Urban Kenya? – Rachel Knighton
Rachel Knighton speaks from personal experience
I remember sitting in a geography class, several years ago, learning about urbanisation. The textbook in front of me told of the rise in migration from rural to urban areas, as people flocked to the city in search of a higher income for their families. The case study was Kenya.
Growing up in Kenya, life seemed idyllic. My family lived next to a small village in the foothills of Mount Kenya. It is only now, though, that I can look back over my upbringing – replacing those rose-tinted glasses instead for a critical eye – and ask myself whether my experience of Kenya reflects what was written on that page.
On paper it was just statistics. In real life, I knew it to be true: the rate of urbanisation in Kenya is one of the highest in the world. Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, has burgeoned in recent years. If you drive along any of the main roads through the city, you will see that it is rife with street-sellers trying to sell their wares. Every convenience any tourist could want and need is readily available through your own car window during a traffic jam – do not, or at least try not to be alarmed if a huge and very dangerous looking knife is pointed at you “for a good price”! On the topic of roadways, the amount of traffic has become almost unbearable, so much so that a drive across what is a significantly smaller city than London becomes a two-hour trek.
But traffic is the least of Nairobi’s problems. Its slums are a larger issue. I haven’t ever been into Kibera (Kenya’s largest slum), but from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s not somewhere any human being should be subjected to live in – horrible, cramped conditions, not to mention the crime rates and disease epidemics. The fact is that people move to the city because they think that that is where the money is. They would be right, except that most of it is out of their reach. Instead, they are trading their lush environment for squalor.
In a bid to become more commercial and westernised, disintegration of culture is another concern. Tribes such as the Maasai, one of the oldest and most distinct semi-nomadic ethnic groups in Kenya, spend less time tendering the country that they know best and more time selling their ornate beadwork on the beaches and pavements of Kenya. As authentic and beautiful as these trinkets seem, there is an ugliness to their existence because you know that beneath it all is a painful uprooting and a sense of desperation in the search for survival. Ultimately, you know that they are selling their culture away for a few bob. Caps with the emblem of Coca-Cola take the place of traditional headgear; t-shirts and jeans covered in prints of various American rappers supplant the kangas and kikois – all in the name of globalisation.
What saddens me most is that the urge to change exists at all – why can’t the people of Kenya be able to cherish what they have and be happy where they are? The sheer scale and existence of poverty is a hard fact that cannot and should not be ignored; yet there is definitely more to the Kenya than the poverty-stricken adverts broadcasted over here. It is a brilliantly diverse country – the game reserves, great lakes of the Rift Valley region, and beaches are magnificent assets. Yet what is important here is what is often missed by the travelling-eye of the average tourist, and that is the very rural parts of the country.
Rural Kenya contains valuable and varied reserves of land, conditioned by an equatorial climate. The slopes of the mountain where I used to live, with it’s greenery and rich red soil, lends itself as the perfect place to grow all kinds of things – most notably tea and coffee. Yet ironically, this source of wealth and of copious resources often gets overlooked. Everyone wants to be a businessman, but far fewer take on farming. White farmers may be disliked for their trade, but if the people of Kenya were able to learn how to take care of the land that they have, they could experience the same success.
In fact, the issue of rural development in a third world country such as Kenya is often ignored. Small villages lack resources and are thus unable to make the most of their natural environment, where everything that is needed to live on grows under the earth that the villagers tread. The problem lies with equity and the solution is complicated, yet the crux of the matter is political. Some grass-root charities have the right idea: they’ve realised that what needs to be developed are the local shambas, yet it is down to the government to continuously support these smallholdings and to promote fair-trade. It is not about establishing huge businesses and money markets, which would destroy the countryside in a disregard for anything other than commodities; indeed, there has been a huge amount of deforestation in Kenya of late. It is about learning to recognize and to cultivate what is already there.
People place less importance on the countryside because it is in the city that they want to live – in the city, the streets are ‘paved with gold’. This myth needs to be dispelled as it has been in the occident. It is a real tragedy that Kenyans feel the need to leave their home areas to venture into the city and be swallowed up by service industries, and to live a life of lesser quality when there is so much potential, but so little opportunity, back home. Here in the UK, we are fortunate that wealth is distributed more evenly throughout the country. This means that we are enabled to value our countryside. Unfortunately, the current trend in Kenya is not about the rural areas – it’s about the city; it’s about urbanisation.
In the year before I came to York, I went back to Kenya, wanting to seize the chance to live there for a relatively long period of time and experience as an adult what I remembered so vividly as a child. The truth is that it has changed and will continue to change and expand – first it was Nairobi and now it is the larger towns. Perhaps development on a smaller, more sustainable scale will occur in the ruralities, but until then, urbanisation will continue to enlarge the slums and the vigilante groups that strut them, inventing dislocated sub-cultures as it goes along.
Excellent. However I do believe that not only Kenya suffers the invention of “disclocated sub-cultures as it goes along”. I believe that is but a socio-cultural human tendency. As societies evolve and time passes, new cultures emerge. The loss of our roots and traditions, displaced by new cultures, is no different to religion or other cultures overtaking previously more primitive customs and traditions. Be it Mexico, the UK, China, Japan or the USA it actually seems to be the lure of primarily Westernised or money/capitalist-related rather than simply urbanisation (which you do identify in the article anyway) that is the key eroder of a country’s identity and values.
Urbanisation to me is simply a manifestation of capitalisation and the world’s overuse of its resources. And this has been happening since the Industrial Revolution around the world.
I miss Kenya a great deal having lived there for 16 years. A wonderful and fragile nation. But I believe its leaders must invest in its infrastructure and in its traditions if they are not to hit a very hard brick wall in the next 25 years.