Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [3]
Kibera is only one of about a hundred slums in Nairobi, and it is by no means the worst. Altogether more than half of Nairobi’s three million people are packed into these immensely squalid zones, which together occupy only about 1.5 percent of the city’s land. In wonder I asked David Sanderson what made Kibera superior.
“There are a lot of factories around here,” he said, “so there’s work, though nearly all of it is casual. If you’re lucky you might make a dollar a day, enough to buy a little food and a jerry can of water and to put something aside for your rent.”
“How much is rent?”
“Oh, not much. Ten or twelve dollars a month. But the average annual income in Kenya is $280, so $120 or $140 in rent every year is a big slice of your income. And nearly everything else is expensive here, too, even water. The average person in a slum like Kibera pays five times what people in the developed world pay for the same volume of water piped to their homes.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
He nodded. “Every time you flush a toilet you use more water than the average person in the developing world has for all purposes in a day—cooking, cleaning, drinking, everything. It’s very tough. For a lot of people Kibera is essentially a life sentence. Unless you are exceptionally lucky with employment, it’s very, very difficult to get ahead.”
Every day around the world, 180,000 people fetch up in or are born into cities like Nairobi, mostly into slums like Kibera. Ninety percent of the world’s population growth in the twenty-first century will be in cities. “For better or worse, this is where the future is,” David said. Yet, amazingly, aid agencies like CARE can do little for urban slums like Kibera. The governments won’t let them. “Mostly they won’t permit any kind of permanent improvements because they fear it would just affirm Kibera’s existence, and also they are afraid that it would encourage more people to pour in from the countryside. So they’d rather pretend these places don’t exist.”
“But they must know it’s here.”
He smiled and pointed to a big house—a compound— commanding a neighboring hillside only a couple of hundred yards from Kibera’s edge. The house, David told me, was the Nairobi residence of Daniel arap Moi, president of Kenya since 1978. “This is what he sees every morning when he looks out his window. Of course they know it’s here.”
Walking along with us was one of our minders, a kindly man of indeterminate age named Bonard Onyango. I asked him if he had always lived in Kibera. “Oh no,” he said. “I came here from the country twenty years ago.”
“How bad can the country be that you’d prefer this?” I asked.
“The country is very nice,” he agreed, “but there’s no work there and so no money. If you have no money, you can’t send your children to school. But in the city if you work hard and you are lucky you can educate your children and maybe they will have a better life. All these people, they are here for their children.”
“Really?” I said, impressed.
“Oh, yes. Most of them.”
Kentice had been listening to this and was nodding in agreement. “Just over there,” she said, pointing vaguely along some roof tops, “is the Olympic Primary School. Do you know, it is the best primary school in all of Kenya?”
“Truly?” I said, impressed.
She nodded gravely. “Three of the eight top-scoring primary schools in the country are here in Kibera. People from outside Kibera try to get their children into these schools because they are so good.” She nodded some more. “People here will do anything to improve the lot of their children.”
“So it’s not completely hopeless?” I said.
Kentice gave a big laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “In Kenya we always have hope.”
In the afternoon, just to make sure the contrast was total, we drove out to the western edge of the city through a succession of wooded suburbs that seemed to owe more to Guild-ford or Weybridge than to Africa. Our destination was a formerly all-white preserve called Karen, whose most famous resident was also, though coincidentally, called Karen. I