On the fringes of Nairobi

KIBERA IN NAIROBI IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST SLUMS IN AFRICA—ALMOST A MILLION PEOPLE CALL IT HOME. WORLDWIDE, OVER A BILLION PEOPLE LIVE IN SLUMS. IN 20 YEARS THE FIGURE COULD DOUBLE. IS THERE ANY WAY TO HALT THE TREND?

To call Kibera a slum is to flatter the place. Kibera is much less than a slum. It is mud, garbage and stench. A cesspit stuffed full of people. On the hill above Soweto, one of the most miserable parts of this shanty town, you can hear it: from the mud huts down in the valley comes a sea of babbling. It sounds almost festive, like the chitchat in the foyer of an opera house during intermission. And just like the densely packed crowd of operagoers in the foyer of a sell-out performance, the people in Kibera live in equally crowded conditions. A room perhaps three by four meters is home to 10, 12, perhaps 15 people. One wonders where they all find space to sleep.

EACH ROOM IS AN APARTMENT
Kibera has no streets or paths—just spaces that happened to be left free after the houses were built. Sometimes they’re so narrow that only children can squeeze through; and sometimes they’re so steep that they turn into slippery mudslides after a downpour. The buildings are elongated constructions, their walls a frame of mud-covered sticks, topped with a rusty red corrugated iron roof. All rooms are directly side by side: five, eight or ten to a house. Each room has a door to the outside. Each room is an apartment. There is no water and no electricity, and very few of these rented houses have a toilet. Most of the residents of Kibera relieve themselves in so-called “flying toilets.” And that’s just what they are: people go to the bathroom in plastic bags and throw them away, high over their heads. They usually land right in front of the neighbor’s door.

Kibera cannot be found on any map. The land on which the town was built belongs to the state. No property was ever designated, nor building licenses granted. Yet still, around one quarter of the three million inhabitants of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, live there; between 500,000 and 900,000 people, according to official estimates. It is, by far, the biggest of Nairobi’s 135 slums and one of the largest in the world.

NO ACCESS TO DRINKING WATER
For a long time, people knew only that there were slums throughout the third world. However, it is no more than five years since an international conference in Nairobi defined what makes an area a slum: no access to drinking water and/or sanitation facilities, uncertain property ownership, endangerment from environmental influences and less than five square meters of floor space per person. If one of these criteria is met, UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Program, designates the area a slum.

UN-Habitat recently compiled the first global report on slums on this basis. The result: around a billion people currently live in slums. If there is no fundamental change in economic policy, the figure will rise to two billion in 20 years.

ONE SQUARE METER PER PERSON
Zuleika Anisa lives in an apartment that meets all of the criteria in the UN’s definition: no water, no electricity, no toilet. The house is perched on a hillside prone to landslides. Her room is about 15 square meters and houses the same number of people: she, her sister-inlaw, the sister-in-law’s sister and their three husbands. Plus nine children. “I live in Kibera because I can’t afford anything else,” says Anisa. Her husband is a handyman for the postal service; everyone else in the extended family is unemployed. “Now and again the men find a bit of work on construction sites. And I collect firewood to sell. You have to venture ever further out to find any firewood.” Around Kibera there are only a few Acacia trees left. No shrubs, no bushes, not even any scrubland. Everything was taken for firewood long ago. Ecologically speaking, the area is a wasteland. The creek running through the middle of the settlement is a foul-smelling sewer of indefinable color.

Anisa, 26, and her husband were the first of their extended family to move to the capital from the west of Kenya. Where they come from there is even less hope of work. “If you don’t have a job, you don’t have any money and you can’t buy yourself any clothes and shoes.” That, at least, was something she was able to soon afford in Kibera. And when she returned to her village in the tribal territory of the Luo that first Christmas wearing decent clothes and her husband was able to buy his friends a schnapps, that was when her sisterin- law and the sister-in-law’s sister, their husbands and their children decided to come to Kibera. They pay 400 Kenyan shillings a month for the room, just over ¤ 4. And five shillings for each 20-liter canister of water. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot: “If we had 3,000 shillings (just over ¤ 30) a month, that would be enough,” reckons Anisa. “But we don’t always have that much.”

NIGHTLY ATTACKS
When night falls over Kibera, everything goes quiet. That’s when gangs of youths rampage through the slum, armed with knives and machetes. “No one goes out after 7 o’clock at night,” says Anisa. “Everyone here has been attacked at least once.” People are not even safe in their houses. “They knock on the door and flash a police badge, but it’s a fake. If you don’t let them in, they kick the door down. They take everything you’ve got.” The oil lamp, the battered plates and cups, the cobbled-together table and stools, the thin, stained mattresses. In Africa, the process of urbanization began a lot later than it did, for example, in Latin America. There, almost 80 percent of the population lives in towns and cities. Demographers believe this marks the completion of the large-scale rural-urban shift. Slums in Latin America have virtually stopped expanding. In Africa and Asia, on the other hand, only 30 to 40 percent of the population lives in urban areas. According to UN forecasts, the population of cities on these two continents will double in the next 15 years. The slums will get even bigger.

EXPLOSIVE GROWTH
UN-Habitat believes that the explosive growth of the African slums is a consequence of the policies pursued by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Back in the 1960s, poor countries were encouraged to install trade barriers. Thus protected, the countries’ industries would develop. Governments used borrowed money to finance investment programs and steered themselves straight into a debt crisis. Efforts to counteract the problems began at the start of the 1980s: trade barriers were abolished, the poor countries integrated into the global market. Governments were told to pull back from economic activity. Privatization and the closure of unprofitable businesses ensued.

In the 1980s alone, the International Monetary Fund decreed 156 structural adjustment programs for African nations. The result, according to UN-Habitat: “National budgets are back on track but the long-term prospects are dim.” Urban industry, completely at the mercy of the global markets, could not compete and collapsed. Rural food production was industrialized and converted to agricultural exports. The money earned is used to service the accumulated debt mountains. However, the agricultural industry needs fewer workers than the smallholder agricultural economy. As a result, people move from the countryside to the towns and cities to find work—and there they encounter the industrial workers who have been laid off. All of them end up in the slums. A slum like Kibera effectively works on the basis of liberal economic principles: the state is not permitted to do anything that can be done privately. The shanty huts were built by private individuals. Those who live in Kibera call them landlords, although they do not own the land on which the houses stand. The mud huts pay for themselves quickly, and then all they do is bring in money. If any of the tenants can’t pay, the landlord sends his cohorts: muscle-bound young men with mirrored sunglasses who evict the defaulting tenants from the room. The next tenants are already waiting in line.

In Jakarta, Harare and other big cities, governments have tried to put an end to such conditions by simply tearing the slums down. Experience shows that they just spring up somewhere else. Nevertheless, slums are not condemned to continuing their downward spiral forever. UN-Habitat has found that, with the cooperation of the residents, they can be improved and turned into neighborhoods worthy of human habitation. The state must ensure provision of the basic infrastructure. And it must grant the residents ownership of the land on which they live. If slum dwellers know that no one will drive them out, they will invest in their homes.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT IS IMPORTANT
There are, as yet, few examples of such developments. One of them is in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. In the 1980s, the La Chacra slum, housing more than 10,000, was built up on the banks of a river. It wasn’t much better than Kibera and was just as dangerous. Not ten years ago, the City Hall parceled up the land and gave it to the residents. Power lines were laid, as were water and drainage pipes. Since then, the people of La Chacra put every spare cent into where they live. There are no huts made of cardboard and plastic sheets any more—the dwellings are now small stone-built houses. The paths have been paved on the initiative of the residents themselves. Crime has gone down dramatically. La Chacra is not a slum like Kibera, it’s a residential area for the lower middle class.

(Text: Toni Keppeler, Photos: Thomas Omondi)