The Dutch tourists came well prepared for the walking safari: strong shoes and sunscreen, backpacks and bottled water. Ahead lay an afternoon visiting one of Kenya’s most recognisable sights — but one that rarely features in tourist brochures.
“It might seem a bit strange to come here,” said Eric Schlangen, as the guide led him towards the sea of tin-roofed shacks that constitute Kibera, often described as one of the world’s largest slums. “But I wanted to see how people live in this country, not just the animals.”
Slum tourism is taking off in Kenya. Several local organisations have started selling guided trips through Kibera, a short drive from the luxury hotels that serve most foreign visitors in Nairobi.
For about $32, tourists are promised a glimpse into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into tiny rooms along dirt paths littered with excrement-filled plastic bags known as “flying toilets”, as one tour agency explains on its website.
While Kibera has long been an obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries and film crews shooting movies such as The Constant Gardener, its addition to the tourist circuit has stirred debate.
Critics say that unlike township tours in South Africa, which help tell the story of the apartheid struggle, Kibera’s sole attraction is its open-sewer poverty — with residents on parade like animals in a zoo.
“You might argue that it is good for business and that might be truly so, but it smells,” wrote one critic when one of the first tours began in 2007.
Unpleasant whiff aside, the tours have proved popular and at least two new operators have started up in recent months.
Martin Oduor guided the Dutch group for Kibera Tours, which promises that its profits will stay in the local community. He said that the aim was to humanise residents, not degrade them. “We want to demystify this place, that it is so dangerous and sad,” said Oduor as he walked through the slum where he was born and still lives. “People are poor, but they have normal lives.”
Dust whipped through the narrow alleys where vendors sold tins of charcoal and barbecued fish. Children shouted “How are you?” and a woman wondered aloud how the white skins were coping with the sun.
A former local councillor said the tourists were welcome, while a stove-seller frowned at a camera and told a different story.
At an orphanage where the children sleep three to a bed, the Dutch party offered a donation; at a women’s craft shop, they bought trinkets.
As they moved further into Kibera, across a mangled railway line that had been ripped up during last year’s election violence, the path slithered downhill between walls of jagged iron sheets.
Careful steps were required to avoid the black stream littered with telltale plastic bags. Halfway down the slope, Oduor stopped at a community project designed to help end the sewerage problem — a public toilet.
A pot of water was boiling on a gas fire. Oduor asked if anyone knew what type of gas was being used. “Very natural gas,” Schlangen answered correctly — biogas made from human waste.
That was not the only surprise.
“Mzungu [white person], look at the bananas,” a young boy shouted, pointing to the banana plant growing among the shacks.
Further along the railway line, which is flanked by large piles of rubbish, large spinach plants were growing in sacks.
Oduor proudly gestured across the valley to new six-storey blocks of flats, part of a long-awaited slum-upgrading programme launched by the government and the UN last week.
Evening was approaching. Music blared and street vendors were frying potatoes and doughnuts.
Schlangen, who had come to Kenya via Egypt, said that he would remember Kibera as a place of hope.
“This made more of an impression on me than the pyramids of Giza,” he said. – guardian.co.uk