Fred ran to catch up to the men who were beating the thief.

The thief stole a radio, which would have taken months to afford.  He was bleeding.  He fell, and someone kicked him in the head. They dragged him onto the railroad tracks. Fred took my phone and started filming.  The men were beating the thief senseless.

“We have been killing thieves!” one man shouted.  Other men rushed up, carrying machetes, shovels, and pitchforks. “We don’t go to the police!”

Fred ran ahead to film the thief.  He dodged his way through the crowd.  

The thief fell on the railroad tracks.  They lifted him up and pushed him forward, but he was bleeding and falling down.  A crowd grew behind the thief as they pushed him to where the they thought the stereo was hidden.  The thief fell again, and laid still.

“He is trying to die!”  The man said.  “But he cannot die until he produces the radio!”

Kibera slum is in a valley in Nairobi.  Through the center there is a river.  High on one side are railroad tracks.  People have built all along the tracks, and when the train comes it shakes everything to pieces.   

The other side has a high road, which was famous for carjackings and robberies.  There is a golf course near that road, and houses for richer people.  I asked Fred how many people lived in Kibera.  “A lot,” he said.  “A lot a lot.”  

That was about as accurate as anything.

Rent for a mud shack started at about 1000 shillings.  But later, for no reason, it could go up to 2000 shillings.  Then later it could go up to 3000 shillings.  This could happen within a single year. The houses were all mud huts, or made of scrap tin.  They were very very small and very very close together.  The spaces between the shacks were called corridors. The ground was dirt and garbage.  It was cut by open sewers.  People braided hair there.  They washed clothes.

As a child, Fred was a violent thief. He used a pistol during robberies, making everyone lie on the ground.  Everyone in the slum knew who he was.

His gang was called the 42 Brothers.  His first robbery happened when he was twelve, then things became even more violent.  A war started.  Fred lived because someone warned him that the enemy was coming.  He ran away to Mombasa to hide. When he came back, he said, he had been saved by God. He was 28 now.  All but 3 for the 42 brothers were dead.

He had a young son, and as we walked through the narrow corridors in the slum, his son would appear now and then and cling onto Fred’s clothes. Fred would put his hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder.

As we walked, everyone knew who Fred was, but they didn’t seem afraid.  He was reformed now.  He was trying to help people.

He put together a team to look after a little girl.  She was seven, he said, and had been raped.  He held his hand next to his thigh to show how tall she was.  It was important to look after her, he said, because she was so small.  As he was speaking, we walked past a little kid standing near a speaker, and Fred said the music was to raise money for a burial.  The speaker was taller than the kid.

Fred told me that in Kibera babies were thrown into the air right after they were born and that  dedicated them to God.  I didn’t see this with my own eyes.

The slum had a prophet named Ondeto.   One day, Ondeto told his followers to go to the Central Business District of Nairobi, up to the big buildings, and fly.  If they jumped, he told them, he would give them wings.  

Many people died.

People considered Ondeto to be like Jesus. They kept him for many days after his death, waiting for him to come back.  His followers dressed in colorful robes.  Each color had a power given by a certain saint, and when God spoke to the people he told them which color to wear.  The men wore these bright robes, and carried wooden swords.  Some carved wooden AK47s.  They used them to shoot angels. One day a man walked into the Central Business District wearing bright robes, carrying two wooden AK47s.  He was arrested.

“It was very challenging to someone like me,” Fred said.  “I had no school, I didn’t have any course.  I don’t have anything to do.  I left my school from level three.  So it was very very stupid of me to start looking for jobs or work.  I don’t have papers.  So I started doing small small business.  Small small small.”

Fred had a shop, but it was mostly empty.  One day, he said, he would fill it with goods, and be a store owner.  The door was purple, and the sign painting man had painted the name of the store in white letters. FREDY AND SONS.  

He was trying to start a club. He needed liquor, so he saved up 80 dollars, which was a small fortune.  He had a friend who knew where to buy the liquor, so Fred gave him the money and a list, and the friend took the bus to the Central Business District. While we waited for his friend to return, Fred got a phone call. He answered while he was walking, and crashed himself into a mud wall.  His money was gone.  No liquor was coming.  

“How?”  I asked him. “What happened?” He just looked at the sky.

We were walking back from a church and a little girl was walking along on the some garbage.  She was about 8.  She vomited in her hands and then took a few steps and vomited again.

“She is sick,” Fred said. 

We walked around and Fred showed me the basics of daily life. We met a man who was covered in silver chains.  There were big rings on all of his fingers.  Some fingers had more than one ring. They looked like brass knuckles.  He was running for political office in Kibera.  

“Why does he have all of those chains?” I asked Fred.

“He wants to be big,” Fred said.  “He wants to be famous.”

The tailor worked under a sheet to block the sun.  He had been in his spot for many many years.  He kept a toy car in his sewing box in case someone visited with a child. 

Evelyn was born where there are many plants, then travelled to Kibera.  She sold tomatoes.  Business was not good.  If she was lucky she could make 400 shillings per day. Her name, she said, meant "born in the evening."

Eunice sold trinkets and little toys.  She worked holding her baby.  Wilson sold screws that he found.  He had many types.  Whatever he earned, he called his “daily bread.”  Everyone called it that.

We walked through the corridors and we came to a quiet place.  There was a woman standing there with a baby in her arms.  She handed the baby to Fred, and Fred rocked the baby in his arms.  “This is my wife,” he said.  “The one I told you about. This is the mother of the young boy.”

She looked at me.  She seemed annoyed with Fred in a secret way, as if, if I wasn’t there, it might have been different.  A drunk man wearing a neon tracksuit stumbled into the quiet place.  He started talking to Fred in Swahili. Fred gave the baby back to the lady, and then we walked off with this stumbling drunk man. The man was alone, he was new in Kibera.  Fred told me the man was lost, because he was trying to buy weed but there was no weed where we were standing.  So Fred went to show the lost man where to buy weed.

There was a day care in a small dark room, and two young women were caring for seventy babies.  The babies covered the whole floor.  Someone was crying but it was impossible to tell who it was.  Both of the young women working at the daycare were named Mercy.  They had another colleague who was also named Mercy. Mercy told me that their main task was not to care for the babies, simply to keep them inside.  If they went out, she said, they could be defiled.  I asked her what she meant, and she whispered it to me.

Two witch doctors lived in a small shack.  Like all shacks in Kibera, it had a tin roof.  It was about ten foot by ten foot.  The walls were mud.  Out front there was a wobbly rock that served as a step up a steep slope.  There were a few accoutrements of witch-doctoring on the table.  When we entered, these were hidden away.  A witch doctor could cure anything, not just heath issues.  If your business failed or you fought with your wife, you could be given a ritual to perform, but sometimes the rituals were impossible.  For example, you might be asked to find a chicken that is pure black, even though there was no such chicken in Kibera.  

That’s how powerful the magic was.  

The home of the witch doctors was destroyed by rain.  The tin roof had holes in it, the ceiling looked like stars.  Whenever it rained, homes got destroyed.  Roads washed away, and so on.

A woman was waiting anxiously in the street.  She was going to visit the man who could fight demons. She went in, stepping over a chicken, and into a room with an alter and pictures of Jesus and Mary on the walls.  Her three sons came in and sat on the couch.  They touched their face and looked around.  They seemed nervous.

The man who could fight demons put on a purple robe.  Everyone kneeled and prayed to God.  Then the man who could fight demons stood up in front of the lady, who was still kneeling. He shouted up to heaven for the angels to come down.  The woman held a candle  The man who could fight demons had an assistant.  They shouted up to God.  Sometimes they whistled or cried. 

A chicken wandered in.  The man who could fight demons kicked it. He lifted the chicken up and threw it through the curtain into the other room.  He laughed.  Then he went back to fighting demons.

“It gets crazy,” Fred told me.  “Oh, they roll on the floor.  They scream, they shout.”

“Whats wrong with her?” I asked him.

“She’s been sick,” he said.  “For four years.”

Paul asked me if I knew anything about forex trading.  He said that since I use computers I must have some information.  I told him that I knew someone who did that, and it was like gambling.  He liked that.  He said that he liked to gamble.  He and Fred got excited about gambling, so we went into a little shack to play some spinning wheel game that cost 10 shillings.  It was based on premier league teams, but it was just electronic roulette.  Then we walked some more and Paul told me that a dollar was really powerful in Kibera.  He reckoned that if he had one dollar, that would be great, but if he had 10 dollars, that would be REALLY great, and he reckoned that forex trading might help him achieve that. 

There was a certain area close to where the railroad tracks passed through the slum.  There were many churches there.  The pastors were all afraid that their churches will be destroyed by the railroad.  I was not sure whether this was because the government would come to reclaim the land, or whether it was because one day the train would come off the tracks and crush all of the churches. 

The next day I returned to visit the man who could fight demons.  His church was full of broken gambling machines, broken audio mixers, etc.  He had some of them opened up.  When he was working on electronics, he wore street clothes.  He kept the pictures of Jesus and Mary on the wall. He wiped his face with a cloth.  “Which is harder to fix?” I asked him.  “People or electronics?”

People were easy, he said.  Electronics were hard.  

Fred's friend Michael had just gotten out of jail. He couldn’t walk properly, because the police beat him with a log.  The prisoners were only fed garbage.  Michael pointed to some kale in an open sewer, and said the food was like that.   He was in a room with 100 other men, and he was in there so long, with only an electric bulb for light, that his eyes stopped making tears.

I mentioned this to Fred and Fred told me that he too had been in jail. He did some math in his mind, trying to figure out which years of his life had been spent in jail.  From 16 years old until 19 years old, he said.   I asked Fred how many of the young men in Kibera had been in jail, and he said out of 100, maybe 93 were jail birds. They could fly, he said.  Fly right in to jail, fly right out again. He said he could recognize a jail bird just by looking at his face. 

There was a schoolmaster who took the school fees of the parents and got drunk in the morning.  He also ran a tailor shop, and the inside smelled of alcohol.  Other men wobbled between the shacks, shouting.  One, Fred said, had completely lost his mind.  The alcohol was dangerous, it could make you blind, or kill you. 

“Alcohol, weed, tablets,” Fred said.  “Some pills.  I don’t know their names. They are red. Some are white. If you go to a location for mad people, it is those pills that have been given. But now, those pills are being sold to other people.”

“So when you want to get drunk like whiskey, you order a pill.  So now you feel like, you are everything.” 

“When someone uses a pill, he feels like he can kill anyone. He can do everything.”

“Some people believe Kibera is a violent place,” Fred said. “Some people believe Kibera is for the robbers. That robbers are the ones living in Kibera.  Some people believe that Kibera is jobless people.  So everyone has his mind, about Kibera.”

I mumbled something.

“I support it 25%,” Fred said.  “It’s good to say the truth, yeah? Becasue Kibera has robbers.  Kibera has prostitutes.  Kibera has gangs.  Kibera has pastors. Kibera has schools, Kibera has everything.”

Years ago there was horrific violence.  People were still worried the violence would return. One day a man stood up to speak beneath a tall flag, he told the people what happened the last time there was fighting.  There were photos on the ground of a dead man.  Thousands of people died.  There was a photo of a morgue so packed with bodies so that the door would not shut.   Men lined up to look at the pictures, without speaking, staring down at them for some time.

Elisha told me that during the violence, the enemy tribe cut off arms and heads and threw them at his tribe.  He said this was unfair because the people in Kibera were only throwing rocks.  I don’t know if this was true.

We came to a bridge my first day in Kibera, and as we were going across, a group of boys came from behind us.  The tallest was waving a piece of rebar like a sword. There were five or six of them, and they surrounded us.  The smallest, who was maybe only 12, held a little plastic shiv against my stomach.  He looked like he was going to throw up.  

Fred stood against the leader of the boys, the one with the rebar, and stared at him.  Below the bridge, on a pile of garbage, there was a dead pig.

Weren’t you scared? I asked him.  It was five on one, six on one, even.

“What you should know is that Kibera is the same as back home,” Fred said.  “Kenya is the same as back home.  So you should not be in Kenya and be polite.  You be hard and be strong, yeah?  The challenges you face at home are the very same challenges you face here.  The way people are rude back home is the way people are rude back here. You get polite people here, polite people there. So, for you to achieve your goals…”  then a strong wind came up.

Hours later, after I left, Fred hired a motorcycle taxi.  He was upset because of what happened. He went straight to where the boys were, and found the whole area covered in blood. The boys claimed it was a mistake, a misunderstanding.   They made peace.  We learned later that the boys were robbers.  Their leader was a murderer.  He had killed at least five people.

The pig was killed by electricity. 

The boys broke into homes.  They called robberies “missions.”  Four of them would burst into a home, and the fifth would drive the getaway car.  If anyone resisted, bang bang bang.  Once, they were robbing a house, and four police burst in the back door with big guns.  Bang bang bang.  The newspaper had a story the next day saying two thugs were dead.  That's how they learned their friends were killed by gunfire.  

It was important to make peace, Fred said.

We went to some schools and I met a few of the students who were lucky enough to have their school fees paid.  When asked, their most common dreams involved flying.  Many of them wanted to be pilots. It seemed connected in a loose way to Ondeto, promising to give people wings.  It seemed connected to the babies being thrown in the air, which I never saw with my own eyes.  

“Me I don’t smoke weed,” Fred said. “I don’t drink alcohol.  And people, even my parents, they normally ask questions.  How do I survive without using all of these things?  My younger brother is using these things.  My elder brother is using these things.”

Cholera, Typhoid, and HIV were common.  Fred told me there was such a stigma against HIV that people wouldn’t even hang their drying clothes next to someone’s who had HIV.  He showed me how the water pipes were broken, how they mixed with sewer water.

A little girl fell of her bike, and landed on her face.  She didn’t move, so I started to walk towards her.  Fred grabbed my arm.  “Wait,” he said.  “If a child falls, and she sees you, she’ll cry.”  We waited.

“If she doesn’t see anyone,” he said, “she’ll be strong.”

Fred had a poster in his house called “The Ten Golden Secrets of Marriage.”  Rule # 5 was TO MARRY IS TO DECLARE WAR.  There was another poster on his wall of a little kid pointing at the camera.  It said BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY WILL SEE GOD.

I told him that it was supposed to rain, but he didn’t believe it.  Rain destroyed homes in Kibera.  It was loud on the tin roofs.  “We know when it will rain,” he said.

We walked along a high place, and a man was dancing on the railroad tracks.  The train was stuck.  Soon it would be coming towards him.  He jumped off the tracks, considered it, then jumped back on.  He turned to us.

"So this slum is what you call Kibera," he said. "It is the second slum in the world, following Soweto in South Africa.  Do you understand that?  The second biggest.  But soon! Soon! We will overtake South Africa, the place you call Soweto.  Because in Soweto, the guy is trying to rehabilitate, and they are trying to maybe do other things.  So that place will be reformed, ok?  But here in Kenya, there’s nothing being done. The slum is expanding! SOON!"

My last day in Kibera, Fred said that his dream was to leave the slum. It would be better for his son, he said, and save him from the robberies and violence Fred had faced. It would save him from so many things.  “I have to stay hard on him,” he said.  “My vision is to leave Kibera. To go to an estate which is safer.”  We talked about other ideas, other business opportunities he might have.  He told me he wanted to learn magic.  Maybe on Youtube, he said.  Magic lessons weren’t offered in Kenya.

After Fred ran off to film the thief, the crowd grew and grew.  We walked along the railroad tracks until we came to a place with so many people watching, and the thief was beaten again there, and then dragged further up to the tracks to a place that overlooked the slum.  By the time I caught up to Fred, the men surrounded the thief. There was a crowd of more than seventy people. The thief was bleeding.  Thick blood came out of his mouth.  

The thief was made to sit with the stolen stereo, a pair of keys, a phone, and a wallet, and people took his picture on their phones.  There was a loud debate.  One man picked up a shovel, and tried to hit the thief in the head.  Another man stopped him.  

They let the thief go. 

“We have been killing thieves,” the man said.  “But we don’t want to kill this one.”

A crazy man stood ranting with listeners around him.  He told the whole story of how the thief was discovered, and how the thief thought he would get away with it, but was caught instead. How they had debated, and let him live. Now, rather than of a crowd of angry men, The thief was followed by three men, and a group of women in bright dresses, some of them carrying food, others carrying babies.

As the riot faded away, people who had hastily hidden their informal shops began selling again.  They rolled out mats and displayed broken computer monitors, collections of screws, trinkets, pipe fittings, and baby toys.  Fred picked up a pair of kid’s shoes and quietly examined them, turning them around in his hands.  

Some time earlier, completely unrelated, he was telling me the story of how he fled Kibera, and survived somehow and returned, and he was hinting at all the things he had done before he was saved.  I never asked him exactly what he had done.  He was telling me how messy it all was now.  I didn’t know what to say.  His problems now were like anyone else’s.  A wife, a child.  A world that was difficult.  Children who said they would fly, as soon as they got older.

“It’s a long journey, isn’t it Fred?” I said. 

“Very long,” he said.