Before the mass revolt in Kenya spread countrywide in June, it had started in the informal settlement area of Mathare, in Nairobi, following forced evictions after flooding in the area. Wairimu Gathimba writes about how this wave of brutal action in the city was simply the latest in a long history of brutal evictions. Gathimba looks at the long struggle by residents to remain in the city in the face of such evictions, and what we can learn from their battle to keep their homes.
By Wairimu Gathimba
At the Madaraka Day celebrations in Bungoma this year, President William Ruto gave a lengthy speech where among many things, he (re)affirmed his commitment to Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA), gave a firm warning to land grabbers and boasted of several of his government’s achievements including how during his controversial visit to the US, he was able to negotiate “…the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, an instrument which has enhanced access to the US market for African exports, and catalysed the rapid growth of Kenyan exports, especially in the textile and apparels industry.”
Meanwhile, 400km away, in Kenya’s capital city Nairobi, residents in the neighbourhoods of Mathare, Mukuru, and Kibera were once again facing demolitions. This time, the demolitions followed widespread flooding in the city, after which the government sought to crack down on those who have built on riparian reserves along the city’s rivers. The disproportionate focus of this crack-down on informal settlements, however, raises questions. Various other neighbourhoods in the city also experienced flooding; the UN Avenue in the diplomatic blue zone of Gigiri was closed for a while following flooding, and in its neighbouring settlement of Runda, we saw the city’s affluent moving around in boats as the raging waters of Ruaka river left their home compounds unspared.
Such ‘segregated’ action is not new in the machinations of the city. A lot has been written of Nairobi’s colonial hangovers, not least because of the continued class basis of the city’s geography 60 years after independence and the way access to city services is spread along these same lines. Land, both in the urban and rural areas, has always been the key arena in which Kenya’s colonial and post-colonial (read neo-colonial) elite have expressed their priorities.
Under the racial hierarchy of the Kenyan colonial government, Europeans inhabited the cooler suburbs to the West; the Asians were relegated to the North and part of the East, while Africans mostly settled in the Eastern and Southern parts of the city. The areas to the East, where Africans settled, were densely populated as the colonial government discouraged the provision of large-scale public housing to limit the excessive influx of Africans into the city, which had been envisioned as a white city.
Africans were only meant to be temporary residents of the city on a work basis, but as their populations increased as they fled the reserves upcountry to make ends meet elsewhere, so did the burgeoning of the informal(ized) settlements they created. Despite this, the city’s development plans ignored these settlements, and thus, they were locked out of the provision of essential infrastructure. Nairobi’s 1948 Master Plan and other major urban development plans entirely neglected informal settlements, and 60 years after independence, little, if any, planning in these settlements exists, and when there are ‘reforms’, it is often done piecemeal through small, boutique projects led by civil society actors.
Today, over 60% of the city’s population lives in these settlements, which occupy just above 5% of the land area of Nairobi. In 1995, this figure was just slightly lower at 55%; which Graham Aalders argues mean that informal settlements should not be perceived as isolated “pockets of poverty” that we can continue to ignore but as part and parcel of the city where most of its population lives. For the city’s middle-class inhabiting other parts of Nairobi such as along Thika Road or those in the more affluent suburbs, it is easy to think of these neighbourhoods in this manner.
In the course of my interaction with these settlements as a member of the Kenyan social justice movement (most social justice centers are in Nairobi’s Eastlands) and through my work as a researcher, I have come to find that residents possess a very different view of themselves and the spaces they inhabit. In place of viewing these places as “pockets of poverty”, I have come to think of them as self-built pro-poor neighbourhoods, where residents are able to survive in a city that was never meant for people like them.
When I asked her why she returned to Mukuru following the 2021 demolitions, one resident explained to me how, in Mukuru, she can survive on the Ksh10,000 (US$78) she makes monthly, paying rent, paying fees for one child in high school and another in university and feeding her family. Following the Expressway-led demolitions in Mukuru, she was forced to move to Pipeline, where she told me she found it very hard to survive, even struggling to put food on the table because of the expensive rent.
Another 65-year-old woman who has lived in Mukuru kwa Njenga since the early 1980s told me she returned following the 2021 demolitions because she was able to enjoy some dignity there; she had her own Fresh Life toilet on her compound, could use the clothing lines as freely as she desired and could plant some sukumawiki outside her two-room house.
This is not to say that these neighbourhoods do not have their problems; residents themselves are profoundly aware of the issues they face in these settlements. In talking about the issue with the Expressway demolitions of 2021 in Mukuru kwa Njenga, one resident told me that:
We know the importance of roads. This is a ghetto, we experience floods and fires sometimes, and we need fire engines and other emergency responders to be able to get to us. We understand these challenges exist. We understand roads benefit the public, even if it takes a long time for us to see the benefits.… But what happened was that they demolished entire villages. It was total destruction. I have never seen a government devour its people like that.
Despite the “ghetto-like” conditions they live in, residents of Mukuru and Mathare have, over the years, developed a deep sense of belonging and even appreciation for these neighbourhoods. Many people I have spoken to in both communities were born there, and many arrived there as children or young adults, staying in these places for four, five decades. The statement “huku ndio ocha” (‘this is our hometown’) is one I’ve heard one too many times. Yet when government officials arrive in informal settlements to carry out demolitions, they often tell residents they should return to the places on the back of their IDs. The assumption in this statement is that these residents are rural migrants who have ties back ‘upcountry’ and can resume lives there at the drop of a hat. Yet this is not the case. At a forum I attended in early June following the evictions in Mathare, a resident in her 50s told me that she has lived since she was six, while many others talked about how they were born in the neighbourhood.
This is not particularly surprising and is in line with the colonial government’s visions of Kenyans as temporary residents of cities who are just here to work, or to put it simply, tenants at the government’s will, who are inhabitants for as long as it is convenient. When the reigning administration needs to put up a ‘pet legacy project’ to signify it has been working as in the case of the Expressway, or to offer some semblance of a response to a flood crisis (despite ignoring the meteorological warnings of floods and even forcing the met department director to apologize for his prediction) as is the case currently, the residents of Nairobi’s informal settlements become disposable, required to move at no notice. The city, with its grand visions, as outlined in various strategic plans such as “Nairobi Metro 2030 Strategy: A Vision for a World-Class Metropolis”, Vision 2030, etc., considers these locations removable “stains” on an aspiring world-class city. Once locked out of the colonial city, the workers residing in Nairobi’s informal settlements are again excluded from the post-colonial “world-class metropolis.”
Yet, as Wangui Kimari writes, even though these locations may be considered ‘stains’ on the aspiringly modern metropolis, they endure as a defining feature of its landscape. They refuse to be erased, shaping a significant part of the city’s culture and forming their own popular economies, whether through the malls of Eastleigh or thrift markets such as Gikomba. In the context of demolitions, residents refuse erasure by returning to sites they were evicted from within months of demolition. Indeed, at the forum in Mathare I attended, I could already see a new structure being put up on one of the demolished plots. A community organizer in Mukuru kwa Njenga recently told me, “sisi tumeamua kukwama huku” (‘We have decided to stick here’).
In such instances, we see rebuilding on demolished sites emerge as resistance, a way in which residents who inhabit spaces that many other actors (public and private) want them out of refuse to let go of their claim and their homes. Residents often understand that their inhabitation of spaces that are central in the city is unwanted; a resident of Mukuru once mentioned to me understands that the land they live on is like a “hot cake” due to its proximity to the CBD, the airport and the Industrial Area and that “they have no benefit”, because they do not pay most of the rents (house rents, taxes, etc.,) the city would hope to extract from its citizens. Or in other words, these residents of neighborhoods have escaped the rigidity of market-driven systems which would expect that they only occupy land if they can pay premium prices for it.
For its “hot cake” nature, such land remains subject to a variegation of ownership claims from multiple interests. First, are residents, who lay claim to the land by virtue of occupation for decades, decades over which, in light of being locked out of formal land tenure systems, they have even developed their own popular land transfer/purchase agreements. A resident of Mukuru kwa Reuben once explained to me that the buyer and seller simply meet with their witnesses and a village elder and sign an agreement, after which cash exchanges hands and the land is recognized as the buyer’s. Residents perceive of themselves as legitimate inhabitants of such land, and even in the event of state-ordered evictions, expect compensation and relocation. Second are the private actors who are clearly networked with the governing power. Ownership claims from this group often stem from the 1980s and the 1990s, when Moi often allocated land to his cronies as a political reward. Both parties find themselves embroiled in lengthy court battles, and as these go on, residents remain on the land, even if under uncertain conditions.
These uncertain, under-constant-negotiation, intricacies of occupation, however, become flattened by the state in the typical Kenyan fashion of “orders from above” when deemed necessary. In 2021, there were demolitions in Mukuru kwa Njenga “necessitated” by the Expressway, while in 2024, there are demolitions in Mathare, Mukuru, and Kibera “necessitated” by floods. In these two instances, eviction orders are legitimized by promises of prosperity (the Expressway) or public safety (floods) to carry out evictions that would otherwise attract immense backlash under normal conditions.
Even then, demolitions are carried out with a heavy-hand, contrary to the law, as laid out in previous judgements on evictions. The current demolitions, for example, are primarily carried out at night and over the weekend. For these reasons, residents distrust the intentions behind such demolitions, often suspecting that private interests are at play. After over 40,000 people were left homeless in Mukuru kwa Njenga in 2021 following a round of evictions related to the Expressway – the Expressway link road meant to pass through the settlement ended up not even passing through it, reinforcing the resident’s beliefs that the Expressway was just an excuse to reorder the space into a more desirable world-class form. Despite their bulldozers being on-site, the Nairobi Metropolitan Service later denied involvement in these evictions.
In Mathare, the same views are currently being expressed. Following the revelation of the orders ’to return’ to the location at the back of one’s ID at the forum mentioned earlier, a woman asked, “Wanataka tutoke Nairobi nani abaki uku?” (‘They want us to vacate and leave this place to who?’) and was answered “Wao na watoto wao” (‘Them and their kids’) by others in the focus group. And in both Mukuru and Mathare, residents also report being extorted by various actors. In Mukuru kwa Njenga, a resident showed me a receipt of payment to a company that claims ownership of the land there, and in Mathare, administrators at a school recounted to the Nation newspaper how they were asked to part with Ksh1 million (US$7.500) so that the school is spared demolition.
With such things happening, we must question the very nature of the official narrative of eviction and be more perceptive about how evictions are conducted in the name of public good but are often just points at which state, county government, and private interests converge to form an opportune moment for the erasure of “stains” on Nairobi’s modernist visions for itself. And as residents rebuild on the sites of demolitions once again, we must, as Kimari writes, open our eyes to the issues of the very existence of these informal settlements and advocate and campaign for national land reform, and social justice for all.
Wairimu Gathimba is a writer and researcher within Kenya’s social justice movement.
Featured Photograph: Destruction of a slum in Kibera (17 November 2009).
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