Djemba, centre, with a group of boys he counsels through the Kings of Kibera Project. Jason Taylor
By Adam Parsons
The first lesson I learned from Djemba and the boys was not surprisingly a lesson in forbearance. I awoke just after five o’clock in the morning to be ready for our prearranged rendezvous; by six o’clock I was part of the scuttling sea of commuters, soon crammed into bus number 32 on the now familiar route down Kenyatta Avenue, past the suited men in City Square, the loiterers in Uhuru Park, the gaudy Protestant Church on Valley Road and the grey desolation of Kenyatta National Hospital.
I felt like a worker myself at Adams Corner, part of the throng of bobbing faces walking purposefully in every direction, although my work for today was far from the office blocks of Barclays Plaza. With notebook ever in hand, and with the dazed fog of overtiredness leading me to stand on the corner of Winners Chapel with my eyes half shut, it wasn’t long before Daniel arrived punctually with Paul, Moses, Eriek, David, and Josephat alongside the grinning Djemba. They all looked pleased to see me; we knocked fists as per the usual form, silently walked behind the market stalls to a swampy refuse area filled with thousands of plastic bottles, and then waited whilst all the boys — except for Djemba — crept into a bush, started taking off their clothes, and quickly emerged in a different set of garments caked in an unbelievable amount of filth. “Twende Mukore!” shouted David Makomi, teaching me the words in Kiswahili – “Let’s go scrap metal hunting!”
The idea was for me to witness a day in the life of the typical “Nairobi street boy,” a moniker that Djemba and the others willingly used in self-reference (it was better than the sobriquet used by most adult Kenyans – “chokora mapipa,” meaning “eaters out of garbage bins”).
Most children on the street actually go home at night to an impoverished family, according to the research by Unicef and ActionAid, but the children ‘of’ the street – “watoto wa barabarani” – are estranged from their parental home, or else completely abandoned and subsisting on their own. All of my new friends were decidedly a part of the lattermost category. I was to learn more as we meandered through the suburbs of Karen, famously named after Karen Blixen who wrote the bestseller Out of Africa, and still the home of many ex-pats inside high-walled stately homes, often with guards stood by the entrance.
It was once nicknamed “Happy Valley” for its life of parties and safari game hunting, but the greatest happiness that we were liable to find in Karen, once the boys had methodically scrummaged through the bushes and gutters, was a valuable piece of scrap metal hidden deep inside a dustbin. I tailed behind with Djemba whilst the others went about their business, loudly play-fighting amongst themselves, but also foraging, I observed, with an underlying sincerity of purpose. This was, after all, their only legitimate source of shillings to buy food.
Djemba, who was walking with a slightly lopsided gait, said he had been run over by a car a few weeks back and crippled in the knee. “Scrap metal is not good for you,” he said. “You become old man, too much, too many people looking-looking. We really want to do something good, selling things, and manage for ourselves, because this is not good work, you can even meet with snake. Like me – I met with big snake. I kill it. Yeah. I not afraid of snake. In bush. He jumps we catch it. You are afraid, he will bite you.” I’d had a romantic idea about helping the boys with their ‘mukore’ this morning, perhaps hauling a filthy sack over my shoulder and filling it with recyclable rubbish, but Djemba was so willing to answer my questions that I decided to learn more by scribbling down his words. Djemba also took our interchange very seriously, often prefacing his response with a sharp intake of breath and the word “Okay,” as if tutoring a backward student which, in many ways, I was.
Asked how he met the other boys, he began a soliloquy about his life from the age of nine, a continuation of his unfathomable history; his father left home when he was six years old, if I understood correctly, and stole all their possessions before later dying of Aids. Djemba was later forced to leave school, move to the city with his mother and eleven siblings, until she “left us, she didn’t come back to find us.” He was forced to look after his little brother, who must have been two years old when he was given refuge “in the centre. Small. Class one. He’ll finish school.” His words, although staccato and ungrammatical, had a repetitive and rhythmic effect which was often poetic; “You know that my brother, when we were young, many problems, many problems, and my mother could not feed us anymore. Cos no job. No job. So us, we could not just stay there alone. And so we started walking. We walked. We walked to find something. I was six. Then we were used to it, every day, every day, then we end up going going going far, and we don’t go back home again.”
As he spoke to me, often jigging his body to invisible music, or flailing his arms and exclaiming in laughs or one of his “Eh!” exclamations when I asked something especially naïve, the other boys continued jibing each other and stopping outside the grand houses to filter through garbage pails. All of the guards, far from chasing then away, silently stood nearby and pretended not to notice. David, the boy who I first met chewing khat, was particularly fearless, opening the gates without guards and wandering straight in, and sometimes running straight out if a dog started barking in the garden. Paul Mustafa, wearing a flat blue cap like a train driver, was doing exceptionally well with a sack soon heaving with bits of bulky garbage. Metal, I was told by Daniel, was much heavier and far more lucrative than collecting plastic – five shillings for a kilogram, which would require a sack bigger than them for its plastic equivalent.
Djemba, meanwhile, was trying his best to help me understand street life. “Girls?” he exclaimed, when I asked why I had never seen any on the streets. “Eh eh eh eh eh! Don’t talk. Many girls. In the city. Ah. Sniff glue. Many. And er, okay, you know girls, people like. So they are a little bit [ie. desired]. The government catch them in the street and take them to a centre. And many street boys, and many girls. Boys are too much. The girls can wash clothes, and there are people. Yah, get money.” When I asked about drugs as we wandered through the well-kept suburbs, why so many street children sniffed glue, his response was typically shrewd and candid;
“Nobody can tell them this is bad. That’s why we like to go and tell them. We did not go to school, so you do not know how dangerous this drug is.”
Did you ever try sniffing the glue?”
“Yah. Eh!”
For how long?
“Me? I sniff for not even one year.”
What made you realise that it was not good?
“Hey, people, they will not give you money, they will say you are going to buy glue. Yah.”
Was it true?
“Eh! Yeah. Hey we use a lot of money, you don’t eat. You don’t eat, you just glue, just money. It affects the health. You are all taken to doctor. The whites came, they tell us to stop.”
You went to a doctor? So you were pretty sick?
“Yeah. But the one who was helping us, in Adams [corner], food, food, when they come they take us to eat, they rent for us a house, we stop sleeping outside.”
When did you first meet the muzungu?
“Three years back. Eh!”
That was when they first helped you?
“Yeah. Hey now there is even becoming more difficult, life is becoming very-very difficult now. Why I am saying this? You know since we were young, we had enough money. ‘We give you, now you are grown up, we will not give you money, we will give you job.’ They tell you you will have to work. And then you will not eat. And now, that is why you find we don’t even – we sleep hungry every day. No money.”
There’s not enough work?
“Yeah. It’s not even [not] enough work; you did not go to school, nobody can give you work.”
[Daniel, who can overhear, then shouts an interjection from in front: “We want them to give us learning. Yeah. Learn well.”]
“You get your job. No. No work. That’s why every time when you wake up, eh, you have to pray that God will show you the way.”
For that day?
“Yeah. Because nobody knows a good day or a bad day. But you know it’s a good day, because you wake up.”
You wake up, so it’s a good day?
“Yah [Laugh]. We wake up, it’s a good day.”
It was a continual theme in my conversations with Djemba and the other street boys, the pattern of life throwing everything against you and then taking everything away, with only an inner spirit of cold resistance to keep you standing on your feet. We were walking down a main road by this point, meandering through petrol stations and peering into oily bins, cutting across lines of smoky traffic and kicking at the bushes for any stray bits of car metal.
Djemba and I were dragging further behind whilst I tried pushing him further for more grisly intimations of street horrors. Had any of his friends died, I asked? “Yeah. Sickness. Police shooting,” he said, mentioning a boy from years before who was seriously wounded in the legs and lungs, slowly dying on the street over a number of days despite Djemba’s diligent care.
He was reluctant to ponder on the details. “His name was – I don’t know, it start with ‘S,’” he said. “Long time ago. And I like when I forget something very terrible. ‘Cos then it start me thinking, thinking thinking too much, then you become again afraid. Yah, I will become crazy, start walking in the road. Many people become crazy.” I’d seen one or two such ‘crazy’ people myself, I told him. “Eh! Not one or two,” he said. “Eh. In Kibera people are crazy, people-are-crazy. Cra-zy. They don’t care. Because people doesn’t care for them.”
This level of insight from a seventeen-year-old malnourished, stunted, brilliantly resilient young boy, often amazed me with its simple virtuosity. I made an offhand remark, in attempted empathy, that people are also dangerous when they are crazy. “No, [having] no work is dangerous,” he countered. “That is the problem. Because without work, when somebody is just doing what he needs to do, to grab out of him so that he can put in the stomach… Because [if] food is there, if everything is there, why do you steal?” You cannot know if someone is dangerous, said Djemba, until you have been in his position.
“Could it be that he knows that stealing is going to shorten away his life? ‘Cos when the police got him, will shot him, and then he will die. So many people know this. They know, but the problem is how to survive. God is not to bring food – he gives food, everything. When God says we should love one another, we share what we have, but because people are all crazy, that makes people dangerous, and more dangerous. But in Nairobi, I don’t see people as dangerous. Because me, I know myself, the way I have walked all around. Ah. Nobody’s dangerous. We are the dangerous, even more than them. Because we are sleeping outside, we are strong, our minds are now [motion of sharpness] – think, think deep. Think very deep.”
Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources. A panel of experts will discuss the issues raised in the book at a public debate on Weds 20 January 2010, 6pm, at the National Museum of Kenya, Museum Hill, Nairobi. To purchase a copy of the book or download it for free, visit www.stwr.org/megaslumming
