The Africans by David Lamb Read Free Book Online Page A

passes to enter white areas of most capitals. In South Africa they still do, and more than 300,000 blacks are arrested each year there for violating the “pass laws.”

COLLISION OF PAST AND PRESENT

    There is no turning back. The old people in the villages just have to accept that things are changing and the traditions they grew up with are dying.
    —O LIVER L ITONDO ,
a Kenyan television commentator
    T HE MUD is ankle-deep in Mathare Valley during Kenya’s long, cold rainy season from March to June, and from a distance the area looks like a huge junkyard, its sides and floor cluttered with stacks of wood and cardboard and all manner of discarded oddities. Stretching out for more than a mile north of Nairobi, the valley is filled with a strange silence, leaving you with no more sense of motion or color than a one-dimensional black-and-white photograph would. At night you could drive right by it without realizing there was a living soul anywhere around.
    Yet this valley is home to more than 100,000 people, a makeshift city as large as South Bend, Indiana. Like so many other Africans, the inhabitants had deserted their villages for the promises of the city. But the city had neither jobs nor homes for them, so they squeezed into the slums outside Nairobi, and places like Mathare Valley—with no running water or electric light—became the graveyards of hope for Africa’s shifting populations.
    I remember walking through the valley one day, picking my way along the muddy paths that meander among the shanties, and being struck by how still everything was. It was like a movie without sound. I stopped at a lean- to whose roof was made of paper bags. A pot of maize porridge was cooking outside, and Mary Ngei leaned over the charcoal embers to protect her family’s meal from the soft rain. Was she willing to talk for a while? Yes, she said. Was I willing to give her a few shillings for her time? Sure, I said. Shepulled from her pocket a piece of paper that was worn and held together by tape. She unfolded it carefully, smoothing each wrinkle, and held it out for me to examine.
    “There,” she said, “you see. All A’s. Hannah always got all A’s.”
    Mrs. Ngei, forty years old and the mother of thirteen children, folded her daughter’s report card in tidy little squares and tucked it under a loose board in her wooden bed where she kept a few other treasures. No, she said, Hannah was no longer in school. In fact, she wasn’t quite sure where her fifteen-year-old daughter was. All her children had dropped out of school because the Ngeis were unable to pay the annual enrollment fee of 30 shillings ($3.70). The younger ones had become street urchins, begging and scraping for survival in the Nairobi streets, and the older ones, she feared, had turned to prostitution and thievery. Her husband walked to Nairobi almost every morning, looking for work as a casual laborer, but he had found no more than five or six days’ employment in the year that they had been in the city, and she had no particular hope that he would return home that evening with either money or good news.
    “Really,” she said, “I don’t know what we will do. This is no way to live. People get sick here, they just die. They don’t get to see a doctor. We could go back to the
shamba
but there’s no doctor there either. And no jobs and no money. What we need is to get Hannah back in school so she can be smart and get a job and help support us.”
    The Nairobi City Council views the valley dwellers as illegal squatters and periodically dispatches several bulldozers to level their jerry-built world. Knowing that they must often flee on short notice, the people disassemble their homes every morning, piling the cardboard and chunks of wood neatly on the ground. Every evening they rebuild them. The entire process takes only a few minutes, but it enables the squatters simply to pick up their homes and move if they hear the rumble of bulldozers approaching over