Africa, My Passion

  She also places some of them on the edge of the railway track and it’s clear that a lot of soil here has eroded away, which is what made the track down to her hut so steep. She shows us her sacks proudly and then invites us in. We’re following Anne, who’s barefoot, back down towards the little shack when all of a sudden there’s a ferocious whistling and roaring noise as a huge great black train hurtles by. Anne stops at the hut, opens the door and invites us into a small dark room without windows. If she closed the door it would be pitch black, despite the sunshine outside. The room has obviously been tidied up but even so there are piles of stuff everywhere. I sit myself down on a little bench next to a small table. Anne sits down on a stool. Behind her, on top of several plastic bags, there is a black box full of gardening tools leaning against the wall.

  There is a corner for cooking and on the wall is a newspaper cutting of US President Barack Obama. We’re all crowded together in her nice and clean little house. It’s built of wooden poles and clay, although the clay is flaking away in places. Anne reminds me of Priscilla, a woman I got to know in Mombasa years ago. I lived with her for several months in a little hut like this when I came to marry Lketinga, the story told in my first book, The White Masai.

  I ask her a few questions and she answers me calmly in her pleasant voice. Our conversation has to compete with a rooster that calls incessantly outside and music coming from one of the other huts. I ask her how long she’s lived here.

  ‘I’m fifty years of age and I’ve lived in this house half my life. I come from Kisumu, a town on the western side of Kenya, Obama’s side.’

  I can’t help laughing. I’ve heard that so often. Everybody from Western Kenya points out proudly that he or she comes from ‘Obama’s side’. Everybody, it seems, wants to claim some sort of relationship to the first black president of the USA.

  ‘I was married young,’ Anne continues, ‘and had six children with my husband. Sadly two died just after birth, and so my man went off and married somebody else. His family rejected me once he had a new wife. And I couldn’t go back to my own family, that’s not how we do things. As soon as you’re married you’re part of your husband’s clan. The only help my mother could offer was to get me a job as a housemaid for a family in Nairobi. So I left my children with my mother and came here to Kibera. Some friends found me this little place to live. Every day I would go into the city to clean and wash. Then a few years later my mother died and I had to bring all the kids here. There wasn’t anybody else to look after them. All my other relatives were dead. So we just had to live from one day to the next, all of us crammed into this little room. The older two daughters had to look after the little ones so that I could still go to work and we just about managed to get by. There were still evenings when we went to bed hungry. I got paid a hundred shillings [about €1] a day, for washing mountains of clothing with my bare hands from dawn to dusk. On the way home I would spend thirty shillings on corn flour and the rest on charcoal, water and some fat or salt. Then there was the rent to pay. That keeps going up. When I first moved in I paid a hundred shillings a month, today it’s more like six hundred. Obviously I had to walk into the city every day as I couldn’t afford the bus. But if I couldn’t get any washing to do, we wouldn’t have had anything to eat. As it was we only managed one meal a day, and you don’t sleep well if you go to bed hungry.’

  I interrupt her to ask how many children still live with her, as I can’t imagine living in this little room with six kids who by now must be nearly grown up. She tells me: ‘The two elder girls moved out. I have no idea how they got by, because neither got married. One daughter had two children but she died when the youngest was just a year old, and so they live with me. My other daughter is dead too. I suspect both of them were HIV-positive. I couldn’t afford to pay for their funerals and was happy that at least their boyfriends took care of that. My only condition was that I could be present at the funerals, so I could pay my respects. I hardly felt that I had been a good mother to them. But now I still have my four other children living here with me, so altogether that makes six children between the ages of ten and nineteen that I’ve got to feed.’

  There’s no hint of resentment in her voice, just a persistent worry. I do my sums, and soon realise that not all the children can be from her first marriage. At this she gives a hearty laugh for the first time, winks and says, ‘No, I was still young and I had a boyfriend who left me with more children. He used to help me out with the rent now and then but I’ve no idea where he is these days. When I was still young, it could be dangerous enough living on my own here in the slums. I would get men knocking on the door, expecting to be invited in. Things were better if they knew I had a steady boyfriend. I don’t need to worry so much now that I’m an old lady, but sometimes you still have to be careful when it gets dark. Some of them couldn’t care less whether you’re young or old. If you go out at night you never know if you might get mugged or raped. I stay home of an evening.’

  I ask her if her daughter’s two children are infected with HIV. She says: ‘I’ve never had them tested as neither of them have shown any signs over the course of nine years. They say just one in four children is infected if the mother was HIV-positive, so I think my grandchildren might just be lucky.’

  At that moment one of the little boys appears, gawps at us strangers, pulls on a pair of wellingtons and runs out again. I ask Anne how they all manage to sleep in such a small room, and she replies, ‘Corinne, that is my biggest concern, because they’re all getting bigger and need more space. The two grandchildren sleep in my bed with me. Two of the others sleep on that bench you’re sitting on, sideways. But that means one of them always has his feet in the other’s face. Another one of them sleeps here on the table, and another sleeps on a pile of clothes I spread on the floor when the door is closed. We have to all eat together first because there’s no room to move when we’re all lying down. In the mornings I get up early, and get the children out to school. Unfortunately I can’t give them anything to eat to take with them, because I can’t afford it. They have to see what they can find along the way.’

  All this time the radio next door is still blaring and the rooster’s still crowing his head off.

  ‘But life has got a lot better for us since I’ve had these vegetable sacks from Solidarité,’ she adds with a smile. ‘It means we at least always have something to eat every day. I can either cook my own vegetables or sell a few bunches. I make about thirty shillings a week like that. Life isn’t bad. Every day we have ugali [a maize dish eaten like porridge or made thicker into dumplings] with kale. If we don’t have much money we just make the ugali thinner so it’s more like a soup. The only thing is you can’t keep it long. But the thirteen vegetable sacks guarantee us at least one meal a day. Then a couple of days a week I do washing for other people, so we can pay the rent. Otherwise the landlord would be round to take away the door or even the roof over our heads until we’ve paid up. If that happens and the rains come, you can lose everything. Even with a roof, you still get water pouring in, and it’s still cold at night.’

  I find myself dumbstruck, amazed how Anne does whatever she can to feed her children and grandchildren, while refusing to complain about her lot. She seems proud that she’s managed to up their standard of living after two years of hard work cultivating the veggie bags.

  Before I leave, I ask her is she has any dreams for her future. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘the one thing I wish for is a house of my own, even if it’s just a little place, no bigger than this. But it has to be mine, so that my children can be sure of having a roof over their heads after I die. As things stand every day I worry the landlord is going to turn up and demand his house back. Despite the fact we’ve lived here so long and everybody is so jammed together, I still don’t know my neighbours well. I don’t even know what they do for a living. Maybe one of them’s a night watchman, maybe one of them works for a bank, and maybe they don’t do anything at all. Nobody here really mixes with any
body else. Everyone is just out for themselves.’

  There’s no way I can leave without giving her some money so that at least she has enough to pay the next month’s rent and doesn’t have to worry about this evening’s meal. I can see from her face that she wasn’t expecting it and is absolutely delighted. She takes me by the hand and gives me such an intense look of gratitude that it bring tears to my eyes.

  We go back out into the blinding sunshine. There’s clean laundry hanging on a line, fluttering in the wind above the filthy ground. We set off to find the next soul willing to share their life story with us. I turn round one last time to see Anne standing barefoot outside her little hut, waving us a fond farewell.

  Cabbage instead of rat poison – how Irene’s life was saved

  We’re off to see Irene, just twenty-three years old, HIV-positive and single mother of two, or so Pastor Elly, who’s taking us to meet her, tells me. On our way we pass a stall selling leftover bits of fish: fish heads or skeletons with the heads and tails still attached laid out to dry in the sun, covered in flies. Pastor Elly tells me that in the evening the dried remains are boiled up to make fish soup. He does what he can with modest means – sometimes no more than a few kind words – to minister to a flock of three thousand households, some of which are extremely poor indeed.

  Children keep running up to say hello. They nearly all say the same thing: ‘How are you? How are you?’ Some of the tin shacks here are painted in gaudy colours. One of them, just in front of us, is painted blue with pictures of all sorts of exotic hairstyles. But the door to what is obviously the local hairdresser’s is closed. It would seem there are no more customers expected today. A few steps further on we come across a rose bush planted next to a tin wall. It is an unexpectedly fragrant and colourful natural wonder in these intensely unfamiliar surroundings.

  Certain aspects of the slum are both fascinating and repellent. You continually come across situations that for most Europeans are completely alien, but that doesn’t mean it’s all misery and tragedy. It just depends on the people. People laugh, debate, sometimes argue, but the children for the most part seem happy, even if some of them look older than their years. The alleys and footpaths might be dirty and grimy but by and large people keep their clothes clean, which astonishes me as after just a few hours in Kibera I’m filthy from head to foot.

  One woman is selling mandazi. I love these little triangular doughnuts. She has set up a plastic bowl full of them on a little stool. The man on her left is selling tin cans full of charcoal, while the man on her right has made a machine to sharpen knives from bits of a bicycle.

  Pastor Elly stops when we come up to this woman and introduces her to us as Irene. I hold out my hand to her. She looks a lot older than twenty-three, even though I can see she’s wearing what clearly used to be a school uniform underneath her green dress. She has a baby on one hip but looks gaunt and lean. She has her hair plaited in tight rows along her skull and differently coloured flip-flops on her feet.

  She takes us over to her hut, which unlike Anne’s is made completely of corrugated iron. She’s covered the walls inside with cloth hangings to make it seem just a little more homely and there’s a sheet of thick plastic on the floor. No window here either. We sit ourselves down on a little bench and she perches on the end of her narrow bed. Behind her is a big sheet of prettily embroidered cloth designed to hide her bed somewhat. She puts the child, who is about nine months old, down in a little plastic chair, gives it a lollipop and starts telling us about herself, mentioning in the first sentence that if it weren’t for Solidarité and Pastor Elly, she’d be dead.

  I want to hear her story from the beginning and start by asking her how long she’s been living in the slums. She speaks in a quiet voice, not least so that the neighbours won’t hear as every word penetrates the thin walls.

  ‘I came here back in 2003, when I was sixteen. Before that I lived in Western Kenya. We lived on a small farm and I was the oldest of nine children. My dad was a bus driver for the school that my best friend and I went to. She was a bit older than me. Life was pretty good really, until my mother died, just after I’d finished fourth form. I don’t know what she died of. But when I think back on it now, I think she just died of grief, because after her funeral I found out that my father had been having an affair with my best friend. It was a shock to me and I believe that was what killed my mother. As the oldest child, it was now up to me to look after the farm and my little brothers and sisters, so I had to give up school.

  ‘It got worse. My dad married the girl who had been my schoolmate. One minute she was my best friend, the next she was my stepmother. It was impossible for me to see her with my father so soon after the death of my mother. It turned into hell – we turned into bitter enemies. She treated me badly and tried to dump all the domestic work on me. She kept going on at me to find a boyfriend of my own, as at sixteen years of age I was too old to continue to live with them. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and went off to live with an aunt in Kisumu. But I couldn’t get on there either as she and her husband argued all the time. She suggested I go to Nairobi to get a job as a housemaid. She said she knew somebody in Kimera who could help me. And she really did: she found me a job as a maid to a really nice woman. I got fed and paid, the work wasn’t too hard and the woman was nice to me. But a few months later she had to go off to Mombasa for some reason and didn’t know when she’d be coming back. She said I should go back to the farm and she’d call to let me know when she needed me again. So once again I had no job and no money.’

  Irene told me her life story without expression, without anger, just quietly and almost as if she was on automatic pilot. ‘I went back to my father but it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t want me back home any more. My aunt in Kisumu had separated from her husband but she’d got a new boyfriend, and I had simply no idea who to turn to, what to do. Then one day I met a guy I had known since I was in the second form at school. We were good friends but we’d never slept together. He said I could stay with him, but before long we ended up having sex and I got pregnant almost straight away. He didn’t want any responsibility for it and so we split up. For a second time I headed off to my aunt’s friend in Kibera, this time heavily pregnant. She said I could stay until the child was born. She told her work colleagues about me and after my little daughter was born they let me take her to a kindergarten. The boss was a friend of my aunt’s friend and didn’t charge me for looking after the baby. In fact, she was good enough to find this place for me to live and even paid three months’ rent in advance to give me enough time to find work.

  ‘At first I had no furniture at all, not even this piece of plastic on the floor, just a few pieces of newspaper and cardboard, and when it rained the water came in. But I didn’t need to cook because when I went to pick up my baby in the evening they gave me a meal. For a while at least, my life wasn’t too bad. But then everything went to pieces, particularly here in the slums after the riots that followed the 2007 elections. I went out every day looking for work: cleaning, doing washing, anything at all just to make enough money to get by. But it got harder and harder: I’m from the Luo tribe and in those days no Kikuyu would offer us a job. There was next to no food to be had. So when a man offered to marry me and look after me and the baby I was really happy, even though I had promised never again to let myself be used by some man. He was a bit older, though, and seemed to be a serious type, so I trusted him, especially when he promised to do something for my brothers and sisters back home. We’re both Catholics though and as the Church doesn’t allow condoms or any other forms of contraceptive I was soon pregnant again. When it was getting near my time, I went to the closest hospital, which was in a tent. Like all other mothers in Kenya I had to have a blood test and found out, just a few hours before my second child was due to be born, that I was HIV-positive. My blood count was high, though, which indicated I had only recently been infected. It was terrible news to hear just before I was about to give bir
th. Immediately I was transferred to another hospital tent that made a point of doing everything possible to make sure the infection wasn’t passed on to the baby. My hospital fees were taken care of because of this, but it wasn’t much compensation. I was just twenty-two years old and had already been sentenced to death.

  ‘Back home I told my husband he’d given me the AIDS virus and told him he should go to the doctor so he could get treated too. But all he did was get angry and tell me I’d got it the wrong way round: I must have given him the virus. It wasn’t his baby. I should just clear off out of there. He didn’t want anything more to do with me.’

  When she mentioned her infection, Irene’s voice dropped to a whisper. Nobody in the neighbourhood knew, it appeared, and if they did, they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. She was terrified of being treated like a leper. Once a week she went to the clinic to get her medicine and took a long detour on the way to make sure nobody spotted her.

  Her little daughter all this time is sucking on a lollipop and is a complete sticky mess, not that anybody minds. Outside somebody is making a frightful din working with some piece of metal. Irene seems used to it. She just continues with her story as if nothing is going on. ‘After that man threw me out I decided never to get married again. I was still only young but already had two children and now this disease. In our culture there’s no shame in not being married. But I was desperate too and couldn’t see how I was going to get by. I had no food and I couldn’t even work as the child was still a tiny baby. I moved back into this hut with no furniture and the rent to find.