Demolition Drive Targets Street Hawkers, Too : Kenya Cleanup Strikes Squatters

When the bulldozers came to demolish her shack of cardboard and mud, it was all Grace Nduta could do to place a sheet of cellophane over her 8-month-old son before fleeing with him into the downpour outside.

She and two other women found a night’s refuge in a nearby nuns’ residence before venturing out again to erect new shacks about 100 yards from the first. Then they went back to work, gathering scrap paper to be converted into newsprint and toilet paper.

Consider Nduta and the other victims of this city’s longstanding war between permanence and transience: The scene played out not long ago in the shanty village of Kanaro, a collection of huts and paper shacks deep within Nairobi’s industrial district, has been repeated in dozens of places across town.

Bulldozers have mounted lightning strikes not only on these shanties but on the tin-and-wood kiosks of tens of thousands of street hawkers. Around the time that Nduta was being evicted, about 4,000 hawkers were marching on City Hall to protest a 9 a.m. raid that had demolished dozens of open-air stalls located around the city’s busiest intercity bus station.

In a statement, the hawkers noted that they had been fixtures at the bus station for 20 years. “We have lost close to a million shillings (about $55,000) through these inhuman demolitions of our stands and the confiscation of timber, clothes and other merchandise.”

Squatters and street hawkers scarcely rank as the fringe of Nairobi’s population. As many as 45% of the estimated 2 million people here live in illegal housing--that is, homes that are substandard or erected on public land.

About 40,000 hawkers ply their trade illicitly in a city where licenses are available for only 6,000. So the latest cleanup drive has further menaced the already precarious existence of hundreds of thousands of people.

Like all the previous drives, moreover, this one is doomed to fail. Its victims are all part of the same phenomenon. Every year, in cities all across Africa--whether Nairobi, or Lusaka, Zambia, or Kinshasa, Zaire--the city’s chimerical promise of jobs lures hundreds of thousands of people off the land and into the squatter villages.

Kenya simply does not have the money to finance the construction of the hundreds of thousands of low-income housing units needed to accommodate its squatters. Also, attempts to regulate the hawkers--providing centralized market centers or standardized stalls for them--have foundered in the face of their numbers and unwillingness to subject themselves to the regulatory bureaucracy.

“Again and again, it’s the same phenomenon of trying to control that which you can’t control,” said Richard Martin, a housing and development consultant in Nairobi with the U.S. Agency for International Development. “Nairobi is a big city, and most people don’t have the time or ability to go through proper channels.”

Many end up in a purgatory of unemployment and landlessness.

“I don’t know where I came from,” says Lucy Nyoki, 23, who with Nduta found brief shelter in the local Roman Catholic residence, cradling her 2-month-old son. “But now I’m too old to return.”

The remark is as telling in a psychological sense as in a geographical sense, notes a Roman Catholic pastor whose church abuts the site of Kanaro, the shanty village. “They come here looking for work and stay on even if they find nothing,” he said. “Meanwhile, back in their villages the family land’s been sold, or cultivated. Their families have moved on. They couldn’t go back even if they could find their old village.”

Nairobi’s demolition drives are recurring events, often erupting when the city is putting on a grand event of one sort or another. A U.N. women’s conference in 1985 and the 1983 annual meeting of the Organization of African Unity both brought on large-scale demolition.

The latest sweep coincides with an unprecedented boom in commercial and high-grade residential construction in the city.

At the same time, the government has embarked on a cleanliness campaign connected with celebrations at the end of last year of the 25th anniversary of Kenya’s independence and the 10th anniversary of President Daniel Arap Moi’s administration.

Municipal authorities often say they are clearing the land to make room for more-substantial housing, but the new structures are invariably too pricey for the dispossessed.

“The high-rises that get built simply push these other groups farther out to the margin,” said Ezra Mbogori, deputy director of the Undugu Society, which sponsors educational and shelter programs for slum youth.

Moreover, as in many African cities, the line between the temporary and the permanent is often a capricious one. Some illegal kiosks are sufficiently established to boast telephone service, which is often lacking in the newest and grandest office blocks and homes.

Similarly, some of Nairobi’s largest and grittiest slums have achieved a sort of substantiality that belies their origins as agglomerations of mud and paper sheds. One of the largest, the Mathare Valley, was the target of repeated demolition assaults in the 1970s. In the end, officials gave up, and Mathare now supports a population that includes thousands of artisans.