Photograph: Nairobi matatu : NPR

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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence during which NPR's worldwide group shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.

The second you board the Onyx bus, the music grabs you.

Gospel, Gengetone, Afrobeats — competing at volumes that make dialog pointless. Eight TV screens flash music movies across the cockpit alone. 16 in whole. Blue LEDs chase one another throughout the ceiling. Each floor is painted: footballers, rappers, politicians in wild chromatic element.

I rating the entrance seat, driving for about half-hour with Henry Muindi, the proprietor, from Nairobi's Central Enterprise District out to Dandora in Eastlands. Onyx is new, and at present the preferred bus on the route due to its graffiti, music selection and the younger crew. It's extremely lavish. Outdoors, a child spots the bus and shouts. Henry beams.

"There isn't a Nairobi with out nganya," he says, utilizing Swahili slang for these blinged-out autos. "If in case you have not skilled this matatu tradition — it's best to by no means say you're in Nairobi."

These privately owned minibuses are legally public transport. However over the previous decade, they've turn into one thing else fully — shifting canvases, cellular sound techniques, rolling declarations of what younger Nairobi finds cool proper now.