An American in Kibera

Something is wrong when international organisations like the United Nations inflate their estimates of Kibera’s population by hundreds of thousands of people.

Since the Kenya government’s September census report showed that Kibera boasts just about 170,000 inhabitants — not the 800,000 figure so often cited — I wondered what other myths about Kibera had morphed into truths over the years.

If anything, the inaccuracy made me more curious about life in a place I had only read about.
I had met and befriended a number of Kibera residents in my short stay in the country, so I called them to arrange a visit.

I hoped that by living in Kibera, its neighborhoods would reveal to me a side they did not display in the official discourse on slums.

So I “visited” my friends, only that this time, I would stay for four days and nights.
I journeyed into Kibera not to gawk, but to chat. I wanted to let Kibera soak into my skin for a few days.

Maybe then I could understand, at least partially, this beast they call a slum.
I had no plans except to meet people during my four-night stay in Kibera’s Lindi and Makina neighbourhoods.

Not quite knowing what to expect, I boarded a matatu and said goodbye to my Ksh24,000 ($307) per month room in Gigiri — home to the United Nations complex and the US embassy, and host to Nairobi’s ritziest homes and shopping mall — Kibera’s conventional opposite.

I was now in Kibera. I watched the early evening news from a plush couch, the refrigerator humming behind me.

On the TV screen, a man from the Kenya Wildlife Service was imploring Kenyans to visit the national parks to see the country’s wildlife.

The problem, the man lamented, is the notion that Kenya’s wildlife is only for foreign tourists. What went unspoken was the idea that foreigners are only interested in Kenya’s wildlife.
True enough, in the 1930s, American author Ernest Hemingway was too busy blasting away at every lion, kudu and rhino that crossed his path to have anything to do with the Kenyans he called “savages” in his book Green Hills of Africa.

Today, the tourists are still shootingwith their cameras wildlife, the same Hemingway shot with his rifle.

When they do take an interest in Kenyans, they flock to the so-called slums for urban safaris that absurdly mimic a jaunt through the Tsavo National Park. They gape and gawk and shoot with their cameras.

It’s no wonder that earlier this year, Kibera dweller Kennedy Odede wrote in the New York Times that he “felt like a tiger in a cage” when tourists trudged through his neighbourhood, cameras flashing.

The crucial difference, though, between touring a game reserve and a neighbourhood is simple. Humans speak and zebras don’t. Hence the absurdity of mutely snapping that shutter at Kibera’s dwellers.

A Nubian tale