On Squatting Near the State House

By David Blumenkrantz

Not 200 yards from the front gate of the mysterious and ornate State House, where security is prime and the president "eats ugali" with dealmakers and sellouts, an undeveloped swath of land cuts a shallow valley between the residential apartments of State House Crescent (where I live), and the pricey private Moi Girl's School across the ridge. Among the arrowroots and sugar cane, a small band of squatters survive in their own miniature slum. Unseen, unheard from, and uncared for by the world around them.

Nyambura Photo by David Blumenkrantz

NEW NEIGHBORS
The mzee who runs the property and is allowing others to stay with him is a wily old character named Mureithi. He, along with another man called Chege, their "wives" Nyambura and Rosemary, and assorted other characters such as Simon the laborer and Ndungu, are just barely existing in tiny, collapsing shacks made of mud, wood, corrugated tin, cardboard and polythene. Their settlement is obscured by sugarcane stalks, which they freely offer us-- much more than our teeth can stand. They wash themselves with water taken from an open drainage system-- the water isn't the cleanest-- by standing in the lids of tin trashcans, splashing the water on their legs. Garbage and insects are everywhere, they cook on a small charcoal fire, sleep in filthy beds, live in tattered and dirty clothing . . .

Our lives have become intertwined, starting with the concern we started showing for Mureithi, who was hit by a car some months back. Relegated to his musty bedroom, with a painfully swollen leg (Kenyatta Hospital's treatment left little to be desired, and we were certain his leg was still broken), we started bringing him food, cigarettes, even a few beers now and then. Finally we took him back to the hospital one day-- I borrowed a stretcher from AMREF, and Simon and I had to carry him out of the small valley they live in, up to where my car could reach. Millicent, Mureithi and I then experienced Kenyatta Hospital at it's most unorganized and incompetent: being sent in several directions, interminably long waits, finally the x-ray, then back to the original ward where they told us to leave him as he would be re-admitted. To my chagrin, when I came home that evening Millicent told me that they refused to admit him, and Chege literally carried him a good deal of the way home on his back.

Mureithi Photo by David Blumenkrantz

It seems the poorer you are, the more you're at the mercy of nature. Surely there are countless peasant farmers rejoicing in the fact that these short rains have now extended past their normal duration, bringing the early promise of good harvests. But to visit the leaning mud and stick squatter shack of Mureithi, these days inundated by the rains to the point where any venture out of bed for the ailing mzee means encounters with cold mud and puddles, is a sharp return to the flipside. Our short visits to pick up a hoe, or drop off beer, cigarettes, medicine or food is a sobering reminder of the insurmountability of life for the impoverished.

Mureithi claims his once-broken leg has improved markedly, and with the pain in his knee subsiding, we hope it won't be long before he can discard the crude, makeshift crutches. Lately however, he's been complaining of an intense aching somewhere inside or behind his ribs, particularly on one side. He has countered this by rallying himself to do a bit of stretching each day, if only to break the monotony of lying in the tiny shack, where only the portion of roof directly over his bed is well insulated from the rains, watching (as I did one cold morning) as huge drops eroded entire portions of a wall. One wonders how long this shack will stand . . . A makeshift table at bedside does not escape the drippings, nor does the dirt floor, which turns to ooze. Outside, weather-beaten sufarias catch fresh drinking water from the sky, and Mureithi's dog recently watched her puppies die of an unknown cause, one by one.

Chege and Nyambura Photo by David Blumenkrantz

In the room next to Mureithi, Chege and Nyambura, strange but somehow compatible bedfellows, laugh to us through the cracked wall, arising with jokes about their drinking exploits the night before, and thanking us for our food gifts. The lives of those two is a story in itself. Suffice to say that here necessity is the mother of invention, and when there's nothing physical to meld or utilize in the inventions, the creative mind takes over. Both Chege and Nyambura, Kikuyus on the short end of the stick, are scrapping by with a bit of drinking, a touch of craziness, and what is becoming more obvious with each passing encounter, dependant laziness. While I, until recently, bore the brunt of Chege's requests and bravado claims, Millicent must play host to the indigent Nyambura, who has been showing up at our door, peppering the hapless Millie with her bag lady monologues, with numerous requests for clothing, drinks, and so on.

It is the same old dilemma-- and one we have made policy to accept in our home-- we never refuse anyone food, but we are teaching ourselves to draw the line in other ways. I wish sometimes I had the words to convince Chege to utilize more of the vast area of squatter territory the government has allowed Mureithi. Instead, a relatively tiny part of the land is being cultivated this season, much in part to Mureithi's bad leg. Even still I've learned how quickly, with a little help, one can clear and cultivate a substantial portion of land.

SQUATTING ON SQUATTER'S LAND
Chege spoke for Mureithi when granting my request for a small spot of land to start a vegetable garden. Living here, in the predominantly agricultural country of Central Kenya, I've found myself more and more attracted to the idea of small-scale farming. Finally I asked Chege, who was at my home one evening asking for a job of any sort, if there was a piece of that land not being used. He told us that Mureithi had agreed to allot Millicent and I a small corner for our planting. I'm not exactly sure, but I think the land is state property, with Mureithi paying a small yearly fee to the government so that he can "squat" there until the government decides to develop. This however is totally unverifiable and better left unasked and unanswered, I suspect. So as of last Sunday, when for the first time I took a jembe into my soft hands and started clearing the land, I became somewhat of a neo-squatter in Kenya.

Millicent and I break the land Photographer unknown

Once Chege realized how serious I was (and Millicent as well-- she is the boss of her shamba without a doubt, and the hardest and most skilled worker), our small garden was expanded to include nearly half of an acre of Kenya's fertile reddish-brown soil. We took to the land with a fury, clearing most of it the first day (the blisters that cover my palms and thumbs are a bittersweet reminder). At first it was just Millicent and I, along with Mureithi's woman Rosemary, a roundish, gap-toothed, lady of around twenty-five, who did the digging and slashing under the warm afternoon sky. The barely literate Rosemary, with whom I could only communicate in Swahili, seemed to me the stereotypical African peasant woman. With or without us she would depend on this type of very small-scale farming just for survival-- not as an educational experience as I can so take it. Wearing a permanently beaten-down facial expression, Her unsupported breasts heaved as she beat the ground with her jembe; her dress too old and small to hold her frame, her bare feet unaffected by the rocks, branches, or bits and pieces of glass and trash that littered the fallow urban shamba.

Millicent, with a plastic shower cap in place of the traditional scarf, worked with the joyful seriousness of a woman with a natural feel for farming, and is something of our spiritual leader. When she catches a passerby (the path through the shambas to downtown passes along the bottom of our land) gazing curiously at the sight of a mzungu involving himself in what has always been the work of Africans, particularly women, Millicent startles the spectator with a crisp, "We! Unafanya nini hapa! Kuja kutusaidia!" (You! What are you doing here? Come and help us!) By the late afternoon, quite a bit had been accomplished, as Chege and Nyambura showed up, a bit tipsy as usual, along with Ndugu, a quiet, younger man, to pitch in. Soon, we had a huge fire going; burning piles of trash and old maize stalks. Once the fire was fanned by the wind and caught the nearby scrub brush, threatening to spread throughout the small valley. Chege beat it down with a large branch of leaves, as we threw dirt to help control the blaze.

Millicent Akoth Photo by David Blumenkrantz

We actually got as far in the first day as starting the nursery for our onions, tomatoes, carrots, green peppers, chili peppers and cabbage, While some went to the bottom of the land to carry water in gallon-sized tin cans to our newly planted seeds others were slashing the trees branches and grass to cover the seeds. Chege took me to his compost heap, where we scooped up handfuls of natural fertilizers from underneath maize stalks, and filled several tin cans. As the work progressed, I sensed the closeness one can feel when working the land with others. Millicent was especially happy, as she and Nyambura (a fortyish, hard-edged Kikuyu woman with a sharp tongue and a rapid fire delivery of Swahili I can never quite catch) forged a loose mother/daughter alliance. "Nakupenda, Nyambura" (I love you), Millicent half-teased, as if to soften up the older woman's hard exterior. Another time Millicent turned to me, smiling as brightly as possible, and expressed her joy at seeing everyone working together. "It's good to have such people around, it's just like home, in Siaya!" (Her district in western Kenya's Nyanza Province).

Indeed it is good. Yesterday after work, we returned to shamba, and were later joined by Rosie and "Mama Juice," the large Luo woman (hence a natural tribal ally to Millicent) who for months has been selling us her fresh-made passion fruit juice. That is her business, door-to-door juice with a smile and lots of laughs, hiding an interior life of struggle. She cares for seven children plus grandchildren, with probably very little income more than her juice profits. Mama Juice quickly grabbed the jembe, and like a woman returning to her favorite childhood memories, began ripping into the remaining portion of uncleared land. This work went on until it was too dark to continue. Afterward we talked through the fence to some workers at the Nairobi University dormitory kitchen, who provided us with drinking water and coffee, with friendly alliances built for the future. Everyone loves a well-worked piece of land in Africa, it seems. People actually seem more pleased than surprised that I will mix it up in the dust and sweat of farming. At work the next day, Theresia Kimanthi looked at my blistered hands and wondered aloud why "I don't get someone to do the work for me?" For myself, I can only answer that this is a long-overdue reunion with earth, nature, and hence my own soul. Not to mention a "test" to see if farming is actually for me, as my thoughts often wander toward one day having my own small shamba, wherever it may be.

A FEW WEEKS LATER . . .
We've had the help of many friends, such as Chanya, who has become a good friend and work partner these past weeks; or Simon and his brothers, some local boys we met who are starting their own shamba on a nearby lot, and made sure to water our crops twice a day (and helped with weeding, also) during the week that I was in Kampala.

At Millicent's insistence, she, Chanya and I last week took our jembe's out and extended our shamba by an additional 25 feet or so downward toward the water-- an act that took only one hour, and which after planting will yield a significant amount of maize, beans and possibly potatoes. (Of course, I had come home from work so angry from InterAid political bullshit that evening that I was literally breaking stones in two with my overly enthusiastic swings of the jembe). Altogether the shamba, which was originally intended just to be a small pilot garden, is now quite large, perhaps a half-acre.

When working with my squatter friends, I feel as though something inside of them was being rekindled-- could it have been that they have grown used to the idleness of their impoverished existence? Chege is particularly enthusiastic, already counting in his head the profits we'll make from selling part of the harvest. "When people know of this shamba, they will come from all around here to buy these tomatoes and green peppers," he declared through happily glazed eyes and yellowing teeth. He hopes now to extend our fortunes by planting his sukuma wiki in another plot nearby. Swahili for "push the week," the green staple vegetable is among the cheapest, healthiest, and most common of all foods eaten by the average African family. I'm glad to be part of this experience, even though there is a question somewhere in the back of my mind as to why they hadn't started a shamba such as this before. Though they've grown maize, sugar cane and sukuma wiki, there is a lot of land sitting fallow, covered by brush. Chege has done the preliminary clearing of this plot, as with others, but a full-fledged subsistence operation seems to be lacking, for reasons I can't figure. The seeds we bought were not that expensive, by any standards.

Last night we had a small bit of rain. A blessing to our seeds, I was told. In two weeks they should be ready to transplant into the rest of the shamba. By then we will have the land fertilized and terraced, and can also plant our other crops-- maize, beans and potatoes. They say by January we'll be able to reap what we've sown.

WATER IS THE BLESSING AND THE CURSE
We were still faced with the specter of having to cart water in buckets from the open drainage ditch we had dammed up, if there was to be any hope at all for our seedlings to last until the rains came. With seven small nurseries and ten planted rows of cabbage, sukuma wiki, onions, tomatoes, spinach, carrots, green peppers, and chili peppers, we were (with the occasional but increasingly rare help of the Chege/Nyambura squatter gang) carting as many as ten to fifteen large buckets of water to keep the ground moist. As for the numerous rows of beans and maize, we were, as I grew to appreciate as quickly as my hands had become calloused, like subsistence farmers throughout the world: working without systems of irrigation, forever at the mercy of the rains.

At last the day came for the rain's blessings. After a few false starts, the season of the short rains arrived in full force. On our knees, and up to our elbows in the dirt, we had planted rows and rows of our last seedlings. Watching my friend, I learned to handle the delicate onion and cabbage roots, as Millicent, in her headscarf, out-paced me at the same work. Racing to beat the dusk, we began our several trips (of about 75 yards) to the water source, and watered each of the nurseries, plus the newly laid rows. It was just at the point of sunset, and just when we had finished the final rows, that a magically light mist started to descend.

"It's raining!" Millicent's light exclamation floated across the shamba. "I like it," she added in her childlike manner, but she needn't have said anything-- her smile was radiant, her satisfaction in our accomplishment and good luck a profound complement to my own exhilaration. We dawdled home in a state of bliss, filthy from head to toe, but carrying the satisfaction in our hearts that only hard work rewarded by nature can bring . . . I knew then that I had made the right decision in seeking out and starting the shamba, (technically I was still squatting). I told myself that even if the rains failed somewhere down the line and the crops withered in the hot equatorial sun, I had learned both the toil and the joy of the subsistence farmer. Of course, I had the luxury of getting into my car and driving to the nearest market should that happen . . .

THE FINAL LESSON
We have completed harvesting our shamba. Unfortunately this first agricultural era came to an end today. When we went to reclear the land and plant again before the long rains take hold, we found sweet potatoes and maize already planted. We discovered that the old man who had allowed us to squat on his squatting territory had healed sufficiently enough to resquat on that piece of land. Old Mureithi is by now well-known for his unabashed greed, so I'm not really surprised (he'd come to our house, and without so much as a greeting, rub his fingers together, as though that's the signal for me to open the purse strings and fork over his beer money), However we were disappointed at losing the chance at trying for a good crop with the long rains. Of course the bottom line is that he and his co-squatter girlfriend Joyce need the land much more than we do, but our valid complaint (in any peasant court) is that he wouldn't have made the effort to clear the land such as we had done. Now he's simply walking (actually limping in dirty boxer shorts) onto a prepared plot and throwing down seeds. Even Chege, who remains living with the ever-crazed Nyambura as Mureithi's neighbor in the mud and stick duplex has registered disgust at this turn of events . . . oh, this neighborhood. Characteristically, Millicent has just informed me that we must go to Mureithi peacefully with some food to thank him for letting us use the shamba. "Good for good," she calls it.

Chege Photo by David Blumenkrantz

Where then, has the industrious spirit of Chege gone-- he who grew up as many Africans of his generation, in a rural farming environment? All I can theorize, to rationalize Chege's plight, is that the man, formerly with the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, and still in reasonable control of his senses, has skidded to rock-bottom. All of his kindness, his tokens of friendship and hearty handshakes do not disguise the desperateness in his eyes when we speak seriously about finding him work, or about his past or future. He's willing to go anywhere, it seems, except to face his wife and family on what he describes as a big shamba in Muranga-- a victim of the modern African status quo, which dictates that a man should go to the city to earn, while the wife stays on the land. This Nairobi life, he tells me again and again, "is not good for me."