I this two part series, Byawoman walked through the Mathare Valley with a couple of lads who are driving the creative social justice movements of Mathare. The walk began at the Mathare Social Justice Centre through the various wards of Mathare, exiting at the back wall of the Moi Air Base. The six wards of the Mathare slum are Hospital, Huruma, Kiamaiko, Mabatini, Mlango Kubwa, and Ngei and within that are about 13 sub-areas referred to as villages. A special thank you to the creatives and docu-journalist Maurice Oniang’o, who took the photos at the stops we considered safe enough to.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE REALITY OF MATHARE

Think of favours you have needed to ask of a neighbour, a friend, a colleague. Have you ever said, “I need a wall, help me with a wall?” Yes, a wall. The canvas that Mutua and other artists of Mathare use to apply their talent, cope with the unimaginable, sensitise the community and stay away from a life of crime.

Many Kenyans do not know the slum or much about it and if one should say Mathare, the average local would associate it with the Mathari Mental Hospital.

Slum dwellers make up 50-60% of Nairobi’s about 4.5 million population, squeezed in 6% of the city’s land. It is easy to live in a bubble and go about your Nairobi life away from the reality next door. It is also easy to shut it out; it is emotionally heavy to observe and as Wilberforce stated, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know”. It is the kind of poverty that we cannot in any form romanticise, not even through the stories of creativity. It would be unjust to do so.

It may not surprise you that many of us who spend endless hours rebuking poverty and condemning the systems on Twitter have never stepped foot in Mathare (or other slums within Nairobi) nor interacted with the community consisting of about half a million people. Some of whom can only be observed for they are themselves unable to articulate their state of being.

The backyard of the Sanaa Centre where the Mathare River flows

There in-between the Sanaa Centre in the Kosovo village of Mathare – recently co-founded by one ambitious Micko Migra – and the polluted black Mathare River streaming by and carrying with it the smell of despair, overlooking the mabati shacks, stands a girl of no more than two years old, no adult in sight. This sets the scene for a heart-breaking sight of her innocence; oblivious of any other life beyond what she sees and within her a list of various likely futures, should she stay alive: crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, rape, brewing of the illicit alcohol chang’aa as a job … or the one in a couple of hundred thousands who will make it out of the hood. We do not yet know; neither does she.

Governmental and global organisations use the euphemism ‘informal settlement’ to give dignity to a place that is nothing close to dignified and should not at all exist. If our foraging ancestors were to revisit the earth and see this, they would be in complete disbelief of the conditions the human species has allowed to exist despite our cognitive, industrial and scientific revolutions. As Harari rightly said, we have transitioned into an “ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions” – that discrepancy between the revolutions and individual suffering. We proclaim akin to humanist liberalism, that each human being has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We invented human rights but cannot uphold them, for no other reasons but the dominance of imperial capitalistic greed that drives our world order and the inflation of our individual importance versus co-existing in an ecosystem alongside other forms of nature: other people, animals, plants, micro-organisms, water bodies.

How many bags of flour will we keep donating and education fund raising events will we keep having while places like Mathare continue to deteriorate and perpetuate intergenerational poverty, housing school going children, who do not have access to proper sanitation and who themselves end up in drug use and criminal gangs, with the exception of the few we may celebrate as having made it, forgetful that it is the exception, not the rule.

MICKO MIGRA

The Kosovo village of Mathare is among the more deteriorated but peaceful side of Mathare and the village known for its creatives. Among them Micko Migra, who in 2020 founded the Sanaa Centre. Micko and the spoken word poet Anthem Republic came together when they realised they were meeting at different events where performing artists came together, commuting or walking long distances in search of that artistic home and family. They thought, why not create a safe space for creatives at home – at this point being in Kosovo. They saw such a venue as the missing piece of the puzzle in the artistic spaces of Mathare. “Here the artists in the hood can express themselves and their artistic vibe freely and “wapelekane radar,” Micko says, which in the organically evolving sheng language means to keep someone posted/ in the know of the latest.

They pitched their idea to other artists in the hood and were able to secure a room with an alleyway made of iron sheets, which they brought life to through graffiti art. But one cannot ignore the pungent Mathare River struggling to stream through.

“The valley is dominated by darkness, there is no light to show other creatives something that they should look up to,” Micko poignantly says, pointing toward the black river.

Sanaa is centered around several major activities, these are: events where a particular artist is highlighted, podcasts, festivals such as the one coming up in November and this is held in a space in front of the centre about six by six metres in size, surrounded by walls filled with graffiti art done by the hands of Mathare artists such as Mutua Mchoraji and Poolman, who accompany us on this trail through Mathare to see their other work.

Social media has been a great tool for the artists in Mathare; a tool that they rely on extensively to connect with other artists out there and to showcase their work. Despite the fact that the people of Mathare are living below the poverty line, an investment in some data to stay connected is considered essential. The online space, as expressed by Micko, has also been a tool to share information to a scale that they would not be able to without it. We would all agree that post Covid in particular, social media has been essential in driving an agenda.

Micko was born in Mathare and in upper primary he moved with his parents upcountry as the last born who still lived at home. Upon finishing high school he understood that music was his way of being in the world and “I decided to come back to the city and chase my artistic dream,” he explains with a cheeky smile and motioning his hands the way a rapper would on stage. Micko’s vision is to travel the world and impact people with his music, “I want to use my music to advocate for peace, dignity and development,” Micko explains these as the principles guiding the Sanaa Centre: the arts as a peaceful form of activism. “But I also want to entertain the people, I want to make people dance!” The beat of his recent release Feelanga Free, is sure to get one swaying. Micko is also a designer with both graphic design and web designing skills and is currently drawing up some shoe designs as part of his vision.

Micko is Luo and his music falls under the genres of afro Luo, Luo ragga and afro ragga in a street vibe. Ironically, having been born and raised in Mathare, the first language he spoke was Kikuyu. He also considers Sheng among his main languages. However, moving to the countryside, he realised he did not know his own native language and took initiative to learn the Luo language, “I fell in love with it and it’s the language I use in my music,” Micko says.

As we look at the shacks of Kosovo, and it all seems silent from the outside, in most of these homes where the artists live, creation is happening. “We have many youths but we do not have playgrounds, we do not have shared space for youth to interact, so it means the youth are getting creative in whatever small space they have.” Micko did not have a mentor and once again relied on the internet and the other artists in Mathare to learn the trade of his music. Through the Sanaa Centre, Micko hopes other youth can access that mentorship. Micko explains that the artists challenge each other to create more and they then use events to show and test their work, practise among crowds, sometimes freestyle acapella, as he termed it, “And now here I am, I have realised my type of music, I am chasing my dream.”

Micko concludes that the Mathare Valley has all the talent that is needed, from musicians, to painters to videographers and dancers, and all they need is support and opportunity and he believes Sanaa is this family where they will grow and learn from each other. Equipment is a challenge and support in the basic resources, to produce creative work and build the artistic culture, is a gap they hope to fill.

“Art is a soft power that goes a long way, it does not have boundaries, it stores history and it changes people,” Micko says.

MUTUA MCHORAJI & POOLMAN SHOWCASE THEIR GRAFFITI

Both Mutua Mchoraji and Poolman, as he is known, enjoyed art from as early as nursery school. At that time cartoons such as Tom & Jerry were the inspiration. Later in their young adult life – early 20s, they came together to work on various pieces of graffiti, which Mutua introduced Poolman to. They first came together through the Pawa254 art and culture collaborative hub for youth geared toward social change, founded by activist Boniface Mwangi, known for his documentation of Kenya’s Post-Election Violence of 2007/8 – the genesis of his influence in socio-political matters of the country and a supporter of the initiatives such as the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC).

While walking to the Mundika side of Mathare, we cross over narrow and muddy alleys in-between the shacks and make a stop where Mutua grabs a snack from a middle-aged woman frying them in a pan on a jiko. She cuts a bit of brown paper from maize flour packaging she is recycling and serves a spoon full of the snack known as mara for 20 shillings a serving. I am offered a taste and I pick two pieces, clueless of what I am consuming. It tastes a bit like liver and looks like small intestines. I conclude that it is chicken intestines. I ask what mara is and they respond that ‘mara is just mara’.

In Mundika , they show me some graffiti they worked on, displaying Covid safety guidelines. The other key themes of their artwork are crime, drug abuse, police brutality and extrajudicial killings as well as teenage pregnancies, which he says is very common. I spot the European Union logo on one of the walls and I ask of their involvement. Mutua explains that they donated the art supplies and a water tank. I enquire on how many water tanks and he informs me it was but one water tank.

Mutua seems content with the donation, and goes on to tell me how his single mother, upon noticing that he was skilled in drawing, would spare from the little she had to buy him pencils. She never imposed a vision of success on him but supported Mutua from what she was observing of him. Mutua’s practice came from working on graffiti in the Mlango Kubwa ward of Mathare, known for its high rate of crime. He shared his idea of crime prevention through art with the youth of Mlango Kubwa, “They told me, we like your idea, but most of us are thieves, we work in mjengo, so how do we get money for this,” Mutua explains the thin line between creativity and crime. In the daylight you may be working on art together and in the night your friend is part of a gang and the next thing you know, police are looking for him as a suspect. Mutua says that as long as you happen to be seen with a suspected gang member your life is in danger. If they get shot, you get shot too and therefore they have had to be careful about whom they walk with outside of the creative spaces. As we walk past Bondeni, where the smell of the illicit brew catches the senses, Mutua points to the area famous for the extrajudicial killings, including one that prominently made it to the media, covered in Allan Namu’s Africa Uncensored episode The Invisible Line. The claim is that these are criminals who have been warned repeatedly and who have committed violent crimes. Nonetheless, following an incident as that featured in the Invisible Line, there was failure to prove that the young man, brutally murdered, was involved in crime. Even so, the killing of suspects has not offered reform to the ignored causes of Mathare as a home for gangsters. It, on the contrary, perpetuates a culture of bitterness and brutality.

To buy paints, Mutua has had to sometimes sell his shoes. Through his work and that of the other artists, the community of Mlango Kubwa felt that their environment was beginning to feel and look better and they would contribute toward the cost of the paints. After this came the Mathare Green Movement in 2017 launched by Oyunga Pala and the MSJC to make Mathare clean and green, as it once was.

I ask Poolman if he sees himself staying in the hood and he tells me that the aim is always to get out of the hood, but come back to support other youth to do the same.

Our walk continues to Huruma, which is where the slum dwellers relocate if they happen to be doing a little better in life. They move out of the shacks. The Huruma area is however densely populated and known for the poorly built flats that come crumbling down ever so often as seen on the news. People are pacing in both directions, fast, and trade is actively taking place with vendors selling items made of rubber and plastic, vegetables, clean water, clothing items and the like. Huruma, Mutua explains, is also where the teen gangs hang about and participate in both petty and more severe crime when they decide that school will not change their lives. These crimes can take place in broad daylight and include stabbing.

L to R: Eugene, Mutua, Byawoman, Poolman and the Mathare Lil Wayne.

While leaving the Mathare slum, other creatives, who have managed to stay away from crime, Saidi (a graffiti artist) and Eugene (teaches the youth of Mathare dance as his art form), tell me how they try to cope mentally, “But sometimes something in me just feels angry,” Eugene says of their condition and speaks of the resilience it takes to avoid depression.

Saidi doing what he is good at while we chat

A jovial, friendly and harmless but intoxicated young man who used to be the hood’s legendary Mathare United football player Zola joins us. Sadly, a life of drugs got the better of him and even though he still speaks of himself as Zola the footballer, the dream has fallen from its height.

Zola

Eugene receives a call as we walk out of the hood, not far from the Mathare police station. It is his uncle who happens to have spotted him from afar and insists that he wears his mask. This is because he could be the next victim of police brutality from this group of youth whose life may be worth a mask or missing the curfew by a minute, but whose worries and drudgery ranks a mask low on the hierarchy of needs.

Across the road is the barbed wire fence of the Moi Air Base, a stark and cruel division, as outside this fence spread across a couple of hundred metres are vagabonds, whom we would refer to as mad people, covered in soot. Some sniffing on intoxicating substances, some lying down with nonchalance, some chanting in indecipherable tones – or is it a prayer of despair?

Shortly after this interview, Poolman was arrested for graffiti that was termed inciteful on the theme of police brutality. The MSJC was set up to deal with the scale of police brutality in Mathare. While the matter was reported to the MSJC the police still required ‘bail’ of 10,000/- to release Poolman. A couple of weeks later, Mutua informed me that seven young men, suspects, were killed. This is the daily reality of the youth in Mathare. Not just death, but brutal death, as regular as having a cup of tea in the morning.

Poolman

Sustainable change of the Mathare Valley seems far from sight. And while I set out looking for a story of hope, of which I met youth who inspired me to believe in change and to play our part as catalysts, I sincerely questioned the hope for the reformation of the Mathare Valley. This requires intervention far beyond the world of the creatives operating under a government that has “bigger” matters to attend to – BBIs and building expressways for industrialisation in a capital city where report after report have pointed to poor land use and planning as a major constraint to urbanisation, and where residents live mainly in informal conditions. This compelled Byawoman to dig deeper into the failure to reform such spaces and a wonder of what this valley looked like and stood for before it became a slum. This will be featured in part two of this series alongside more on the Green Movement with Wyban who recently authored the book They Were Us: Stories of Victims and Survivors of Police Brutality in Kenya, capturing the stories of The Mothers of Victims & Survivors Network (MVSN).

Connect with the social justice creatives of the Mathare Valley via the Instagram handles and stream Micko’s music on Spotify or Apple Music if you want a good dance with a good message:
@micko.migra
@mutua_arts
@wybanmusic
@poolman_edits
@anthem_republiq
@pawa254
@mothersvictims