Unauthorised Observations of a Slum Tourist Part 1

Anyone who has watched Comic Relief will be familiar with Kibera. Every year fat comedians come here and cry their eyes out after witnessing the stench, the filth, and the desperate poverty of the ‘biggest slum in Africa’, and their tears urge us to pick up our phones and donate ‘just ten pounds to feed a little African child for a month’.

Technically I live in Kibera. That is only because my estate falls within the perimeters of the huge area which was once forest known as Kibera. In fact, I have a two bedroom house within a walled compound with a day and night security guard, and in theory I have running water and a legal supply of electricity. However, on a good day if I limbered up I would be able to throw a stone from my porch and it would bounce off the tin roofs of the slum proper.

It is not possible for a mzungu (or odiero as my neighbours would call us) to talk with authority about Kibera. It’s existence, functionality and intricacies are too tightly woven into ancient African heritage for a foreigner to be able to come to any conclusions about why? how? or who? I say ‘who’ because no one even knows how many people live here. Some say 2 million, others 1 million, others 170,000. I’m going with 1 million – why not? After all I told you I’m not speaking with authority; it’s just a gut feeling. Why? – there are over 2,000 Non-Governmental Organisations’s operating in Kibera, and nearly all of them are trying to say why Kibera is as it is, and what should be done to change it, but if you ask many Kiberans what has changed in the last ten years they will answer ‘not a lot’. And ‘how’?: how so many Kiberans manage to get by day to day is not a question that anyone who chooses to visit can answer, because by being a voluntary Kiberan you exclude yourself from the risks, anxieties and cycles of false hope that are faced by those who have no choice but to be there.

But that leads me to my first unauthorised observation. Not all Kiberans have to be there. I know many people who live deep in the slum who could probably afford the rent of other estates such as Olympic, Jamuhuri, Fort Jesus, even Langata. It is also interesting that many inhabitants of Kibera have not lived there all their lives. Or if they have it was their parents who migrated here twenty years ago. As a result, they usually still have relatives living in the rural areas, and in many cases they may even have land to their name. If things were so bad in Kibera could they not try going back there? In a recent government effort to reclaim slum land, sky-rise apartments in Langata were offered to Kiberans at the same rent as they had been paying in Kibera. It took a year to persuade enough slum dwellers to shift, and as they moved their huts were instantly filled by relatives or friends who had been queuing up to occupy this prized spot on the edge of Nairobi.

So why do so many people choose this existence? My first explanation, derived from my own experiences, is that in Kibera you are free. Working on a tourist visa means I am perpetually afraid of being stopped and extorted by the police, or even being taken to immigration and thrown onto a plane bound for Heathrow with a big ‘visa denied’ stamp on my passport. However, there are no patrolling police in Kibera and this means whenever I’m inside the slum I can relax. In a recent incident a lone policeman wandering the slum pathways was jumped by a gang of youths and had to walk back to the main road gunless and bootless. If there are no police, there certainly aren’t any Nairobi City Council officials who snoop around the rest of town like rats looking for ‘foul play’ which can yield them abundant bribes. I was once guilty of this ‘foul play’ because I painted my house without their permission.  They threatened to arrest me for ‘renovating a house without getting relevant consent from the Nairobi City Council.’ This could not have happened in the slum. After all, the whole sprawl was built without consent from the City Council so are they going to extort everyone? In fact, in Kibera you don’t need to pay a shilling in income tax, council tax or any other tax; the water is free and if you pay for electricity you don’t pay Kenya Power and Lighting Company but more likely the guy who rigged you up to the illegal connection (otherwise known as Kibera Power and Lighting Company). You won’t have to show anyone your ID and if you choose it, no one needs to know you exist.

The dearth of official law enforcement in Kibera means that something must take its place and I will revisit this issue in a later section, but the result is that the inhabitants of Kibera are more free than their real-world counterparts in the rest of the city. This freedom contributes to the second appeal of Kibera; the cheap cost of living. Avoiding taxes means retailers who operate within the slum can reduce their prices considerably. Combine that with the tiny overheads of running a shop in the slum, the tiny margins the shopkeepers are happy to live on, and the fact that most accessories sold within Kibera have been acquired by dubious means, and you find prices of goods in Kibera which cannot be matched anywhere else. Then the rent; I don’t know anyone in Kibera who pays more than $20 per month in rent. Some pay as little as $5. In my neighbourhood many of the landlords were chased away after the post-election violence in 2008 so the inhabitants don’t pay any rent at all. And these are not the kind of slum houses you picture in Bombay or the favellas of South America; many of these houses have concrete walls and all of them have tin roofs – you don’t find homes draped in tarpaulins and patched in cardboard in Kibera. If you are paid $20 dollars a month as a security guard or maid (slave labour? I will return to this also) as so many Kiberans are, then the cheap cost of living is no great consolation to you. But if you eventually manage to graduate up the pay scale, you may find that you can cover your basic expenses and TV’s, DVD players, flash mobiles and designer clothes soon follow.

Another nice thing about Kibera is the strength of community. When I first visited the slums guided by a girl called Lydia I was introduced to at least four of her mothers. I thought I could spot some family resemblance between her and the first mother, so I was a bit confused when I met the second lady and by the time I got to the fourth I had given up asking for an explanation. I now know that Lydia doesn’t have a real mother, but anyone in her neighbourhood who is old enough to be her mother is called Mum. In return they treat her as a daughter when she needs motherly attention - which is often. In Kibera, if you don’t trust yourself with your savings you give the money to your neighbour to put it under their mattress. If you need to go up-country to bury a relative you give your child to the house next door for over a week. If your friend is arriving late at night you organise a protective guard of four or more people to fetch him from the bus stage. If rains destroy your house you call on your friends to rebuild it so it’s up again within two days. If your father dies, the neighbourhood cries and a metallic pot is quickly filled with coins to cover his funeral expenses. If you know a mzungu then you will introduce him to everyone in the neighbourhood in case he can also pay their children’s school fees. These are all scenarios that I have witnessed, and I remind the Kiberans of these benefits whenever they ask if life would be better for them living as an immigrant in a London suburb.

Although people of Kibera do not appreciate this support network, they miss it when it is not there, and deep down they cherish the neighbourhood that protects them. If you are used to the slum, used to the smells, the overcrowding, the constant racket, the leaking roofs, and the repetitive treks to the water pump, then it is tempting to stick it out for some time to improve the financial security of your future. ‘Some time’ can be many years. Naturally, however, I think every Kiberan has an ambition or pipe-dream of one day moving out. That is because there are things that even those who are born in Kibera do not get used to: the cholera, the  HIV, the screams of domestic violence, the flooding sewage ditches, and the fatal clashes between gangs. So when the time is right they do go: it is unusual to see anyone over sixty walking around in the slums, and that’s not just because of low life expectancy. But until they have made the most of all the opportunities Nairobi has to offer them they also make the most of the positive aspects of Kibera. It would be extremely naive to suggest that life in Kibera is all rosy, but I wanted the first part of these observations to persuade you that things are not as desperate for the average Kiberan as the crying comedians would have you believe. Kenyans are proud people and they would like us to think they are in control of their lives. Let’s not sell their dignity just to beat Comic Relief’s fundraising record.

Solidarity or Xenophobia?

I am getting much better at sleeping on my regular international bus journeys and while travelling from Kampala to Nairobi on Wednesday I managed to doze off before we had even left the suburbs of Kampala. I was soon awoken by a loud discussion at the front of the bus. A Somali man was shouting and gesticulating at the driver, waving his yellow ticket and saying something like 'sasa unalipa' (now you pay!). The driver was Ugandan and did not speak Swahili very well and was telling the Somali man in English he was crazy over and over again.

Apparently the Somali man had followed the bus on a motorbike taxi ever since we had departed from the bus terminal. He had flagged down the bus when he eventually caught up with us (nearly getting run over) and forced his way on. Now he was claiming the driver had to pay for his motorbike taxi because we had left early.

I was a bit shocked at how rude the Somali man was being to the bus driver - his abuse was getting louder and more desperate and I was angry with him for waking me from my snooze which I knew would elude me for a while now. But what was more alarming was the response of the rest of the passengers. Firstly, two men on the bus thought it was their role to step in on behalf of the driver and find any reason why this Somali man was in the wrong. 'You can't treat our driver like that'; 'apologise now for your language'; 'you were late for the bus you cannot enter now'; 'get off the bus this instance'. Then the women who were sitting around me started gossipping: 'if it was me I would have accepted I had missed the bus'; 'this man has not been checked he is a security threat'; 'do we even know who this man is, he could be a terrorist'; 'how do we know he isn't carrying a bomb'; 'let's just call the police'.

At this point I started to wonder if the same reaction would have been provoked if the man trying to board the bus had been a Ugandan. After all he had paid for his ticket and we had left dead on time so maybe it was a bit unfair that we left without him. Maybe he had a really important engagement in Nairobi - if I had paid $25 for a bus and I missed it by a few minutes I think I would have done the same. Eventually things settled down and we continued on our journey. From the back I wasn't sure if the Somali man was on the bus or not. A few minutes later the women started chatting again: 'the thing is he's a Somali, you know Somali's have hot heads, they can't control their temper'; 'you know what makes me happy is that all of us stood up against him, it shows how we all know what is right and what is wrong, and that man was wromg!'

At the next police stop about half an hour later we were held up and the bus driver was summoned outside. I saw the Somali man and the bus driver being led away to a police car. The same two busy body men went to give evidence (risky in with Ugandan police) and they were away for forty minutes. The women continued gossipping: 'if he wasn't so hot-headed he would have realised it would have been much cheaper to wait and buy another bus ticket than pay this bribe to the police.' Everyone, including the Somali man, were put back on the bus and as the two witnesses walked back up the aisle they thought it their duty to inform us that everything was OK - the bus driver had been given points on his license but he was allowed to carry on driving us to Nairobi.

How did they arrive at this outcome? My theory is that after their heated discussion the driver eventually gave in and let the Somali man stay on the bus. Then one of the passengers called the police to alert them of this 'security threat'. The police at the next stop therefore stopped our bus and officially punished the driver for being negligent. Then after releasing the driver they probably accepted a substanial bribe from the Somali man who had also broken the law by entering a bus when it wasn't at a bus stop. They checked him for bombs and then let him board the bus he had paid for. Crazy and intriguing. I wanted to find out more and I'm sure the gossipping women would have divulged all their unauthorised knowledge if I had done some investigating but I fell asleep and woke up to the Nairobi morning rush hour.

Mama Kizza's Restaurant

About four weeks after Mama Kizza opened her restaurant she told us she needed loan to pay off two months of rent arrears to her landlord. Apparently he had raised the rent from 60,000 to 70,000 Ugandan Shillings per month (28$) and was demanding payment immediately. This was not the first time we have been requested for money to pay off Mama Kizza’s debts and often in the past we have refused yet she has always survived so I was reluctant to change policy now. Having said that the lead up to the launch of her restaurant seems to have been a particularly challenging period for Mama Kizza – her house flooded in December and over Christmas she fell sick with malaria. In the meantime fourteen year old Kizza looked after the other three children. He brought in the house’s only income of less than 1$ per day picking the limbs of grasshoppers which are then prepared as a local delicacy.

Kizza’s family are the only Ugandan members of the Xavier Project, and I would like to start with their story in this journal because the ups and downs of their struggle are as dramatic as any of those faced by our refugee members. They exemplify many of the vulnerabilities of those stuck in the daily grind of poverty and yet on a daily basis amaze me with their determination and resourcefulness. A series of misfortunes have set them back during the time we have known them. Firstly, a previously existing father-figure was causing them troubles when I first met the family and this was one of the initial reasons why Kizza was not in school – there was no one to pay the minimal primary school fees (100$ per year at the time). Then Kizza fell very sick with cerebral malaria and his mother put all her savings into his medical fees. This left Kizza with severe memory problems (he is no longer really able to manage in an academic setting) but also left the family out of any resources to pay rent so they were kicked out of their home. Their new house was in a marshy area of Kampala which increased the risk of others catching malaria, and increased the risk of flooding which would have a further effect on their health and their capacity to do anything.

From this point Mama Kizza found temporary employment as a washerwoman and as a maid, but it never lasted long, and the reasons listed always put the blame on the employer. Based on some small loans and grants from the Xavier Project Mama Kizza did eventually build up the prospects of her family selling second hand clothes in Owino market in Kampala but when the whole market burnt down in a suspected arson attack her hopes again took a turn for the worse. At this stage, when we were repeatedly asked to step in I was also starting to lose hope in this family’s ability to stand on their own feet. I now know from closely monitoring the new restaurant that it was not for lack of trying that Mama Kizza seemed to always land again at rock bottom, but a series of misfortunes. However, when Edgar and I called her to our office in November to see if she had any entrepreneurial ideas I really did not believe that this meek creature would be able to make anything of our investment. Against my better judgement we issued a $100 grant (not even a loan) as capital to open a small restaurant in Nsambya Kevina.  I left Kampala with Mama Kizza in the capable hands of her mentor, Edgar.

When I came back in January Edgar said we should go and check up on Mama Kizza. I didn’t even think she would have found a place to rent yet, but when we arrived in kevina I was shocked to see Kizza and his sister Gloria waving me into a little porta-cabin on the side of the road. ‘Hello brudda, hello brudda, come and eat with us!’ Inside a room no bigger than a tool-shed I found Mama Kizza bent double over a charcoal stove and round the only table were two Ugandan men devouring beans and posho. I was very impressed but to attract attention they needed to decorate it, both inside and outside, because at the moment it still looked like a slum hut. Two weeks later when I returned Edgar had mobilised our young kids and they had painted the hut in brilliant blue with the words ‘Restaurant, for breakfast, CHAI, lunch, supper’ written in red.

I think from that point on I became Mama Kizza’s most extravagant customer, bringing guests from all over Kampala to eat at her restaurant, but at the same time I could see that taxi drivers, and local businessmen were eating there almost as loyally. And Mama Kizza told us the business was a huge success so when she asked for another loan to cover her rent I was a little disappointed. What about the profits from this business? Mama Kizza said she wasn’t sure if the profits would cover the demands of her increasingly strict landlord so we decided to do some analysis to determine whether she would be able to meet his demands. This accidentally brought about a study which gave me a fascinating insight into the financial life of someone living below the poverty line.

Edgar and I gave Mama Kizza an accounts book, and asked her to record every transaction she made. In other microfinance projects that we set up we encourage the proprietors to keep their business accounts separate from their personal finances. However, since Mama Kizza was the sole proprietor of her business and her family were so intertwined in it we decided that she should not separate the two. In fact, one of the business’ great bonuses is that every day she is able to feed all her children on the left over food from the restaurant. Two weeks later we returned again to the restaurant to have a look at her records. Everyday Mama Kizza had quite significant expenses for her business, usually exceeding 20,000 UGX which was spent on food, but on most days her sales covered this. She would keep a record of her balance at the end of the day, and on most days it went up. On Sundays it went up radically, a pattern we put down to the fact that other local restaurants were closed and people were coming back from church. As a result on both Sundays she put her excess balance into an informal savings cooperative, which we discovered she has actually been a member of for many years. What was most interesting was that apart from these outgoings there were hardly any costs. On one occasion she accounted for 500 shillings phone credit and on another day she had to spend about 3000 shillings (1.25$) on other household goods, but apart from this she did not spend any money. This might be explained by the fact that out of 14 days she had worked 13 of them and the reason she had not worked on the 14^th day was because we had called her for a meeting at our office at 2pm – the worst possible time for her business and since she had no one to help her she had to lock up the restaurant for the day! (‘Monday was very bad for business brudda’). On some days she would only make about $1 profit, and the reason for this is that she charges way too little – 2000 UGX for beef, rice and matoke (savoury bananas). But if she could do this consistently it would just about meet her other expenses.

We decided that with the Sunday boosters she would eventually be able to pay off her debts, and so it was better for her to owe money to us than a threatening landlord. However, we decided to go half way and give her a loan of $24 which she could give to her landlord (half of what she owed him) and pay us back in two months time. This time I really think we might see that money again but I’ll let you know how it goes. By the way, I really recommend the beef and matoke – if you’re ever passing the T-Juntion  to Ave Maria road in Kevina, don’t fail to drop into the blue box.