Kibera Slum Is Now The face of Kenya Abroad

[Guest guest]

Kibera Slum Is Now The face of Kenya Abroad

Saturday, 19 March 2011 00:12

BY ANDREA BOHNSTEDT

Having just finished the last of her course work for her MBA, Dayo resurfaced

with impressive amounts of energy and dragged me away from my laptop to have

lunch and to solve some of the world's problems. We swiftly dealt with country

perceptions even before food arrived. It was India that had got on her nerves,

or rather India's reputation:

She thought that African countries really needed to take some PR inspiration

from the sub continent: All you ever see are tales of outsourcing glory and

other economic success stories, but she thought the country was no less messy

than most of Africa. And Africa's reputation still isn't anything to write home

about.

So better PR for Africa? I couldn't get very hopped up about this subject: I'm

generally leaning towards a position encapsulated in this internet comment: `You

do not have a perception problem. You have a reality problem'. I.e., I don't

subscribe to the Mutua School of Thought that all problems are made up by

malicious journalists, and usually find that acknowledging and then, more

importantly, addressing problems may be more productive.

But in the end, of course perceptions are important: It doesn't matter much that

you could probably snooze through your holiday at the coast quite happily as

long as there were images of burning slums on CNN.

Thankfully the mental associations between Kenya and the horrors of the

post-election violence faded. They were poison for both tourism and any other

business. But is Kenya back to being seen as the land of lions, elephants and

jumping skinny tribal people with good beadwork?

I find even this image restrictive since there is so much more going on here in

business, in art, well, in life. But as long as Kenya is at least perceived as

safari country, things can't be so bad, right? Even Brand Kenya has the Maasai

Mara on its homepage as a welcome.

But if you're abroad, you might get a completely different impression. It took a

friend in the UK to alert me to this: Comic Relief had sent a bunch of UK

celebrities to live in Kibera. This is good practice:

You're gotta do Kibera. It will help you discover the unexpected fact that even

in the slums, people care about their family, look after their accommodation,

earn a living. This is your spiritual reward of socially responsible tourism:

The moment of recognition that Africans are, astonishingly, really 'like us'

(except `happy with so little'.

At the last book fair in furt, my friend Agatha spotted a woman wearing a

tag `I have worked in Kibera, Africa's largest slum'. The last census may have

found a substantially smaller population than previously assumed, but that's

what Kibera is: Africa's poverty in a button on a jacket. For your

enlightenment.

So this bunch of UK celebrities were made to live in Kibera for a week. I had no

clue of this, and I hadn't really seen anyone of my focus group (read: Facebook

friends/Twitter followers) talk about it either. So I had to rely on my friend

for a recap of what was titled `Slum Survivor' (yes, really):`They were all

given slum families to live with and were suitably horrified and appalled.

Breaking the rules of the game, the comic Lenny Henry - who did a whole lot of

crying on the breast of the slum dweller he was shacked up with - spent GBP800

(about KES110,000) of his own money buying the chap a new shack which didn't

have an open sewer running through the kids bedroom.'

Nice, no? My friend continued: `It was all pretty stereotypical stuff, with the

celebrities serving the traditional role of deus ex machina and the role or

helpfulness of aid never questioned. Nor did the programme-makers appear to

touch on the fact that Kenya has a functioning government whose job is,

notionally, to take on problems like Kibera. And a middle and upper class that

happily ignores the Kibera on its doorstep and whose members would never dream

of slumming it for so much as a week.'

I don't know about the functioning government – right now it seems mostly busy

blackmailing everyone and their pet fish into getting a handful `our sons' out

of their mass-murder court case because the timing would be `inconvenient' for

their political careers (this matters how?) and because it would `endanger

stability' (well, if you know that, do something already!).

But it comes back to the discussion that Dayo and I had: If you sit in the UK

and you're wondering whether you should outsource some of your business to India

or Kenya, then images of shacks with an open sewer in the kids' bedroom won't

help Kenya's case – and it's certainly not a true representation of Kenya.

But it's undoubtedly there: `A pig shouldn't have to live in the conditions that

half of Nairobi lives in', my friend said. `Kenya isn't associated abroad with

lions and elephants any more. Kibera has become as iconic as the leaping maasai

warrior used to be.'

Bohnstedt is an independent risk analyst and publishes the online

business magazine, www.ratio-magazine.com.

[Guest guest]

Kibera Slum Is Now The face of Kenya Abroad

Saturday, 19 March 2011 00:12

BY ANDREA BOHNSTEDT

Having just finished the last of her course work for her MBA, Dayo resurfaced

with impressive amounts of energy and dragged me away from my laptop to have

lunch and to solve some of the world's problems. We swiftly dealt with country

perceptions even before food arrived. It was India that had got on her nerves,

or rather India's reputation:

She thought that African countries really needed to take some PR inspiration

from the sub continent: All you ever see are tales of outsourcing glory and

other economic success stories, but she thought the country was no less messy

than most of Africa. And Africa's reputation still isn't anything to write home

about.

So better PR for Africa? I couldn't get very hopped up about this subject: I'm

generally leaning towards a position encapsulated in this internet comment: `You

do not have a perception problem. You have a reality problem'. I.e., I don't

subscribe to the Mutua School of Thought that all problems are made up by

malicious journalists, and usually find that acknowledging and then, more

importantly, addressing problems may be more productive.

But in the end, of course perceptions are important: It doesn't matter much that

you could probably snooze through your holiday at the coast quite happily as

long as there were images of burning slums on CNN.

Thankfully the mental associations between Kenya and the horrors of the

post-election violence faded. They were poison for both tourism and any other

business. But is Kenya back to being seen as the land of lions, elephants and

jumping skinny tribal people with good beadwork?

I find even this image restrictive since there is so much more going on here in

business, in art, well, in life. But as long as Kenya is at least perceived as

safari country, things can't be so bad, right? Even Brand Kenya has the Maasai

Mara on its homepage as a welcome.

But if you're abroad, you might get a completely different impression. It took a

friend in the UK to alert me to this: Comic Relief had sent a bunch of UK

celebrities to live in Kibera. This is good practice:

You're gotta do Kibera. It will help you discover the unexpected fact that even

in the slums, people care about their family, look after their accommodation,

earn a living. This is your spiritual reward of socially responsible tourism:

The moment of recognition that Africans are, astonishingly, really 'like us'

(except `happy with so little'.

At the last book fair in furt, my friend Agatha spotted a woman wearing a

tag `I have worked in Kibera, Africa's largest slum'. The last census may have

found a substantially smaller population than previously assumed, but that's

what Kibera is: Africa's poverty in a button on a jacket. For your

enlightenment.

So this bunch of UK celebrities were made to live in Kibera for a week. I had no

clue of this, and I hadn't really seen anyone of my focus group (read: Facebook

friends/Twitter followers) talk about it either. So I had to rely on my friend

for a recap of what was titled `Slum Survivor' (yes, really):`They were all

given slum families to live with and were suitably horrified and appalled.

Breaking the rules of the game, the comic Lenny Henry - who did a whole lot of

crying on the breast of the slum dweller he was shacked up with - spent GBP800

(about KES110,000) of his own money buying the chap a new shack which didn't

have an open sewer running through the kids bedroom.'

Nice, no? My friend continued: `It was all pretty stereotypical stuff, with the

celebrities serving the traditional role of deus ex machina and the role or

helpfulness of aid never questioned. Nor did the programme-makers appear to

touch on the fact that Kenya has a functioning government whose job is,

notionally, to take on problems like Kibera. And a middle and upper class that

happily ignores the Kibera on its doorstep and whose members would never dream

of slumming it for so much as a week.'

I don't know about the functioning government – right now it seems mostly busy

blackmailing everyone and their pet fish into getting a handful `our sons' out

of their mass-murder court case because the timing would be `inconvenient' for

their political careers (this matters how?) and because it would `endanger

stability' (well, if you know that, do something already!).

But it comes back to the discussion that Dayo and I had: If you sit in the UK

and you're wondering whether you should outsource some of your business to India

or Kenya, then images of shacks with an open sewer in the kids' bedroom won't

help Kenya's case – and it's certainly not a true representation of Kenya.

But it's undoubtedly there: `A pig shouldn't have to live in the conditions that

half of Nairobi lives in', my friend said. `Kenya isn't associated abroad with

lions and elephants any more. Kibera has become as iconic as the leaping maasai

warrior used to be.'

Bohnstedt is an independent risk analyst and publishes the online

business magazine, www.ratio-magazine.com.