Category: Perspective

Homeless of Nairobi: Facebook project gives rough sleepers a voice

“So what do you do daily?” “I just walk around looking for food… I’m 72.” “And you’re still strong ey?” “Yes, and if someone would hire me, I can still work.” (Pic: Homeless of Nairobi)

“I’ve lived two lives in this life.”

“How?”

“I had things, now I have nothing.”

“What are you afraid of most?”

“El Niño is coming.”

“And what makes you laugh?”

“Life.”

This was a conversation with Daniel, a destitute man in Nairobi, Kenya, posted on the internet last August. That night, thanks to a stranger, he received a cooked meal of ugali and stew. Then came more donations of food, money, clothes, a bed and a shack for him to live in.

Here lies the power of Homeless of Nairobi, a Facebook page pricking the conscience of those who take such things for granted.

It is “a virtual home” for the homeless people of the Kenyan capital and one of the few places where they are seen, heard and dignified.

The page features photos, conversations and updates on volunteer projects, such as a group effort on Christmas day that fed about 600 people with 600 loaves of bread, 500 packets of milk, 500 bananas and about 50 bottles of soda.

Not every story has a happy ending. “Today is a heartbreaking day for the Homeless Of Nairobi project,” read a post in November. “Over the past two months, we found a home for a wonderful man called Daniel… It has now come to our attention that Daniel has now left the house in favour of the streets once again. It is hard to understand why but we had told him that there is no pressure on him to stay.”

Building a movement
The page was launched last year by Sham Patel (29), who was born and raised in Nairobi but spent three years as a student in Liverpool in the UK. Like many other residents, he gave little thought to people without a home until a chance encounter gave him a flash of empathy and changed his perspective.

“Ever since I was young, I’ve seen homeless people on the streets of Nairobi,” he recalled this week. “They have become part of the wallpaper of this city. For a long time, I didn’t see them as people but as pests who bother people for money. We’re conditioned to think like that by an apathetic society from when we’re young. We’re pre-programmed.”

But then one rainy day, on his way to the gym, he saw some homeless people huddled under a plastic sheet. “It made me think about how I’d feel if that was me or my parents out in the rain without shelter and food. I decided then that it was time to try to make a small difference where possible so the next day I took them bread and milk and started a conversation with them and it was incredible how much they knew about life and their philosophies and belief in God was astounding.”

Patel added: “They shared the bread with me. In fact, they offered it to me first before they ate. Since then, I’ve decided to talk to and spread the stories of as many homeless people as possible with the hope that we can build a movement that will lead to finding ways to help these men, women and children that much of society and our government has discarded.”

One of his major inspirations for the format was Humans of New York, a popular website cataloguing photos, snippets and stories from the US city’s inhabitants. Patel met its founder briefly and was advised: “Just go for it.”

Since then he has gone out day and night, gathering dozens of photos and stories, and the page has gained more than 3 000 likes on Facebook. It offers a rare insight into the pitiless conditions of the homeless in a major African city who have little social support or sympathy from the police. Some turn to drugs for escapism from hunger, pain or misery. A poignant entry on Thursday with a picture of children read:

“How much is the bottle of glue you’re sniffing?”

“We get it for about 30 shillings.”

“So why don’t you buy a small meal with that 30 shillings?”

“Because that meal will not even be enough to fill my stomach. That food will not help me when it is cold at night or when I am hungry again. The glue lasts longer and helps me forget where I am.”

(Pic: Homeless of Nairobi)

According to the charity Kenya Children of Hope, in 2007 it was estimated that there were 250 000 – 300 000 children living and working on the streets across the country with, with more than 60 000 of them in Nairobi.

Mixed responses
Patel said he gets a varied response from those he asks to take part. “Most of the time, the homeless people are really happy just to talk to someone and we can talk for a pretty long time. Other homeless people aren’t so friendly because of their lack of trust or because they’re high on something or the other.

“But it’s been pretty mixed. There was the time I was almost robbed by three homeless people and there was another time we were chased down the street by a homeless guy who, it turns out, is a little psychotic or just really angry. But for the better part, most homeless people are very accommodating even though they do not trust the colour of my skin.”

Patel, who also runs Myrobi, a company that deals in T-shirts and marketing materials with a business partner, says he hopes to achieve “big things” with the Homeless of Nairobi project, including crowd funded projects and a homeless shelter where people can learn skills such as pottery, farming, mechanics and stitching.

“We want to have a psychiatry unit at the shelter because a lot of these homeless people have seen and endured things that human beings should not see. For example, the homeless girls being raped in town constantly.

“These people need psychiatrists to help them deal with the problems they’ve faced. We don’t just want to create a place where we dump homeless people and feed them. We want to bring them back from the brink they stand on. And their resilience proves that it is possible to do exactly that.”

David Smith for the Guardian Africa Network

9 years ago

Inside Boko Haram’s ‘Islamic state’: Hunger, killings, economic collapse

Nigerians displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks are seen near their tents at a faith-based camp for internally displaced people in Yola, Adamawa State. (Pic: Reuters)

Boko Haram says it is building an Islamic state that will revive the glory days of northern Nigeria’s medieval Muslim empires, but for those in its territory life is a litany of killings, kidnappings, hunger and economic collapse.

The Islamist group’s five-year-old campaign has become one of the deadliest in the world, with around 10 000 people killed last year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Hundreds, mostly women and children, have been kidnapped.

It remains the biggest threat to the stability of Africa’s biggest economy ahead of a vote on February 14 in which President Goodluck Jonathan will seek re-election.

But while it has matched Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in its brutality – it beheads its enemies on camera – it has seriously lagged in the more mundane business of state building.

“The Islamic state is a figment of their imagination. They are just going into your house and saying they have taken over,” said Phineas Elisha, government spokesperson for Adamawa state, one of three states under emergency rule to fight the insurgency.

Unlike its Middle East counterparts wooing locals with a semblance of administration, villagers trapped by Boko Haram face food shortages, slavery, killing and a lock down on economic activity, those who escaped say.

“(They) have no form of government,” Elisha, who saw the devastation caused by Boko Haram after government forces recaptured the town of Mubi in November.

Boko Haram, which never talks to media except to deliver jihadist videos to local journalists, could not be reached for comment.

‘Muslim territory’
Boko Haram’s leaders talk about reviving one of the West African Islamic empires that for centuries prospered off the Saharan trade in slaves, ivory and gold, but they demonstrate little evidence of state building.

In August a man saying he was Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau – the military says it killed Shekau – issued a video declaring a “Muslim territory” in Gwoza, by the Cameroon border.

There were echoes of Islamic State’s proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria two months earlier. Boko Haram controls an area just over 30000 square km of territory, about the size of Belgium, according to a Reuters calculation based on security sources and government data.

But while in Syria, after initially brutal takeovers, Islamic State has tried to win over communities, those who escaped Boko Haram say the rebels do little for them beyond forcing them to adopt their brand of Islam.

“They provide raw rice to cook, the rice that they stole from the shops. They provide a kettle and … scarves to cover up the women,” said Maryam Peter from Pambla village.

“People are going hungry. They are only feeding on corn and squash. No meat, nothing like that. The insurgents are not providing anything else,” she added.

Maryam said most daily interactions with the militants involved them questioning villagers on their movements and forbidding them from trying to escape – a rule she managed to flout when she fled a week ago.

A government-run camp in a former school is now her home, along with 1 000 others, where mothers cook on outdoor fires while children run around. Some 1.5 million people have been rendered homeless by the war,Oxfam says.

Bodies pile up
And those the militants kill, they often fail to bury. The first thing the Nigerian Red Cross has to do when a town falls back into government hands is clear the corpses, Aliyu Maikano, a Red Cross official, told Reuters.

After the army recaptured Mubi in November, Maikano had to cover his nose to avoid the stench of rotting corpses.

Those still alive “were starved for food, water, almost everything there. There’s no drinking water because (in) most of the wells there you’ll find dead bodies,” Maikano said.

Many residents looked tattered and malnourished, and some were unable to speak.

“They are heartless. ISIS (Islamic State) is a kind of organised group, it’s a business. These guys are not.”

A former resident of Mubi said the rebels had renamed the town “Madinatul Islam” or “City of Islam”.

But when government spokesperson Phineas Elisha walked into the Emir’s palace after its recapture, everything had been looted, even the windows and doors.

“Mubi was a ghost town … Virtually all the shops were looted.” he said. It took him hours to find a bottle of water.

Sometimes the rebels simply loot the unprotected villages and hide out in bush camps, security sources say.Murna Philip, who escaped the occupied town of Michika five months ago, said a few dozen fighters had occupied an abattoir, a school and a lodge, but little else.

To survive under their watch you have to pretend to support them, said Andrew Miyanda, who escaped the rebels last week, walking for days to the Benue river.

“They would write Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (Boko Haram’s full name) on their trouser legs in marker or the back of their shirts,” he said. “You had to turn up your trousers with the marker on to show that you are a member.”

Buildings were torched and boys were abducted for “training”, he said, a practice reminiscent of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Slowly, with the help of traditional hunters armed with home made guns and a reputation for magic powers, government forces have pushed Boko Haram out of some of its southern possessions.

Morris Enoch, a leader of the hunters, says they found an arsenal of military weapons: rocket launchers, machine guns, dynamite, anti-aircraft guns and grenades.

The rebels rarely leave behind much else.

9 years ago

Why do we need big numbers for African deaths to matter?

‘2000 people killed.’

‘Actually it is 150 people.’

‘That makes it fine then. Thank you for the correction, we can continue to ignore the Boko Haram crisis.’

This is clearly how the Nigerian government thought the conversation would go when they sought to amend the ‘error’ that had been widely published about the recent attacks in Baga.

A man holds a placard reading “I am Nigerian, stop Boko Haram” during a gathering at the trocadero place in Paris on January 18 2015 to protest against Boko Haram Islamists after a large-scale attack in Baga. (Pic: AFP)

The question one needs to ask is why does it seem that reducing the numbers of deaths makes the situation any better? The fact that there are any people who have perished at all should be cause for the same amount of uproar.

Within Africa we enjoy playing the numbers game when it comes to how serious a tragedy is.

We treat death like a party; the higher the numbers the more serious the event.

Why make a fuss about having one girl missing when we could have 250? It is not a real event until the number hits the triple digits. Why be bothered with one person being shot dead in a police shootout when we could have police kill whole groups of miners?

What this seems to say is that there is a need to supplement the quality of an African life with quantity. In order to make a human life matter we need the numbers, but we never have the names and faces.

These are always irrelevant.

When we scope a news article for simply the digits and never the story we say that African lives are worth less.

Within the international realm we make good news when whole groups of us have died or disappeared. It cannot be three or four of us, we need to make it a party.

#BringBackOurGirls was an international phenomenon because the number of girls missing was truly mind-boggling. How in the age of Google Earth can we not find 200+ girls? The world had no choice but to get behind it because of the scale of it.

However, #JeSuisCharlie saw 12 deaths trump the amount of international attention that #BringBackOurGirls and has become one of the most-used hashtags in Twitter history.

The heinous acts that prompted the two hashtags are based on ideals of western values clashing with fundamentalist Islamic ideals. Both involved the lives of people. If we do the maths (because it is about the bottom line), if all lives matter equally should we not have had nearly ten times the uproar for the Nigerian girls as we did for the French deaths?

A mass solidarity march in the streets of Paris on January 11 2015. (Pic: Reuters)

Where is our international march featuring the ‘who’s who’ of political figures? Our own leaders were falling all over themselves in order to proclaim that they were Charlie but barely uttered a peep about bringing back our girls. The 2000 deaths have barely managed to cause a whisper as it is continuously drowned out by the roar of defiance coming from the #CharlieHebdo saga.

Furthermore the names of African victims are rarely released. They often fall into the oblivion of numbers, allowed to become another statistic. Only those who are prominent in some way (a relation of a politician, a foreign national of another country for example) are given names, faces and back stories.

So the killing of 28 bus passengers in November by al-Shabaab near the town of Mandera, on the border between Somali and Kenya, remains just that: the death of 28 nameless, faceless bus passengers.

And what of those in Niger who died protesting against Charlie Hebdo? Where are their names, their backgrounds, an in-depth exploration of their dreams and ideologies?

They have no identities in the media. They simply add to the numbers that are part of the story. Had this occurred in the West, we would have read about the lives of the victims, their families would have all been interviewed and we would have known everything about them, because in death they mattered.

In Africa, the dead mostly remain nameless. It would seem in death we do not matter outside of adding ‘meat’ to a story.

Maybe therein lies the problem. Terrorist attacks are happening so often on the continent that they no longer shock us to our core.Two killed in a bomb blast in a Nairobi market; 15 girls kidnapped here; a suicide bombing there. It is only if we can squeeze those many into one incident that there is enough potency to make it so that it actually matters.

We need to start valuing the lives of Africans.

A great deal of this lies in how we portray the loss of African lives in the media. It depends on the amount of depth and clout that is given to stories within local spheres. If one girl gets kidnapped it must be treated as if it is the end of the world because it is. And when something happens to one person or 50 people it matters just the same.

We need to name them and not wait for media outlets and information providers abroad to name them for us.

We need to name ourselves before others can give us names.

Once we give those names we need to care about them enough to cause an uproar, because they do matter.

If we fail to fix this, we shall get to a point where we are missing 500 girls, enduring massacres of 5000 people and having entire mining villages shot down but no one will bat an eyelid because ‘at least it isn’t 250 girls, 2000 people and a few miners.’ We will find these numbers rising because we seemed to not care when the numbers were smaller.

Kagure Mugo is a freelance writer and co-founder and curator of holaafrica.org, a Pan-Africanist queer women’s collective which engages in activism and awareness-building around issues of African women’s identity, experiences and sexuality. Connect with her on Twitter: @tiffmugo

9 years ago

I have decided to leave Zimbabwe

(Pic: AFP)

I am a Zimbabwean and I have decided to leave the country! Yes, you heard that right, I have decided to leave the country!

But first things first.

My name is Jimmy, and I am an ICT professional (an Internationally Certified Computer Programmer). I have had my fair share of good fortune in Zimbabwe. I have worked for the financial services industry, from the stock market, asset management, to the banking sector. I have even worked for software houses that are into fulltime software development. Yeah, yeah, one can say I have prospered in the republic.

But why leave the beloved Republic of Zimbabwe?

I can promise you it has nothing to do with my hatred for this country or because I have always wanted to leave, or because some friend or relative has decided to send me a ‘ticket’.

No.

At this point I can only tell you of a few reasons why I decided to leave the beloved republic.

Trust me, I am patriotic to Zimbabwe. I love Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is in my heart.

After all, I have lived for over 30 years in the beloved republic. I was born here. I was raised here. I was educated here. My entire life has been in the republic. In fact, when all my peers and former school mates left I stayed because I was patriotic to the land. I saw a future where others couldn’t see one. I told myself that whatever we were going through as a country would soon come to an end and that in no time things would be better.

For a long time I didn’t even wish to get a passport. I didn’t see the need for one. I wasn’t going anywhere, and no one could convince me to step outside the borders of the republic.

And then most of my cousins started leaving.

Some of my friends left too. Within about two years or so of their leaving, they started sending us pictures of their nice cars, houses, the fancy restaurants, the food they ate … blah blah blah.

But that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t moved. I was a patriot. I loved my country. I was optimistic and very hopeful that in a few years things would change. I told myself that I too would one day, in the republic, drive a Range Rover.

But then things changed for me.

In short, allow me to say I married and along came two children. Life in Zimbabwe is something else once you start having kids and you need to feed them. Suddenly you need a two- or more bedroom house to rent. Of course in the republic we don’t buy houses, they are very expensive, and the banks are not giving mortgage loans.

Then came the 2012 elections. Then came the company closures. Then banks started closing.

Of course the factories have been closed for a while and I sort of winked at that because I worked for a bank. But when my bank started facing the liquidity crisis and closure I knew at once that no one was immune to the environment.

Then I started realising something about the republic.

No one cares for the public. We have dirty water in the taps and no one cares. We have erratic supply of electricity and no one cares. The roads are in shambles and no one is doing anything about it. Fuel prices go up and we can’t do anything about it. New taxes are introduced and we can only comply. Internet is very expensive. The public hospitals, the ones which we can afford, provide crappy service and people are dying because the nurses don’t care. I know because I watched my mother-in-law die at the hands of poor service delivery. And no one cares. Not them, not you, not the minister of health. No one. The company CEOs get treated outside the country now. But what about me? What about my kids?

Become an entrepreneur, they keep telling us. Start your own business. Create your own job.

But not everybody has dreams of owning or running a business. Some of us are just content to be the spanner boys and the foot soldiers. Some of us are content just doing our jobs and getting paid for it.

I don’t know about you but I am tired of the dirty tap water. I am tired of seeing all those potholes in a road. I am tired of sometimes available power supply. I am tired of walking the streets of a capital city that are infested with ‘bhero-stalls’ and cheap, crappy, Chinese products. I am tired of calling the national electricity department for a fault and they come 10 days later. I am tired of poor internet speeds. I am tired of expensive fuel. I am tired of working for ‘hand-to-mouth’ pay-outs. You can’t have savings accounts in the republic. Your bank could just close tomorrow. I am just tired of struggling for everything. Why does it cost me an arm and a leg to buy a flat-screen TV?

And guess what, my children have to grow up in such an environment and go to schools whose teachers don’t even know why they are doing what they do.

No.

I am sick and tired of it all.

Surely I wasn’t born to suffer. I just want a better life, that’s all.

And where am I gonna go?

Anywhere outside Zimbabwe.

Perhaps Botswana? Perhaps South Africa? (Wait, those guys don’t want us anymore). Perhaps Zambia? Perhaps Kenya? Perhaps Namibia? Take me anywhere where the visa application is not a hassle and I’ll gladly go.

Once again, my name is Jimmy and I am a Zimbabwean. I am an ICT professional and I am leaving Zimbabwe!

This post was first published on 263Chat.

9 years ago

African novels are not anthropological documents

Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo with her award-winning debut novel . (Pic: AFP)

We have to be careful how we position African novels, that we don’t make claims for the African novel that it does not make for itself.

So when someone comes to you looking for a novel that represents Africa or African life, say you can’t help.

A novel is not an anthropological document, meaning that it can only give a peep into life through a very, very, very narrow frame. That’s why it’s dangerous to get into the habit of thinking of novels as expressive of truth and reality.

I remember an American student asking, after reading Things Fall Apart, whether human sacrifice was a thing in Africa. Now imagine your first American novel was American Psycho, would you ever think to ask an American if most American men were prone to a similar kind of psychosis?

From years of studying British and African novels, I find that people make demands on African novels that they don’t make on other kinds of novels. Whether realist or fantasy, African novels are required to offer direct access to Africa’s way of life.

The truth is that no matter how true-to-life, how history-based a novel such as Things Fall Apart might be, it is first and foremost a fictional work. Things Fall Apart is a fictional representation of life. It is not life. It is not a document on how African fathers kill their foster children. It is not a document on how polygamous marriages work. It is not a document on why Igbo men love yams so much. It is not a document on late 19th century Igbo laws and customs. It is a story.

There is nothing more unattractive and annoying than a naive novel-reader, someone who believes everything they read in novels, who can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that novels tell us very little about real life, even when they claim to do so.

But isn’t this a question as old as Aristotle – the question of how life relates to fiction? Since Aristotle, European philosophers and novelists have written themselves to death about how much of life can be captured in art. The sad thing is that today, Africa bears the burden of the most simplistic understanding of that link between art and life. So many readers go about expecting African novels to tell them a political and anthropological fact about African life.

To be fair, there is a certain sense in which every novel whispers something to us about a real world out there. But you have to love the novel for itself first before you can hear what it says or does not say about that world.

So never encourage anyone to expect an African novel to tell them the truth about Africa and its people. It is far too much to ask a novel. And people who put such a burden on a novel are being lazy, small-minded, and sorta cheap.

If you really want to learn about Lagos, get a plane ticket.

Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.