“The idea of staging the carnival in Nairobi, and doing it with street kids, is almost genius: it gives the opportunity to make something shine that is not yet visible.” Okaba Buluma recounts how the first Carnival of Nairobi came about.
The idea of the carnival was born from some chats with Marco, during the years I spent in Italy, between 2008 and 2009. Marco had a habit of walking around Milan to visit art galleries and would often take me with him. In those years he frequently told me about his idea of bringing a matatu (a minibus for public transport, often colourful, airbrushed and filled with loud music) to Milan.
And while talking about this idea, it emerged that in Europe, in Italy, there is carnival, which is an explosion of imagination, just as matatu are. Marco wondered what life Kenyan creativity would take on if transposed into a context like that of carnival. Because in carnival there is indeed a great deal of madness, but it is also an explosion of life, an expression of the beauty of life.
This idea of a carnival was ignited even more last year, while walking along Kabiria road with Chiara. We said to each other: guys, we're finishing Ciak! Kibera, the next challenge has to be the carnival! I once took part in the carnival of Acireale, the most beautiful in Sicily, and there you see magnificent floats made of flowers that move, spew fire, spew smoke — for almost a week there is so much movement. And this made me imagine what might be born, what might come out of an experience like that brought into an African context. I would be curious to see a carnival in Nairobi, with a street character, in Africa, that sooner or later will take on a life of its own, with its own unique aspects.
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The idea of staging the carnival in Nairobi, and doing it with street kids, is almost genius: it gives the opportunity to make something shine that is not yet visible. On the street there are many hidden treasures that are generally unknown until you go and touch them: a rough diamond looks like an unremarkable stone, but if you dig well it starts to shine. If you don't dig, if you don't go through a process like this, you can't come to understand and appreciate what we are missing out on, as human beings, by ignoring the lives of street kids. The fact that we are finally putting on this carnival in Nairobi, after so many years, means that that idea was like a seed in the conscience of many of us that has slowly made its journey and is now growing.
The carnival gives us the opportunity to open a magical window. Because of the conditions they live in, these kids no longer believe they can realise their dreams, which remain only in their heads. The carnival is, in fact, a window that allows the world and society to see these hidden treasures. All of us, when we look towards street life, usually see only negative things, people living in a pitiable situation. But by giving them a chance, these people shine — these children manage to do things we cannot even imagine: the carnival gives the opportunity to see all this potential in its fullness.
I see the opportunity to give a voice to a child who communicates in a way we do not know, and that in this way we might manage to understand, because they will send a very clear message about what their dreams are, about what their daily life is like, and how they live it, how they appreciate it, what they are learning from their experience on the street. The carnival will bring us the possibility of tasting both the sides we consider negative about street life, and the positive ones, which we do not yet know. It will give us the opportunity to explore a world we do not know very well, and it is also an opportunity for the children, for street kids, to teach us the small things that make life more beautiful and that we are forgetting.
When I saw the difficulties of the first workshops, I thought of Chinese bamboo, which, in order to grow, follows a somewhat unusual path. From our point of view, planting Chinese bamboo can seem like a waste of time, because the years go by but you see nothing growing and you are almost tempted to stop cultivating it. Yet that bamboo takes five years to create a solid network of roots. In the same way, during those first meetings at the street bases — sometimes difficult ones — a network of relationships was being created, the foundations on which to build were being laid.
Building this carnival can be tiring, because every street group is different and lives a completely different experience from the others: sometimes it takes more time to understand the dynamics of life on the street. But this allows you to build a relationship, to become familiar with the kids, and in this way they too manage to understand that friends have arrived who want to take part in their life in a new way. Once mutual understanding and trust are reached, at that point the work will gather a momentum we cannot imagine, because we will understand each other more easily and readily. Just like Chinese bamboo, which after five years suddenly appears, grows very quickly and reaches great heights.
This carnival places itself at the service of something very precious, because it plays on the level of the image that street children and street kids have of themselves, and because it brings beauty out of the experience they are living. You can be very beautiful, yet if society continually bombards you with negative messages about yourself, you start to doubt whether you are truly beautiful. When, through an experience like this, a child manages to blossom, it helps their self-esteem, it strengthens the idea they have of themselves: even if they are living a difficult reality, they understand that they are special, that they have something unique in the world. Of course, they will do everything they can to face the difficulties of street life, but in the end there is hope: not everything is lost, there is still something that can be done, and what is emerging in the preparation of this carnival bears witness to that — it is a testament that there is life, even on the street.