It Happened on the Way to War (7 page)

“Big
gota
, Dan,” I extended my fist.

OLUOCH AND I struck a deal that night back at Fort Jesus. I could keep my gear at his house and have access to a bed and a meal whenever I needed it without giving advance notice. In return, I would pay him a thousand shillings a day, about $13, and I would hire his nephew as a research assistant for another thousand shillings per day. Despite having graduated with honors in political science from Kenya's top university, the University of Nairobi, Oluoch's nephew was still searching for work.

The following day, Oluoch took me downtown to meet his contact at the Ministry of Education. Oluoch wasn't much of a conversationalist. He stared out the window until I asked him about the official we were going to meet to fast-track my research permit.

“He's a Kamba. They like sex.”

“Who?” I asked, taken aback.

“The Kamba, they like sex. They are loose, not serious people.”

“So is the official like this?”

“Of course, he's Kamba, like I said. The Kikuyu on the other hand, all they care about is money. They are businessmen or thieves, or both. Never trust a Kikuyu.”

Oluoch continued, unfazed by the strangers surrounding us: Luhya were submissive and best suited for simple jobs such as watchmen and cooks. Nubians were lazy because most Nubians survived simply by renting out a few plots in Kibera. Kalenjin, the ethnic group of President Moi, were fast runners but slow-minded.

“And the Luo?” I preempted him. “What are my relatives known for?”

Pleased by my question, Oluoch responded, “We are stubborn and smart. We are smart because we eat so much fish.”

That was it, the ethnic taxonomy, cut-and-dried. It was absurd. Had a teenager mentioned the same stereotypes to me, I might have lectured the kid about bigotry. Yet Oluoch aired them as if they were science.

By the time we reached Jogoo House “B” in the city center, it was midafternoon. It was a tired, grim high-rise. None of the lights worked and half the elevators were busted. Men wore dark suits. Women avoided eye contact, and no one smiled. I was wearing my classiest outfit for the occasion: a seersucker blazer, khaki pants, and my Timberland boots.

A faded bronze nameplate on the office door read PERMANENT SECRETARY. I assumed the permanent secretary was a mid-level bureaucrat, a paper pusher. After a half-hour, his assistant escorted us into his office. A handsome maroon carpet covered the floor. Photographs of men with serious looks lined the walls.

The permanent secretary rose from behind his large desk and greeted us in English.

“
Vipi mzee?
” I said, figuring I would lighten it up a bit. “What's up, old man?”

He furrowed his eyebrows.

“Big
gota
.” I offered my clenched fist over his desk.

Oluoch shrugged his shoulders. I kept my fist extended and then shook it slightly to signal that he was leaving me hanging.

“Yes, yes, very good.” The permanent secretary, who I would later learn was the second highest-ranking official in the Ministry of Education, laughed and touched my fist with his flat hand, as if he were tapping the head of a small child. He lifted a folder with the three-page application Oluoch and I had prepared. “So, Kibera. Tell me, young man, what is it you want to do down there?”

In broken Swahili I told the permanent secretary that I wanted to live in Kibera and talk to young people about their lives. Before I could mention the part about studying ethnic violence, he interrupted, “So, you're into reggae? Discos?”

“Um, sure.”

“And you like African women?”

I didn't see that coming. “No, no, bwana, it's research,” I backpedaled. “You have amazing women here. I mean, I love them. I love them all. But I have a girlfriend.” It was a bit of a fib. I hadn't had a steady girlfriend for months. The last one I had had dumped me for working too much.

“Hmph.” The permanent secretary didn't believe me. Understandably, he saw me as a young, clueless college student in Kenya to have a good time, and that was fine by him as long as I paid my $400 research-permit fee.

“There you go
gota
man.” He laughed and passed me the permit. “You're welcome to Kenya.”

Oluoch wasn't too pleased by my actions, and he had a right to be upset. My big
gota
to the permanent secretary was a stupid, juvenile move. Oluoch looked as if he was about to explode as we boarded a bus back to Fort Jesus. His attitude prompted me to fiddle with my cell phone. Texting was not yet popular in the States. I decided to try out my first text with a note to Dan. My message started off with a simple “What's up?” until it dawned on me that I had no interest in spending the night at Oluoch's. I changed the note and shot Dan a request: “Can I crash at your place tonight?”

“No prob.
Unajua
the way?”

I wasn't sure if I remembered the route to Dan's place, but I didn't want to inconvenience him. It seemed like a good challenge of my Marine navigating skills.

“Hakuna matata,”
I thumbed out the line made famous by
The Lion King
. “No problem.”

IT WAS DUSK and thousands of residents were returning to Kibera for the night, the daily tide rushing back to sea. Within minutes of having crossed the tracks, I was thoroughly lost, and the mud alley ahead of me looked like a firing line. Gangs of young men hung out on each side of it surveying the foot traffic, looking bored and mean. There were too many men to give fist bumps, and it was getting dark. Jane had warned me to be careful at night, when the thugs came out to prey on the drunks and
washamba
.
Mshamba
translated to “farmer,” but it meant anyone new to Kibera, a rookie without a clue. I was a big white
mshamba
, though I tried my best to look cool and confident. I couldn't afford to show them how lost and afraid I really was.

Deep reggae rumbled from within the only painted shack on the alleyway, a forest green ten-by-ten with an orange sheet draped over its entrance. MAD LION BASE the main wall of the shack read above a painting of a lion's head that looked like something out of a comic book. The beast's salivating mouth was frozen between a smile and a snarl. Its fiery red eyes appeared to be watching me.

Men smoked joints on a wooden bench. The bass thumped, rippling the orange sheet and rattling the thin tin walls. One of the men took a drag and pointed at me like a target. Heads turned.

I walked on, sweating, wondering why I had been so foolish to have walked into Kibera alone on my second night in the slum. My father would have been furious with my judgment, as would Major Boothby.

“Mister Omosh,” a voice said.

I spun around but didn't see anyone.

“Mister Omosh.” A young boy half my height was standing at my legs.

I crouched down and gave him a
gota
. “Hey, buddy, how do ya know my name?”

The boy was a relative of Baba Chris, the man who had offered me chai at the front gate to Dan's compound. As relieved as I felt about now having a guide to reach Dan's shack, I didn't know what to make of the fact that the news of my presence was spreading so rapidly.
Would the community awareness protect me, or would it make me more vulnerable?

BY THE TIME I arrived at Dan's shack, he had finished cooking the maize meal
ugali
and
sukuma wiki
, collard greens. Baba Chris joined us for dinner. He was sick and wanted to make some small talk to take his mind from the pain. We spoke about English Premier League soccer, then we turned to politics, which Baba Chris seemed to follow as if it were a sport. Baba Chris was particularly enthused about the prospects of his tribe's most famous politician, Raila Odinga. Odinga, the Luo son of Kenya's first vice president, was the member of Parliament for the district of Nairobi that included Kibera. He was also the leader of the NDP, the opposition party that had been rallying at the dirt pulpit near the tracks.

Eventually Baba Chris brought the conversation to his illness. Sweating and shivering, he had lost his appetite and was in too much pain to ignore it. A friend of his who was a nurse thought he had malaria. The cost of the medication was about $7, which was more than he could afford. A week earlier he had spent his meager savings on school fees for his children. Without other options, Baba Chris intended to wait it out. If his wife made enough money selling some “small things” in the local markets, they might be able to pay for the medication in a few days. I didn't ask what was on my mind:
Was Baba Chris going to die?

Later that night, as Dan slept soundly, I tried to process the blizzard that had been my first two and a half days in and around Kibera. I knew so little about the place, and it was so vast. Yet I was meeting good people: Jane with her unforgettable smile and infectious laugh, Dan, and Baba Chris. The only reason Baba Chris brought up the cost of the malaria medication was because I had asked him. He never asked me for assistance, and I wasn't sure how I would have responded if he had asked for help. I told myself that as a rule I wouldn't give out money in Kibera. It was a safety mechanism that my father had suggested. The color of my skin made people suspect that I had a lot of money, and I couldn't afford to confirm those suspicions if I intended to spend my nights there. Yet I wanted to help Baba Chris. I admired his strength, and I felt that I knew him even though we had just met. I could give him some of my mefloquine pills. However, to the best of my knowledge the pills were designed to prevent malaria, not treat it.
Perhaps I could give Baba Chris some money through Dan?

People shouted in the distance. The noises never stopped in Kibera. Images of small coffins swirled in my head. I had come to study youth and ethnic violence. Now I was thinking about what it must be like to be Baba Chris, to have a family and be stuck in this place. My mind was so far away from research. Ethnic violence seemed like a remote problem relative to day-to-day survival.

I could remember only one other time in my life when my world had been suddenly turned upside down by a place. It was that time at the roundabout before our safari, when my mom and I saw the small street girl with an infant on her back and the bottle of glue in her mouth. I was fourteen years old, and I wanted to help that girl and the infant. Afterward, my mother had told me that my instincts were right. “It's natural to feel bad,” she had said. “There's a lot of pain in the world, and it's good to help when you can.”

Kibera was unbelievable. It was as if I was imagining it even though I was there in a tin shack with my back against a lumpy mattress. It wasn't simply the side effects of the mefloquine that left me questioning reality. It was everything about the place—its magnitude; its deprivation; its raw pain. Kibera was wrong. In our world of plenty, people shouldn't live like this. How was it possible that a father might die of a disease that could be treated for seven dollars? I paid more for my haircuts.

*
  Tom Mboya,
The Challenge of Nationhood
(Nairobi: East African Publishers, 1993), 9.

CHAPTER THREE

The Present and the Future Leaders

Kibera, Kenya

JUNE 2000

FOR TWO WEEKS I had been staying in Gatwekera, one of Kibera's eleven villages. I switched every other night between Dan's place and other locations. Guys with shacks never seemed to object to adding another friend or relative. It was one of the unwritten rules of Kibera: To survive you pulled together. If you had the means, you shared, because you never knew when your time of need might come. It was easy to lose every physical possession when you had little and the threats were many: fire, theft, sickness, injury, unemployment, or just a string of bad luck. For many residents, the community was their only insurance.

We packed together like sardines, positioning ourselves head to foot so people of the same size didn't lie next to each other. Otherwise, you slept next to a friend's gnarly foot and got kicked in the face all night. In the mornings, I handed my host fifty shillings, about seventy-five cents. It was slightly more than the cost of my water, chai, dinner, and access to a
choo
—a pit latrine. I never returned for an overnight if my host asked for more, and I often commented about being a broke college student. I didn't want people to think I carried much money. I had learned about the danger of cash in a place such as Kibera from one of Dan's neighbors, a middle-aged man who was attacked one night by thugs with machetes. The man believed that the thugs had followed him from the market after he accidentally flashed two thousand-shilling notes while purchasing some food. They had crashed through his door, sliced him across the chest, and demanded precisely two thousand shillings. He had almost lost his life for $26.

There was another reason to be cautious about money. Money threatened to further complicate the relationships that I was navigating with my sources, many of whom were becoming friends. Most of these young men had unrealistic expectations about how I might be able to help. One young man asked me for a month's rent; another asked for an American wife. I tried to be straightforward and direct about my own limitations, though it was difficult because once they opened their lives to me, I felt an obligation to do something more substantial. I wanted to help them, but I didn't know where to begin. The need was so colossal in proportion to my resources, and I didn't want to create dependency.

The young men I interviewed represented each of Kibera's five largest ethnic groups, with one exception. In my initial two weeks in Kibera, I didn't meet one Nubian. My sources told me that the Nubians, who were also known as Nubis, were combative and kept to themselves. They had a reputation for being insular and guarded after enduring years of encroachment by other ethnic groups migrating into Kibera.

Fewer than thirty thousand Nubians lived in Kibera. They resided in only four of Kibera's eleven villages, and Gatwekera, where I spent most of my time, was not one of them. Yet the Nubians defined Kibera. Their presence made it the only slum in Nairobi where residents had legitimate claims to land dating as far back as the colonial era. The Nubians of Kibera descended from Sudanese and Ugandan soldiers who fought with the British Empire's King's African Rifles. Their British military commanders regarded them as “a better class” of warriors with “a capacity above that of the ordinary African.”
*
In return for their service at the turn of the twentieth century, the British granted them severance pay and rights to settle on the fringe of Nairobi with their families. The Nubian settlers called their new home
kibra
, a Nubian word for “bush,” because it was so heavily vegetated. That was the beginning of what less than one hundred years later would become one of the largest slums in the world. As far as the Nubians were concerned, the four villages in Kibera belonged to them.

From rural farms to slums to city life in an “estate” such as Fort Jesus—or maybe even a house in a posh neighborhood such as Woodley, where the president lived—that was the dream of Dan Ogola and so many young people who had migrated to Kibera. By contrast, I had heard that many Nubian young men sought a life in Kibera, even if they eventually had the means to move out. For many of them, Kibera was not a transitory stop on a dream of upward socioeconomic mobility. They were proud of Kibera in a way that was distinct from the attitude of other ethnic groups. I needed to meet them and hear their story.

I RETURNED TO Oluoch and Elizabeth's compound in Fort Jesus once a week to shower, consolidate my field notes, and get five hours of uninterrupted sleep. During these evenings, I enjoyed talking with Elizabeth. Each conversation took us deeper into her own vision to create a Montessori-method nursery school inside the slum. She had given it a lot of thought, and she appreciated hearing some of my observations. As much as Elizabeth wanted to help, she didn't know the slum well. Fort Jesus was less than three hundred yards from Kibera, yet it was a world away.

When I told Oluoch about my need to talk to Nubian youth, he commented between swigs of Tusker beer, “I don't know many of those people. Muslims, they are lazy and don't do much. But I do know this one. Taib he's called. He owes me a favor.”

Oluoch explained that Taib was a former councillor, a member of the ruling KANU political party who had lost his last reelection bid as one of Kibera's three representatives on the city council. Taib wanted to run again, and Oluoch thought he would be interested in meeting with a
mzungu
. He drained his Tusker and called Taib. Within two minutes, I had a meeting scheduled.

The following day, Taib met me with a firm handshake at the door to his office on Kibera's north end. His curly gray hair receded from his high forehead. He wore short, faded jeans that revealed a couple inches of skin above his ankles and bare feet. I placed my mud-caked Timberlands by the door and joined him on a thatched mat.

“So you're here on research, is it?” Taib asked.

“Sort of. I'm talking with youth and staying in a shack near the river.”

“Really, a
mzungu
, down there?”

“Yes, Gatwekera.”

“Gatwekera?”

“That's right.”

“It's dirty there.” His line caught me off guard. The Nubian villages in Kibera allegedly had higher standards of living than the parts of Kibera closer to the river. However, we were still in the slum. The houses were made of mud. The sewage ran in open sumps.

A striking, elegant woman dressed in black and gold entered the room. She offered us the most common snack in Kibera—white bread and butter—and Nubian-style strong tea without milk.

“So the Nubians were warriors?” I asked Taib as the woman poured a steaming shot of tea, stopping precisely at the rim of the glass.

“Ah, yes, so you know some of our history. I bet they don't teach that in North Carolina.” Taib chuckled. “Let me tell you about the Nubians, young man.”

For the next hour Taib took me on an accelerated history of the Nubians in Kibera. It was the narrative of a disenfranchised people. After military service with the British King's African Rifles, the Nubians carved out an exclusive and highly lucrative business selling “Nubian gin,” an illicit moonshine. Perceived by many Kenyans as old colonial loyalists, the Nubians were largely excluded from the euphoria of Kenyan independence in 1963. Once a charismatic Nubian lost his seat as the area member of Parliament in 1974, the Kibera land grab began in full force. Marginalized from political power, the Nubians had little recourse as migrant families flooded into Nairobi's slums hoping to escape the grueling, monotonous struggle that characterized rural existence for many Kenyans. Mwangi Maathai, the ex-husband of Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, was elected as the area parliamentarian. According to Taib, Maathai worked in concert with corrupt lower-level politicians and political appointees, the district officers, councillors, and chiefs who granted construction permits in return for bribes that sometimes included claims to future cash flows from rent collection. Kenya's political and economic elite were one and the same, and they were profiting from the growth and perpetuation of the slum.

Taib claimed that Kibera received no government services, and that city council maps identified the land as simply belonging to the “Office of the President.” He argued that he had little power to bring resources to the slum when he had served as councillor, though he continued to battle for land-tenure rights, which the Nubians never possessed. Over the years, Nubian claims to Kibera decreased in acreage as the land skyrocketed in value. Initial claims to more than 4,000 acres had diminished to as little as 450 acres, an area larger than half the size of the modern Kibera slums and potentially worth tens of millions of dollars to developers and politicians anxious to gentrify the area.

Despite all of this, the Nubians aligned with the reigning political party, KANU. For much of Kenya's postcolonial history, they had no other viable option. The Nubians were too small a constituency to put up a fight from the outside. Taib owned the building we sat in, and he had decided to make it a KANU field office when he ran for councillor in 1993. He hoped its branding would generate more resources for his campaign. “But it led to nothing,” he snapped.

When I shifted the conversation to youth development, Taib claimed, “No one has done more for youths in Kibera than I have. I've really tried to rehabilitate them. The problem with youth idleness is a big one.”

One of my core areas of research was to determine what organizations existed in Kibera for youth, and whether any of those organizations helped prevent ethnic violence. Most of my sources believed that only a handful of organizations in Kibera involved youth, and none of these organizations appeared to be well regarded. One organization from another slum in Nairobi, however, frequently came up in conversations as an example of a great youth program: the Mathare Youth Sports Association, or MYSA. I heard about MYSA so much that I was curious about its model of using sports to promote youth leadership. “Do you have any success stories in Kibera, like MYSA?” I asked Taib.

“MYSA,” Taib exhaled. “Everyone knows MYSA. But the fact is here we have KIYESA [Kibera Youth and Environment Sports Association], and we were around before even MYSA. We just never had a
mzungu
to fund-raise for us.”

I assumed the bitterness in Taib's voice came from a place of envy, or some other backstory of personality clashes and politics that I might never understand. Regardless, it was surprising to hear about KIYESA. The organization that Taib had cofounded in the early 1980s hadn't come up once in my interviews with youth. Taib explained that KIYESA held soccer tournaments each year and then launched into a tirade about NGOs, the typically international nongovernmental organizations. He accused NGOs of existing simply to perpetuate the relatively luxurious lifestyles of their staff.

“They keep their offices outside of Kibera and drive nice cars. The money goes here,” he slapped his stomach. “Not here,” he stomped his foot on the ground.

Taib's comment struck a chord. I was dismayed at the level of waste and ineffectiveness I had witnessed when I visited one large NGO in Kibera that was managed by outsiders. I was beginning to discover that most large NGOs had a similar approach. They were top-down and entered the slum with preconceived ideas of what was wrong and how to fix it. They didn't seem to ask or involve the local population. The people these NGOs purported to serve needed to be included in more of the decision making. Although the term was so frequently used that it could sound clichéd, the residents needed to be “empowered.”

“Even right here you have an example of a community-based group. These are the ones the
wazungu
should support, not the big NGOs. You've seen Gange?” Taib pointed toward the door.

“The trash pit?”

“No, no, the car wash, in front of the trash.”

“There's a car wash there?”

“Come.”

We stepped out of his office door. A few tough-looking men washed cars with sponges in front of a rotting heap of garbage with street children and slum dogs scavenging through it. A small metal sign read:

GANGE YOUTH SELF-HELP GROUP

PROJECT NO. 1

REHABILITATION CENTRE

“I got these youths their space,” Taib said, and led me to a few men sitting on a bench.
Youth
in Kenya could refer to anyone under the age of forty.

“
Salaam alaikum
.” The oldest member of the group stood up and greeted us. He was wearing a tank top.

“Ali, I want you to meet Omosh.” Taib introduced me.

Ali laughed. It was a deep, hearty laugh like my father's. He looked like a soldier. He kept his hair cropped short. His upper body was so lean and muscular that it appeared to be chiseled.

“You're strong. Do you lift weights?” I shook Ali's hand with a firm grip.