Kibera is the Zsa Zsa Gabor of slums: famous for being famous (it was featured in The Constant Gardener), its beauties and blemishes endlessly exaggerated by local and international media alike, Kibera’s half-million or so residents play host to a small army of earnest NGO’s, exploitative religious groups, intrepid journalists, bedazzled tourists, and visiting celebrities eager to connect with the other side of the tracks—like Barack Obama, who passed by on his way to his grandma’s in 2006.
I like it, too. But it had been a couple months since my last visit (my appreciation for the place is predicated on not having to stay), so last weekend I decided it was time for another incursion.
Nice siding, was my first thought on arrival. Brand new sheets of aluminum glittered everywhere in the sunlight, formed into long lines of shack that had sprouted up to replace the hundreds burnt down in January’s violence. The old festival atmosphere I knew and loved, of fish cookers and CD pirates and preachers and hair-weavers all spinning a raucous economy out of thin air, was back. No more machetes and smoking ruins. The riots were but a dismal memory; now, the only people running amok with evil designs were barefoot toddlers. Even the alcoholics had cheered up.
One of my favourite people in Kibera is Salim Mohamed, the thirty-one-year-old director of a community organization called Carolina for Kibera, and the person Mr. Obama came to see that day two years ago. Salim, ever humble, points out that Obama had in fact come to see C4K, as everyone here knows it. And everyone does know it; during January’s riots, C4K’s headquarters remained untouched as virtually every other building in sight was looted and torched. The reason they left C4K alone was not just the helps the neighbourhood out by providing everything from a free clinic to garbage collection and soccer tournament for kids; it’s because everyone respects Salim.
A diminutive man with a ready, gleeful laugh, Salim isn’t what you’d expect. For on thing, he’s too gentle to be a slum chief, despite having grown up in an abusive orphanage in Mathare, arguably Kenya’s most desperate slum.
Salim’s un-thuggish-ness almost cost him his life, when he was fifteen years old and spent eight months in a maximum security prison for stealing a bicycle.
“I was too meek to fend for myself; I couldn’t even get any food,” he told me, laughing at the memory as though at a slapstick comedy starring someone else. “The only time I ate was when my brothers from the orphanage brought me bread and milk on the weekend. I almost died.”
Like most developing world jails, Kenyan prisons are chronically overcrowded, lethally violent, and teeming with disease. They kill fifty inmates a month across the country; when Salim related his experience to me, it struck me as a typical travesty that the Kenyan legal system would send a grade ten student to such a place for stealing a bike, while the grand larcenists in office openly stole millions from the public purse without the slightest consequence.
“But in a way, it was good for me to go to jail,” Salim went on. “It made me realize I never, ever wanted to go back. And it gave me a lot of credit; people really respected me when I came out.”
His background enables Salim to give succour to a poverty-stricken community without being seen as a sucker. And that’s a constant issue in a place like Nairobi, whose millions of poor are adept exploiting the hapless aid-workers that fly in from all corners of the western world.
“Last week,” Salim recalled, “a lady came in to my office and asked if I could provide food for her orphanage. I asked her, why don’t you register with the government and get help from them? And she said she only has eighteen kids, but you needed twenty to register with the government. Then she asked if I knew of two orphans who she could take in! But I said, why would I put two children into your care when you can’t even take care of the ones you already have! Such people make me furious. They see these kids as a way to make money. I really let her have it – I don’t think I’ll see her again. If she sees me on the street, she’ll cross and walk the other way.”
In short, Salim applies to community development what Ernest Hemingway described as the essential ingredient for every writer: “A built-in bullshit detector.”
Which was something this writer should have applied to the sight of all those shiny new aluminum storefronts bedecking the entrance to Kibera. It turned out, as Salim explained, that local politicians had appropriated the land from the original owners of the burnt-down stores, none of whom had legal proof of their ownership—that being one of the defining characteristics of slum life, after all. From Rio’s City of God to Capetown’s Soweto, no one officially exists. Given that the very people to whom they might turn for help were the same ones stealing their property, there was nothing these people could do but watch as their elected representatives refurbished their livelihoods and sold them to the highest bidder.
Fortunately for Kibera, there are unelected representatives like Salim. He took me deeper into the slum, where nothing has shined for quite some time, to check out the hospital C4K was building. A four-story complex whose materials were all carried in by hand (the broadest approach to the hospital is about a metre wide), the hospital will be finished in July and provide free medical care to tens of thousands of people. Its solar-paneled roof towers over the surrounding brown sea of tin-and-mud huts like a palace; when I asked if he wasn’t worried about it getting looted, Salim said no: the workers he’d hired to build the thing all lived within a hundred metres of here. If anyone tried lifting a single brick, they would probably be lynched.
In which case, I supposed, it was a good thing there was a hospital in the neighbourhood.
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