In the late 1970s, two close friends and business partners, Sobhagayachand Vidhu Ramji Shah (Bachubhai) and Maneklal Rughani (the successful minds behind Text Book Centre) visited the newly opened Brent Cross Shopping Centre in London. Inspired by the concept of a self-contained "city within a city," they returned to Nairobi determined to build East Africa's very first enclosed, modern shopping mall on a plot of family land in Westlands.
Construction was well underway when history threw an extreme roadblock in their path. The devastating August 1982 coup d'état attempt triggered widespread political panic, citywide looting, and economic instability.
Terrified of the country's economic future, nearly all of the 200 prospective retailers who had signed up to lease spaces abruptly pulled out of their contracts, and international investors fled the market.
Despite advice to sell the land and cut their losses, the founders doubled down, opting to fund the massive engineering project purely out of their own family savings. On April 27, 1983, the doors finally opened to an empty echo chamber. The mall launched with only two brave tenants: the family's own Text Book Centre and Uchumi Supermarket.
The original Text Book Centre and Uchumi Supermarket outlets at Sarit Centre, the mall's two initial tenants when it opened in April 1983.
It took two long, anxious years of seeing only a handful of vehicles streaming into the parking lot before the business community regained its confidence.
By late 1984, the property was completely occupied, forever shifting Nairobi's corporate and retail gravity away from the traditional CBD. Uncovering Sarit Centre history 1983 and the resilience of the Shah family Nairobi reveals how an act of pure entrepreneurial defiance built the legendary first enclosed mall East Africa relies on today.
