbed by the soft patter of joggers on the red earth paths below.

This tree-filled park, away from the frantic centre, was once the Hampstead Heath of Nairobi, where families would bring picnics and the weekend papers to snooze on. But as crime levels in the Kenyan capital shot up and the city began to refer to itself as "Nairobbery", people began to avoid isolated paths and bushes where muggers and rapists could hide. The park was abandoned, and left to fill up with weeds. Only the monkeys remained.

Now, after the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her urban conservation work, the city council has decided to pull up the weeds, clear the paths and encourage people to come back into the park for guided walks and group runs. Slowly, the arboretum is filling up once again on Sundays with picnicking families and impromptu church groups, singing gospel songs in the dappled sunlight. On weekdays, pedestrians walk through on their way to work, and the joggers puff their way past newly installed dustbins and noticeboards. The monkeys, still in their branches, look down in bemusement.

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While Nairobi city council sorts out its parks, it has allowed the roads to descend into chaos. At the Westlands roundabout, a key intersection between the suburbs and the city centre, engineers installed traffic lights to ease the congestion. But the timing of the lights was so bad that instead of crawling through the junction, the traffic stopped moving altogether. Only the matatus - the minibuses with psychopathic drivers that are the closest things Nairobi has to a public transport system - kept moving by the simple expedient of weaving between the cars and knocking off wing mirrors.

The solution? Not disciplining the matatu drivers or improving the timing of the lights, as you might think. The authorities have cleared the roadside of hawkers, who had set up stalls selling clothes, bananas and mobile phone chargers, so that cars can mount the pavement to escape the worst of the jams. Engineers have also set all the traffic lights at amber, to allow drivers to decide for themselves whether to give way or plunge into the maelstrom and hope for the best. An advertisement in the local newspapers reassured readers that this is all part of a carefully thought-out plan to study traffic flows in African urban centres.

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The Carnivore restaurant in Nairobi makes a point of serving up such delicacies as crocodile (a little slimy, with lots of cartilage), but even the most dedicated meat lovers find its meals too rich for everyday eating.

Instead, people prefer chicken, goat or beef, usually barbecued and served with lots of ugali, or maize porridge. Across the city, there are tiny white shacks where butchers will hack off meat from whole carcasses hanging from hooks on the wall to satisfy the Kenyan appetite for nyama choma (grilled meat).

But it now transpires that they have been tucking into impala steaks, donkey mince and zebra fillets without even realising. A recent survey showed that almost half of the "beef" sold by Nairobi's butchers is in fact bushmeat, poached from the country's national parks.

Villagers who live around the parks are often furious that they have been forced off their land to make way for wildlife, and see no reason why they should not spear or trap zebras, dik-diks and gazelles to fill their cooking pot and sell on to traders. Their townie cousins, meanwhile, are left wondering why their Sunday lunch tastes a little tougher than usual.