MEmOIRS OF A

KENYA n SH A CK D We L L e R
03

T W E LV E G A t E S

C I t Y,
HALLELUJAH!
R ev. Gar y Davis

tO tHE

AGE OF Z I N C

S T ORIES OF UR B A N I N FOR M ALI T Y

B OO K 0 3

M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

to million others who have been born and raised in the slums. My memories of Korogocho are rekindled every time I enter any informal settlement or slum in any urban town. These memories compound both my positive energy which brings out the zeal, energy, courage and my positive attitude towards life and the people generally. It is a kind of memory that tells me you have come from the thickest part of the jungle and for that matter the hardest part of life where few of the young people now adults can boast of having succeeded or made it in life. In that count I see myself to be amongst those very few of the youths who have grown into adulthood having integrated themselves with the rest of the social and economic class.

aving grown up in Korogocho for me was just as normal as it has been

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C H A P T E R

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The other cluster of memories that never leaves my mind, heart and spirit is that kind of feeling that is scaring and dead bad! This is the memory that brings images of faces of youths or teenagers whose lives were censured to an early death or who made a choice of engaging in crime even though there were no options for most of them to choose from. It is the life of crime, violence, hate, anger and suicide. This is the kind of life that every growing boy child in the slum is acculturated into as part of the urban survival. Let me put this point in a better perspective by being more illustrative in my thoughts next week.

I WA S R A I S E d I n t H E C O U nt R Y I bEEn WORkInG In tHE

tOWn t R O U bLE
EVER SInCE I SEt mY SUItCASE dOWn BEEn In

Bob Dylan

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B OO K 0 3

M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

he year is 2008, location is Kiamutesya Slum in Mlango Kubwa-

Mathare and the time is around 12.30pm and the normal Mau Mau road (the road that cuts across the Mathare valley and runs adjacent to Juja road right from Kiamutesya all the way to Mabatini) is covered with a buzz of activities mainly food vendors, firewood sellers, greengrocers. The street at this hour was busy with mainly school children who were

02
C H A P T E R

grabbing fast food from the Mama nitilie (Tanzanian Swahili referring to women food vendors) we were having a visit to a community toilet project that was being renovated in the settlement and our team was composed of few community members mainly from the Federation in charge of the project and some of the youths who were to be the beneficiary of the project as their income generating project. As our team walked basically from the toilet to the road we observed from one end of the road a group of youths numbering close to eight smartly dressed in suits or rather in an official manner to the point of attracting attention in the settlement. Their walk, dressing, confidence and persona suggested they were not ordinary visitors or strangers to this settlement. As a matter of fact one would have thought they were guys out on a promo, working for a sale company, or special branch from the police or a very important entourage of government or diplomatic corps.

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B OO K 0 3

M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

We immediately noticed that busy activities that were going on along that section of the road where the group was visible almost came into a pause like a sudden stop to a loud music playing. The quietness came with a chilling fear that I personally felt gripping me and causing nervousness among our team members and even the community leaders from the federation remained frozen for a moment and at that time as the group of youths approached us we noticed some 3 policemen who were on patrol in the settlement diverting and taking a different route as if avoiding to meet the oncoming group of youths this happened very naturally that to a stranger one would not have suspected or understood what was happening. As they approached I could not hold my curiosity to want to know who the young men were and to my own comfort and surprise I was able to spot at least three of them whom I had seen in the area before and had interacted with them through the youth organization we had started engaging on waste management. I got further relief when they greeted us as they passed us and entered into a congested lane within the settlement and whoop they vanished. Immediately they were out of the road life naturally returned to normal as if nothing had happened. Being a community organizer and with my slum life experience I realized I was relieved just like the rest of the team the moment they left meaning all of us had been captives of that fear. This was naturally followed up with lots of questions in my mind.

Where were they coming from all eight dressed in such an official manner at that time of the day? Why was everyone including the federation members scared? What about the police taking a different route and pretending they did not see them? Who were they? What was really happening? I became curious and followed the story deeper... As a start the community federation team reminded us that there was nothing to be afraid off since the young men meant no one in the community any harm. Then they told us that they were coming from town (basically city center) and that this was when they were coming back to the settlement. The explanation continued to state that the group was a professional group of criminals and that their game or rather their job is highly regarded and respected (literally) by some of the community members. Yes, any youth involved in crime of their state was highly glorified by the rest of the community members. In fact one member of the federation told me that in the settlement of Kiamutesya you can find a family where three of its generations have been actively involved in crime. That is to say, that some of the young men we saw had their fathers and grandfathers all actively involved in crime. Hence, making crime is normal family business as well as community way of life.

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AGE OF Z I N C

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On E m I G H t EVEn COnSIdER

mISdIRECtInG
A StRAnGER FOR HIS OWn

GOOd.
Ivan Vladislavic

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AGE OF Z I N C

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B OO K 0 3

M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

and consciously or unintentionally the crime mentorship programme has continued in the settlement where younger boys of ages between 10-15 years who have dropped out of school for various reasons get involved in snatching hand bags, phones and possessions to unsuspected motorists and passersby along Juja road and after a while those who gain confidence very early move their snatching job into town. The next set of petty criminals will be seen in the settlement involved in

s I got interested with the topic I learnt that crime was truly accepted

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C H A P T E R

burglary within the settlement especially in the unsecured areas of the settlements. Note that secured areas are those that the residents have designed a response to insecurity that is feared by those wishing to steal in their neighborhood. The most feared response is use of mob-justice which sees a number of young boys being lynched whenever caught or suspected of stealing or being a thief. (will relook at the issue of mob injustice again).

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The mob justice and police killings according to most criminals have graduated the youths into armed robbers, or has enticed them to become big timers. As big timers the group becomes professional in their job and they stop terrorizing their neighbors and instead engage themselves into other forms of crime outside their settlement. It is at this point that the community start recognizing them as their heroes and the young men are made celebs by their peers and parents. It is this group that mentors the young ones. This groups motto is to live young as a king than live poor the rest of your life. The group believes that luck and death are the same they all come once. Therefore their hope is that one day the catch will be enough to take them and their families out of poverty.

PLEASE

SpARE mE
tHE WISdOm O F F O L kt A L E S , MACHOkALI SAId, FORCInG HImSELF tO

L AUGH
AS IF HE HAd bEEn JOkInG, bUt In HIS HEARt H E WA S b U R n I n G W I t H

AnXIEtY,
FOR AnOtHER tHOUGHt H A d C R E pt I nt O
*

HIS mInd.
Ngugi wa Thiongo

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M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

a single mother, had just migrated into the city of Nairobi. Our first rental house in Kariobangi was made of mud lumped onto a frame of wattle poles, and had a tin sheet roof. The room we, the children, occupied was divided into two sections: one side for the nine of us and on the other side we had space for our familys goats. Later, when I was eleven, going on to class four, my mother managed to get a piece of land to construct her own house in Korogocho slum. She did

recall my early life with somberness. This was a time when my mother,

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this through her Nyakinyua group. Nyakinyua women dancing groups were formed purposely to perform during government functions or other gatherings that required entertainment. Though our house was built under the high voltage power line, we lived there for over 20 years oblivious of the danger. We, and all the goats and some chicken, lived in that house without threat from the power company or the government. The construction of our first house involved us all. It did not require a lot of expertise in the construction as I recall vividly the activities. All we needed were wattle poles that were plenty in Korogocho. With the poles we mixed grass and mud and covered the walls. For the roof, it was improved later, we only used sheets of polythene. There was plenty of waste polythene and PVC in the citys dumping site that shares a fence with Korogocho.

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Later the house was improved as we continued staying there. It never got to the stage where it required an architect nor a design approved by the City Council. To this day the quality of houses in Korogocho remain largely unchanged. However, the slum now has a good tarmac road network and better electricity and water supply. It was much later, when we were older, that we fully understood how tough life was and how wise my mother was in shielding us from the full impact of our situation. Many evenings, the pot would be set to boil for the evening meal. After sometime my mother would say that firewood had ran out and send us out to get any flammable material outside. We would come back and the fire would be started again and the food would continue bubbling. Occasionally my mother would stir the food or add fuel to the fire. Eventually we would get drowsy and nod off in the comfort that when the food was ready we would be woken up to eat. Our young minds never suspected that all that the pot had was boiling water. We all thought that we kept falling asleep before the evening meal was ready. Today, I understand the power that hope brings.

L AnGUAGE
IS A CItY

tO tHE bUILdInG

HU mAn bEInG
R alph Waldo Emerson

OF WHICH EVERY

bROUGHt A StOnE.

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M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

ne thing my mother could not shield us from was moving from low

income housing in Kariobangi to Korogocho slum. The feeling of moving into Korogocho was sickening and scary. Very frightening indeed. We had lived close enough to Korogocho to understand that our moving meant life had taken a turn for the worst. Yet, for my mother, it meant she did not need to pay rent. It also meant we would have a piece of land in the city of Nairobi. As a single mother struggling to raise children without any assured job it must have been a most liberating thing. So as a strategy of raising us, my mother religiously maintained most of her rural culture and traditions.

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Looking back, this contributed greatly to our character and behavior. Today, in comparison to most of the children we grew up around, my mothers strategy worked. Even as children we knew that the other children in Korogocho were urban kids and mainly ghetto. This is how it happened: My mother maintained a very strong link with her rural folks. Every school holiday we would be sent home to our relatives. The visits played a major part in molding our values and character. As urban dwellers we were humbled by the harsh life our rural peers lived. They walked long distances to fetch water, firewood and to school, to church and occasionally to the shops. They tilled the land, took care of livestock. They had no electricity, ate very plain food, dressed in near-rugs. Yet they had enough time to study and were quite disciplined.

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At the time our relatives were not rich. They didnt have much, but our cousins, nephews, nieces and some of my step brothers and sisters inspired us, they influenced how we thought. My mother ensured the connection to our rural links remained strong. While in the city my mother adopted an attitude of doing anything or any job for the sake of her children. In time the family had grown to include nine children. She engaged in many manual jobs besides her main one of raising us and ensuring we go to school every day. Some of her jobs included providing unskilled labor in construction sites, as well as painting houses in the posh estates that were being constructed in city like Outer-Ring and Buruburu. Of all the jobs she did I have always admired her for two: urban farming and local alcohol brewing.

O wen : W H A t I S H A pp E n I n G ? Y o L L A nd : I m n O t S U R E . BUt Im COnCERnEd AbOUt m Y p A R t I n I t. It S A n

EVICtIOn
Brian Friel

OF SORtS.

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M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

with some of her peers, would identify lands that had not been developed, both public and private lands. They would clear the land, cultivate it and grow foods like maize, beans and other legumes, vegetables, sweat potatoes, Irish potatoes. Since the women did not own the lands, they had an amazing system where the size or the number of gardens, called shambas, was determined by ones ability to maintain and sustain or manage them. My mother had four gardens in the city where she did her farming. This was possible because we were a big family hence she had a larger labour force.

temming from her rural roots, farming was important. My mother,

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Two shambas belonged to private individuals and one was later taken and developed. Through my mothers farming zeal I must admit I was able to appreciate how the city of Nairobi was growing. It also allowed me to see how people behaved differently. For instance Buruburu estate, where one shamba was located, was considered to be among the most affluent areas in Nairobi. Whenever we were there we would see how different we were from other children of the city. In fact it became very clear that economically and socially we were different from the children raised up in Buruburu. It wasnt even surprising that many of the residents in Buruburu never liked us coming close to their houses. So we found other routes to the shamba. Even when it rained we couldnt shelter anywhere close to their houses. We felt that we were lower people than the Buruburu people. Whether it rained or shone we would walk and work on the shamba and this we did for many years.

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I remember I stopped going to Buruburu after I joined secondary school for fear that some of my classmates might see me. As I matured from boyhood, I was getting a lot more exposed to life in the ghetto and I began to acquire an urban identity. So activities like carrying a jembe (hoe) and walking, rather than boarding a matatu (Nairobis public transport minibuses) started to embarrass me. I remember I shifted to work in the fourth shamba located within the Kariobangi Sewerage Plant, very close to our house. Here none of my classmates would ever see me. Using the treated sewerage wastewater we grew a lot of vegetables. My mother mainly sold the produce from this shamba in order to cater for household needs that had to be bought. Farming was, and still is, in my system.

WHERE JUStICE IS

dEnIEd,

EnFORCEd,
W H E R E I G n O R A n C E p R E VA I L S , A nd W H E R E A n Y O n E C L A S S IS mAdE tO FEEL tHAt SOCIEtY IS An ORGAnIzEd

WHERE pOVERtY IS

COnS pIRACY
t O O pp R E S S , R O b A nd d E G R A d E t H E m , nEItHER pERSOnS nOR pROpERtY WILL bE SAFE.
Frederick Douglass

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M E M OIRS OF A K E N YA N SHAC K D WELLER

e had a skill and it could be used to make some money when we

werent working in our own shambas. We became unskilled labour in coffee plantations at the outskirts of the city. When we started going to the plantations, my elder sisters had been working there for some time. I was in class three at this time and I must have been less than ten years old. I cannot recall whether it was voluntary or we were just taken along.

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Many children my age worked in the plantations. I recall that at around 5am, during school holidays, we would be picked up by a lorry and taken to some coffee estates not very far from Nairobi. The lorry was usually full mainly with my age mates. All we were required to have was a 5-liter jerrican and an empty sack. The assignment was to pick coffee at great speed trying to get as much as possible. The payment was based on the number of kilos picked.

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Each adult person would be assigned a portion of the plantation and then a supervisor would manage several rows that were assigned to the pickers. At exactly 6pm all the picking would stop and all pickers would take their filled sacks to the factory for weighing and paying. The amounts paid were so low that many adult pickers had recruited children like us to help out. So as hired-without-consent child coffee pickers we boarded the lorry to work alongside our now grown up sisters. My memories of this experience reminds me of the chilly mornings when our fingers would go numb and of dreary days when we got rained on while picking coffee. Yet there were some humorous moments. It was not unusual for some pickers to steal from each other and replace the emptied sacks with construction aggregate. Everyone would have a good laugh at the weighing station.

C AU GHt
dRIVInG AGAInSt tRAFFIC.

YOUVE bEEn

REpORt

FOR pSYCHIAtRIC E VA L U A t I O n .
Monopoly board game, L agos edition

To date in some of the coffee estates and plantations incidents of child labor are still reported, though most of the coffee establishments have continued to deny these claims.

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the journey of becoming alcoholic or drug user begins. The story of my mother as a brewer who never drank alcohol, to many people who I have shared this story with, tells the story of the morality of survival. My mother was introduced into brewing by her stepsister, who had also shown her the way to get around city life. Our first brew was called busaa. It was a traditional brew mainly consumed

ow does a journey of a thousand miles begin? Perhaps the same way

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C H A P T E R

by the people of Western Kenya. The brew was prepared using millet and yeast. The mixture of millet and water was fermented for couple of days to produce thick coarse paste. The paste was fried using a big metallic pan outside the house. The fried or, if you prefer, cooked matter would be put into a drum and mixed with water to ferment again for another couple of days to produce the alcohol. Busaa is preferred hot and is considered to be a social drink. Most customers drank and socialized in our house. Due to its cumbersome nature my mother abandoned the busaa business and entered into the distillation of Changaa. Unlike busaa, Changaa is not associated with any customary brews. It is far more potent and is considered to be more illegal than busaa. And therefore it fetched more.

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With her experience and with ready customers my mother started brewing Changaa or the African Gin. It is as clear as ordinary gin. Brewing Changaa was a different game to the busaa service. You had to have your wits around you. In order to make it as a changaa brewer you first need to be well protected by law enforcers. This requires the brewer to set aside some cash to off pay policemen, the administration police and sometimes the local area chief. Then the recipient of this bribe offered instructions as to how one should do to avoid being arrested or being caught with the alcohol.

A L L k I nd S O F

FIGHtS
bREAk OUt bEtWEEn tHE

tHE SHACkS,
A nd t H E L A R G E R H O U S E S .
Woody Guthrie *

SmALLER HOUSES,

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or a Changaa manufacturer you will require an industry or physical space.

Now for a single unit dweller like my mother this was tricky. Therefore it required innovation. The brewing process started with fermenting molasses mixed with yeast and water and closed in a drum (a cylindrical container normally used to store chemicals or liquids measuring around 100 liters). The fermentation process takes not less than 7 days and produces a very distinct smell of alcohol. This can easily attract attention. To get around the risk of being smelled out

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C H A P T E R

or the drum being seen a smart brewer like my mother had to bury the drum under my bed. This actually meant me getting the feel of a ready matured brew before anyone else. Anyway, after fermentation the result is a thick dark liquid. This is put into another drum ready for distillation. The distillation process could be done into two ways. One required a pipe that would bring out vapor that is cooled using water or a distillation process where the vapor cools off into an aluminum pot inside the drum. The result is a clear and very strong alcohol. To test its alcoholic nature most of the customers would light it using a match box and its blue flame represented a clear alcohol substance. All the brewing activities took place very early in the morning between 3 am to 5 am not to attract attention from the neighbors nor the police patrolling the area.

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HIStORY

HIStORIES tImE tO SEE tHEmSELVES

t H R O U G H t H E tA n G L E OF tROpICAL VInES.
Edouard Glissant

IS FISSUREd bY

t H At C A S t AWAY UpOn IRREmEdIAbLE SHORES tHOSE WHO nEVER HAd

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