The Old Hack

Tia Goldenberg's blog is one of the best I've encountered.  She is a 24 year old Canadian journalist who went to Kenya to escape the harsh Canadian winter and to try to forge a future career in journalism.  She worries about her future.  She has no need to - she is a very powerful writer. This item from her blog, Kookoo for Kenya is her entry for 21st August 2007.

"On your left, poverty" - tourists flock to Kenyan slums

Nairobi (dpa) - "On your left is Kibera, Africa‘s largest slum," says James Asudi, sitting in a large, white safari van ferrying tourists to the informal settlement.

The van, the type which is ubiquitous in Kenya‘s game parks, hobbles down Kibera‘s bumpy roads, passing scores of people in bedraggled clothing, barefoot children with mucus running down their faces and little girls with tightly braided hair playing skipping rope they‘ve made out of various pieces of rubber.

Asudi runs one of at least three tour companies that offer visitors to Nairobi a chance to get away from wildlife and see a different side of impoverished Africa.

But this type of tourism has generated some controversy in the East African country, where half the population lives on less than one dollar a day, many of them in congested slums, in tiny shacks made of mud and corrugated tin.

Asudi said he brings tourists here to expose Kibera and Nairobi‘s other informal settlements to the world, but critics charge he is exploiting the residents of the sprawling slums.

"People say I am operating like a zoo. I don‘t conduct Kibera tourism for my benefit," said Asudi who added he is known as a "rogue tour operator" in Kenya‘s flourishing industry.

"I want to expose Kibera to the whole world so misfortunes are known the world over and the people here can get donations," he said.

Asudi has had 12 visitors embark on his slum tours since he began them in January, compared to about 40 clients who have ventured on more conventional tours like wildlife safaris.

On the way to the slum, tourists can pop open the safari van‘s detachable roof to get a better look and a better shot of Kibera residents going about their business and once out of the car,
tourists walk past the sights of everyday life in the slum.

Women hunched over a big basin of soapy water, scrub clothes vigorously. Visitors pass common toilets run by various aid agencies which residents must pay five cents to use. And they meander past tiny rooms equipped with a pool table or cramped bars airing the latest football match.

The tour guides, a couple of Kibera residents, explain about flying toilets, plastic bags used when toilets are just too expensive or unavailable, and then flung high above the tin roof shacks.

People lining the serpentine streets hardly flinch when they see tourists mostly because visitors - from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to comedian Chris Rock - seem to flock here.

Kibera, which houses between 250,000 to a million people, gained notoriety in the British film The Constant Gardener and has since become a prime location for high-profile names to spur some publicity.

On a recent trip by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, residents voiced their disappointment at the visits which they said never result in any tangible benefit for them.

"Slum tourism has become an inevitable result of raising the profile of the slum situation in Africa. The idea should be looked at seriously so that it benefits the community and doesn‘t exploit it," said Sharad Shankardass, spokesman for the UN‘s housing agency, Habitat.

Slum tourism is relatively new in Kenya. The idea took off about 10 years ago in South Africa‘s Soweto slum where tourists can pop into former president Nelson Mandela‘s home and then stop for a bite to eat at some of the restaurants that cater to the visitors.

Shankardass highlights Soweto as a successful form of slum tourism where the community actually reaps some rewards.

But residents of Kibera say they don‘t see the fruits of welcoming strangers into their neighbourhoods.

"I feel like I am in a zoo," said Amos Lewick, 18, who sells mandazi or donuts, for eight cents a piece on a main pathway. "If they can help us fix this slum, they are welcomed."

Asudi, the tour operator, said he charges tourists 100 dollars for the trip into the slum - 40 dollars is for transportation and 60 dollars is a recommended donation which is used to buy staple foods like sugar, flour and cooking oil.

The food is distributed to women who are all "affected by HIV," Asudi said. And tourists actually hand the goods over to the residents themselves.

But the 10 women Asudi referred to are all neighbours of one of the resident tour guides, which elicits some questions from tourists about how far donations raised actually reach.

"I‘m not sure that I would recommend the trip because I‘m not sure it benefits the people on the ground," said Yvonne Meyer, a German native who has worked in Kenya for three years and brought her mother to see the slum.

And while the majority of Kibera‘s residents said they did not mind having tourists stroll through their streets, some are taking advantage of the influx of foreigners.

One woman, dressed in a colourful head wrap and matching dress, sold dried fish on the side of the road - a perfect photo opportunity, despite the wafting smell and swarming flies.

"One hundred shillings (1 dollar and 50 cents)," she said, as a blond tourist approached her, camera in hand.

"Twenty shillings for fish, 100 shillings for a photo."

Image: "A mama mzee at Nyumbani village, near Kitui, Kenya" by Tia Goldenberg