What life in Mathare tells us about freedom in Kenya

The name Mathare evokes different meanings for Kenyans who know it. The most common is Mathari Mental Hospital, Kenya’s main and national mental referral hospital. Thus, to be associated with Mathare is to suggest mental illness, in some sense.

But Mathare is also deemed to be one of the largest slums in Nairobi and Kenya. This underprivileged neighbourhood is talked about and written about as if it is undesirable, insecure, inhospitable and a place to avoid going to unless it is necessary to.

Yet Mathare, which is a former quarry, provided the stones for building residential and office blocks in early colonial Nairobi. Like many other poor neighbourhoods in Nairobi, Mathare provides labour – cooks, nannies, gardeners, drivers, caretakers etc – to the richer and gated neighbours, especially Muthaiga. The contrast between the wealth and greenery of Muthaiga and the poverty and ruggedness of Mathare is a study of inequality in postcolonial Kenya and a reminder that the struggle for independence didn’t bear fruits for all Kenyans.

Indeed, this is the story or stories of Mathare: An Urban Bastion of Anti-oppression Struggle in Kenya by Samuel Gathanga Ndung’u (Daraja Press, 2022).

According to Ndung’u, is Kenya’s most densely populated slum, reported to have an estimated population of “500,000 residents concentrated in a mere 7.25 square kilometres.” Yet, according to Ndung’u, Mathare was a core part of the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya. The neighbourhood was first settled after the 1st World War. The earliest settlers were locals who had been displaced from the areas around Muthaiga, Karura, and City Park. They ended up in the areas next to the quarry since this was largely unclaimed land.

Over time, Kenyans from other regions of the country who sought work and livelihood in Nairobi ended up settling in Mathare. Considering that life in Nairobi had been racially segregated and housing was strictly controlled, Mathare provided affordable but temporary accommodation.

The large population of non-permanent residents provided fertile ground for the recruitment of members of the anti-colonial struggles. The Mau Mau fighters as well as trade unionists found common ground in Mathare. Why? Largely because the residents of Mathare were mainly people who had been alienated from their lands, were doing menial and clerical jobs at poor pay in Nairobi and lived under constant harassment of the police because of the Mau Mau war.

Many residents of Mathare became victims of Operation Anvil of April 1954, which sought to remove Mau Mau fighters and their sympathisers from Nairobi. Thus, the story of Kenya’s anticolonial struggles should always pay homage to Mathare.

But Ndung’u, who was born and raised in Mathare, argues that “the history of our liberation struggle for independence and subsequent struggles for social justice, has trivialised and nearly obliterated the role played by Mathare.” Indeed, he insists that he writes with the hope to redress the sidelining as well as construct the “history of this urban bastion of anti-oppression struggle.” Ndung’u is writing himself into the histories of the struggles in Mathare since the colonial days whilst at the same time celebrating ‘other’ struggles in postcolonial Kenya that share the spirit of anti-oppression with Mathare.

However, history is a difficult subject to deal with today. There are too many revisionists around stories of anti-oppression. There are doubters aplenty. Deniers of anti-oppression struggles shadow the tellers of stories of struggles for freedom and equality. Anti-oppression struggles often count as more betrayers than believers. This is why it is not surprising that many women and men have struggled against the vagaries of life in Mathare since the days of colonialism to date but very few have ever bothered to write the story of this part of Nairobi with a rich anticolonial history. This is why the larger canvas of anticolonial struggles in Kenya is torn today, and the paintbrushes that would have drawn the strokes to teach today’s generation about human struggles against oppression are destroyed. 

Why bother with history, one would ask? Why does Mathare matter? What really do anti-oppression struggles mean? History tends to disturb memory. It can force individuals and communities to remember that which they would rather forget. If one revives the history of Mau Mau, one would definitely resuscitate stories of land alienation in the White Highlands in Kenya. If the true story of how Mathare was settled were to be told, the teller would revivify claims to justice and equity. One would be forced to destabilise stories of Mathare landlords and postcolonial governments which have paid lip service to developing Mathare.

Mathare: An Urban Bastion of Anti-oppression Struggle in Kenya is a testimony to other urban struggles for justice and equity in Kenya. These stories are found all over the country. The lack of potable water or electricity or medical care or schools or housing in Mathare, as Ndung’u notes is a story that can easily be found in Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisumu or any other Kenyan town. When Ndung’u writes about inter-ethnic violence in Mathare during the postelection crisis of 2007 when politicians mobilised neighbours to fight each other simply because they supposedly came from different tribes, he is simply highlighting what has been a key feature of Kenyan politics since the mid-1960s.

But the story of Mathare: An Urban Bastion of Anti-oppression Struggle in Kenya is not just a tale of abandonment by the government or false promises by politicians or non-ending police brutality or cyclic poverty, among other difficulties that the downtrodden have to bear every day. It is, indeed, a refusal to give up. As the author suggests in the introduction, he is not writing the story because he is “motivated by anger or bitterness, but as a counter-narrative of the place, I call home, from a proud insider’s perspective.

It is the beautiful story of a former quarry that turned into an urban bastion against oppression by the colonial government and the four ruling regimes we’ve had in Kenya since independence.” In other words, this story of Mathare is a claim to belong to the bigger narrative of Kenyanhood by thousands of the underprivileged citizens of Mathare, and the millions of others in Nairobi – and Kenya – who remain on the periphery of the center.

The writer teaches literature, performing arts and communication at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]