Scenes from Kibera

The following post was written by UUSC President Charlie Clements. Clements writes from Kenya, where he is leading an emergency delegation to assess the political and humanitarian crisis that has engulfed the country in the wake of the flawed presidential elections of December 2007.

Nairobi’s Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa after Soweto, South Africa is virtually a ghost town after riots last week burned much of it. People are still hesitant to return to their homes because they may not exist, there is virtually no place to buy food, or they feel insecure as tensions about the electoral fraud continue to simmer.

The delegation was invited to visit a community of jobless vendors in Kibera on a day when one headline in Nairobi read, “500,000 Workers Lose Jobs.” We were met at the edge of the charred, five-acre Toi Market by several leaders of the Toi Market Traders Society. The president of the society, Ezekiel Rema, said he worked last Wednesday, but that there was little he could do to protect his place of business, or those of his colleagues, when a gang of approximately a thousand men descended on the market, creating mass panic as they set kiosks on fire. He said they were armed with pangas (machetes) and “metal” (meaning heavy iron rods that are often used for digging post holes).

He showed us how sturdy the kiosks are, as we looked at several being rebuilt. A woman named Kamane stood behind large piles of leafy greens, one of which was kale. She was unprotected in the hot sun, as was her produce. She said a plastic covering used to shield her produce, which had already completely wilted by midmorning. Across from her kiosk stood a large fallen water tank, already marked – “PEACE” -- by a ubiquitous graffiti artist, who seems to use any flat surface as the voice for these almost one million residents. She said she has to walk more than half a mile now to get water to dampen and preserve her produce.

The Toi Market is home to roughly 3,000 vendors, who have a cooperative savings scheme and a loan program. Rema asked us if we want to see his office, and he took us to a two-story corrugated tin building on the edge of the market. It, too, had been ransacked, but there was little to burn. The furniture was trashed, and an employee was picking up loan applications and savings books from off the floor. Rema said the rioters emptied the society’s files onto the floor, trashed any furniture they didn’t carry away, and then broke most of the windows. He said there were 1,200 open loans for which they now have little documentation.

I explained we would be briefing donor institutions on our return and that it would be helpful to know his most urgent need. He didn’t miss a beat, saying ”Capital for a loan fund.” He told us that these women and men need to buy materials to rebuild their kiosks and that they need to buy new inventory. Many will not be able to rebuild their livelihoods without it. He mentioned that the members of the society have had reliable loan-repayment records over the years.

He was grateful that only one of their members had been killed. I asked about the circumstances, and he said the woman had wandered unexpectedly into the path of rioters. He said she was identifiable as a married Kikuyu because of a certain way she had tied a scarf across her shoulders. Later, we met with a male nurse who works in a clinic in Kibera. He saw seven gunshot-wound victims, all allegedly shot by police, none fatally. The injured had to wait hours for transport because there were many roadblocks that ambulances wouldn’t or couldn’t pass. I noticed a nearly intact building, which Rema said was the police office -- in return for not trying to halt the destruction, the police station was spared.

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The entire area looks like ground zero of a firebomb explosion. Even the once-stately trees have been set on fire. The kiosks for which they provided shade served as kindling. We pass two large churches and an elementary school that are now just shells. We then drive down by the railway lines, which usually carry freight from the port of Mombasa through Nairobi to Kampala. News reports today said that a dozen Kampala-bound trains were waiting for the tracks to be repaired to pass Nairobi and that a half dozen were stranded heading in the other direction. This shutdown is one of the chief causes of food and fuel shortages in parts of the region…literally, this slum, home to a million people, is the crossroads of East Africa.

We watch as a crew of perhaps fifty men lift heavy crowbars in unison to the call and response of a tall man in a doctor’s long, white coat. He’s the foreman and performs a function similar to a coxswain on a rowing shell. Undoubtedly, there are construction cranes elsewhere in Nairobi that could lift these massive loads, but no one would dare bring them to Kibera.

The graffiti of Solo is ubiquitous – “No Raila, No Peace.” Some of it almost shouts and seems like the angry voice of the slum – “Don’t kill Kenyans, they voted peacefully.” And finally, the one that makes us all catch our breath – “No Raila, No Justice, No People, No Kenya.” He signs some of his work Solo 7, but his neat hand is unmistakable, even when he doesn’t sign his messages. Later, I learn he was born on 7/7/77, the seventh child in his family, both of his names have seven letters, and he’s an artist with a shared studio in the middle of Kibera, protected somehow from the police, who must not like him, and from fires, which have destroyed entire neighborhoods, but have not silenced the community’s voice.

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We met with religious leaders today – Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant. They acknowledged that while strong voices from each faith have spoken out, they’ve eroded their own moral authority because they’ve failed to speak as one. They trace the historical roots of this crisis to the birth of Kenya and Kenyatta’s aggregation of privilege and land to the Kikuyu.

The opposition has called for another day of mass action on Thursday, and the internal security minister has said publicly that the police are instructed “not to use live bullets on demonstrators.” He said that police are under strict orders not to use excessive force. His comments follow widespread television coverage of a policeman shooting an unarmed demonstrator in Kisumu and then kicking him as he lay dying. At first, the police claimed the video was a fake, generated by computers.

There is growing anger here about what the United States is not doing. The United States is still wiping egg off its face for being one of the first nations to congratulate Kibaki on his victory. That gaffe was compounded by the U.S. ambassador’s platitude that whatever the Kenyans worked out would be fine. Our country’s misguided policy was not assisted by the visit of the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer. Compared to the pressure being applied on the government of Kenya by the United Kingdom and the European Union, the silence of the United States is deafening to ordinary Kenyans. The message being received by Kenyans is that the United States does not want to risk the alienation of Kibaki…or as Kenyans are saying, the United States seems to be interested in peace, but not justice. Solo says it explicitly on walls and curbs in Kibera: “No justice. No peace.”

The imminent arrival of a team of prestigious African leaders – Kofi Annan, Graca Machel, Yoweri Museveni -- to attempt mediation has inspired hope. Tomorrow, we travel to Kisumu, where a massive interfaith memorial service was held in a stadium for victims, with permission of the government. It was the largest public gathering since the violence began and it was peaceful. Maybe things are moving ever so slowly in a better direction.