Kibera

Publisher: Abacus; Hachette Book Group; Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008;
ISBN13: 978-0316113786;
ISBN10: 0316113786;
Pages: 368;
Format: Hardback

http://bordersliteratureonline.net/books/Say-You%E2%80%99re-One-Of-them


Say You’re One of Them is catholic priest, Uwem Akpan’s debut book set in selected countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.  Emerging out of the book’s unleashed passions, are two monsters and a wounded angel. The first monster has two heads: one is poverty, that chronic, terrifying condition of lack; moral chaos is the other: the disintegration of values when the only organising principle that society offers is survival. Towering over Africa, an ancient tree planted in her soil, the second monster bears two fearsome names: Ethnocentrism, religious fanaticism. A swooping vulture, religious fanaticism surveys endless carnage with stony eyes and ethnocentrism surveys the remains of armed conflicts erupting in his name, throughout African lands.

This 2008 paper looks at Nairobi's single storey, largely unserviced, wattle-and-daube slums, with their rental market, from the perspective of the city's multi-storey tenements. This allows it to ask particular questions about upgrading interventions.

This paper is alive with the spontaneous initiatives in Kibera and Dharavi, especially anchored in their economic activities. By tracing the developing scenarios embedded in the everyday life of two case studies, economic footprints as well as other living patterns offer ground-based observations that challenge the overwhelming myth of poverty. The following analyses seek out human agency in spontaneous circumstances, which include the positive characteristics and weaknesses of their mechanisms. Illustrations on the articulation of spontaneous strategies also provide a fertile ground for reflections, especially the alternative role of professionals (designers). I intend to call for a new epistemology as well as an alternative framework, which are anchored in the developing nature of spontaneous settlement. Besides, design actions based on users need to be facilitated; so too does the sharing of the abovementioned knowledge and experience among different stakeholders.

This thesis is positioned at the confluence of two major business trends of the previous decade. First is the emergence of business models that offer valuable goods or services for free. Second is the challenge of profitably meeting the needs of the world’s four billion poorest people, the so called Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). This paper aims to contribute to both fields by extending the lessons from one to another, looking at how the experiences of companies competing against free in the developed world might relate to social enterprises struggling to overcome expectations of free at the BoP.

In response to the provocation of this special issue, about the extent to which we might be ‘beyond recognition’ out of concern for its colonising tendencies, this paper enquires into norms of recognition in international development. The paper establishes development as a site in which governmentality operates (following Tania Murray Li), in which coloniality is at play, and which also forms a field of recognition. I provide an analysis of a land-based recognition claim by the minority ethnic Nubians in Kenya, and the non-recognition of this claim by the Kenya Slum Upgrading Project. The paper identifies three particular explanations for this non-recognition, all of which exhibit coloniality: the epistemic context, the programmatic nature of the development, and hierarchies of personnel. Together, these phenomena precluded the project from engaging in the difficult but necessary discussion around the Nubians’ claim because it was too political. The paper concludes that though we have cause to be concerned about the effects of coloniality on recognition regimes partly constituted by international development, international development has its limits in the milieu in which it operates, and political subjects can and do turn away from it to engage other, albeit imbricated, fields of recognition.

This article examines the discourse surrounding Kibera, a highly populated low-income community in Nairobi, Kenya. Based on 11 months of fieldwork and interviews with 56 Kibera residents, this article discusses the disconnect between the lives experienced by residents and the hyperbolic and essentialised discourse that depicts Kibera as a community defined by sickness, crime and despair. While residents do not deny many of the hardships that are central to the Kibera discourse, they articulate maisha mtaani [life in the neighbourhood] as complex, diverse and contextual. Sadly, several groups that claim to serve the good of Kibera are partially responsible for perpetuating this harmful discourse. In fact, some NGOs, journalists and residents benefit from reproducing a discourse that actively marginalises Kibera and its people.

Using a gendered analysis, this article examines the post election violence (PEV) in Kibera, Kenya, between December 2007 and February 2008. Through in-depth interviews with Kibera residents, the article interrogates how gender influenced violent mobilizations in Kenya's most notorious slum. Most scholarly analyses have tended to understand the post-election violence as a result of politicized ethnic identities, class, and local socioeconomic dynamics. Implicitly or explicitly, these frameworks assume that women are victims of violence while men are its perpetrators, and ignore the ways in which gender, which cuts across these categories, produces and shapes conflict. Kibera's conflict is often ascribed to the mobilization of disaffected male youths by political " Big Men. " But the research findings show how men, who would ordinarily not go to war, are obliged to fight to " save face " in their communities and how women become integral to the production of violent exclusionary mobilizations. Significantly, notions of masculinity and femininity modified the character of Kibera's conflict. Acts of gender-based violence, gang rapes, and forced circumcisions became intensely entwined with ethno-political performances to annihilate opposing groups. The battle for political power was also a battle of masculinities.

We argue that slum tourist media exemplify a distinct and growing narrative genre about posthumanitarian travel: ironic encounters. In ironic encounters, Global North tourists construct a humanitarian Self through their firsthand engagement with suffering in the Global South. In these stories, tourists present their travels as essential for coveted experiential knowledge while depicting locals as the true beneficiaries of the tourists' self-discovery. We examine 3 high-profile texts produced by visitors of Kibera, a densely populated low-income community in Nairobi, Kenya: the BBC special Famous, Rich and in the Slums, the book Megaslumming, and a White House slideshow about Jill Biden's tour of Kibera. Emblematic of ironic encounters, these texts ultimately justify slum tourism as a humanitarian act.

PEN NIGERIA is the Nigerian Centre of PEN INTERNATIONAL which is an international association of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists. It is a worldwide association of writers founded in 1921, known to play a leading role in promoting literature as a force of global culture and defending freedom of expression and linguistic rights across the world. PEN Nigeria became affiliated to PEN International on November 21st, 2001 at the congress held in London.

This is a research study on the effects of social media among the youths in Kibera, written and submitted  in partial fulfillment for an academic course - Research Project - at Multimedia University of Kenya - supervised by Lecturer Fridah Nkatha in August, 2015.