kibera- battlefield for the west's conscience

i stumbled on this blog post the other day (i say stumble, my colleague Jamal sent it to me). it chimed with conversations we had had about Kibera after visiting, so i replied... copied below

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My first visit to subsaharan africa involved a visit to Kibera. Kibera seemed bizarre. while obviously there are real people living there, and it is really obviously disadvantaged, teeming, insanitary etc. on some level it also felt like a slum theme park. you almost couldn't turn without seeing a group of American missionaries or an sustainability project being run by a well meaning NGO.

we were always in one of the "less bad" bits apparently, although these ranged from gated developments abutted by shanties to "proper" slums with roads constituted of 2m. deep of rubbish with sewers trickling down ravines gouged from the mess. The people we met would talk about the nastier parts of kibera, as though destitution was a goal to be strived

for, or as though Kibera is designated to make an impact; what i was being shown should be enough to shock, but if not dark whisperings of nastier corners should do the trick.

I felt that i hadn't really seen a slum. I felt that Kibera has become (and i say this without meaning to dismiss the plights of people who live there- it is a grim place, and the facts of the post election violence a few years ago are incontrovertible) the front line in the west's battle with it's own conscience, where we conspicuously play out our good works on the feckless African poor, where paternalism rebrands itself as inclusion and sustainable development and colonialism exports not diamonds or rubber but smug moral justification like papal indulgences.

For Kibera to play this role, there must be a common accepted discourse around the horror and the scale of the slum. NGOs, missionaries, journalists working in the slum or returning from a visit there need to be able to allude to "the biggest" "the oldest" "the most violent" "the poorest" "the slumiest" to make sense of their work to others, to reinforce the importance and value of what they do and to win the war for their own consciences.