Kenya's Detroit

“I would not trust any Kenyan with money,” Jeff told me. “Not even me.”

Jeff was expelled from school because he could no longer make his school payments. An organization that he worked for was paying his fees, but the accountant was embezzling the funds. While a part of him was visibly disappointed, things always seemed to work out. “There are people with disadvantages and no opportunities,” he told Brian earlier. “Then there are those like me with disadvantages but make their own opportunities.” Jeff was sure that something would work out.

I liked him from the very start. When Brian told him that he was going to meet a friend with the same name, Jeff replied, “Good. My clone.”

I found a Kenyan I could trust.

~~~

Jeff lived and grew up in Mathare, the third largest slum in Kenya. Having been in Kibera for the past few days, Mathare was a breath of dirty air.

Kibera is a poor Kenyan’s New York City. It has everything. There is a reason a journalist recently titled his book Megaslumming. Kibera is huge, filthy, edgy, violent, and at times disgusting. It is the largest slum in East Africa, with an estimated half million people. There are twelve villages – or neighborhoods – with names like Kangwere, Soweto East, Raila Estate, Silanga and Maikina. Narrow alleyways merge with bigger, bumpy dirt “roads”, hardly suitable for cars. So very few come by, save for the NGO Landcruisers. Most of the roads are plastic garbage bags mixed with dirt. Rainy days are extra grimy. During the post election violence, conflict broke out between the rival political parties, leading to the destruction of homes, several people being killed, and the expulsion of most Kikuyu landlords from their homes. They have been afraid to come back. NGOs are everywhere – there are too many to count.

When a white person says that they work in Kibera, the response is “Wow, good for you.” When a Kenyan tells a potential employer they are from Kibera, they cannot get a job.

Everybody wants to “upgrade Kibera.” The CDC runs a clinic called Carolina for Kibera, one of the best health clinics in the country. Jill Biden visited the site yesterday. Obama brought his family on his last trip. The government – with support from UN-HABITAT and the World Bank – is carrying out its slum upgrading project in Kibera. The settlement sits 20 minutes from the City Center, and five minutes from Prestige Shopping Center. I can rent my executive suite and be there in 10 minutes.

Kibera is romantic. It is situated on a hill overlooking the Nairobi skyline, and the sun sets offering beautiful glimpses of the city. The roofs of the buildings shine a rusted tin, and the sounds of playing children narrate the valley. A famous European artist painted murals on the roofs of several Kibera shacks. The filmmaker of “Run Lola Run” shot his recent fantastical film there. There is a reason Nairobi City Council still claims the land as their own – it is every developer’s dreamscape.

~~~

Mathare – as Brian pointedly called it – is Kenya’s Detroit. Instead of Soweto East, one of Mathare’s neighborhoods is called Kosovo. Instead of slum upgrading, there are CDF projects that have been abandoned. Mathare is situated on the Eastern side of the city, where Africans were forced to live during colonial times. It is like Gotham’s underbelly. While the sun illuminates the Kiberan Hills, it seems to forget the East side altogether. So do most international NGOs, tourists, and the Kenyan government.

The matatu ride was only 10 shillings, and the tote seemed surprise when we tapped his shoulder at the stop for Mathare. It was the same reaction when I was in South Africa and I took the train to Kyaletsha Township and the ticket seller told me, “You’re the only white person I have ever sold a ticket to.”

There is nothing glamorous about Mathare. Brian and I walked with Jeff down the main road, full of shanty bars getting ready for the World Cup. Men stumbled out at 11 in the morning. Drunk. The children’s school outfits were filthy. I looked at some of the laundry drying on a line, and it hardly seemed clean. Dirty – but laundered – second hand clothing.

While Kibera was filthy, the dirt that stuck to my shoes dried like red clay. The Mathare dirt, on the other hand, clouded the air and simply captured the atmosphere like an Oklahoma dust storm. There was no industry in sight, except the illegal beer that is brewed every day, leaving a smell that becomes associated with the slum itself. “Sometimes they even put battery material in the beer to make it brew quicker,” Jeff explained to us as we saw a mini explosion – the result of the chemical reaction that is necessary during the alcohol-making process.

We stood on the third floor of a permanent structure that housed an NGO that gave cameras to slum residents to document their lives. Since the movie Born into Brothels, NGOs like this are all the rave. Giving a voice to marginalized communities through art. Every developing country I have been to has an NGO like this, and even my good friends in Chicago started a similar project in Uganda. If the government will not preserve a safe and creative space for human development, the idea is that somebody should.

It was a wonderful view of the slum. Brian, Jeff, his friend Tyson and I stood there and talked shop. Talked politics. The slum is surrounded by importance, even wealth, but it seems to be decaying, disintegrating to the ground. A perfect instance of slum downgrading.

A river runs through the middle, but there was no water flowing today. A newly built bridge covered the river, funded by recent government money to make the slums safer. Since 2003, the Kenyan government has made illegal settlements an important priority of their development strategy, and hundreds of projects have been funded across the country. The majority of these projects are small, simple public infrastructure projects like footbridges, toilets, and water points.

Tyson explained how most of the Luos lived on the far side of the river, while the Kikuyus lived closer to the main road. Before the post election violence it was much more mixed, but since then the river became the dividing line. Gangs like the Taliban and Russia terrorize the community. Tyson explained, “Russia has only seven members, but they are extremely dangerous. They have guns.”

I asked Jeff if the politicians came into the community. “During election time, but that is it. Then we never see them again.” He explained that there was not even campaigning for the YES campaign (to pass the draft constitution), and that people would not even wear party t-shirts or hats anymore. There are very few political posters or banners. “Since the post election violence, people are extremely scared. They seem to live in fear of what might happen again.” Tell a Mathare resident that democracy is about consensus and they probably won’t believe you.

While most of the buildings are small shacks made of tin, two big buildings stood out, and were only a few hundred meters apart. “Those are the new toilet structures that the government is building us,” Tyson told us. “We may not have any food to eat, but we will have a place to shit.” Tyson has lived in Mathare for twenty years and that is the first thing he has seen the government do for his community. “Fucking toilets.” Oh, and the bridge too. But people don't feel safe crossing it.

But the toilets were not even operational. One was almost completed, and the other was on its final stage. The toilet wars had already begun. The almost-completed structure was currently operated by gangs, and was not registered by the government. It would not have water until this process was complete. The other structure was run by a community organization – or steering committee – and had the okay by the government to begin its operations. But the gang wants to control both structures, and they have been in intense negotiation for quite some time. The area chief has already bought off members of the gang, but the dispute continues.

Meanwhile, people keep shitting in bags and disposing them in public spaces – a process called “flying toilets.”

~~~

Directly across the main road from Mathare is Eastleigh, a predominantly Muslim immigrant community from Somalia and Ethiopia. “The houses there are extremely expensive,” Jeff told us. Multiple-storey flats, mosques, banks and supermarkets line the neatly-organized streets. “Open 24 hours” signs were posted to many of the buildings – a self contained market in the middle of Nairobi. “These people have tons of money – they work very hard. And they have lots of money coming in from the diaspora and from the pirating.”

The dirt roads were wide, and they even had street names and signs. Jeff told us how the businesses wanted to pave the roads, and they even came together and agreed to pay for it themselves. But the Kenyan government would not allow it. They did not want the Somalis becoming too powerful and taking over the city.

My hometown of Minneapolis deals with similar issues, thousands of miles apart.