Behind every person there is a story, there are emotions. A complicated banality that we often forget when we find ourselves face to face with the last, with those who have nothing. This is the story of some street kids from Nairobi who turned a stereotype on its head with one big celebration.
When I received the phone call asking me to follow the experience of Carnival! Nairobi up close, my mind immediately flew to that autumn evening last year at Barrio's, a theatre in the Barona area of Milan. And to that coffee the following day with Emiliana Sabiu and Carlo Spiga from the association Cherimus. That evening, Cherimus and another association, Amani, were presenting the short film Bisu Ndoto, two words from two different languages — Sardinian and Swahili respectively — with the same meaning: "dream".
Bisu Ndoto was born out of a project — Ciak! Kibera — which saw a group of artists shoot a short musical film through the streets of one of the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, Kibera, located in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. On that occasion, the artists of Cherimus worked with former street children who, thanks to the work of Amani and Koinonia Community, the third protagonist of this story, live in reception houses, and educational, scholastic and vocational centres run by local workers. But the project I am about to tell you about is decidedly more ambitious: to bring a carnival parade to Nairobi — the first ever organised in the Kenyan capital.
The carnival directly involved the groups of young people who still live on the street, even though in the meantime some have chosen to join these centres. "We were full of questions and doubts about what it would mean to work with young people living on the street," says Sabiu, the artist responsible for Carnival! Nairobi. "But the educators accompanied us step by step, making our project possible."
What does it mean to live on the street? A question that has no precise answer, and sometimes no answer at all. Living on the street, in fact, means many things.
For example, it can mean choosing to leave one's home due to the absence of a family to take care of you. Whether through violence, poverty, or all of these things combined. Other times it means having been driven out of those same homes.
It means relying on other young people who live on the street and seeking in them a "family". It means inventing ways and means to get through the constant need to fill the hours and the stomach without being "consumed" by thoughts and worries. This is why the majority of these young people, the street children, turn to glue and aviation fuel in order to "cloud" those voices and "numb" the stomach, dissuading it from its constant demand to be filled. "I sniff glue so I don't feel hungry" is one of the most common reasons given.
Living on the street means fighting every night to survive, finding a safe spot, a makeshift shack, and avoiding getting caught up in some sudden clash, some act of revenge, or some round-up that even the police organise to show they are doing something to solve this "problem". Yes, because for a large part of the community, street children are chokora — rubbish that every now and then someone tries to remove (or simply move along) to give the city a cleaner image.
"Honestly, it would have been far simpler to organise a lovely fancy-dress carnival with the children who live in our centres, involving local schools, inviting people to a nice parade and having fun together," writes Chiara Avezzano, head of project planning at Amani, who has lived between Milan and Nairobi for years. "But no, we wanted those boys there, not others. They were the ones who had to lead the parade. We want to give them the opportunity to turn the order of things on its head, to break the rules dictated by this society that corners young people and calls them 'animals'. We wanted to unleash chaos in order to overturn a wrong order and build a new one."
A similar approach to that of Okada Buluma, who is responsible for the social objectives of Koinonia Community's projects and describes the carnival as "a window that allows the world and society to see these hidden treasures (street children, ed.). All of us, normally, when we look at street life, see only negative things, people living in a pitiful situation. But given an opportunity, these people shine, these children manage to do things we cannot even imagine: the carnival gives the opportunity to see this potential in its fullness."
The Carnival! Nairobi experience began in the south of Sardinia with the running of art workshops in schools in the villages of Narcao and Perdaxius, two small Sardinian municipalities. Perdaxius, with 1,400 souls, is also home to Cherimus's headquarters. At the end of February, the group of artists made up of Matteo Rubbi, Derek MF Di Fabio, Fiammetta Caime and Emiliana Sabiu moved to Nairobi to bring their activities to African soil – in what was a fully-fledged artist residency by the name of Darajart* – which concluded with the carnival on 14 April. A parade of floats, masks, flags and music that brought life to the streets of the Riruta neighbourhood, home to the Kivuli centre (meaning "refuge"), the most important one, the "capital" of the Koinonia association in Kenya. Taking part in the carnival were, in particular, street kids from the bases in the neighbourhoods of Kawangware, Mtindwa and the town of Ngong.
As I mentioned, some of the young people involved chose to leave street life behind. The workshops took place as part of a programme that the social workers, the Koinonia educators, have been running every year for over 20 years. A programme whose purpose is to give a chance to choose to children who have no choice. A simple action like "drawing a dream" – one of the activities proposed by the Cherimus artists – becomes one of the few moments to express oneself, to understand what these young people would like to be in the future. "This helps us above all in the recovery process of some of the children," says Mary Osinde, one of the educators interviewed by Matteo Rubbi. "When we go out on the street we meet these young boys and girls. We build a bond over a period of three months; they get to know our names, we trace back the homes they ran away from so we can get to know their families before they come into our centres. In the meantime we stay with them, we do activities, breakfast and lunch. They share their thoughts and open up to us; sometimes they explain to us why they left home and ended up on the street."
The three bases involved in Carnival! Nairobi gave rise to different forms of expression, but often shared ones. All the young people have a dream they've been holding onto that brought them into agreement: a home. This dream is in each of their minds, and for that reason "we didn't develop it straight away," Sabiu recounts, "we left it to incubate and started building it a few days before the carnival. Conceived at the respective bases as though it were a prototype, the concept of home was then distilled into a project that we made at Kivuli and mounted on a pick-up truck" before parading at the heart of the procession, like a beating heart made of music and dance.
The other element, the other object of desire for many of the children involved was the matatu – that is, the characteristic public transport bus, often brightly painted and airbrushed, that races through the battered streets of Nairobi filling them with music and smog. Working on a matatu "is an end goal, a common aspiration expressed by two of the three bases we worked with," Sabiu stresses. While the young people from Kawangware decided to make a "flying matatu" that rises above the traffic "because it has long legs of metal and bamboo that allow cars to pass underneath," those from Mtindwa created an eight-metre-long "dragon matatu": "An ambitious and gigantic work that was nonetheless made possible by the seamstresses of Kivuli."