Kenya's slum dwellers versus the elite
Sick of their living conditions, Nairobi's poorest are suing their plutocrat landlords for the right to their land
When bulldozers came to demolish Yophinalis Nyakundi's home five years ago, there was nothing he could do to stop them. The assault on his part of Nairobi's vast Mukuru slum, known to residents as "Gateway", started at around midnight and the wrecking machines were backed by armed police. The hundreds of families living in the tin shacks were given no time to retrieve anything. Furious residents were waved away with a court order obtained a fortnight before but never shown to the people whose lives it would ruin.
"There was no warning. The bulldozer even destroyed the house with all our things inside. We lost everything," says Mr Nyakundi, 38, who has grown up moving between the "villages" of Mukuru – a complex of shantytowns stretched across the Kenyan capital's industrial area. After the eviction in 2007, he shared a corrugated iron hovel with another family while he laboured in nearby factories or sold fruit and vegetables to put together enough money to build a new shack.
Mr Nyakundi's story is not exceptional in a city where 2.65 million of its four million inhabitants live in slums. He is part of what is known as the "invisible majority" of Nairobians who face long-term consequences of land-grabbing and murky title deeds, prey to slum lords who have made vast profits from building shantytowns on contested land and using the notoriously corrupt police and courts system to protect their investments. What is unusual is that he has turned to the same judicial system to put an end to the epidemic of forced evictions. Along with 40 of his neighbours, he brought a petition this month naming some of Kenya's most powerful individuals, companies and banks, demanding rights to the land they live on and an end to forced evictions. Among the respondents, who must now answer the petition, are the former President Daniel arap Moi – who oversaw land grants in the area – and Cyrus Jirongo, a presidential contender who is among the landowners.
The petitioners, who are being supported by an umbrella group for slum-dwellers, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, have succeeded in obtaining an injunction barring any further evictions in an area of Mukuru that is home to more than 100,000 people. The implications of the case are enormous in a city where 67 per cent of the population lives on less than 2 per cent of the land. The petition is being seen as a test for Kenya's much-vaunted new constitution that passed a referendum last year and is supposed to guarantee peoples' rights to adequate housing and secure tenure.
In many senses the history of Mukuru is the history of Nairobi itself. Before the country gained independence, it was a vast estate belonging to Jack Reuben, a British Army veteran whose service during the Second World War saw him awarded a huge tract of land. He established Villa Franca, which was divided between a sisal plantation and a depot for the Reuben haulage empire. Both businesses needed workers, so a labour camp was established.
Soon after independence from Britain in 1963, Mr Reuben left Kenya and his lands passed to the new state. Left without homes or jobs, Villa Franca's workforce squatted on the land, calling it Mukuru kwa Reuben, or "Reuben's place", in Swahili.
In the early 1980s, Kenya's land ministry came with promises and beacons which it used to measure the squatter camp and the surrounding area. Officials told residents that the beacons were the first step towards helping them to build permanent homes. Four years later, authorities began demolishing the shanties. There were to be no permanent homes.
In the years that followed, the petition alleges, the land was parcelled out to friends and allies of then-president Mr Moi. Under Kenyan, law the land was to be developed within two years or handed back to the state. In reality, it was either left vacant by its speculating owners or used as collateral for hefty bank loans.
When Kenya's Co-operative Bank tried to cash in the supposed security by selling one of the plots in Mukuru kwa Reuben in August this year, it found its headquarters and the auction house besieged by furious residents. They were determined not only to save their homes but to stop the destruction of a community school built on the land. The show of strength and the bank's eventual abandonment of efforts to sell has invigorated the slum-dwellers' movement...
