Disability is not Inability

:: NAIROBI, KENYA.

“Development” has come home to roost across Kenya. Schools are being built, bridges constructed, lights installed, roads paved, wells dug. Which is to say, schools are being built where the incumbent MP is seeking a renewed contract in the upcoming election’ bridges are being built where votes might be bought; and lights are being instable where the wealthy live.

But what about the regular people? Those who live under the heel of the politicians and super-rich aristocracy? Those who build their tin shacks in the shadow of twenty-metre billboards proclaiming the “Coke Side of Life”?

These are the people who have been forgotten by the false promise of neoliberalism’s “development”, to say nothing of their own government’s inaction. Without money or resources, those people mean nothing in the palaces of power.

All across Kenya, they are consigned to hard lives under challenging conditions. In the countryside, they grow a little food on what land they own, carrying it on their own backs kilometers to the nearest market. Such a life soon becomes intolerable. The small farmer turns her weary eyes to the gleaming lights of Nairobi.

But in the big city, the problems are only amplified a thousand fold. Those who are lured from the countryside become mired in the massive slums of Kibera, Mathare, and Kangemi, where well over a million faceless men and women struggle for life day to day, land to mouth, beneath the sea of tin roofs. Caught between criminal gangs and corrupt police, many see no way out of the hell in which they have become entangled.