Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [33]
Kibera, like most African slums, is a true arrival city. Though it has existed here for 90 years, created when Kenya’s colonial administration granted some parkland to the homeless Nubian veterans of the First World War, in the post-colonial decades it has become a vital instrument of urbanization, propelling entire villages and districts into the city. Despite its horrid conditions, it does provide a vital stream of cash to the troubled villages of Kenya and its neighboring countries, and it also succeeds in turning people into urbanites. “I am a Nairobi resident now, I speak the language and I know how to be a woman here,” says Eunice, who grew up farming maize, cassava, and potatoes in the dry northwest of Kenya. There, her entire family lived in a grass hut and usually ate only one meal of porridge a day. As knowledge of the city spread and successive famines decimated their village, she and her husband soon realized that their only chance of keeping their children alive was to build a link to the city, 400 kilometers away.
First, in 1996, her husband went; he stayed a few months, but before he could find a job an unnamed disease killed him—not a rare occurrence among rural-migrant men in the African city. Eunice and her sons agreed she should make the move herself, in 2001, using a network of established people from her district within Kibera to find a landlord willing to rent her a hut. “We wanted to try to live again, to see if life could change,” she recalls. The move provided her with a welcome escape from the tribal customs of the village, where she would have been required to marry her husband’s brother after her husband’s death. In the city, she was freed from the restrictive dress codes of the village, and from religion. She relished the chance to earn her own money and went to work as a housekeeper in one of the middle-class houses outside the slum (which is wrapped around Nairobi’s main golf course). Over the next few years, she was able to bring her children, and now they are determined to make the city their home and their future, despite its many depredations. “The only way I will return to the village,” Eunice says, “is inside a casket.”
It would be a grotesque understatement to say that the Orembo family live in inadequate housing. To get water, Eunice must walk 75 meters and pay to fill up a plastic container from a hose supplied by one of the slum’s “water mafias,” at rates up to 20 times those paid by the city’s wealthier homes (a price discrepancy that is typical of slums everywhere). She also pays 150 shillings ($2) a month for the privilege of lining up for half an hour to use crude municipal toilets, 50 meters away; the only alternative is the alarmingly popular “flying toilet,” in which a plastic bag filled with waste is flung out the window at night, contributing to Kibera’s mountain of stench. Getting into the proper city, less than a kilometer away, is damningly difficult, an odyssey of perilous and unhygienic lanes leading to a shortage of bridges and trains. There are almost no spaces in which someone like Eunice could open a small business (and she very much wants to do so), and most of these spaces are controlled by criminal gangs or ethnic mafias. There are very few free schools here, and the fees can be prohibitive: Eunice had to pull her youngest son out of school because she couldn’t afford the fee. This, and the lack of decent employment opportunities for males, leads to thousands of idle young men on the street who turn to theft, drug dealing, or the brewing and selling of homemade liquor to get by, a social stew that prevents Kibera from developing into a successful arrival city.
For the privilege of living here, Eunice pays a landlord $17 a month, around half her typical monthly income. The landlord, who rents out hundreds of huts, does not own the land himself; it is municipal land, and his claim to ownership is as ephemeral and insecure