Kibera Slum is the second largest slum in Africa, one of the largest and poorest urban slums in the world.  It is located in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Nowadays I’m even afraid of being with white people,” she said.

“You’re afraid?

”Yeah.  because most of them, what they do, they come and take your stories.  And then what they do, they change it in another way. I don’t even understand. They promise to come back to help you or support you, but they never come.  There are these fakes ones, and the original ones.  But nowadays, many of them are fake.  Fake white men, fake white ladies.  They are coming taking interviews and photos, promising that they are going to do something best for you and your family.  But what they can offer you is maybe just a small packet of ugali.  Maize flour.  So they give you like two packets.”

We discuss what ugali is.  She asks me if I ever tasted it. 

“So they promise.  They say that they’re doing research, but they’re not doing research.  They pretend that they are supporting. 

”I hope I’m not making you feel bad,” she said. She laughed.  “Well, You’re still around.”

“So they promise that they are doing research, they are taking photos.  

“Many of you guys, that is what you do to us.”

“So you feel it’s bullshit,” I said.

“I feel you just want a story to fuck us up. They take a story, they put it on the internet, pretending that they love you.”

“Those people we are dealing with, what they do, they’re just eating the money.  They got 3 million, and we only got 1 thousand 1 thousand 1 thousand.

“Nowadays, all of my white friends, they run from the truth.  “

”What’s the truth?” I said.

“Why don’t you just help somebody?  Instead of using them to help your family?  Or to help the things that you do?  Like, you are using the photo of this person, or you are posting it.  you are going to tell people, support this woman, I am supporting her.  How can you use somebody to feed your children?  It’s not good.

”You know that person, you promise me that you are coming back with a big bale of mutumba.  You post it.  You say, 'Hey this lady needs a big bale of mutumbas.'  They send you money to send it back to me.  I go buy that big bale, but that money you are using to do something else.  But it’s my face.  My shop, maybe.  My life in another way, that brought that to you.

“You can feel bad, yes?  We are human beings.

"You know they are recording it?  Someone has a phone.  Someone has a flash. Someone is talking to you.  It’s like you are naked.  You are talking like that because you want something out of it.  And you are giving out the truth.  What you are passing through.  Somebody like me what I am passing through someone will say 'Oh god!  Let me help her!  Let me support her!'

"What people do is just eat the money.  We are used to that.  But one day God will bless us.  One day things will be better."

The man who could heal people by praying also fixed electronics. His tiny 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 pictures of Jesus and Mary on his walls.  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 was my security man.  His son was nine.  Once in a while, as we were walking along, his little boy would come up and cling on to Fred’s jacket.  Fred put his hand lightly on the little boy’s shoulder.  

Fred used to be one of the worst bad guys in the slum. 

Fred used to be in a gang called the 42 brothers.  Now there were only three brothers left.  The other 39 died.

We were walking once and we saw a little girl fall off her bike.  She didn't move for a few seconds, 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."

“It was very challenging to someone like me,” he 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 knew how to disarm a man holding a gun. He said that it was easier to face a man with a gun the closer he was to you.  He knew how to burst into a store and make everyone get on the ground. 
 
He and his wife were separated.  I got the sense that he missed her.

It was very difficult to build up a business. Fre saved up to buy some liquor to start a club.  But when he sent a man to buy the liquor, the man stole the money.  He also had a shop with a purple door called FREDY AND SONS, from which he wanted sell food, but it didn’t have anything in it, so he couldn’t open it yet.  

After his money got stolen, hired a Maasai to guard his club.  Two Maasai showed up.  The first was wearing traditional robes.  He was the Business and Marketing Maasai.  His colleague was wearing a shirt and pants, but he stood sideways and carried a stick.  That was Security Maasai. The Maasai fought lions.  They drank blood. 

There was a lady waiting outside the door of the man who could cure people by prayer. When he arrived, the woman went into his tiny church. She stepped over a chicken, and into a room with an altar. The wall was covered with pictures of Jesus and Mary and Ondeto.  On a couch pressed against the wall, there were three men, holding their hands to their faces. They were nervous.  The lady was their mother.

The priest put on a purple robe.  Everyone kneeled and prayed.  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 priest had an assistant.  The two of them sang.   Sometimes they whistled or cried. 

A chicken wandered in.  The priest 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.”

A man pulled us into a tailor shop. The whole shop stunk of alcohol.  The man behind the sewing machine was irate. Fred pulled us out and we rushed away down a slippery hill.  That was the schoolmaster, he said.  Each morning he took all of the school fees and got drunk.  It was about 10:30 a.m.

By noon, men were wobbling down the gaps between shacks, or falling drunk in the road.  Fred called the drink an “illicit brew.”  It was called changa. They brewed it in shacks by the river.  It was dangerous.  It could make you blind or kill you.  The police took bribes to ignore such t.  Pills of different types were becoming more popular.  

“Alcohol, weed, tablets.  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,” Fred said.

“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.”

“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.”  

Fred examined a pair of kid’s shoes, looking at them from every angle. A mad man walked by, with a big scar on his head.  

Was it a robbery?  When I tell it personally, yes it was.  Speaking journalistically, very properly, nothing was stolen.  Fred scared them away.  So journalistically speaking, it was not a robbery.

Here is what I can say about it:  It took place on a bridge.  Fred, myself, and five robbers were standing on the bridge, and under the bridge there was a bunch of garbage, and on the garbage was a dead pig.  The littlest boy, maybe twelve, had a plastic shiv.  He looked like he was going to throw up.

Hours later, we went back to talk to them. The whole area was covered in blood.  The boys claimed it was a mistake, a misunderstanding.   We made peace.  The main boy was a murderer.  He killed at least five people.

The pig was killed by electricity. 

The boys went on missions.  That is what they called robberies.  They broke into homes.  Four would burst into the home, the other 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.

We walked to a high place near the railroad tracks.  A man was wobbling on the tracks, balancing on one foot.  

"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!" 

There was a certain area where the railroad tracks passed through the slum.  There were many churches there.  The pastors were all afraid that their churches would 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.

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.

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 had a child with them. 

Fred and I saw a little kid standing by a speaker.  The speaker was bigger than the kid.  Fred said the kid was there because someone died.  The music was to tell everyone that the person was dead, so they would donate money for the burial. 

Fred started explaining about children, and how he wanted to help them, because it was so difficult to be small in the slum. He held his hand up next to his thigh, and he told me about a girl he knew who was about that tall.  She was eight, and he told me that he was trying to organize a team to help look after her.  Becasue she was so small, he said.  I didn’t understand, and then Fred told me that she had been raped, so he wanted to be sure that she always had someone looking after her. 

There were two witch doctors who lived in a small shack.  Like the other shacks, it was tiny, made of mud and tin.  It was falling apart.  There was a wobbly stone in front in place of a step.  All of the witch doctor tools and materials were hidden when we went in. 

Witch doctors could cure anything. Of course if you were sick they could help you, but they could do other things too.  If your wife left, or if your business failed, they gave you a ritual.

Sometimes the rituals were impossible.  For example, the witch doctors could ask someone to bring them a pure black hen, with no white feathers.  When one looked, one found that no such hen even existed 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, so the ceiling looked like stars.  Whenever it rained in Kibera, homes got destroyed.  Roads washed away, and so on.

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. 

The slum had a prophet.  His name was 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 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.

There was a day care in a single small, dark, room.  In the daycare, there are 70 babies.  The floor was so covered in babies, that in order to move, one had to move babies out of the way.  The babies were looked after by two young women.  The women were both named Mercy.  I told them I didn’t believe them, so they wrote their full names down for me.  They said that they had another colleague.  She was also named Mercy.  One of the babies was crying for mama, but it was impossible to tell who was crying.  

The real problem was not caring for the 70 babies.  The real problem was that they didn't have food for any of the babies.  The only purpose of the day care was to keep the babies inside.  If the babies went outside, Mercy told me, they would be defiled.  I asked her what she meant, “defiled,” and she whispered it to me.

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 a few years ago.  There were photos on the ground of a dead man.  Thousands of people died.  The morgue was packed with bodies so that the door would not shut.   Men lined up and look at the pictures.  They stood in a line looking at them without saying anything.

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.  

There was a big commotion because thief was caught stealing a radio. People ran to where the thief was. He was dragged through the corridors, and when he fell, someone kicked him in the head.  The thief was bleeding.  He couldn’t stand, so they lifted him up.  They pushed him to the railroad tracks.  Then they followed him, carrying pitchforks, shovels, machetes, and sticks.

“We don’t go to the police!” a man said.  “We have been killing thieves!”

They brought him along the railroad tracks.  Both sides were covered in plants. The crowd grew to 50 men. Where there was a clearing, hundreds of people waiting for the thief.  The men spun the thief around and beat him.  

“We don’t want to kill this one,” the man said.  

“We will wait to see where he hid the radio.”

The men carried and pushed the thief forward.  Women and men jumped out of the way.  They reached a high place overlooking the slum.  The thief tried to to die, but it didn’t work.  

“He is pretending he is dying,” the man said.  He pointed.  “But he cannot die until he produces the radio!”

A man in a business suit struggled to hit the thief on the head with a heavy shovel.  Someone else grabbed the shovel, holding it back, and the two got in an argument.  The thief spit out a tooth.  Heavy, muscousy blood came out of his mouth.

As the thief was led away, one man stood ranting.  He waved his arms in the air.  A group of men stood around him, listening. 

He was explaining how the thief stole the radio, Fred told me.  How he thought he would get away with it.  How they caught him. While the man shouted, the thief was led away. Now, instead of a lynch mob, the thief was followed by a stream of women in bright dresses.  Many had babies on their backs.  People selling shoes and bits of electronics started setting up their shops again.  

Fred picked up another pair of kids' shoes.  He looked at them, turned them over in his hands.  A far distance below, in the valley, there were kids running.

“What you should know is that Kibera is the same as back home,” he 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.

He told me that when he was born, they threw him into the air.  That was what happened to all babies in Kibera, he said.  They were thrown up into the air, and that dedicated them. 

He 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 with a picture of a little kid.  It said BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY WILL SEE GOD.

Once we were walking 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.

Here, it’s not a good place to be,” she said.  “If those people who are under the ground wake up and say “enough is enough!  We have been using these people to feed ourselves! It’s high time we support them.” It will work. Life will change.  But if they leave it like this, people will continue dying. Young boys will continue spreading the disease of HIV. Even if they have medicines around.  They don't care!  They find you walking at night, some junkie junkie man, they will just rape you.  Somebody like me I close as early as possible, and go back to my house.  I am an artist.  I want to go far.  I don’t want to die tomorrow.  Or leave my kids suffering because i am dying from HIV.  I have strength.  I told you.  It’s been two and a half years now, I’ve never trusted any man.  If I try, and I get pregnant?  Ok there’s this medicine for pregnancy but I don’t want to use them because I don’t know how it will effect my body.  Something like that.  Now I am fat.  I used to be small.  Like now I am jumping rope, I want to go back to my body.  Are you afraid here?”

I told her I wanted to do drawings about Kibera. I asked her what she thought. 

“Being an artist is not bad.  It’s good. But using other people’s stories, maybe to put it in the internet, tell them that you are supporting them, then the people donate to you.”

I explained to her I didn’t want to take donations.  I just wanted to do drawings. I stumbled over my words.

“What do you think?” I asked her.  “Still bullshit?”

“No,” she said.  “It’s cool.”

There were so many people coming in, making sad videos, she said, claiming that they would help.  

“Even if they come here tomorrow, if they hear me talking like this,” she said. “They will cut my neck off. Yes. But me I don’t care.  I don’t give a fuck, man. I’ll tell the truth.  Let me die, but I’ll tell the truth.  I don't care even if I die.  God knows that I’m dying because of telling the truth.”

“Yeah but I like you a lot,” she said. “We can be friends, what do you think?”