Africa, My Passion

by Corinne Hofmann

  I’ve rented a flat in the centre of town for four weeks. By Kenyan standards it’s more than adequate, even if it’s not quite what we might expect in Europe. I have to climb six flights of stairs every day to get to my apartment as there’s no lift. I also have to bring in my own drinking water as Nairobi tap water isn’t recommended for delicate European stomachs. The furniture is a bit rundown and the plaster is peeling from the walls in places. The shower isn’t reliable all through the day as the water struggles to make its way up to the higher floors. I fill up a bucket before I shower so that I can at least be sure of rinsing the shampoo out of my hair when I wash it. I can’t rely on the toilet either and find myself calling in a plumber every three to four days. In the little kitchen I have a fridge and an old gas cooker with a rather dodgy burner. But in the living room there’s a television and a powerful music system. There’s a cleaner who comes in daily and when things go wrong the concierge tries to sort them out.

  There’s even an outdoor swimming pool, which given the general shortage of water in Nairobi is a real luxury. But most important of all is the fact that we have a twenty-four-hour porter on the door, which means that no uninvited guests can get into the gated area. But then that’s almost always the case in the better-off parts of Nairobi. Depending on which company he works for a porter-cum-guard can earn between €80 and €120 a month. When you take into account that I’m paying €740 a month rent for a one-bedroom apartment, it makes you wonder what the conditions must be like where the porter lives. But by and large I’m comfortable here. Later on, when I’ve spent days on end in the slums, climbing up six floors to my simple little room feels like living in the lap of luxury.

  The day after we arrive Klaus and I head out to find a market so I can get that typically African hectic buzz I love so much. We find one on a large area of land not too far out of the city centre. I wander among the stalls where the locals sell fruit and vegetables laid out attractively on simple trestle tables. Some of the sellers have simply laid out tomatoes on the ground, selling them for a few cents. Then we come to a fish stall with big deep-fried fish laid out next to one another neatly on brown paper. The stallholder has lit a fire on the ground and is using a wok to fry the fish in oil until they go crispy. She’s doing great business with people queuing up to carry away their purchases wrapped up in newspaper. It smells great and makes me salivate just to look at it.

  For the moment I wander on, taking in the colourful scene. We come across the second-hand section of the market where there are huge piles of shoes, clothes and handbags – in fact, almost anything you can imagine is on sale. All the clothes are clean and each item has been ironed. Obviously I get pestered to buy something as they all reckon they can do a good deal with a white person. I reply with a smile and say I’ll take a look later. It’s amazing just how much there is on offer, but for today I’m happy enough to soak up the atmosphere. One or two of the sellers have sprawled out on top of their pile of wares to take a midday siesta. We leave the ‘clothing department’ behind us and come across the vegetable wholesale department. The ground here is a real quagmire and we’re thankful we put on wellington boots. One of the stalls is already sold out and the plump woman in charge is lying on the ground taking the money from her employees. It’s a great sight: I can’t imagine how anyone back in Europe would react to see a shop owner lying down among their cabbages and tomatoes.

  Behind her I notice there are a couple of cows chomping away on bits of discarded greenery. There’s music coming from behind what purports to be a little teahouse, but looks like a rather dilapidated shack. I tiptoe up to it and suddenly find myself looking at an open-air church service. It’s amazing: everybody up and dancing around a little square in front of a pastor and a musician playing on a keyboard. The speakers have been cobbled together and the sound is more than a little tinny, but the dancers are all swaying together devoutly, clapping their hands and singing along to the melody.

  A little further I come across a ditch full of dirty water and just beyond it what appears to be an ironing shop. I can’t get over the sight of a forty-something man standing there with a makeshift ironing board and an antediluvian iron filled with hot charcoal, ironing a white shirt so carefully that not one speck of charcoal falls out to dirty it. I ask him if he minds me sitting watching him for a while. He’s more than happy and points to a bench clearly intended for customers to sit while they wait. He tells me proudly, still ironing away, that this is his own business and he has two employees, indicating the two younger men behind him, also busy ironing. He’s been doing this for five years, having built up the business on his own. He uses one hand to show off the premises: walls made from a few empty maize sacks hanging from hails, a sheet of plastic as a roof to keep off the sun. He admits that he can’t iron when it’s raining because it won’t quite keep out the rain. The ironing boards are broad planks of wood set up on plastic stands. The little makeshift shop which accommodates all three of them is barely three metres by five – or, ten foot by sixteen.

  It might seem random to my Swiss way of looking at the world, but it works well. More and more customers keep coming in while I sit there. Somebody brings in a dress to be ironed, another woman hands over five skirts she wants to sell in the second-hand market. I ask him how business is and he says, ‘Not bad. I get a lot of custom from the second-hand clothes market and some days I end up ironing six hundred items. I start at 8 a.m. and work until 6 p.m. After that it’s too dark.’

  Good grief, I’m thinking to myself: ironing six hundred items with that ancient heavy old iron. Back home people moan if they have to iron one basket of washing with our super-light modern steam irons. But here’s this man who’s just proud that he’s managed to get hold of more than one basic iron and been able to hire two employees. ‘I get between three and twenty shillings per item,’ he tells me. ‘But I have to give ten shillings a day to the Masai for them to look after the place at night. They graze their cattle just over there. They make good nightwatchmen and would defend the shops here with their lives. There are more than a hundred shops here and they all pay them the same. Then it costs another hundred shillings a month to rent the spot. I pay my assistants half what I charge per item.’

  When I think that 100 Kenyan shillings is just €1, those seem ludicrously small sums. But things are different here.

  I’m amazed to watch him slip several skirts one under the other, lay a damp cloth on top of them and pick up a different, much heavier iron from the ground. He explains to me: ‘You need a different type of iron depending on the fabric. I have to use a really heavy, very hot iron for cotton, but I have a lighter one for silk. To get the iron really hot I put a couple of tin cans over it. That acts like a sort of oven that heats up the charcoal even more but makes the iron lighter.’

  He beams at me and suggests I might like to have a go. I’m not so sure this is a good idea: you need to hold a wet cloth over the handle even to hold the iron and I’m not certain I could make sure none of the charcoal falls on to the clean washing. I explain why I’m a bit afraid, and he just says, ‘Hakuna matata – it’s not hard, you’ll manage.’ Reluctant to disappoint him I get up, go over to the ironing board and pick up the iron. I can hardly believe how heavy it is: it has to weigh at least two kilograms. There’s absolutely no way I could make that thing glide smoothly and easily over the clothing laid out. It’s hard enough to do just a few centimetres and the three of them burst out laughing when I give up. I laugh along with them but start coughing. All of a sudden the ironing man gets serious and tells me: ‘It’s not a healthy job. You spend all day breathing in charcoal dust. I’m forty-two years old and I can’t keep on doing it for much longer. Some days I can’t catch my breath. But I have a wife and two children to feed. We’re having a church wedding next week,’ he says proudly.

  ‘Why now?’ I ask.

  ‘Because a wedding costs a lot of money. All the relatives want to come. I’ll have to provide food and drink for ov
er a hundred people and lots of them will need putting up because they have to come a long way to get to Nairobi. But after being married for ten years, I’ve scraped the money together and want to do this for my wife,’ he says with a smile of satisfaction spread across his face.

  I wish him all the best and congratulate him. I could see from the moment I laid eyes on him that this was a good and honest man. As far as I can tell from the nearly three hours I’ve spent sitting here watching him work, the customers seem to like him too. I take my farewell, delighted to have made the acquaintance of such a hard-working, good-natured man who clearly loves his wife and is satisfied with his simple lot in life.

  With a spring in our step after such an uplifting experience we make our way back through several muddy ditches to where we parked the car. A few days later I find myself thinking of the ironing man again and tell myself never to grumble when I have to do the ironing: all I need to do is plug it in and the work, by comparison, practically does itself.

  GREENERY IN THE MIDST OF THE SLUMS

  Klaus has organised a meeting for me with the French charity foundation Solidarité, which provides self-help assistance for Nairobi’s slum dwellers. One of their projects is to teach people to grow their own vegetables in big plastic bags filled with soil. In a slum where nobody has a garden because there simply isn’t any space, it sounds like a brilliant idea. I’m eager to hear more about it, to go and see the project itself and meet the people enrolled in it.

  We turn up at the headquarters of the organisation, introduce ourselves, and a bubbly female agriculture scientist explains the programme to me and then spontaneously volunteers to take us out on a tour of the slums the next day to see it in action.

  The next morning we head for Kibera, the biggest slum in all of Kenya. In Nairobi alone there are more than two hundred districts classified as slums, which are home to more than half the city’s population. Kibera stretches over three square kilometres, and is home to several hundred thousand people. You can imagine how closely they live to each other. Nobody has any privacy. Only a few shacks have electricity and everybody has to fetch their water in canisters. There’s on average just one toilet for several hundred people. If the queues are too long they have to use plastic bags to relieve themselves. Kibera is effectively a city within a city, with its own rules and regulations. Each and every inhabitant is concerned only with day-to-day survival. Today I’m going to meet some of them and hear their life stories.

  There are four of us altogether; it’s not advisable for ‘white people’ to visit unaccompanied. Apart from anything else it would be easy to get lost in among so many similar tin shacks and never find a way out again. The first thing we have to do is register our presence with the district officer in order to get official permission to enter Kibera. We have to show our papers and enter our names and addresses in a visitors’ book. Before leaving we will have to come by again and register that we have left so the district officer knows nobody has simply disappeared. We then plod on foot through an ankle-deep morass of dirt, mud and excrement. I’m glad I’ve remembered my wellies. I’m going to need them.

  Antony, from criminal to gardener

  First of all we go to see a group of young men who make a living from the so-called ‘Gardens in a Sack’. They are lucky enough to have a piece of land outside the slum, close to the main road. Even so, it’s very noisy and there’s a perpetual stink of exhaust fumes. Every few seconds some hulking great lorry rattles past. I can see, even as we come on to their land, that the young men in question are hard at work. Some of them are digging up soil while others are collecting little stones. There are loads of big white sacks with greenery growing from them scattered about. I’m introduced to Antony, who is twenty-eight years old and seems to be the group leader, even though officially there is no such thing. He’s of average height with muscular arms and a red cap on his head. He’s going to tell me what they do here and why.

  ‘You have to know, Corinne,’ he starts by saying, ‘before we got the chance to earn a living like this, we were all thieves and layabouts. We stole anything we could and even our neighbours didn’t trust us. But what can you do when your stomach is growling with hunger? Most of us were drug users as a way to overcome our misery. A few of us had even been to school up to leaving age, but still couldn’t find a job. I wasn’t bad in school, even if I was born in a slum, as was my mother before me. I lived in a tiny hut with her and five brothers and sisters. I never knew my father. It’s the same for lots of lads around here. You all get together, form a gang. There were about fifty of us altogether, though not all of them are still alive. About twenty were gunned down by the police, another ten are banged up in jail. The remaining seventeen of us work here on the Project. The lads range in age from nineteen up to thirty-two.

  ‘We started back in 1990 when the chaos after the elections made things worse for everybody. We bumped into this training guy from Solidarité who got us to see that if we continued living the way we had been we’d all pretty soon join our brothers under the soil. But if we turned over a new leaf we’d even get a piece of land, he told us. He said the guy who owned the land was so thankful for not being killed during the troubles that he had offered it to the charity as a gift.

  ‘The rest is pretty easy, really. We fill up a 100kg plastic sack with soil and small to medium-sized stones. What we do is effectively build up a column of stone in the middle and surround it with soil. That means that it all gets roughly the same amount of water. We then cut about fifty holes in the sacks and plant sukuma wiki (a type of green cabbage) or some other green vegetable in them. One of these bags doesn’t take up that much space, just about thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres. But lots of vegetables around here grow vertically. Solidarité gives us the seedlings. We have to water them twice a day, but after just four weeks you can harvest the first vegetables and then every two weeks thereafter. Obviously you don’t plant them all at the same time, so you can harvest them whenever you need to.’

  He tells me all of this with a calm, quiet confidence. I’m impressed and go to take a look at these sacks. Some of them already have ripe veg growing from them, others are still at the seedling stage. One of the men is picking off leaves that have gone brown and throwing them to the chickens that are running around. The chickens are also part of the Project. Anyone who works hard enough can start rearing chickens too in order to have eggs either for himself or to sell on. I come across a few hutches – they are breeding rabbits too! The rabbit hutches are built one on top of the other to maximise use of space. On top of the hutches lie clear plastic bags full of water. Six hours lying out in the hot Kenyan sun in this way is in fact a way of sterilising the water; it ensures that it is free of germs and can be used as drinking water.

  Antony tells me proudly that each of them can make between €80 and €100 a month, which is enough to live on. He has a wife and two children and his wife is proud that he has honest work to do, and that the neighbours respect him. These young men have won themselves a good name. Today there are lots of people come to buy their vegetables, even occasionally a chicken. In turn they do their own bit of social work, trying to turn round other kids who are still stuck in the loop of begging, stealing and drug-taking. ‘Every now and then we manage to enlist one of them in the Project,’ Antony says. ‘There were only twelve of us working here a year ago. Now there are seventeen.’ He sits back reflectively for a moment or two and then says, ‘If it weren’t for Solidarité and these vegetable sacks, I’d be dead by now.’ He gives me a grave look as he gets to his feet to go back to work.

  I’m very impressed to see that young kids who only a year ago were drug-takers, thieves and criminals have had their lives turned round by some plastic sacks. By now there are some 70,000 households using the sacks like this, the Solidarité people tell me.

  I say farewell to Antony and head off to visit a few other people. Walking along the narrow tracks that lead through the slums we have to take care
not to cut ourselves on the rusty iron of the sacks. Every so often we have to jump over stinking open sewers. Everywhere you look there are people of every age and size, some of them sitting between bits of cardboard or planks of wood, trying to sell something, others hurrying along the alleyways carrying loads, usually on their heads. Almost everybody we come across glowers at us suspiciously, until we say hello and then they almost always smile back.

  Anne, the quiet warrior

  We’re now on our way to see Anne. She’s involved in the vegetable sack scheme too but lives in another part of the slum. They tell me that even here in this giant slum there are relatively ‘good’ and ‘bad’ areas. The one we’re headed for now is one of the worse ones, named Soweto, after the infamous township in South Africa. To get there we make for a railway junction so that, like most of the inhabitants, we can get along faster by walking on the tracks. We’re higher up now and have a better view of the entire Kibera slum, which spreads out behind the modern apartment blocks of the city centre. Local traders use the train tracks too, spreading out their wares on the sleepers. Some of them are selling shoes; others have put up little wooden stands and are selling sweets or vegetables. All around them are heaps of rubbish. Here and there little groups of people are sitting together on the tracks and chatting to one another. The railway embankment is higher up than the slum alleyways and the air is better, except that several times a day they all have to scatter when a train comes through.

  After walking a fair distance along the tracks I spot some of the sacks with vegetables growing out of them down below us. To get to them we have to make our way down a steep little path. It is lucky that it is dry: when it rains this little path turns into a mudslide, making it impossible to descend. At the bottom we are greeted by a well-built lady out watering her vegetables. I put Anne’s age at around sixty, but it turns out she’s a decade younger, the same age as me. She’s wearing a simple but clean blue-grey dress and has a cloth wrapped around her head, with a few grey hairs poking out. Anne looks after thirteen vegetable sacks placed around her little hut.