John Tyman's Cultures in Context Series AFRICAN HABITATS : FOREST, GRASSLAND AND SLUM Studies of the Maasai, the Luhya, and Nairobi's Urban Fringe |
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John Tyman's Cultures in Context Series AFRICAN HABITATS : FOREST, GRASSLAND AND SLUM Studies of the Maasai, the Luhya, and Nairobi's Urban Fringe |
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| 501. Driven by the pressure of population growth and the shortage of productive land, by drought, by the perceived harshness of rural life and the imagined attractions of the city, thousands of people each year leave their tribal communities up country and flock to Nairobi seeking a better life. (Bus station in Nairobi.) |
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| 502. Nairobi appears to the casual visitor to be a place of great wealth and opportunity. Its central business district is full of glossy hotels and office blocks, and stores offering a range of expensive consumer goods. |
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| 503. It is also true that there are residential suburbs in which wealthy Kenyans and expatriates live in great comfort: but most of those who move to Nairobi are forced to live in improvised slum communities -- referred to as "peoples’ settlements" – within and on the outskirts of the city. |
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| 504. More than two-third’s of Nairobi’s population now live in these informal settlements – on less than one third of the city’s land. These are not planned communities supplied with basic infrastructure: instead they are improvised ill-equipped settlements created by the people who live there, though they will in most cases have no legal right to the land they occupy. As a result they lack security of tenure and can only live a day, or a month, at a time. |
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| 505. This is the story of Kibera, the largest peoples’ settlement in Nairobi, where many thousands of families and single men and women struggle to survive in a community with almost no services and few opportunities for remunerative employment. Kibera is situated 7 kilometres from the centre of the city, on the Motoine Ngong, a tributary of the Nairobi River, and overlooks the Nairobi Dam, which is highly polluted with waste from the settlement. Among those who live here are many who have demonstrated incredible determination and resourcefulness; and you will be meeting some of them. |
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| 506. "Kibera", formerly "Kibra", means "forest" in the language of the Nubian people who lived here in colonial days, after they were recruited by the British. It was a military base, and much of the area was forested then. The Nubians were noted warriors and fought on behalf of the British as "askaris" in regional conflicts -- including the Mau Mau insurgency. Following independence they were unpopular as a result and were deprived of most of the land they occupied at that time, freeing it for settlement. And the trees disappeared soon after. |
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| 507. This is also the story of a boy from Kibera named Samuel Mangi, who has also lived in Australia and is now torn between two worlds. Having seen how people live in the "Developed World" he knows how lucky they are and how wide is the gulf that separates them from the harsher reality of life in the "Third World" or "Developing World". Samuel’s tricks with soccer balls and his brilliance on the field even got him on television. (Article in the “Tweed Sun” of July 13th 2006.) |
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| 508. And this is also the story of a link forged between an Australian community and the people of Kenya, and of a “mentoring program” which may well serve as an example to the rest of the world ... of the difference people can make if they care enough. So, let's begin with Kibera. |
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| 509. Unofficial estimates suggest that the population of Kibera numbers in excess of 800,000 and it is only one of several such informal people settlements close to Nairobi, none of which has been provided with the basic infrastructure and services “Westerners” would expect to see in a town of even one hundred inhabitants. Water is not piped to houses, nor are there sewers to dispose of waste, no formal electricity grid and, as you can see, no garbage collections. |
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| 510. The houses are crammed together within an area of just 2.5 square kilometres. The shortage of space and the fact that the settlements evolved informally without planning instructions is obvious from the density of housing and the lack of proper roads; also from the absence of green spaces. The population density here is over 300,000 per square kilometre. Children play in back lanes and beside the railway track. |
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| 511. The very harshness of life in a community with so few material advantages has, however, been the springboard to an impressive array of self-help groups and local initiatives. Some individuals, inevitably, are overcome by the seeming helplessness of their situation but others have banned together, determined to pool their resources and energy to change things for the better. (Group leaders in workshop on improving local health and hygiene.) |
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| 512. This is one of the roads linking Kibera with Nairobi. The cutting on the left carries the main rail line from the coast at Mombasa inland through Nairobi to Uganda. The long building on the left, beside the tracks, is a community school. |
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| 513. The reason for the trees on the left of the railway is that the line here marks the boundary between informal settlements and the homes of wealthier people. There is no room for trees in Kibera. |
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| 514. A typical street in Kibera, with two water pipes and an open drain. The latter carries storm water and the waste from domestic kitchens and bathrooms. Since there are no government sewers in Kibera, houses lack proper toilets; and people have to improvise. The drain is not actually connected to the pit latrines which some people build but it is certainly contaminated by seepage, due to a high water table. Garbage is also dumped in the drain, which discharges into the headwaters of the Nairobi River and then into the city reservoir. The street is also the only playground for the children who live in the houses on either side. The blue building on the right is a shop, as many of the structures here function both as shops and houses. |
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| 515. A road on the outskirts of Kibera transformed into a muddy track by water leaking from broken water pipes laid by local operators to tap into the Council water main. These broken pipes waste much valuable water. Worse still they are siphoning back contaminants into the water main, resulting in pollution which threatens the health not only of those who live in Kibera. To repair them would be too much bother, as the operators would have to dig into a mass of individual pipes to find their own. |
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| 516. The shortage of space in Kibera is obvious here from the clothing stall perched over the drain beside the railway, and from the houses on the right close to the track. |
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| 517. Woman washing clothes in the lane way between two rows of houses. In the absence of even the simplest of washing machines, no laundry tub and no piped water, washing clothes is a slow process and she will be bent double doing so for hours on end ... after first carrying the water by hand from a standpipe far from her home. |
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| 518. Laundry is hung up to dry in back lanes, though in the case of older homes it may be soiled my contact with mud walls. |
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