Kenya (Nairobi) – Kibera: Part One

Alan squatted down on a bare spot of ashen rubble and shattered office ware he had kicked clear. His slightly torn red shirt contrasted him apart from the charred blue concrete walls, balanced by a shallow glow of daylight from an empty window behind him.
The 12-year old flipped scraps of burnt cardboard with a plastic shard as he explained, “I was just at home giving stones to my father and one of my friends was shot here,” he pointed to his thigh. “There was a fight in which enemies were fighting, and people were fighting each other.”
“Who exactly was fighting? What happened?”
“Police and also people. They go to house by house, house by house. They open the door, they beat you, they beat you, they rape you.” Alan clapped his hands together. He sat quiet for a moment. “You know most of them were my friends. One of them is in Kenyatta hospital.”
Alan continued, “In Kenya, tribalism is the thing which is going on and it is not finished. Because there are a lot of tribes and every tribe wants a land. You know there are forty-two tribes in Kenya.
“There was a tribe called Kikuyus—you know there is a place, Lainisaba, if they find you there, they take you and they circumcise you,” Alan waved his hands over the rubble. “Just like that, because they are their enemy.”
Public circumcision is a means humiliation and dominance, especially for tribes opposed to the traditional ritual as in the case between the Kikuyu and Luo. The Luo tribe set off the violence in December of 2007 after the Kenyan incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, apparently stole the election from Raila Odinga, a Luo. The police, mostly of Kikuyu origin, joined the violence. Their orders and execution are subject to debate.
“Do you think peace is possible?” Tyler Batson, the director of our documentary, A Chance for Peace, asked.
“No. I do not think so.” A pause. “But now there is grand coalition government of Kibaki and Raila. They are the ones who are in power now. Raila is prime minister. Kibaki is president.” In Kibera, Prime Minister Odinga is refereed to by his first name. “Raila” is painted on the walls of homes and businesses always in reference to “peace”, especially in Kibera.
A melting pot of over 600,000 residents—and on some estimates, one million—Kibera is the largest slum in Kenya, a scant fifteen-minute matatu (bus/van) ride from downtown capital Nairobi. Along the main one-lane highway, hundreds of private vendors hawk goods and services to town residents and adjacent Nairobi. Although bustling with heavy foot-traffic and mass transport, commerce appears scare from competition and poverty.
Tens of thousands of shanty shacks, few of concrete construction, many of corrugated tin siding wired to blue gum branches, blanket gentle rolling hills as one seamless rusting contoured floor. Home to many Kikuyus, as well as Luos, a dozen occupants may sleep in a space the size of a small studio apartment. Water is provided through a well system, but still boiled before drinking. Before the wells though, streams running between villages was potable, but a careless regard for rubbish and unsanitary latrine use has made the watercourse a reeking exposed sewer system.
Post-election, Kibera epitomized the example of violence from tribalism and political outrage. We met Alan while filming the ruins of a government building mobbed by protestors and torched by petrol bombs. I was told three people were killed just a few feet from where I set the camera. Alan, curious about the camera approached us.
Over the concrete fence, a choir’s praises resonated through cracked and scorched walls of a church still in use after fire bombed. A felt a drop of water splash on my neck, and although the sky looked as if it wanted to rain, nothing more fell.
“Can I ask you a question?” Alan asked me studying the camera as I reviewed footage from his interview.
“Sure.” No question followed. He slid two fingers over the camera’s focus ring. “You said you want to be a journalist?” I offered in exchange.
“Yes, but it is not going to happen.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not have money to go to college,” he stated quickly. (Refer to a previous post titled, “Namibia – Sundowner”)
“Do you need to go to college to have a job?”
“Yes.”
After a pause second-guessing my response, I explained to Alan how through persistence and unpaid labor for a local television station, he—in a sense—would get a “free” education, as well as establish connections that could lead to a paying job. In the States, internships especially in the film business are common practice, but here in Kenya?
He looked at me as if his heart, in all seriousness, skipped a beat. “I want your e-mail.”

Dressed in a flannel overcoat, forest-green beanie and enamel-splattered jeans, Solo7 carried a bucket of white paint to a wood fence and brushed the words, “Keep Peace by Solo7”. Local bystanders call out his name with affection as he crossed the Ngong Road to an advertisement wall. Smoke burning from heaps of trash blacken and peal the already muted colors of Melvin’s Chai Tea. “No Dumping” a sign reads. Solo writes, “Keep Kibera Clean by Solo7”. The bold white letters join the hundreds more political statements on every other surface in and outside Kibera’s main throughway. The vandalism is accepted and appreciated, and as a result, Solo7 is a hometown celebrity artist.
A tight dirt corridor between dividers of brown corduroy and pasty mud opens to a four-man Kenyan board game situated across from Solo7’s communal art studio, M2. A heavy metal door pushes into the enclosed cramped patio of a two-story shed. At the edge of the door’s swing is Gambo, another artist dabbing yellow acrylic onto a near-finished art canvas, his studio dubbed, “China”.
I walk up the bottle-cap coated staircase into “Amrika”, Solo7’s stage. Paintings, collages and sculptures shield the rusting tin wall. A window peers over the patio and surrounding Kibera framed over a bench littered with Giger-esque wire-frame figurines and woodcarvings.
Solo7 clears a space, sets a legal-letter sized composition against a propped-up translucent Coca-Cola banner, and outlines an ominous depicted figure with a soft lime-white glow. He dabs the acrylic paint heavily against the canvas; his brush blunt and hardened.
“After people heard that President Kibaki had won election, people grew mad ‘cause they expected Raila to be president. People say that they rigged election results. After that people had grown mad and they started torching people’s properties, setting them a blaze, and they were hunting Kikuyus from this place claiming Kikuyus are responsible for election rigging. So I saw in such a fashion, people cannot live that way forever since we are all suffering. All tribes of Kenya, because it was not business as usual.” He dipped his brush into a cap of green paint and touched the canvas. “Children were dying of hunger, and old men and women too. I decided to come up with this peace initiative writing on the walls at least to educate my fellow youths. ‘Cause they are the youth causing all this chaos. So I wanted them to understand and retreat back.”
Solo7’s penname originates from a series of coincidences: his proper first name, Solomon, being the seventh child in his family, and a series of life incidences that relate or reference the number “7”; in a much more significant way the number “17” has impacted my life.
“How has the post-election violence influenced your creativity?” I asked.
“It only affected the sense of my artwork, but not the creativity. I paint these pictures I normally see a kind of fire feeling. Like this piece that you see here,” Solo turned his body and pointed a large fabric canvas of human shapes worked into a flare of red brilliance. “Its got a lot of warm colors that depict fire.”
Solo continued to describe his depiction of the violence he experienced. I admired it for its composition, but above all the meaning from an artist of resistance.