Headline, December04, 2013

''' O' LORD-GOD : MERCY FOR THE

 POVERTY OF THE SLUMS '''

In England men and women who fled their farms and villages in the late 18th century to seek a better life in the factories of burgeoning Manchester, Leeds and Bradford found no streets paved with Gold.

Rather, they encountered disease, malnutrition and very very often sheer Brutality.

NO CONTINENT is urbanising faster than Africa. Why? Well, one answer is partly statistical : Africa has been the slowest to get started. Another is that parts of Africa, such as the Sahel, have been effected recently by severe climate change, making marginal land unfarmable.

And in countries like Congo and Angola years of fighting have propelled millions to the cities. But a fuller explanation maybe in order. A look at Nairobi provides some answers, and throws up many more question.

For many years the biggest city in East Africa, where human life seems to have begun, was not a bad-advertisement for the urban condition. As the capital of Kenya, Nairobi had the subdued bustle of an administrative centre, some industry, hotels for tourists on their way to or from wildlife safaris, lots of greenery and even a small forest.

The population in 1960 was about 250,000. Today, the forest remains, but, with 3m plus people, Nairobi has lost most of its charm. The traffic is awful, as is the crime, and the superlatives are usually reserved for Kibera, which is supposedly Africa's largest, densest and poorest slum.

It probably is NOT. Luanda, Kinshasa and Lagos, the world's fastest-growing megacity., may all have slums to match Kiberia, whose population is put at anything from 600,000 to 1.2m, depending both on the estimator and on the time of the year, many of its inhabitants  being seasonal migrants. 

What makes Kiberia unusual is, first, that its 256 hectares sit right in the middle of Nairobi and, second, that it finds itself on the doorstep of Habitat, the UN's agency for towns and cities, which is based in a campus of bucolic tranquility not far away.

Accordingly, Kiberia gets no end of attention from outsiders, whether governments throwing money at it, NGOs engaged in mapping and studying it, or film stars shooting ''The Constant Gardner''. Ban Ki-moon paid it a visit within a month of becoming UN's secretary general.

Most of what makes Kiberia interesting, though, is what it shares with other African slums. The density  -shacks packed so tightly that many are accessible only on foot-  ; the dust in the dry seasons- and the mud, when it rains, ; the squalor -you often have to pick your way through streams of black ooze; the hazards -low eaves of jagged corrugated iron; 

And the litter, especially the plastic: the Kiberia's women  ''; Lacking sanitation and fearing robbery and rape if they risk the unlit pathways to the latrines, resort at night to the  ''flying toilet'' , a polythene bag to be cast from their doorway,  much as chamber pots were emptied into the street below in pre-plumbing

Edinburgh. Most striking of all, to those inured to sight of such places through photography,   is the smell.  With piles of human faeces littering the ground and sewage running freely, the stench is simply devastating and ever ever present.

Striking, too, though, and I repeat, Striking, though is the apparent contentment with which the inhabitants accept their lot. It falls short of cheerfulness; tension is constant in Kiberia, and small incidents can quickly turn nasty. But most people are busy getting on with life.

Churches abound, and schools too. Children play in the dirt or on the railway tracks that bisect the slum. Stall-holders sell their goods. Men, ragged or smartly dressed in dark suits, clean their teeth wherever they can spit.

''Indoors, the things and the world is hallucinating and wretched''.

And in the days ahead,  !WOW! will continue to write regularly on Poverty.

With respectful dedication to all the handicapped Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

'''  Your Voice In Deed '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless