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.
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