Behind every person there’s a story and there are feelings. An obvious yet complex fact we often forget when we come face to face with those who come last, those who have nothing. This is the story of how Nairobi’s street children subverted stereotypes by throwing a grand party.
When I received the phone call in which I was asked to follow the Carnival! Nairobi experience first-hand, my mind immediately went to last autumn, to the evening I spent at Barrio’s, a theatre in Milan’s Barona neighbourhood; and that meeting in front of coffee I had with Emiliana Sabiu and Carlo Spiga from the organisation Cherimus the following day. That evening, Cherimus and another NGO, called Amani, were presenting a short movie called Bisu Ndoto, two words from two different languages – respectively Sardinian and Swahili – but with the same meaning: “dream”.
Bisu Ndoto was born out of a project – Ciak! Kibera – which involved a group of artists filming a short musical film on the streets of one of the largest shanty towns in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. Artists from Cherimus had worked with former street children living in halfway houses, educational, scholastic and professional centres managed by local operators thanks to the work carried out by Amani and the Koinonia Community (this story’s third protagonist). But the project I’m about to tell you about is definitely more ambitious: organising a carnival in Nairobi, the first ever in the city.
The carnival directly involved groups of children who still live on the streets, even though some of them have decided to enter the afore-mentioned centres in the meantime. “We were full of questions and doubts about what it would mean to work with street children, but the educators helped us every step of the way, making our project possible,” Saibu, the artist responsible for the Carnival! Nairobi project, recalls.
What does it mean to live on the streets? A question with no definitive answer, as sometimes there just isn’t one. In fact, living on the streets means many things.
For example, it means leaving your home because you don’t have a family who takes care of you. Maybe because of violence, maybe because of poverty, maybe due to a combination of the two. Sometimes it also means being forced to leave these homes.
It means relying on other children who live on the streets and considering them your “family”. It means having to come up with means and tools to be able to overcome the continuous necessity to fill the hours and stomach without being “eaten up” by thoughts and worries. This is why most of the street children decide to sniff glue and jet fuel to “silence” those voices and “confuse” the stomach, dissuading it from its continuous requests to be filled. “I sniff glue so that I don’t feel hungry,” is one of the most common explanations.
Living on the streets means fighting for survival every night, finding a safe place to sleep, an improvised shelter and avoiding getting involved in sudden altercations caused by a revenge or police raids, as the authorities want to show they’re doing something to solve this “problem”. Yes, because most of the community considers street children as chokora, trash that has to be removed every once in a while (or simply relocated) to give the city a cleaner image.
“Honestly, it would’ve been much easier to organise a pretty masked carnival with the kids who live in our centres, involving the neighbourhood schools, inviting people to take part in a beautiful parade and just have fun,” Chiara Avezzano, in charge of Amani’s projects, who has lived between Milan and Nairobi for many years, writes. “But that’s not it, we want those kids, not others. They must lead the parade. We want to give them a chance to invert the order of things, destroy the rules dictated by this society, rules that drive these boys and girls into a corner, labelling them as ‘animals’. We want to give life to chaos in order to radically invert a subverted order and create a new one”.
A similar approach to the one adopted by Okada Buluma, who coordinates Koinonia Community’s educational projects for children and young people, who defines the carnival as, “a window that allows the world and society to see these hidden treasures (the street children, editor’s note). When it comes to life on the streets, we often see the negative side alone – people living in miserable conditions. But by giving them a chance these people shine. These children manage to do things we can’t even imagine. The carnival makes us see this potential to its fullest”.
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The Carnival! Nairobi experience began in the south of Sardinia with art workshops in the towns of Narcao and Pedaxius, two small municipalities. Pedaxius, with its 1,400 inhabitants, is also Cherimus’ home. At the end of February, a group of artists, Matteo Rubbi, Derek MF Di Fabio, Fiammetta Caime and Emiliana Saibu, moved to Nairobi in order to bring their activities to Africa – in an artist residence called Darajart* –, which ended with the carnival on the 14th of April. A parade made up of carriages, masks, flags and music that animated the streets of the Riuta neighbourhood where the centre called Kivuli (which means “shelter”) is found. This is the most important one, the “capital” of the Koinonia association in Kenya. Those who took part in the carnival were mostly street children from the bases in the Kawangware and Mtindwa neighbourhoods and from the city of Ngong.
As I was saying, some of the children involved decided to abandon street life. The workshops took place in the context of a path drawn by social workers, Koinonia’s educators, every year for over two decades. A path aimed at giving a choice to children who have no choice. An action as simple as “drawing a dream”, one of the activities offered by Cherimus’ artists, becomes one of the few moments for these children to express themselves, for them to understand what they for the future. “This helps us especially in the context of some children’s rehabilitation process,” says Mary Osinde, one of the educators interviewed by Matteo Rubbi. “When we go out on the streets we meet these young boys. Over three months we try to create a bond: they know our names, we trace the houses from which they fled to meet their families before they enter our centres. Meanwhile, we’re with them, we do activities, eat and spend time together. They share their thoughts with us and sometimes they open up and start telling us about why they left home and ended up on the street”.
The three bases involved in Carnival! Nairobi brought different but often common forms of expression. Every kid shared a common dream: a home. This dream is in their heads, and Saibu explains that this is why, “we didn’t develop it right away, we left it to incubate and started building it a few days before the carnival. Created in the respective bases as a prototype, the concept of home was then summarised in a project we created in Kivuli and mounted on a pick-up,” which was then placed at the centre of the parade, like a pulsating heart made of music and dance.
The other element, the other object desired by many children was the matatu, the typical bus used for public transport, often coloured and airbrushed, that zooms through the perilous Nairobi streets filling them with music and sm