Companies rake in millions from slum tourism

For $50, about Sh4,250 at today’s exchange rate, Victoria Safari Tours promises to give a visitor a glimpse into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people crammed in tiny rooms along dirt paths littered with excrement in Kibera.

The tour company is offering slum tourism, a controversial concept that is gradually taking root in Kenya.

Variously referred to as pro-poor tours, poverty tourism, poorism and impoverished areas tours, it is visiting a slum to see how humans live in impoverished conditions.

Some say it is a valid way to learn about one’s self, another culture and possibly contribute in some way to alleviating that community’s plight. Others see it as an evil form of voyeurism with little benefit to those people.

“Slum tourism represents the most brazen commercialisation of the fate of the underprivileged in the world today,” said Mr Kingsley Kariuki of Muungano wa Wanavijiji, an umbrella lobby for slum dwellers.

There are dozens of such tour companies and local organisations promoting guided trips through Kibera, a short drive from the luxury hotels that serve most foreign visitors in Nairobi.

Slum tours are believed to have started in Kibera around 2007 after a few travel agencies noticed that the slum was generating international attention following high-profile visits by people like then Barack Obama before he became US President and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Hollywood further romanticised the idea of slums across the world and upped curiosity and interest in them with movies such as the 2008 multiple Oscar award winning Slumdog Millionaire. Sarafina! the 1992 movie depicting students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising against apartheid in South Africa, was shot in the Soweto slums.

Slumdog Millionaire was shot in India’s Juhu slums, while the internationally acclaimed City of God was shot in Brazil’s favelas. The 2005 multiple Oscar award-winner The Constant Gardener was partly shot in Kibera.

The informal structures in shantytowns, the sewer trenches and congestion are understandably a subject of curiosity for many who come from where none of these exist, making a trip to Kibera an obligatory stopover for foreign dignitaries.

Victoria Safari Tours notes in its website: “This tour is recommended for all types of visitors such as business travellers, church missionaries, journalists and business executives who would like to have a quick feel of slum life in Kenya.”

Those offering these tours claim they are trying to educate visitors on what life is like in the slums and using the opportunity to help support community-based projects.

But critics charge that these tours are exploitative and demeaning, and the tour companies do little to help the community.

Mr Kariuki says the visitors go back home with tales of how “they survived one of Africa’s most dangerous slums”.

Critics of slum tourism say that unlike township tours in South Africa which help tell the story of the apartheid struggle, Kibera’s sole attraction is its open-sewer poverty, with residents on parade like animals in a zoo.

“The people see the worst face of Kibera, but they hardly get to know the other Kibera of energetic youth, creative minds, people trying making do with almost nothing. They do not know the community spirit in this place,” said Ms Mercy Ooko, a resident of Kibera.

Slum tourism marks another turn in the commercialisation of the lives of the underprivileged. Long before the concept, NGOs were promoting the “sorrowful lives” of the slum dwellers for foreign funding.

These organisations have routinely distorted facts and figures about slum problems in Kenya, especially Kibera, to the more dramatic to suit their funding needs.

For example, before the last national population and housing census, some lies had been peddled about the population of Kibera and over time they had become near truths. In proposals and documents, it had always been said the population of Kibera was over one million people.