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AFRICA - COMMENTARY |
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Vol. XVIII x No. 5 JUNE 2006 |
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THE FERMENTS OF THE SUBURBS I live in the periphery of the periphery of Nairobi. Here, new things are happening all the time, things which never happen in the luxurious fortified subdivisions of the capital’s center. Indeed, it is here where all kinds of ferments of our society are born and grow. By Renato Kizito Sesana Comboni Missionary When, in 1999, I came to live in it, the place was called Riruta. I keep living in the same house but the increase in population has multiplied, even the name of the place. Riruta has been diversified into Riruta East, Ndurarua, Satellite, Railway, etc…. So, now I live in Kabiria, outskirts of Riruta, suburbs of Nairobi, periphery of the West. The peripheries are expanding. At Riruta and whereabouts, with a mass of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, roads are in a disastrous condition; sewage system, electricity and telephone reach only the main roads and offer a less efficient service. The police station is a conglomeration of shacks with rusty iron sheets. Health services and public schools are absolutely inadequate, as it can be seen by the proliferation of private schools and dispensaries of very poor quality themselves that are used by people who have no better alternative. And yet, incredible as it may seem, this Kabiria, periphery of the periphery of the periphery is, for many people, the center, the place which promises the end of all sufferings, the dream of a better future, kept alive by letters of friends who have settled there for some years already. Who would like to live at Kabiria? Not only those who live in the half-dry rural areas of Kenya where health services and schools are practically inexistent but also hundreds and hundreds of desperate people who have escaped from the area of the Great Lakes. As a matter of fact, the sweeping growth of Riruta and Kabiria is, above all, due to the clandestine immigration from that area. To live in heaven To the question: Why have you come to live at Riruta, Jean Jacques, who is from Burundi, with a psychology degree and married to a woman from Rwanda, answers: “When the Tanzanian government decided to make the refugees go back to their country of origin, they made us walk up to the border. We had to cross the river Kagera on a bridge. Under the very eyes of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) staff and the Tanzanian and Rwandan soldiers, people were tied with a rope in order to control all their movements. Whole lines of people were throwing themselves into the river to die instead of going back to Rwanda. Even up to now, nobody has denounced such a thing. I decided to flee, to reach my friends who had already settled here in Nairobi and from whom, every now and then, I was receiving news and who were describing Nairobi as heaven on earth. So, I have arrived here and, later on, was joined by my wife and children. We are all illegal, but alive.” Pierre comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and has just reached 19 years of age. He has been at Riruta for one-and-a-half years. On the day I was writing this text, I accompanied him to meet two investigators of the International Criminal Court. Pierre was a child soldier who fled from his country when his warlord ordered him to kill a journalist and a missionary – people who were considered a threat because they were denouncing what was going on. Pierre decided that he could no longer obey such orders – he had already killed tens of civilians – and had to escape because to refuse to kill meant sure death for himself. The first time I met him was at the bus stop of the buses coming from Kampala. The look of fear and despair was evident on his still childish countenance; his eyes moving incessantly, alert, as in wanting to spot any possible danger. He looked like a trapped animal. Then I saw him growing more serene day by day as he was trying to go back to a normal life, together with the other children of the house in which I live. Today, as he was giving an account of the events of his life to the investigators, for more than two hours, he managed to control himself and to control all the mistrust in the institutions that life has taught him. Later he broke down, sobbed uncontrollably and, when he was able to speak again, he said: “I don’t want to think any more of all the evil I did to others and of what they did to me.” Encounter with God At Kabiria, however, there aren’t only dramatic stories. The suburbs, for those who are able to observe, are also the laboratories of the future society. Here, society changes, discovers new survival forms. In the quarters of the rich Nairobi, dividing hedges are re-enforced with barbed wires; people enclose themselves behind high walls; spot lights are increased in order to light up the surroundings of the mansions as if it were daylight; and night watchmen are multiplied (composed of poor, penniless people who live in the suburbs like Riruta by day and protect the rich by night). There, the ideal is that nothing untoward should happen; nobody should upset the golden lifestyle of the rich. In the suburbs, however, at the periphery, all kinds of ferments of our society are born and grow. Some are ferments of violence and hatred but others are ferments of solidarity and dignity. Here, we have artists, one of whom is Lionel, less than 30 years old but is already preparing for death because of alcoholism. He produces pictures in which life explodes in the most extraordinary shapes and colors. Then, there is Miriam, who lives alone in a shack. At night, with the help of an old typewriter, she creates a plot of a soap opera on the life in the slums which she would like to sell to a private TV station. There is also Charles, from Rwanda, an illegal immigrant, who after a day’s work as a computer technician (while the wife and children are busy cooking supper on a charcoal stove), works on his laptop to develop a new software program. And there is Angela who wants to start a formation group for HIV patients. The suburbs, the periphery, for those who have faith and are willing to be renewed, is an encounter with God who doesn’t keep anything for Himself, who comes from below, who looks at you with eyes of the children, speaks to you with the voice of prostitutes, blesses you with the words of the old man who is on the brink of death. In the suburbs, there are those who have nothing to lose and gamble their whole life on a single item, focusing on it all the perseverance and creativity they have. The refugees are among the most innovative in inventing everyday life. How can we make their stories better known or make correct information reach them? Radio remains the most capable means of communication to reach the suburbs of Nairobi at low cost and the recent combination of radio and cell phones has become a very powerful means of participative communication. Some programs of Radio Waumini in Nairobi can receive more than 150 messages of comment and opinion in a single broadcasting hour. Internet is an important instrument but its potentialities are not yet fully exploited. The still high costs and unreliable telephone lines restrict the usage to a still reduced number of privileged ones. Without counting the fact that, in order to reach everybody via Internet, it is necessary that everybody is literate. The suburbs are still far from that goal. The recent efforts of the Kenyan government to make the eight years of elementary education truly accessible to all and the further efforts to lower the costs of the telephone lines to make them more dependable are steps in the right direction but these will, of course, take time. In Nairobi there is also an online information agency in English, NewsFromAfrica (www.newsfromafrica.com) which is fighting for survival because the big Western mass media prefer to use their ‘special correspondents” instead of the local professionals when dealing with Africa. What is missing then are not the instruments but the will to use them to promote correct and shared information. To make information reach the suburbs, the periphery or about the periphery is not essentially a problem of means but a problem of culture. Mediatic Africa Who has decided that Kabiria is a periphery? Where is the center? Shouldn’t we first ask what gives the idea of a center? Isn’t this idea the result of a grave sickness that has infected the whole Western world which is, by the way, called ethnocentrism? With a variant, the gravest form, called racism. The West, the northern part of the world, is believed to be the center of the world, the development model valid for everybody, and if the others don’t follow suit it is only because they are backward, corrupt, lazy and, naturally, less intelligent. It encloses itself in an isolationism which chooses not to understand the others and, therefore, not to care about the others. There is a part in the Western public opinion, however, that rebels against this state of things, wants to try to understand problems in depth, but this part which is perhaps growing, is certainly still a minority that cannot put weight on the choices of the big mass media. How many times have I been told by competent and passionate special correspondents in a visit to an African country something of this type: “My editor says that one piece of news a day about Africa is more than enough. Therefore, since we are now talking about Somalia, there is no hope that any other African country may have some space, unless for absolutely extraordinary items like new wars, thousands of casualties, famine…” Certainly, wars, deaths and famines are the only things that can arouse interest when we speak of Africa. Let us try instead to overthrow the world. Rewording the title of the book by the journalist of Le Monde Diplomatique Anne-Cecile Robert, L’Afrique au secours de l’Occident, let us prepare ourselves to write another book, The Periphery to the Help of the Center. <WM Copyright©2003-2006 World Mission Magazine |
