What is it that is so charming about B.?

disappearing spaces

I am not from this city. So I don’t know much of what it looked like in the past, although I’d have loved to see it back then, when the wall was still there. What is left now are some scars in the city’s appearance.

They are undefined places, they make the city look vast and wild. It is one of the things that causes my utter fascination for Berlin. Seeing traces of the past, symbols of a whole system and the clear sign that power is not invincible.

Every morning on my way to work, the Tram longs a street called Bernauer Straße, which before 1989 divided people living on one side of the street from those living on the other. Houses have begun to grow out of the soil that was once the death zone for refugees trying to cross to West Berlin. Every time I feel what it is going to be like when it is finished: An organized, closed and integral city area. Convenient and expensive, as it is well situated to reach the government quarter, the main station.

I understand that the city should grow together. But the way Berlin is changing now, I feel like it will more and more come to resemble any western german city. So somehow I would like some of the old to stay. Not out of nostalgic emotions, and people cannot live in the past forever. But I wish there to remain spaces where history is vivid. They should not be confined to some memorial sites. They should be undefined spaces that give room for people to make their own ideas.

Kibera

If life here is cheap, death is free.

The air is infected. It is not just rotten food, dead animals, alcoholic exhalation or feces. Breathe, where do you breathe around here? What I smell while walking through the narrow alleyways is something beyond.
The ground I am balancing on is waste, mud, plastic bags, and dark shimmering water. Slippery, sticky. Many, too many people are making their way through Kibera. Some look sick, some have scars, most have lost that bright shimmer you can find in people’s eyes.
People come here as they cannot afford the rent elsewhere. Tenants pay five to twenty Euros per month for their shacks. It is a joke, they pay for living on a garbage dump. There is no sewage, no running water, no electricity. Food is cheap and yet too expensive for many. Mind you, an avocado for 10 Eurocents.
A small crowd is standing in front of one shack that looks just like all the others: tin, corrugated metal, some brickearth maybe, and plastic covering. As I pass the crowd, I see a man lying on the ground. I imagine he has drunk from the Changaa, which is what made me and my two colleagues from the newspaper come here in the first place. It’s an illicit alcoholic brew, punched together with high amounts of methanol. Changaa costs 10 Eurocents a glass. Literally translated, “changaa” means “kill me quickly”. And it does. 10 ml methanol make you blind, 100 ml make you dead.

The man lying there doesn’t look good, but it seems he is sleeping. “If he is here and not in hospital, he’s probably just sleeping off his intoxication”, something like this crosses my mind. We walk on, reaching another crowd encircling a man who has lost his sight. While I am standing apart and observing the scene, a young man approaches me. “You see, when they go to hospital, they are given Vodka to treat the methanol poisoning.” He gives me many more details on the medical implications; he speaks so agile and eager to share his knowledge so I ask him: “why do you know all this?” He tells me he used to be a student at university before he had to drop out because he couldn’t afford the school fees anymore. So now he lives in Kibera. While he speaks, all the time he seems to smile.
Oh, and I was naïve again. The man I passed by lying in the alleyway was already dead. He had been lying there for over a day.
When we get back to our car, four boys carry a stretcher with another corpse. The slim shape is covered with a colorful blanket. They put it down in front of the police station. My colleague tells me this was a woman who had been drinking with the others.
“Murungu” – “white person”, I hear someone calling me : “Look, in Kenya people die like flies.”

I decided to publish this account, although I have no pictures. I took photos with my colleague’s camera that day, but unfortunately I never got them.

Kondoo Farm

So lately I went to this IDP camp. IDP is short for „Internally Displaced Person“, they are people who had to flee during the post election violence that took grip of Kenya in 2007/2008.

The drive up to Kondoo Farm from Nairobi is spectacular. As we move north, the Rift Valley opens up with a wide, generous landscape, soft green it is. We pass through the towns of Naivasha and Nakuru. Outside of these towns, to the left and right of the road, I see white little dots sprinkled all over. They are tents housing some of the 400.000 refugees that still have not been resettled. It is dry and hot here.

Yet after some 150 kilometers, when we arrive in the area called Burnt Forest, dust comes creeping over the hills. The forest grows thickly, the sky is grey and low. Kondoo Farm is in this area, it was among the places most affected by the post election violence. But people here have returned to their land. ‘They must be better off than those I visited earlier, who don’t dare going back to their hometowns, fearing the wrath of those whom they fled, those they call “enemies” and who are still there”. I turned out to be very wrong.

Kondoo Farm announces itself by a newly built police station, waking over the traffic climbing on the main road. The Kenyan flag is waving high above. The police officer greets us ‘hello’. He is a serious man, looking like he has just gotten up from his bed. Not much exciting seems to be going on around here. The officer orders one of his policemen to get the land rover. There are no built roads into the village. Only rocks and red soil.

The bumpy trail leads us past tiny shanties; few houses have stone or concrete walls. As we approach a bigger stone house, I can hear women singing. The villagers are standing on an otherwise empty space in front of the house and they are singing. “They are greeting us”, says one of the two men I came with. His name is Stephen Kimani and he himself is an IDP. He now represents the IDPs at official occasions in Nairobi. So he is something like their voice, but most of the time he is unsuccessful in the deaf ears of ignorant ministers and members of parliament who promised to help the people whose votes made them to come to power.

Together with two of the villagers, a man and a woman both in their sixties, I walk up the hill and into the open countryside. They left their houses in 2007 when the violent mob at this very place started killing their fellow villagers and burning the houses around them. The woman’s name is Mary Wanjiru. She is coughing, her voice is faint. After everything was over, she came back to her place to find her house and everything she owned was gone.

Mary Wanjiru is not a tall woman, but she is as tall as her tent. It is a donation of USAID, says the canvas cover. She opens it for me to see. In the dusk I cannot recognize much. Some water soaked blankets. It has been raining today for two hours. The tent has holes in it. Does she have a mattress or something like that, I ask. No, nothing. The woman is 60 years old and evening by evening she returns alone to her small, wet, dark piece of plastic. As I ask her if I may take a photo, she nods and sits on a low wooden stool in her tent. I lift the camera . Through the view-finder, I see Mary Wanjiru starts crying. Her eyes are getting red. I take the camera down.

“She is thinking of her house”, says the old man, Francis Kabago Njoroge.

Matatus

Shouting. Dust. And roaring engines. Jump in, and don’t expect the vehicle to wait till you’re seated. It will accelerate suddenly and I almost fell over. A glorious beginning for my very first Matatu ride. These busses are old, run down, and most of the time they are extremely small. Amazing how many people can be crammed in here. The music playing in Matatus ranges from Reggae and Dancehall to Hiphop – all of it in a painful amount of decibel. Pure luxury offer those who have a screen for music videos.

The drivers seem to have a fatalistic approach towards life. They speed and brake abruptly; they have no respect for curves or trucks. I actually didn’t think they could be that fast. The whole ride I hope to arrive safely, which I can’t take for granted. But somehow Matatus evade disaster by an inch every time. And people remain so calm.

The Kenyan government tries to regulate Matatus. They need to have a license, and this is what happens when they don’t: Spotted by a police man, the man collecting the fare (between 20 and 50 Kenyan Shillings, which makes 20 to 50 Eurocents) jumps out of the open bus door in a hectic move, and comes to a halt a few meters further. He knows he’s caught. The ride ends here; we get back our money and continue walking.

GET OFF AT THE CITY CENTER

Nairobi. Everywhere it is busy buzzing full of people streaming like ants all over – dirt tracks, concrete sideways and roads plastered with potholes. The city was a swamp until the end of the 19th century. You can see that it grew fast and without second thought. Buildings are scattered randomly in some areas, still huge holes in the urban system remain. The houses have no coherent appearance, it all looks like it’s not meant to be there.

Maasai and Kikuyu people were driven from their land, so that the city could grow, grow, and grow. Colonial rush at its finest. Jomo Kenyatta was the leader of a Kikuyu group fighting for independence from the British colonial power. He became the first Prime Minister of the entity of Kenya, which pooled more than forty different tribes that had prior to colonialism organized their lives among themselves. Welcome to Kenya.