The Africans by David Lamb Read Free Book Online Page B

the hill that separates Mathare Valley from the old colonial mansions now occupied by ambassadors and millionaire Kenyans. For two or three days after the bulldozers have cut through the hollow, the place remains empty. Then suddenly, mysteriously, one night the inhabitants return and by morning it once more is a tangle of shanties and filth, of people going through the dreary routine of life as though nothing had ever happened.
    I wrote a story for the
Los Angeles Times
about the Ngeis and afew weeks later received a letter from a California reader saying she would like to pay for Hannah’s education, perhaps even sponsor her at a school in the United States. Could I get in touch with the Ngeis? the writer asked. I returned to Mathare Valley. But in the time between my two visits the bulldozers had come and the Ngeis had gone. Someone said they were still in the valley and had set up their shack in a different place. Trying to find Mrs. Ngei was like picking a single face out of a sell-out crowd at Dodger Stadium. Two hours later, having failed, I went back to my office. Even good fortune had mocked the promises of the city.
    Millions of Africans today, from Kenya to the Ivory Coast, from Niger to Botswana, are following the same path as the Ngeis, lured off the farms and into the cities by the dream of a better life. The result of the rural exodus is an urban nightmare: slums, crime, psychological trauma and economies that simply cannot expand fast enough to provide jobs or social services for the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continental population. Here are some capital statistics: The population of Lagos, Nigeria, has grown from 300,000 in 1970 to 3 million today. Nouakchott, Mauritania, had 5,000 residents twenty years ago; today it has 225,000. Nairobi, a city designed for 250,000, will have 7 million residents by 2050 if current growth rates continue. In 1960 only one black African city, Kinshara, Zaire, had a population of more than 500,000; now there are ten.
    In Kenya the minimum monthly wage is $43, but the jobless rate runs about 45 percent, and as in other African countries, there is no such thing as unemployment compensation. Thirteen percent of Nairobi University’s 1,800 graduates will be unable to find work for at least three years. According to the International Labor Organization, 60 million Africans—half the adult population—cannot find work, and if Africa is to meet the ILO’s goal of full employment by the year 2000, it will have to create 150 million jobs, a target that is clearly unattainable. Upper Volta’s major export is people, with 600,000 laborers doing seasonal work in neighboring countries. Unemployment in Djibouti can be as high as 85 percent, and the closest real job market is on another continent, in the Persian Gulf states.
    More than half of Cape Verde’s fisherman population has left the island republic for want of work, and today there are more Cape Verdians living in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than in Cape Verde. In Ethiopia and Tanzania city jobs are so scarce that the governmentstruck people, sometimes at gunpoint, back to the rural areas. Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Mozambique send tens of thousands of their unemployed young men to the South African mines.
    Just a mile or two from Mathare Valley, in the heart of downtown Nairobi, Francis Thuo can look out of his window in the International House at the sprawling city below and can see, far off in the distance, the African plains where giraffes and zebras and antelope still roam in great numbers. Thuo, a prosperous businessman in his mid-forties who is chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange, wears a three-piece business suit with a Lions Club emblem in the lapel. He sends his five children to private schools and his office is tastefully and expensively decorated, with wall-to-wall carpeting and mahogany furniture.
    A long time ago, shortly after he had dropped out of school, Thuo remembers