Opinion - News Analysis   

Africa's biggest slum

Gareth McLean

In 30 years, the U.N. predicts, urban shantytowns such as Kibera, just outside Nairobi, will be the norm.

ON TWO-AND-A-HALF square kilometre patch of land on the south-western outskirts of Nairobi, Kibera is home to nearly one million people — a third of the city's population. Most of them live in one-room mud or wattle huts or in wooden or basic stone houses, often windowless. It is Africa's biggest slum. The Kenyan state provides the huge, illegal sprawl with nothing — no sanitation, no roads, no hospitals. It is a massive ditch of mud and filth, with a brown dribble of a stream running through it.

Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent a month living in Kibera, documenting daily life. He visited people in their homes and their churches and spent time at gyms with lads working out with make-do dumbbells and in shops with girls dreaming of escape. He became immersed in a world in which much is makeshift and ramshackle. He took the walk through the labyrinthine pathways and nameless dirt tracks that crisscross Kibera, most of them running with raw sewage.

But amid the mud and the muck, the stink and the squalor, Mr. Bendiksen says it is the ordinariness of life in Kibera that's most astounding. "You might imagine it as some monolith of desperation and poverty, but that isn't the case," he says. "Of course people know they are poor, but that's not their focus — and they don't want to be seen by the outside world as desperate, sad people. In fact, most have incredible energy. You find very few people sitting around doing nothing: people either work in Nairobi or have a small business in the slum itself. There are vibrant communities there, such diversity of experiences." Mr. Bendiksen is keen that Kibera's citizens aren't dehumanised as human vermin living in filth or romanticised as stoic in the face of poverty.

long with poverty and associated problems, such as prostitution, drug abuse, and crime committed in the pitch-black nights, he says "there is a lot of death." There always has been. In 2001, some ill-advised remarks by Daniel Arap Moi, then Kenyan President, provoked intertribal riots in Kibera — the violence lasted a week and claimed at least 15 lives.

But Kibera's troubles date back to its origins in the 1920s, when the British colonial government offered the land as a place to live to a group of Sudanese Nubian soldiers who fought with the allies in the first world war. The Government failed to formalise the arrangement, so, while others joined the Nubians and the slum bloomed, no one who built homes or businesses on the land had any rights to it. The result, decades on, is a shanty city grown like a fungus, one million people abandoned by their government.

Mr. Bendiksen says Kibera won't be an extreme for much longer. By most estimates, 2007 will see the world's urban population outnumber the rural population for the first time, while those living in slums will exceed a billion. The U.N. predicts the numbers of slum-dwellers will probably double in the next 30 years, meaning the developing world slum will become the primary habitat of mankind.

"Urban poverty is one of the biggest stories happening on the planet," Mr. Bendiksen says, "but it gets ignored because it happens slowly, inexorably. Life as it's lived in Kibera will soon be the most normal way to live on earth."

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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