A tale of two urban villages

South Loresho and Kibagare Village, in Nairobi, sit side by side. In a prefab room, with a single long table, and wobbly white plastic chairs, representatives of both communities also sit side by side. It is a microcosm of a Kenyan moment: someone from Eastern Province speaks and everyone listens. Then there is a parade through some of the other provinces: Western, North Eastern, Central. Although a good guesser may hazard by either their names or their faces exactly where they come from, there is a high chance that at least some of the guesses will be wrong. They speak using the national lingua franca, Kiswahili. They share common concerns – crime, security, employment, poverty.

Outside the room are houses with kei apple hedges. Cars, some ordinary saloon cars, others four-wheel drives with United Nations number plates, slow down to negotiate the speed bump just before the gate. This meeting is in the gated community of South Loresho. Most of the men at this meeting live outside the gates, in Kibagare Village, on patches of ground that slope away from a road so rutted that only the kerbs indicate that it once had pretensions to tarmac.

Contrast this: a patch of public land on which is perched a room four-foot by four-foot, with corrugated metal walls and corrugated metal roofs against a half acre of garden with a four-bedroomed bugalow and a neat sign outside with the house number on. The people who live in Kibagare Village are poor, there’s no doubt. And those who live in South Loresho are financially middle-class. It could have been a fine example of perfect tinder for class war, for resentment on the part of the poor, and fear of the part of the comfortable. Instead, these two communities, through a testing period of Kenya’s history, stayed peaceful.

They did as the pre-election posters advised: Chagua Amani, and they chose peace. Inequity in Kenya is most visible in the squalor of urban poverty, and it is a disadvantage few people will be able shake off. Yet this is what it seems the men of Kibagare Valley aspire to, and wish for themselves and their neighbours. They explain that the land they live on is not theirs. Years ago, the area was full of European-owned coffee estates. They needed workers, and those workers found a bit of hill to perch on. When the coffee estates were sold on, the workers found new kinds of work for people who had bought land in the new development. Many now work as gardeners, cooks, drivers, askaris (security guards). To them, this work is their livelihood and their eventual way out of poverty, if they hunker down and put their shoulders to it. Next door in Kangemi, another poor area, they say, they have their own title deeds, they can have easy money. Here, it is harder for us. If we don’t work, we don’t eat. That is why we decided that peace was better for us than politics. Although you can see that we come from all over Kenya, we did not fight. As one of the men says, “How could I turn against a neighbour who is also struggling and say, today I will burn your house?”

The villagers listened during the two pre-election sessions on community policing that the local police station had organised for them. In order to keep themselves safe, they set up a 50-person strong patrol unit who took it in turns to walk their community at night. When the committee heard that groups were wandering the country trying to stir up trouble, they decided they would let no outsiders in. They imposed a voluntary curfew by asking the area’s residents to stay in their homes as soon as evening fell. The chairman made his personal mobile number freely available so he could organise help whenever it was needed. “But we are all human, we are not perfect.” When there was trouble, the committee made sure the police knew about it. Miscreants were forwarded into the hands of the law.

It could have been so easy for the poor of Kibagare Village to loot the rich in South Loresho. “Poverty is something that drives people to only think about today, not the future. If you are hungry and someone pays you two hundred shillings to burn someone’s house you will do it.” Yet, the men of Kibagare Village chose for the future, not the today, and by doing so, they provide all of Kenya with a message of leadership by example. “If you tell people rules to keep all of you safe, you have to obey the rules yourself, even if you are a leader.”

What is the big secret for peace? Ongea, one of them says. Talk. Talk to your neighbours. Talk to people who live around you. Make connections. Find out who the leaders in neighbouring communities are and talk to them. Make your own networks. As a nation, we have a lot to learn from leaders like this. In a post-election Kenya, we find proud examples of leadership in a group of men in Kibagare Village. Men you can put your trust in, explain your concerns to and know you’ll be listened to.

There once was a Kenya where people chose to live where they would. There still are pockets of Kenya, where people choose to live as they will, irrespective of where their neighbours come from, and willing to live in peace. Chagua Amani: that is what they have done, in these two villages. Choose Peace.

Dayo Forster is a novelist whose first book, Reading the Ceiling, was published in 2007. She lives in Nairobi where she also works part-time as a financial sector development consultant. She is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers.