The Rise of Vertical Slums in Nairobi

The rise of Nairobi’s concrete tenement jungle

This important article was written by urban planner Baraka Mwau. In years to come this research will be recognised for its critical insights. This is the image of Africa’s future urban form for the majority of its city dwellers.

Early evening in the inner-city district of Pipeline-Embakasi in Nairobi, Kenya (Photo: Baraka Mwau)

On a hot and hazy Sunday afternoon, Nairobi’s concrete tenements loom over the city’s shacks (or ‘slums’). Men and women hang clothes on rooftops and balconies – making the buildings appear as a patchwork of fabric mosaics. The streets below buzz with activity: hawkers, stallholders, water vendors and pedestrians bustle among shops, betting joints, cafes and bars. People stream in and out of the tenement’s ground floor gates. Children play.

On the balconies, some tenants pass time in the only place where the building opens up to the air outside. This is something of a luxury – many tenants have inward-facing balconies or live on floors with only artificial lighting. Neither sunlight nor fresh air find their way through here.

Meanwhile, water starts to run again from the only tap on the floor (sometimes the only one in the building) and queues are building up. The building caretaker scales the floors letting tenants know the vital service is on again. Back outside, as the evening closes in, pedestrians pour to and from the matatu pick-up point. Matatu is Nairobi’s informal public transport, including buses, minibuses and vans.

These scenes of tenements and their surroundings are common in the inner-city areas of Pipeline-Embakasi, Kayole, Githurai, Baba Dogo, Mathare Valley and Huruma among others.

Blocks of seven and eight-storey tenements in Pipeline-Embakasi (Photo: Baraka Mwau)

The transition from shacks to tenements

Research by SDI-Kenya under the East African Research Fund (EARF) has been analysing shelter options in Nairobi, focusing on provision to low-income groups. This research shows these groups mainly occupy rental single-room units.

In the past, shacks have dominated supply of the single-room unit. But the last three decades have seen tenements increasingly take over as the future of Nairobi’s ‘low-cost’ rental housing. Tenements are rental walk-up, high-rise structures averaging eight floors, but sometimes rising as high as ten. Multiple single-room units are densely packed into each floor.

The rise of the tenement submarket has essentially been a form of ‘slum upgrading’ driven by the private sector. There have been three main types of transition:

1. In-situ spontaneous transition of individual shack structures to tenements
2. Redevelopment of entire slum settlements or previously planned low-cost housing schemes (eg Kenya’s 1980s ‘site and service schemes’), and
3. Greenfield tenement – in newly subdivided land,

So, what motivated the transition to tenements? In short, they rose out of Kenya’s structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s. Market liberalisation expanded room for the private sector in housing supply. At the same time, local government’s capacity for effective urban planning and management diminished, and remains ineffective – the city has huge backlogs of infrastructure and affordable housing.

Faced with a rapidly growing population alongside low incomes and rising unemployment, private capital emerged to provide ‘low-cost’ rental housing and this new submarket emerged.

For developers, tenements are a lucrative business. High demand brings a market ripe for the picking. Development requires relatively small capital injections and the returns are healthy: investment is often recouped within five years. Maintenance costs are low.

Multi-storey tenements are replacing shacks in many inner city areas of Nairobi (Photo: Baraka Mwau)

Behind the stone and mortar

Tenements provide much-needed affordable shelter for many of Nairobi’s residents. Monthly rent for a unit typically ranges from Ksh. 3000 (US$30) to 5,000 ($50). As well as shelter, the ground units provide commercial space for businesses. This creates a vibrant local economy that supports livelihoods for thousands of households and has made the streets more active.

But these concrete jungles present a critical urban governance challenge. They are mostly built without planning approval and so go against building regulations.

Indeed, the lack of regulation around tenements has seen buildings collapse with tragic consequences. And the development of tenements has created a melting pot of different actors including developers, contractors, land dealers, politicians, public officers, community leaders and local gangs among others.

Tenants often have perceptions that tenements – with their stone and mortar walled units – offer better shelter than shacks, are safer, more affordable and in some sense, more dignified. But do tenements provide better housing?

Tenements have essentially reproduced the inadequate single-room unit of shacks. They are densely occupied to maximise vertical space, and in turn are more overcrowded. They are poorly designed – lower floors lack ventilation and have little or no natural lighting. Water and sanitation provision are inadequate. They offer limited outside space and amenities such as schools or recreation areas.

Overcrowded, sub-standard housing has been linked to social and health problems, which may affect women and children disproportionately (PDF). The flights of stairs present major challenges for small children, the elderly, the sick and disabled.

A plan showing the layout of a typical tenement (Image: Baraka Mwau and Sammy Muinde)

What does the future hold?

What are the policy, health and social implications of this expanding generation of tenement tenants? To date, research on Nairobi tenements is scant. Research on upgrading programmes largely focuses on shack housing; any emerging research on tenements tends to focus on the political economy of tenement production and the nature of housing from the planning and design perspectives.

As the EARF project highlights, more work is needed to understand the social, economic and health impacts of tenement living.

As well as the socio-economic impacts, further concerns arise from fraught tenant-landlord relations. Despite unregulated planning, tenement renting often carries formal ‘contract-like’ agreements. Powerful landlords pursue their interests, often at the expense of vulnerable tenants.

In the absence of foreseeable improvements, it is unclear how tenants will mobilise to demand improved housing conditions. Likewise, concerns arise on how policy interventions will fare after decades of piecemeal slum upgrading projects.

Policy and practice will need to revisit the root causes of what is shaping the transition to ‘low-cost’ housing in Nairobi. While the recent comeback of Kenya’s government in housing is commendable, the current focus on greenfield areas (developments built on new pieces of land) and redeveloping old estates (PDF) will need complementary programs for addressing living conditions in existing shacks and the rapidly expanding tenement areas.

About the author

Baraka Mwau is a consulting urban planner and researcher, and a consultant for the East African Research Fund project, Kenya

Twins on Tour And The Ace Cook are Back

Apologies for the long delay. Here is Chapter 11 – Uganda.

https://spark.adobe.com/page/QXOVYS3tjvDLh/

 

 

The Twins on Tour and The Ace Cook. Adventures in Nairobi

Click below to read Chapter 10

https://spark.adobe.com/page/zUQVWtKgIIyZa/

 

I Have Seen the Future – an essay by Diana Mitlin (photos by Baraka Mwau)

I have seen the face of the “housing” future.  It is chilling.

Jack is not sure where we are going. Or at least he knows where but not how to get there. I would guess at being somewhere behind Mukuru, in the bowels of Mukuru. This is not the informal settlement. This is the industrial Mukuru. We are dwarfed in the car by the size of the trucks motoring on either side of us. Teetering alongside us. Swaying their weight towards us as the potholes unbalance then and then they righten themselves. It is the tankers that give me a sense of unease. Warning signs alerting to the dangerous contents.

The power, the dominance of the space. This lies in the intensity of activity rather than in the scale of the buildings or the breadth of the road. Everywhere was activity. By the side of the road, a simple yellow truck was being scrubbed down by a couple of men. Only to be sent back into the mud once its battered body had been cleaned. There was the idea of a road that had been worn down by the weight of the traffic. This was more a collection of potholes than a road.

We will wait for Kim here, Jack told me. And we sat in relaxed silence. A man emerged and asked Jack to pull back the car. The man was working from the phone booth that was at the back of the parking space. He dusted down the outside and the shelf. Began to pull out the wares. Someone came up to buy airtime.

Kim emerged from the sea of moving traffic. Hand shakes. We followed him. We failed to follow him. Somehow we had emerged in a road I recognised alongside shops that lead into the Mukuru informal housing. Jack phoned. Spoke. Closed the phone. We turned around. Eventually we emerged onto a major – and modern – road; double lines of traffic streaming in straight lines with not a pothole in sight. In front was Kim. Alongside was the railway track. On the other side of the railway track a residential road.  We had to cross the mud to the line and then to the other road. We drove on. It took time for an opening to emerge.  We followed Kim up the road. To the point where they were still building it. Jack chatted to Kim. We drove back. The issue was where to park. Jack was nervous about leaving the car. Kim thought it was safe. Jack still nervous. Kim phoned. We can park here, he said. They know it is us.

I was picking this up. Should I leave my bag in the car, I asked. Leave it, suggested Jack. Jack and Kim were still chatting as we walked into the neighbourhood. I was following. We moved beyond the ground level market stalls into the buildings. We went on. At the beginning the vistas were open, the streets were broad. Kim greeted someone.  A man. Medium height. Slightly stocky build. Friendly, confident, interested. A man showing us work he was proud of. He was dressed casually, warmly because it was a chilly morning in Nairobi. His left hand was in a black glove.

He led us on. Into the spaces between the buildings. Some kind of jungle of buildings. It was not that they were disorderly. But that they encroached on space. Coming close. The roads were being made. There was mud and concrete slabs. Pipes. Sand.  There was mud and I carefully stepped away from the soft mud, onto the rough rocks and the harder compacted soil. Or I tried to step carefully. When we returned to the car a couple of hours later I realised I had not been successful. Jack and Kim had kept their shoes clean; I had not.

I have forgotten his name. I find it again later; Mr Mwangi. The manager who so kindly showed us around. He wanted to marry Kim’s sister. That is what I understood. But even now I am not sure that my understanding was correct. It was a peripheral speech. That I understood. Jack had brought me here to understand tenement finances. Or, as I said to him over lunch, now I better understand your challenge with the structure owners.

Mr Mwangi brought us to a temporary structure. Not a porta-cabin, more of a substantial shack. There were chars and a desk. Slightly shabby. This was a place where work was done. We were about five metres from the entrance of one block, about ten metres from the entrance to a second. There was the muddy walkway between. People were criss- crossing the spaces. Walking with purpose. There were a few curious glances at my white skin, but little real interest.

This is the welfare office, the man with the black glove told us. We organise the infrastructure here. I am the manager of the area. The tenement owners pay me for this.  They pay me KSh30,000 per block to the welfare association. There is additional money they pay for the roads, water, power.  We do it all, he tells us. The government does nothing here. Only the police station is staffed by the state, built by the tenement owners. It is helpful for security.

Kim explains that we are interested to see around. I am not sure what the story is; what the story about me is. That does not matter. Focus, smile, extract information. Keep it light; find the details.

We walk out and  on. We turn the corner. There is a different scale of road building. Machines carefully moving between the buildings. Larger stones. Shifting of rubble. We walk back onto the mud and the pathway. Someone catches up with us; looks at me. Talks to the man with the black glove. Smiles at me and Jack. “I have come to see my investment”, he explains. “I have invested here.” Super smart and casual jeans. Walking slightly ahead of two men; slightly larger, more than slightly protective, aligned to walk behind.

Everywhere we walk there are blocks. Most are about ten stories, some are eight and some are nine. Occasionally there are empty spaces. Occasionally just two stories. Construction is ongoing. There are single blocks and double blocks. Marking out territories with different colours. Colours and design define where one plots ends and another begins.

There are clothes at every window. Hanging out to dry. But not much activity on the street. The cooking that is outside is commercial. There are street foods stalls even now when most of the residents are away at work.  There are taps for water close to the doorways. At some there is a group waiting in turn to fill their containers.

The ground floors are rented out to businesses. As we move back towards the main road then the commercial activities spread up to the first floor as well. We walk passed a woman selling clothes on the bend of a road that is newly finished. Mr Mwange says something to her; she replies. Later Jack tells me he was reproving her for being too close to the traffic. The cars and vans pass within inches. Driving slowly as they navigate the space. Beside the woman and the clothes is a young girl; about seven or eight. She stares out.

Mr Mwangi talks with pride about the infrastructure that is being improved. How great the roads look when they are tarmacked. A new building has been completed. A banner is advertising for tenants. “Free wifi and free DSTV, Plentiful water”. Freshly painted walls in orange and white claim attention and quality. Water is provided throughout the neighbourhood; but on the ground floor only. It must be carried up without lifts. Power is paid for separately.

Mr Mwangi talks about the building that is ongoing. And the quality? What about the quality of the building; I have heard some of the tenements may fall down? He shrugged: it depends on the engineer. These are good, he adds gesturing around us. But one fell down nearer the river.

The residents? Factory workers who can afford. Those who want to move out of the slums. It is mostly factory workers who live here, we are told. They walk to work. They earn KSh500 a day ; they work 25 days a month (as long as they can). So they earn KSh 12500 each month. It costs them KSh 5000 for a room on the inside of the neighbourhood; or KSh 7000 for one alongside finished roads and with improved services, nearer to the outside.  All the rooms are 10 ft by 10 ft.  Those that can rent two rooms. But the wages are so low; Mr Mwangi explains. People cannot afford two rooms.

There are communal services on each floor; toilets. The water is carried up from below. When we walk up to look at the view from the top floor we pass a collection of containers waiting by the toilets. There is some water dripping through the building. The stairs are irregular in the spacing. They have been tiled to give a better feel to the place. We step onto the balcony at the end of the hallway from which the doors access the rooms. We stare over the neighbourhood. Someone brushing his teeth apologies and steps passed us to enter his room again.

When we go down Mr Mwangi apologies. He needs to go. Some paint is coming. He has to sign the bills and arrange for the delivery to be where it is needed.

We move swiftly out of the neighbourhood. I am disorientated by the turns. Suddenly we are on the road on the side of the railway track. We walk down the tarmac road. The car is still there. Mr Mwangi nods to the people selling in the shacks alongside. We shake hands and say goodbye.

Doors are locked at 2200. I remember now. There was an earlier conversation; in the meeting room at the office. Someone was explaining to someone else why not everyone prefers the newly built tenements. Why some prefer the shacks in the informal settlements.

Plots of 33 by 90 feet. 14 rooms a floor. Buildings to 8-10 stories. Let’s make it nine storeys plus the ground floor. That makes it KSh 630,000 a month. The ground floor rentals are Ksh15000-20000. Say KSh 150000; that is another KSh 210,000. And on the busier streets the first floor as well had commercialised. So let’s say each block has an income of Ksh 840,000 a month. Or KSh 10,080,000 a year. Say KSh10 million. That is $100,000 in an annual income.

And to build? KSh 15 million for the land. Ksh 18 million to build. There is, he added, an additional KSh3 million for foundations. The soil is black cotton. It is necessary to go down three storeys; to take it all way. Nothing much in maintenance. So KSh 36 million to build; that is US$ 360,000.

Each plot is 33 by 90 feet. 2970 square feet or 275 square metres. Say two people in each room. That is 252 people. A few more metres along each building. Maybe 1.5 metres per person? Imagine, Jack tells me, when the people come back from the factories. These roads are packed. Really packed. It is hard to walk.

We learn little about who these investors are. Mr Mwangi, Jack tells me, may have four blocks. But that is a small holding. As we are walking out of the area, Kim points out one of the blocks, double plot, smartly painted, right on the edge of the area by the main room. That is owned by senior police and Government officers, he tells us. The judges, they probably own many buildings. But they never come here. They probably do not even know where their blocks are.

We visited the tenement because Jack is trying to tease out in his mind the possible options to move forward in Mukuru.

Jack wants to understand these structure owners. He wants to understand what the “one stop shop” to tenement construction and tenement management regimes really mean. Find the agent, put down the money. And there is the block. The structure owners, he explained, they are excited about this possibility in Mukuru. Some already know they have limited options. They don’t have this kind of capital. But others.  Others are thinking that the redevelopment of Mukuru is opening up this possibility for asset accumulation. Structure owners are saying they don’t want the SPA; they have their own organization. How might a housing solution be structured that gets them on side? That uses their capital?

The residents who come here? They want the services, Jack explains. They want to be clean. The slum rents are KSh 2500 or 3000 for a room of this side. They pay more to be respectable.

Mukuru demands thinking outside of the box. They have 100,000 hhs in Mukuru; there is nothing in the box that is plausible.

 

 

Kibera Evictions by Jack Makau

Its Day 8 – Demo Day

The procession of 300 to 400 slum dwellers get moving at 10 am. There is a small smartphone army of NGOs who are continuously dashing ahead of the procession to snap away. Some idiot runs forward and takes a selfie. To the dismay of the federation one of the partner NGOs has hired a marching band to lead the procession.

From Freedom Corner – a memorial to the struggle for Kenya’s Independence – the orderly musical procession makes it way to the Ministry of Transport. The Ministry houses the ‘Multi-Sectoral Committee on Unsafe Structures’, who are behind the Nairobi evictions.

As the procession approaches the Ministry of Transport, the gates are quickly closed and padlocked. First, the lead team asks to speak to the Minister’s office: they inform that their only interest is to deliver a petition. There’s frantic activity behind the gates; a Mercedes car parked near the gate is driven away. Faces are peering from the Ministry offices. Two armed police officers come to the gate. After a couple of protest songs, there still is no response from the Ministry. The perfect cue that the slum dwellers are waiting for. Time to breach the awkward, but for me rather comfortable, civility. Free at last!!!

A cry rises above the marching band, to retreat from the Ministry’s gate and back to the street. The strategy is to block the road. Someone says in Swahili, “a little tear gas is good for the soul”. The road is quickly occupied. A new energy is starting to take over. The script goes out the window, and is replaced by an anger, that has seemed to be sadly absent in the last week. Another voice demands, “Demolish our homes, we are coming to take your fancy houses”. The blocked traffic starts to turn back. Pedestrians hesitate to walk past. Some in the NGO crowd start to drift to the edges of the crowd – distancing themselves and pretending to be documenting on their phones.

“Kumekujwa” someone says. The nearest English equivalent is, “there is an arrival”. An unmarked Land Cruiser with darkened windows parks a few meters away – no one comes out. On the other side a police truck stops and half a dozen police jump out. No one misses the teargas canisters in their hands, no one stops singing and jiggling. To show defiance some people sit and lie on the road. I suddenly have a deep need to find an outer position to take a panoramic picture on my iPhone. The KYC TV camera guy has the camera strung behind his back and has his right hand raised in the symbol for struggle. I’m certain his KYC TV teacher/mentor in Cape Town would be horrified. I force myself to jump up and down instead.

Battle hardened federation mama, Emily, engages the lead officer. “All we want is to give them our petition – why are they wasting our time? Tell them to come take it, I need to go home before the kids come from school”. “You”, the officer barks back, “are causing a traffic problem – you need to get off the road”. Emily’s response is lost.  The crowd is suddenly wailing. I look both ways, Damn! nowhere to run; we are bang at the centre of the roadblock.

Now Emily has the officer’s arm and is marching to the Ministry gate. Then the officer is talking to someone behind the gate. Then a voice from the federation team near the gate commands, “give them one lane!” . The crowd is upset. Someone starts a countdown, the crowd has turned to the gate and is counting down – we are going to storm the gate. I turn around, and some onlookers have their hands inside of their blazers – pistols are being pulled out.  All the four doors of the unmarked car are now open. The marching band are across the road, opposite the Ministry’s gate. The band are hurriedly packing their instruments.

Within the crowd the federation leaders know there is a deal being done at the gate. They start herding the crowd, “let’s give them one lane for five minutes, they don’t open we take the road again”, they shout.  Reluctantly, the crowd is marshalled to one lane. The tensed police stand down too. The moment passes, I breathe out.

The gate is partially opened and a few people are let in.

In 1997 Papa, now 67 years, was part of the first Kenyan slum dweller exchange to South Africa. He is first through the gate. Ezekiel, federation president and the man with the script and petition is in next. Emily, with the lead policeman still in hand, goes in next. A mostly troublesome “senior youth and suspected police informant” muscles in. Next, petite and clad in a hijab, a new but passionate leader from Mukuru slums. They want to shut the gate, then a mama squeezes in – no one is sure which settlement she’s from and she’s holding the arm of another mama. The negotiating team is in and the gate is shut. Someone says, “that last one is a real stupid”, everyone laughs. Someone starts singing, everyone joins in. Symbols sound and the marching band is back.

45 minutes later, the team emerges with the Housing Secretary. He mounts a chair behind the gate and is handed the protest mega phone. He lyrics all lovely things, “we need a national database of slum dwellers”, “government will build 200,000 social houses…”. The crowd listen a little and then someone shouts, “and the demolitions?”. He calms the crowd and announces, “we will do the demolitions with you”. The crowd starts wailing. He calms the crowd again and corrects himself, “we will work with you to resettle people living in dangerous places”.

Ezekiel then addresses the crowd. He reports the deal they’ve made and is heckled. “We want blood, we want justice, we sent you to drag them out here by the ears and you bring us an agreement instead?”, they shout. And it truly seems all too easy.

Everyone is exhausted, plans to deliver other petitions are abandoned and the crowd melts easily into the street. Soon, we cannot see the other civil society organisations. We get Ezekiel and Emily to debrief over lunch, overlooking the Ministry.

To start, they narrate the proceedings of the meeting. By any standard applicable it sounds like a totally shambolic affair, until…

First, the woman from an unknown settlement jumps right in and accuses the housing ministry of interfering with the selection of representatives to a slum upgrading committee in her settlement. And as her tone rises, the stupid one breaks down and starts crying about the pain she feels about how government has treated her family. Emily tries to establish some sanity, but the ‘senior youth’ jumps up, whips a Kenyan flag from his waist and says he’ll hang himself right there with the flag. “Better I kill myself right here than you come at night to kill me and my children in my shack”, he shouts. Its going terribly. Emily ask them to calm down and asks senior leader Papa to speak. Papa in turn, with complete gravitas, begins by informing that he went to New York in October last year. “And even though I missed my flight, they got me to the next flight and when I got there… ” Again Emily has to jump in. Finally, Ezekiel comes in and does the proper representation and also asks to read the petition in summary. The Housing Secretary takes notes and just as he prepares to respond, the passionate new leader in a hijab, says she would like to share. And share she does. She talks about the federation’s Special Planning Area project in Mukuru slums, probably all she knows about Muungano.  Emily is concerned that the Secretary now looks totally dumfounded.

When he finally gets the chance to speak he says, first he has listened with complete attention because he can see that this cannot be an NGO organised protest, “You people, I can see are genuinely from the slums”. He also observes that there is a lot of pain and third, the petition. The petition, he says, carries everything that the government aims to achieve. He further says what government would like is a database of all slum dwellers, nationally, that are sitting in dangerous and unsuitable places and an engagement with them and Muungano to discuss their resettlement. Emily let’s him know: “all you needed do was ask”.

Day 9 – The Housing Secretary calls the federation chair early, to ask for the other petitions with people’s signatures. He will deliver them himself to the Governor…

At the end, it was all about the protest, the representatives, and the petition. All three could only be delivered so elegantly and successfully by the people who live through the trauma of demolition – by the federation.

A Poem Written by the Late Patrick Magebhula

Illegal by Patrick Magebhula

The rent is too high

So I move to build my own shack.

“It is illegal” they say.

 

The house they planned and built for my parents is too small

So I move and build my own house.

“It is illegal” they say.

 

Violence destroyed our homes

We flee and end up on no man’s land.

“It is illegal” they say.

 

We are not employed.

So we make ways and means to provide for ourselves.

“It’s illegal” they say.

 

They sell vodka. We sell gaveen.

They sell Heineken. We sell Jubas.

They have bars. We have shebeens.

They have their supermarkets. We have our spaza shops.

They build casinos. We have our own gambling dens.

“It’s illegal” they say.

 

Their methods of survival are correct, honest and proper.

Ours are not. That’s what they tell us anyway.

They follow us with dogs and with bulldozers

To sniff out our Permissions to Occupy and to demolish our shacks.

If we bribe them they let us sell our gaveen and our dagga

Then they chase us and shoot us for cars they say we stole.

But when they have caught us they take bribes

And sell the cars for themselves.

“It’s legal” they say.

 

They promise jobs, houses and education

But in the end we get evictions, threats and corruption.

So I guess we settle for the right to survive.

Since we cannot ever meet their standards

We set our own.

They lock us up.

“You are illegal” they say.

 

The Subjects Matter

It was Ben Bradlow, an erstwhile colleague of mine at SDI, who gave this documentary its name (Age of Zinc). He also helped me develop its original structure. We unashamedly borrowed from Dos Passos’s “USA”, with each chapter divided into three segments – text, associated quote and related photo. Ben was also responsible for gathering most of the quotes and some of the photos for the first three chapters, the life stories of an Indian, South African and Kenyan Slum Dweller leader.

Prof. Diana Mitlin assisted me in the production of the fourth chapter, the first life story of a woman slum dweller leader – this time from Zimbabwe. The fifth chapter was the collective effort of 3 young professionals from the SDI Secretariat – Skye Dobson, Ariana Macpherson and Mara Forbes.

While I like to believe that the quality of those first five stories was of a consistently high standard, I have to acknowledge that in my capacity as editor and co-originator, I allowed the structure and more importantly the original intention to somewhat slip away.

Most of the first chapter was written by the person who was its subject. Patrick Magebhula Hunsley happened to be a gifted poet and writer in addition to being an incomparable community organiser for whom mere changes of illusion had become intolerable, long before the illusion of change in his beloved country had been exposed. Since Patrick wrote his own story there was very little mediation between his lived reality and its representation.

Patrick Magebhula Hunsley, South Africa

Our next chapter cast a spotlight on the extraordinary life of the iconic Jockin (Arputham), Indian Slum Dweller and founder of SDI. In this instance the sheer fascination with his exceptional life history was coupled with careful extrapolation of information from interviews and from the sensitive and insightful writing of David Satterthwaite, himself a renowned urbanist and one of Jockin’s close associates. But the shift had already been made. Jockin’s story, as true as it tried to be to his own words, was a small but not insignificant shift from autobiographical reality to biography, the first discrete shuffle in the direction of literature.

Jockin Arputham, India

The steady dilution continued into the third chapter, the life story of Joseph Kimani,  Kenyan slum dweller and NGO activist.  Interestingly enough this was a return to an autobiographical format, but it was an autobiography extracted from tape recorded interviews. Ironically this highlighted the limitations of the interlocutors. This is not because we overstepped the mark – we remained painfully conscious of the risk of ascribing our interpretation to the experiences of the subject of the story – but because the form of intermediation – the recorded interview – although more immediate than the written word, required a specialised expertise we did not possess. This became even more evident in the final chapter, which profiled Katana Gorretti from Uganda, when we replaced telling quotes with extracts from  recorded interviews. As the cliche goes: what we gained on the swings we lost on the roundabouts.

Katana Goretti, Uganda

Even when we told the story of the life of Sekai Chiremba, community leader from Zimbabwe the “voice” is as evidently the voice of the interlocutor as it was when we told Kimani’s story.

It is impossible to divorce representation from class and culture, that is from the society that produces it. Representation still has the ability to take on a life of its own once it enters the public sphere.  There will always be a gap between intention and realisation, “original” in the form of lived experience and “copy” in the form of interpretation. And there will always be a dynamic interface between the two. 

Age of Zinc is not a mouthpiece for SDI, although it almost metamorphosed into that role with each progressive chapter. As important a player as SDI has become in the struggle against poverty it is vtal that the Age of Zinc is rescued from such a task. While it needs to be rescued from SDI it needs to advance the project of a number of its founders – especially Patrick Magebhula and Jockin Arputham. They were always unerringly clear that most (not all) professionals and academics in the urban poverty space, given their links to development assistance, were able to develop and maintain a kind of  “hegemonic culture”, which propagated their own values and norms, with “their feet in the slums but their stomachs in the boardrooms”, so that they became the developers of “common sense” values for all, including and especially the urban poor.  In their own ways both Jockin and Patrick devoted a great deal of their prodigious energy to challenging this notion that professional, academic, upper class and elite champions for social justice articulated values for social change that represented “natural” or “normal” values for all members of society – especially the homeless and landless urban poor.

But in actual fact Jockin and Patrick’s message has been consistently misunderstood. They were certainly cautious about the role of academics and professionals, recognising their capacity to appropriate people’s struggles and redefine them according to their own class and cultural interests, but it is a logic defying leap to impute that they were anti-professional and anti-academic. (It has to be acknowledged that a number of their followers and supporters, professionals and slum-dwellers, have also leapt to this reductionist conclusion).  They were not against professional knowledge. They were powerful advocates for people’s knowledge. They have always argued for a counter-culture, a counter-hegemony of ideas, for the need to develop alternative values and an alternative poverty eradication and development agenda that emanates from the slum dwellers themselves, and is articulated equally by grassroots/community voices and by professionals. The critical issue has always been whose ideas and values are being espoused and championed. The tension between representation and reality indicates that the direction ought to come from the slums, the favelas, the barrios, the mjondolos, not from boardrooms, NGO offices, development assistance headquarters or from government buildings. Of course there will be people from these environments who will champion, amplify and add value to the ideas and aspirations of the grassroots, but it is a thin line between affirmation and appropriation.

This second attempt at reviving the Age of Zinc is in honour of this vision, an attempt to discover, capture and engage with voices of the urban poor, to contribute to a counter-hegemonic understanding of important notions like poverty eradication, informality, redistribution, inclusion – an understanding that percolates upwards instead of tricking down.