Slumdog Millionaire

The smell was the first thing that hit me. The heat between the tightly packed houses of corrugated iron exacerbated the combined stench of human waste, rotting food and who knows what else. It made me want to wretch.

I had been invited to Korogocho slum by one of the pre-novices who had spent two months living there last year while working at a local school and centre for street children. He told me about the small community of Comboni priests who had been working here for many years. They funded this, he said, indicating the tarmac road we were walking on which cuts through the centre of the slum. It was already bustling with people, even this early on a Sunday morning.

Geoff, my guide, took us off the main road and down one of the paths between the ramshackle houses. We sidestepped over the open drainage system which had cut its natural winding path down the centre of the pathway. We reached a brick wall with a mural of important African figures and Geoff knocked at the iron door. We had arrived at the priests’ house for breakfast.

At every Salesian project I’ve seen in Kenya so far, the lives of the priests have frankly been pretty cushty: nice homes in nice areas (Upper Hill, Karen, etc.) surrounded by examples of their many sponsors’ generosity. By contrast, these priests who shared their sliced bread and tea with us were located in the centre of the roughest part of Korogocho slum and were living the basic of lifestyles. As well as wanting to live in sympathy with the slummers, they are also forced to live this way, Geoff explained, as anything of any value that they have would get stolen. To live with the people, they must live the life of the local people.

A trainee priest from the DRC told me how he had been stabbed recently when he went out to get some bread. ‘It was only to take my phone,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s better if we just don’t go out after sunset.’

Despite being celebrated by an Italian, the Sunday mass was happily the most “African” I’ve had since I arrived: the dancers, readers and priests were all wearing African dress, the murals all depicted Biblical characters as Africans, and the whole thing took over 2 hours. Very African, indeed.

After mass, a young man came up to me whose manner instantly suggested that he was entirely ‘with it’. Having struggled through a painfully circular conversation, partly in English partly in Swahili, during which he had asked the same three questions on repeat, Geoff described how the boy had been messed up by sniffing too much glue. In fact, during our chat I noticed that he had occasionally put his handkerchief to his nose to inhale. ‘Was that covered in glue?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said Geoff, ‘He has dipped the cloth in petrol and that’s what he’s sniffing. It’s more expensive than glue, but more powerful too.’

The church overlooked a huge rubbish dump which we walked past on our way to visit Geoff’s former flat. In the distance I could see people wading through the trash hoping to find something, anything, of value which they could then flog back in the slum. Geoff told me about when the rubbish truck comes, you can see a stream of kids running and shouting after it, looking forward to the new delivery of garbage.

Geoff’s flat was in a nicer part of the slum than the priests’ house. For starters, it was a building made of brick. I asked how much it cost to rent. ‘1000 shillings a month’, he replied, which is around £10. ‘And the iron corrugated houses in the centre of the slum cost 500.’ ‘Wow! That’s really expensive,’ I said, with no irony: I thought that 10 quid a month was a lot to pay to live in a slum. Geoff agreed matter-of-factly: ‘If you don’t work, you can’t live in the slum.’

Geoff continued: ‘This nice region is the Luo area [Luo is a Kenyan tribe originally from the West of Kenya]. The dangerous area over there is the Kikuyu part [another Kenyan tribe, from the centre of the country]. If you’re a Kikuyu in the Luo part of the slum, you will be beaten and possibly killed.’ Chillingly he told me that just last year a pregnant woman was thrown off the 4-storey building we were standing under. Her only crime was being a Kikuyu who had strayed into the Luo quarter.

‘But how can you tell Luo from Kikuyu?’

‘From their skin: Luos are brown; Kikuyus are black’, he explained, before adding: ‘Plus it says so on the ID card.’

It wasn’t only the Luo who were criticised. My guide to the slum also censored the Kikuyus. ‘They’re thieves over there’, he said bitterly. Despite the huge floodlight lampposts which tower above the slum skyline, Korogocho was clearly not a place to hang around at night.

A mzungu I met the following day told me that when she had visited a slum she had received a good deal of harassment and had even had her necklace snatched from her neck. I had no such issues during my stroll through the slum, with most people ignoring me or just passively staring as I walked by. The kids were more vocal, singing the ‘how are you?’ reprise repeatedly. One particularly excited boy called ‘Hey mzungu! How are you? You are fine!’ and ran away before I’d even opened my mouth to respond. Later, a group of kids began to follow us chanting ‘How are you? How are you?’ as they went. Another boy got me to pose for his toy camera.

The history of the slum(s) here, their origins and development are not fully clear to me at the moment, and as for their future is even less is known. Everyone I speak to blames the government or successive governments (note: Kenya is still only on its 3^rd President nearly 50 years after independence), probably with reason. People feel that things will only change for Korogocho and the many other slums around Nairobi with the necessary political will.