Journey through slums
Every year, the first Monday of October, is World Habitat Day, when the world reflects on the state of human settlements. This year’s theme, ‘Voices from Slums’, emphasises those living in slums. I took a walk in some slums of Blantyre City and here is what I saw:
——————————————————-
We could have taken a minibus on that sunny Wednesday morning, but 52-year-old Nasibeko laughed it off. I am not rich, she said. So, we took a walk. After a seven-minute walk from Blantyre central business district (CBD), we took a right turn.
That turn took us into the chaos of a market, where a chain of women and children sit on both sides of road’s sidewalks, shouting as they call for customers to buy their various produce. Behind them are chains of hawkers: most selling liquor sachets while a few stock groceries. Those selling liquor sachets are heavily populated, mostly, with youths lingering around as loud music blares from competing speakers.
“Welcome to Mbayani Market,” says Nasibeko, while balancing on her head a bale of sugar she bought in town.
The passable road is small, but big enough to be shared by brick-carrying vehicles and pedestrians. Negotiating one’s way through the crowd of buyers, sellers, loafers, vehicles and passers-by is quite a game of brawn not brain. One pushes and gets pushed, often without committing a crime.
Nasibeko says there are no functioning toilets at the market, with a nearby river serving as a heaven of relief for many.
As we crossed the bridge, the dark and greenish waters passing below the ‘relief’ river is a sorry sight. The waters drag as they carry mountains of refuse dumped from the market.
Yet Nasibeko’s two-bedroomed house—and a chain of others connected without a plan—stand just a stone’s throw away from the river.
“I don’t like October and November. The mosquitoes are too much, we can’t sleep,” she says.
She has seven children, but lives with five as two of whom moved out. The family is from Chiradzulu, but moved to Blantyre in the early 1990s in search of a better life. Until his death in 2004, her husband worked as a guard.
“He left me with nothing, but seven children to look after. I turned to distillingkachasu,” she says as we arrive at her house.
She had left around seven in the morning. Three of her children, who are still at school, were still sleeping. She thought she would find them gone to school. She does not. The last born boy is sitting under a tree playing bawo alone. The other two are still sleeping.
“Ndinu zitsilu eti?[Are you stupid]” she shouts. The boy playing bawo seems oblivious to his mother’s shouting. The other boy—about 12—trudges out of the house stretching himself.
“Didn’t we tell you yesterday that they need money at school?” he says.
She is quiet. She used the money she remained with to pay her K13 000 rentals and also buy a bale of sugar for distilling kachasu. As she stands there, trying to think of what to say next, a group of four men emerged. Their eyes are red and faces swollen. They are her customers.
“Come in the afternoon,” she tells them. They curse and depart.
Nasibeko’s house, which does not have electricity, is surrounded by many others and there is hardly space for a kitchen or even a toilet.
“Sometimes we use flying toilets [where they relieve themselves in plastic bags and then throw them in the river] or we go to a neighbour who has one,” she says.
Such is the life of many people who live in Mbayani and other slums across the country. Mbayani is located just a stone’s throw from the riches of Blantyre CBD.
Peter Kholomana lives in Manje, another slum located about 500 metres from Limbe Market. What he calls home is a one-bedroom shack with his wife and four children. The shack’s two windows have sacks for curtains. In the hot season, the tin roof that covers the shack heats up, turning the homestead into a guillotine.
His surroundings are full of stagnant water, green with algae. The stench from rotting garbage hangs over the neighbourhood like a dark, odious cloud.
But filth and discomfort is hardly an issue to the Kholomanas. They are used to their environment. Electricity is a luxury they can ill afford. To draw water, Kholomana’s wife goes to a kiosk about 200 metres away. That has been her routine since the family moved to Manje five years ago. The family shares a bathroom and toilet with two of their neighbours.
The paradox of it all is that despite all these challenges of survival, Kholomana is happy to have a roof over his head.
“I used to pay K600 for this place when we first moved here. Today, rent has gone up to K4 000. It is tough to find a house in Blantyre if you earn the kind of money I earn as a shop assistant in Limbe,” he says.
When it comes to the wretched existence of the urban poor in Malawi, Manje and Mbayani are just the tip of a large iceberg. The country has many such unplanned settlements as Ndirande, Chirimba, Khama and Chilomoni in Blantyre; Chikanda and Mpondabwino in Zomba; Kawale and Mtandire in Lilongwe; and Zolozolo, Masasa and Ching’ambu in Mzuzu.
Nasibeko and the Kholomanas are among the over 70 percent of the urban population in Malawi who live in substandard housing which comes with little or no social amenities, says Siku Nkhoma, executive director for the Centre for Community Organisation for Development (Ccode).
He admits that the houses people such as Nasibeko and Kholomana live in can best be described as hovels, but insists that there are no slums in Malawi on the scale of Kibera, the biggest in Nairobi and home to over one million of the city’s 2.5 million slum dwellers.
Explains Nkhoma: “In Malawi, we do not necessarily have slums. What we have are informal settlements where people live in slum-like conditions: with poor access to sanitation and water.”
He says informal settlements come in two forms; there is what Ccode calls Traditional Housing Areas (TBAs), which are planned areas where people rent small, dilapidated housings. Many families share poor social amenities in housing areas close to areas of work, which tends to push up the cost of rent.
According to Nkhoma, settlements like Mchesi and Kawale in Lilongwe; Zingwangwa, Bangwe, some parts of Ndirande in Blantyre; and Zolozolo and Chibavi in Mzuzu fit this bill.
The second type are unplanned areas where people live informally like in Chinsapo and Mtandire in Lilongwe; Mbayani and Manje in Blantyre, and Ching’ambo and Area 1B in Mzuzu.
“This is where the bulk of the urban poor live in Malawi. These places are usually very congested with little or no amenities,” says Nkhoma.
But despite the semantic differentiation, the voices of the people living in these areas are hardly heard. They are voices from slums—voices of extreme pain of urban poverty.
