Page 84 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 27 Final

Tourism

some made of cement

blocks. I saw the huge
dumpsites in very close
proximity to the houses.

But I also saw people who
were going about their daily
lives irrespective of what
the environment looked
like. People, amid that

discouraging slum, who
still wake up in the morning
to get their daily bread. I

tried to take photos of these
people but I just could not
bring myself to. I could not
make myself trap them in
digital frames that would tag

them as poor for posterity.

But here is the painful part

of the story, when you
search online for the images
taken by the so-called
poverty tourists, you don’t
find them on the free stock
settlement known as Kibera or Kibra, was sometime in photography websites. You

2017. The place I lived at the time in Nairobi was just a find them on sites where
fence away from Kibera. From my sitting room, you could they are sold for hundreds
hear conversations that were going on in the houses on the of dollars. So, basically, the

other side of the fence. That’s how close we were. So, on so-called poverty tourism
this particular day, there was a need for me to walk through that tags Africans as poor is
Kibera, as some assignment of some sort. I borrowed a DSLR again another exploitative
Camera that was made available by a brother and entered into means of making money by
Kibera. As soon as I entered this so-called slum, I could see foreign tourists in Africa.

glaringly the sharp contrast between the estate I had just come Not to talk of the fact that
out of and where I was walking in Kibera, even though it was the world loves it when the
only separated by a fence. narrative about Africa is

that of poverty, crisis, and
I saw the houses, some made of wood and iron sheets and hunger.

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