The Toughest Slums on Earth

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The Toughest Slums on Earth

by Andre Vltchek / May 24th, 2013

NAIROBI — They tell you ‘peace’, but you know you are living in a warzone. You know it from the start; you’ve sensed it ever since you were a very little boy or a girl. You wake up every morning, not certain whether you will witness another dusk, whether you will experience another sunrise.

A bullet can hit you at any moment while you are walking down the road. If you are a woman, you can be ambushed and dragged into a dark back alley or filthy shack along the way, then raped.

The police are very hard to find, and are hopelessly corrupt. You prefer not to seek their ‘assistance’. You are really on your own: you own no gun, you don’t belong to a gang, and you are extremely poor.

You are exposed.

Around where you live, there are bullets flying and fires burning. Once in a while a gasoline truck explodes, or an entire gangway of some miserable hovels bursts into flames. Loud salvos of sub-machine guns often penetrate the night.

Dreaming in front of burning garbage.

But they tell you ‘peace’. Europeans and North Americans, all those people that are making great incomes running their countless workshops in your dilapidated villages and towns… They are talking about ‘teaching you’ and your fellow slum-dwellers. They are talking about educating you, so that you can continue ‘living in peace’.

The companies and Governments of these ‘noble men and women’, those that are teaching you about peace, are all over your bleeding country. They even use it as a base to invade neighboring lands. They are actually doing many things, while you are eating shit. Well, maybe not literally, but stuff that you aliment yourself on is not really much better.

Gangway in Kariobangi slum in Nairobi.

You have no access to clean water. You stink. If you are a man, you stink. If you are a woman, you are dying from shame, but there is no escape: you stink as well. Chances are you are functionally illiterate. Maybe you can read a few separate words, but the meaning mostly escapes you.

You vote for those who are offering you more ‘bob’, and then you feel proud when you are told, again and again, that you live in a flourishing democracy.

You scream at night. Not every night, of course, but most nights you scream. You are considering ending it all, you often wish you could die, to depart from this world, but you do not dare to kill yourself.

Jitne Watere, former prostitute and victim of sexual abuse.

The more desperate you get, the more you are being told that you live in a ‘peaceful’ country. While everyone actually knows that you live in one of the biggest slums on earth.

You don’t resist. Foreign governments and companies hail you. You are their favorite subject. You are patient and submissive, as almost all people around you are. They kill each other instead of those who drag them into misery: foreign colonialists as well as local elites.

You are constantly publicized as a good example to others, all over the world, especially to those who are opting to fight for justice, dignity and a better society.

*****

Kariobangi is a shantytown, near an enormous slum called Mathare, in the middle of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Through the narrow gangways and filthy roads with open sewage, I am being led to a meeting with “Fire”, a fearless gang member who has spent ten out of his thirty years, in various notorious Kenyan jails.

“Fire” is robust, pensive and humble. He left the high-security prison just recently. He wants to start from the scratch, once again, as he did so many times before.

We sit down on a concrete block. Soon there is a crowd of onlookers, mainly children.

“Do you think people here live in peace?” I ask.

“No”, answers “Fire”. “Here people die every day. All my friends are already dead. Men here die before they turn seventeen; most of them die when they are sixteen.”

“How does it feel?” I ask him. “How does it feel to be alive; to be the only one who managed to survive?”

“I am scared!” He looks at me. I know what he means. I have heard similar stories in Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Uganda, in so many other places. He knows that I know and that is why he speaks. He is not afraid of bullets hitting him, of daggers cutting him to pieces, of police torturing him; he is not afraid of dying. But he is scared of staying alive. Alone.

He is not a coward; he is brave. He is bright. He may be a gangster, but he has plenty of dignity. His fear is not animalistic; it is existential.

“How does it all begin here, in Mathare?”

“Here we start very young; slowly. We start by stealing at home, little by little. Then it gets big. Snatching phones and necklaces, buying guns. Eventually we get caught because we are young and have no experience. We go to prison and prison is both the hell and the university of crime. You enter, you know nothing about crime; you leave and you know everything. You encounter people of all races and trades: bank robbers and serial killers. They tell you: it is better to die robbing a bank than snatching a wrist watch.”

“How bad is the prison, Fire?”

“They rape you. There are no women, so if you are a young boy, you have no chance. Young kids get sodomized. To survive, they have to prostitute themselves. In prison, men rape men. Some marry each other. You get beaten and humiliated; by inmates and by police who are extremely brutal and sadistic. You learn how to get tough. If you survive, you are ready…”

I see a knife, sharp like a razor, shining in the sunlight.

I point at it: “Tell me about this.”

My gangster friend.

“Bila”, he says. “It comes from Somalia. They are made for killing. The way they are shaped, look; you lose so much blood and you die. Here we call them wambe, which in Swahili means razorblade. But no matter how sharp it is; it is still a knife.

“What about guns?” I ask.

“All over the place. They are very cheap. Guns come with the refugees, and the refugees arrive from Somalia and Ethiopia.”

“How do women survive here?”

Ready to kill in Matare slum in Nairobi.

“It is tough for them. Some are forced into prostitution; many join criminal gangs. Their boyfriends force them. Many women are submissive to ‘their men’. They do what they are told. They are told to have sex and they succumb; they get into prostitution, and they even join the gangs. Whatever ‘their men’ order them to do. Women here are scared of losing their men.”
At some point, “Fire” gets quiet. His eyes are fixed at some point in the distance.

“Talk to me” I say. “What is it?”

He looks somewhere else, but eventually he continues speaking. “My generation… I told you… All my friends are dead. All of them… All died… I feel a chill. But I can’t leave the slum… It needs me… I need it… I can’t run away from it, as I can’t run from myself. The slum is the microcosm… it is…”

“Your Kenya?” I suggest.

“Yes”, he nods. “I tell stories… I tell how I survived until this advanced age of thirty. I always tell stories, even to the government people. I tell them how lucky I am to be here… to be alive… I want to be good, but sometimes you can’t sleep three nights on an empty stomach.”

“We both tell stories”, I say.

He does not hear me, anymore. “I wasted so many years… so many years”, he repeats.

*****

Those men of the slums, those boys! They play with guns, and they kill and rob. Like in the battlefields, their faces are resolute, serious. Even as they are doing the most insane things, even as they are ravishing and plundering, they look purposeful, as if their actions would have some deep meaning. Here and in wars, the acts of pillage have an almost religious connotation.
Living in slums is like living in a war zone: day after day, year after year, until one is hit, stabbed, burned; until one falls.

But what about the women of the slums, what happens to them? They become mothers at thirteen, prostitutes at fourteen; they get raped before their first period. Some go through an abortion at fifteen; others are dying of AIDS at the age of sixteen. Some throw their unwanted babies into the gutters, out of sheer thorough desperation.

Are the women of Mathare, are the women of Kibera, really living in peace? Are the women in the slums of Jakarta and Mumbai living in peace? Are the women in Haitian slums living in peace?
Ms. Jitne Watere has her ‘boutique’, in the middle of Kariobangi. It is just a small tent, next to a busy road, with some neat white clothes exhibited inside. I don’t ask about her age; such questions are rude. I don’t want to know any details; the most painful ones.

All I want to know: “Is this a war for you? Or is it peace?”

Somali knife ‘bila’ – the deadliest.

She avoids a direct answer. She looks at me straight in the eyes.

“If you are forced to become a prostitute at the age of twelve… If you get infected with HIV… if you are forced to… Can you call it peace?”

She is younger than I, but she looks at me as if I were a child. I have seen a lot in this life and she was told that I had. But I sense that she has seen much more, and I lower my eyes instinctively, as she speaks.

“By the standards of the slum, I became a prostitute at quite a late age – I was sixteen. I lost many friends. One girl after another was falling, dying from AIDS, from ‘bush abortions’, from being beaten to death, even from poisoning. Others had fallen because of overdose.”

We are standing inside her ‘boutique’. This is one of those moments when a writer sometimes cracks and just drops the notepad into the bag, waves his arm in desperation and says: “Let’s go and get some beer… Let’s get drunk… It is all damn screwed up!” But I get hold of myself; I don’t want to hear her stories through some unnatural filter.
And so we keep standing, facing each other.

“Rape”, she says. “It is often not even called rape here… And do you know what a bush abortion is?”

I nod. I know perfectly well what it is. But I don’t want to hear the details. I know I would not be able to put them into the pages of this brave publication. I stop her. I stop her.

“Fine”, she says. “But one thing you have to know about the bush abortion… It’s that sometimes… very often… mostly… it don’t succeed… If it fails, a woman dies. Or she doesn’t die, but she wishes she did. Because if she doesn’t, what comes is…”

Two of my acquaintances, one a local gangster and one a local ambulance worker, both very strong men, are beginning to look away, in shock. My driver is waiting outside.

“The babies are thrown into the garbage”, she says. “Some alive, some dead. They don’t tell you this in the newspapers… You are not supposed to talk about it… It is common here…”
‘In Indonesia, too’, I think. ‘And in Central America.’ I say nothing.

I ask no further questions. There is no point in asking anything else. She said all there is to say, intuitively, and in summary.

But I was wrong: she had not finished, yet. She drills me with her eyes. I came here, I risked my life to come here, and I did more than what she expected: I listened to her. Now she was going to give me her conclusion, her bottom line:

“Do you know why all this? Do you really… really… want to know?”

I know. She knows. I wrote it thousands of times. It is now her turn to say it:

“Because we are all poor! Because we have nothing! We do not matter. That’s why we die young. That’s why our children die…”

*****

Then, in the car, Douglas who now works for St. John’s Ambulance Service, begins telling me his story:

“There is nothing local people can count on… They are unprotected, totally on their own. Women suffer the most. 90% of women here are single mothers; there is nothing like marriage or loyalty in the slums. The family system was broken. You go from door to door, you ask; you would be shocked.”

Our car is passing by Mathare. Almost all the children here suffer from malnutrition. Many have been working since an early age; pushing heavy carts, carrying loads, selling things by the curb.

“What is the typical story here?” I ask Douglas.

“Fourteen year old girl gets abused… or forced into prostitution… Mostly they become prostitutes for food. They go for about one dollar, out of desperation. She gets pregnant at the age of thirteen or fourteen, at most fifteen. Then her man leaves her. She is left with nothing; no education and no skills. These are girls who leave their children on the street… Others get abortion…

You were just told… many of them die.”

“Very few men get married”, chips in the driver, Gilbert. “Very few take care of their children and their women. Everything collapsed here. The entire structure is gone.”

“I will tell you a story and then you tell me whether this place is a peace area or a war zone”, continues Douglas. “One night I was forced to help my neighbor to give birth… It happened not far from where we are passing now. I was washing a car… My friend ran to me at 1AM, screaming that a woman who was living on our plot had entered labor. We managed to get her to the car. It was three of us in the vehicle – two boys and one woman with labor pains. The child began coming out. I opened the window and began screaming: “Help!” I was begging for some woman to open a door and come out, to help us, because my friend and I had no idea what to do. Nobody came out; they were all scared. My friend ran away. In the end I dashed into the local store and bought a razor blade… I cut her umbilical cord. Then I drove her home. Her son was born. They both survived, miraculously. Like in a war.”

“Like in a war”, I said, recalling a very similar situation, when an indigenous woman entered labor and gave birth in my car, in the Peruvian Andes, in 1992.

*****

In Mathare 4A, the garbage is burning and child-scavengers are performing acrobatic somersaults. The ground is soft, swampy. The entire area consists of metal-sheet shacks, filthy stalls and a fast-moving polluted river. It is not as dirty and hopeless as those slums in Port-Au-Prince or in Jakarta, but it is still filthy to a great extent.

“I grew up here”, says Douglas.“I used to be like those kids. I used to play in the garbage; I used to swim in this river.”

He waves at the kids. They wave back.

“Fortunately, I got some education. Now I do first aid and fire fighting.”

“Douglas, so what are you facing here?” I ask. “What casualties do they bring to the medical posts at night?”

“Victims of all sort of violence”, he replies. “Machete wounds, gunshots… You know, police shoots gangsters and innocent by-standards, while gangsters shoot victims, sometimes police.

Everyday something terrible happens: people are shot, stabbed, and raped.”

I am taking all of this in, then taking notes and photographing somersaulting children.

Tiny and scared in Matare slum.

“We have to go”, says Douglas, abruptly. “They will soon begin closing on us”.

“Wait”, I say. He speaks better here than in the car. It is all flowing well, coming out effortlessly.

“Ok”, he says. “I know what you are trying to prove. And I agree with you a hundred percent. It is a war zone, ok? It is a battleground. But now please listen to me: To me, to us here, it is normal. Totally normal, get it? Violence is normal… I know, I sense it is not good, but it is normal… I buried many friends here. Every day, several people get assaulted, killed, shot. Nothing surprises me, anymore! It is normal! Many of my friends have died… many of “Fire’s” friends died. My cousin was recently killed… He was shot dead, at sixteen! Women… they get raped, brutalized, molested, insulted… At night… almost all of them here experienced some violence, even at home… And at night, only those ‘hardcore’ ones dare to open the door… Men die because they fight back… You know, those gangsters who are assaulting people, they are not as brave as they try to look…Deep inside they are human, scared little kids, boys… They know they can die while stealing, and so they kill, because they are frightened… Despite everything, they want to live… They want to live desperately… and so they kill.”

He said enough. He breathes heavily.

“Normal! All this is normal…” He repeats.

“So why are you crying?” I ask.

He does not reply. He looks around.

“We go!” He shouts at me. “Fast! They are watching us; they are coming. Here they can do anything they want to you… They can take anything…”

“Let’s go”, I agree. “We have photos inside this camera. No matter what, they can’t take this one.”

“We fight?” He asks. “If they come, we fight or we let it go?”

Gilbert, the driver, eval‎uates the situation. He steps on it, and drives the car towards us through the grass. Our feet are caught in unstable, swampy ground. There are strange movements all around us, several people closing on us. The river is on the left. I am considering my options. The river seems to be one possibility.

“We will fight”, I say at the end.

“Good.”

The car is faster than the gang members. We dive in. Gilbert drives towards the road.

When we are inside, Douglas grunts: “You are tough”.

That’s all that matters here. My color of skin becomes irrelevant and so is my work. The only thing that has value in the slum is whether one has guts.

*****

Constable Bobby Ogola is based at Buruburu Police Station. Buruburu is one tough place and Constable is a tough guy who does not seem to like anybody, especially not the gangsters and Somali refugees. Anywhere else his attitude would be questionable, called racist. But it is again normal here, in the war zone called the slum:

“There are too many firearms in the hands of young people aged between sixteen and thirty. Most of the firearms come from Somalia. We have constant cases of car-jacking here, of violent robberies, of rapes and murder. There are also abductions in Eastlands.”

The doctor at the dispensary in the middle of Kiriobangi, calculates that on average, around ten people die a violent death during a weekend, in this slum alone.

The majority of the people in Nairobi live in slums.

As we leave, Gilbert the driver concludes: “You write about these places for years… It is absolutely clear that the people here live in a combat zone. You see their children go hungry everyday. There is no running water, no jobs, and no toilets. But there are bullets and knifes.And there is fear and violent death everywhere.”

“You die if you get sick here”, says “Fire”. “Life is so cheap. Of course people die from cancer and other ‘complicated’ illnesses, because there is no way they would be treated for free. But they also die of easily preventable diseases like malaria. All we can get here are pain killers, sometimes.”

*****

Is the system to blame? Everybody thinks so, but there is also that dogged belief that ‘nothing can be done” and “nothing can be changed”.

The elites are too powerful, and they are backed by several Western powers. Corruption is endemic, but corruption is not homegrown; it came from outside, it was imported, and like elsewhere, it entered the ‘culture’ as local elites were encouraged to collaborate with colonial powers.

While the local MPs are enjoying some of the highest government salaries anywhere in the world, almost no funds are allocated for the improvement of life in the slums.

“We have a program here, we formed an organization”, says Ms. Jitne Watere. “We are trying to help abused women. But very few funds from above are allocated. And that little that there is, disappears in corruption. Women meet, they talk and then they ask: ‘What next?’ But there is nothing we can do.”

*****

While Venezuela, Bolivia, China, Vietnam and other socialist countries have managed to lift hundreds of millions of people from poverty, those close allies or virtual colonies of the West, including Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia, the Philippines and India, to name just a few, developed and then perfected total spite for most of their own people.

In Kenya, they hold elections, but no major political party represents the interests of the impoverished majority. Extreme capitalism serves only a very small minority of the immoral rulers. Statistics are manipulated and twisted, while the media is subservient to local and foreign regimes.

Nairobi, Kampala, Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, Guatemala City – the same pattern of urban violence. Shopping malls and five star hotels surrounded by barbed wires and war zones. Now there are organized tours, to the slums. Some Europeans like to see, to feel the thrill. One week in the national parks of Kenya and Tanzania, then few hours in Kibera, watching people starving and dying. It is a complete experience, something to show neighbors at home or spread through social media. I saw this while writing about the Yugoslav War. I saw this recently on several Syrian borders. War tourism…

*****

Some time ago, I was filming Kibera from the railway tracks; those that pass through this biggest slum on earth. I put my professional camera on a tripod and began working.
An old man approached me. He was drunk, or he was high on miraa.

“I want your camera”, he said. “I can kill you now, and I don’t give a damn what will happen to me after. I am HIV positive; I have nothing, I am dying.”

But he could not kill me. He was weak, and he could hardly stand on his feet. My friends rushed to my rescue, but I didn’t need any help. The man disappeared under the hill. He was destroyed, shaking, and alone.

After that, it was all totally peaceful. It was peaceful for me, for the Kenyan elites and for the global regime.

But soon, as the sun began setting down, below there, in the middle of the slum, the first fires started burning and the first gunshots began resonating. Another battle was beginning, the battle between the victims and the other victims.

The poor have been obediently dying, as the Global regime has been consolidating its control over the planet.

All photos by Andre Vltchek.

André Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker, and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His critically acclaimed political revolutionary novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalism is called Indonesia: The Archipelago of Fear. He just completed a feature documentary Rwanda Gambit about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website. Read other articles by Andre.

This article was posted on Friday, May 24th, 2013 at 5:08am and is filed under Crime, Gender, General, Kenya, Poverty.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/05/the-toughest-slums-on-earth/

Slums and Slumps: Housing under Capitalism

• Paul Bennett |
• the housing market

In 1942 the Beveridge Report identified five giant evils that government social policy should aim to overcome: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Idleness and Squalor. The last of these referred to housing, and more generally to town planning and the environment. The report was, by the standards of such documents, tremendously popular, selling thousands of copies. Newspapers in Nazi Germany were forbidden from mentioning it, on the grounds that it would represent an enormous propaganda victory for the enemy.

Beveridge effectively laid the foundation for the post-war welfare state and the introduction of, among other things, the National Health Service. On the fiftieth anniversary of the report, the academic Ben Pimlott assessed its success. Want and squalor still existed, he argued, with plenty of beggars and homeless people in central London: ‘for the majority, there is less hunger and disease than in the Forties, but for the millions in the minority, there is much more’ (Independent, 1 December 1992).

And despite the decades of legislation, the ‘housing problem’ indeed remains, although its precise nature varies somewhat over time. The overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that were rife in (say) the early twentieth century are largely, though not entirely, things of the past, but housing is one of the biggest failures of the efforts to slay Beveridge’s giants and so shows how reforms cannot banish capitalism’s problems.

In some cases, government policies have been a contributing factor to not just bad housing but loss of life and other disasters. The Housing Subsidy Act of 1956 gave local councils bigger subsidies the higher the tower blocks they built, on the basis that this meant more and cheaper homes in a particular area. In May 1968 the Ronan Point block in east London collapsed after a gas explosion, and four people died. The block had been built using pre-cast concrete panels, which had the ‘advantage’ of not requiring skilled construction workers. But this method of building was intended to be used for six storeys at most, and Ronan Point had twenty-two.

There are many ways of looking at the effect that the recent rise in house prices has had. Between 1959 and 2009, for example, real earnings rose by 169 percent but house prices rose by 273 percent, making houses less affordable than fifty years ago. For many years the average house price has been around three times the median wage, but by last year it was over six times as high. Many workers are forced to rely on the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ as a way of scraping together a mortgage and getting on the property ladder. Some take on mortgages that they will not pay off until well into their sixties, or put off starting a family because of worries about the affordability of housing. In the current recession, the lesser availability of mortgages means that more are forced to rent (though in no way are they ‘choosing’ to rent as is sometimes claimed).

The recession has also led to a dramatic rise in the number of repossessions, though in the UK not as yet to the levels seen in the 1990s. In 1991, for instance, 75,000 homes were repossessed, as against 46,000 last year. In the US, there were 92,000 repossessions in April this year alone, an all-time high. Behind each of these cases is a human tragedy of various degrees, from homelessness to far worse housing conditions, along with general financial melt-down. Landlords who went in for buy-to-let in the hopes of an easy return are turfing out tenants, sometimes changing the locks so that people are made homeless with just the clothes they are wearing (Guardian, 23 June).

In 2000 the government launched the Decent Homes programme to upgrade social housing, with the aim of this being completed by the end of this year. But deadlines slipped so that eventually 2018 was the target year. In the first quarter of this year, just sixty new local authority homes were completed, a figure which reflects among other things the impact of government policy which has emphasised and tried to promote home ownership at the expense of renting. The National Housing Federation recently warned that waiting lists for social housing are at record levels, and ‘an entire generation…would be left with little hope of ever being allocated a social home’. Recent cuts in housing benefit mean almost a million people will lose £12 a week, which is a lot for those on the lowest incomes. Some people, of course, have no trouble finding suitable homes. The W8 postcode in the Kensington area of London is the UK’s most expensive, with the average house costing £1.5million. But even that has desirable and somewhat less desirable areas, with Kensington Palace Gardens as the priciest street in the country, properties there averaging £18million.

It is often implied that there is something ‘natural’ about wishing to own your own house rather than being dependent on renting, but actual housing demand in fact varies widely across a person’s lifetime and, indeed, in different places. In many parts of continental Europe, for instance, home ownership is at much lower levels than in Britain, and far more people live in flats as opposed to houses, without this being seen as in any way unnatural.

The number of homes built goes up and down from year to year (425,000 in 1968 for instance, but just 156,000 in 2009) in a way that has nothing at all to do with people’s demands or needs for somewhere decent to live. Rather it has everything to do with the market, what property companies can make a profit from and what people can afford. According to one standard source, ‘the building industry exists to meet human needs’ (David Donnison and Clare Ungerson: Housing Policy, 1982). If only this were true! Like all industries under capitalism, it exists in fact to make a profit, which is why capitalism will never be able to provide secure and decent housing for all.

In fact it can sensibly be said that there is no ‘housing problem’ at all. People know how to build houses, there are plenty of people with the requisite skills and sufficient supplies of materials. But if you can’t afford the rent or mortgage, then you don’t really count as far as the profit system is concerned. So it’s a problem of poverty in truth, one that would not exist in a society that aimed at meeting human needs rather than making profits for the few.

PAUL BENNETT

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2010/no-1275-november-2010/slums-and-slumps-housing-under-capitalism

Review

Planet of Slums

By Mike Davis, Verso, 2006, £15.99
Jane Kelly

In 1900 London was the largest city in the world at just under six and a half million inhabitants, followed by New York, Paris, Berlin and Chicago. Reaching a peak of 8.6 million in 1939, it is now either twentieth or seventeenth, depending on how you count it.

While New York is still huge - over 22 million including the greater metropolitan area - it is the cities of the third world which now dominate the stakes, and not only in numbers (Mexico City 22 million; Sao Paulo 19.9 million; Mumbai 19. 1 million) but also in rapid growth (Mexico City from 2.9 million in 1950). But it is especially the size of their slums that marks these out as a new phenomenon. In his extraordinary book – Planet of Slums - Mike Davis documents the barbaric lives of the slum dwellers, living in squalor, excluded from the formal economy and with child mortality rates (under five) of between 20 and 30 percent.

We are used to the idea that the cities of the newly industrialised imperialist cities of Europe had large slums in the nineteenth century. Engels wrote about them in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. But these new third world slums are not the result of industrialisation. Rather, like Dublin between 1800 and 1850, the millions who are forced into these burgeoning cities are being turned off the land by industrial agribusiness as well as by civil war, drought and famine; but rather than becoming part of modern industry, they work in the informal economy such as sweatshops and in the ‘service’ sector.

A billion slum dwellers

The statistics Davis gives are staggering - there are now more than a billion slum dwellers, nearly equal to the population of the whole world in Engels’ time. The 193.8 million Chinese slum dwellers represent 37.8 percent of the urban population; in India the figures are 158.4 million and 55.5 percent; in Nigeria 41 .6 million and 79.2 percent. And all of this is taking place under the brutality of neo-liberal policies in agriculture, in the shrinking public sector, the structural adjustment and shock tactics of the World Bank and IMF. While we think of slums as being characteristically in the inner city, increasingly in these megacities the central areas are being gentrified. The squatters, without deed or title to their ‘homes’, despite having lived there for many years, have no rights to the area and are expelled to the edges of the city. Removed from the crowded, but known barrios and favelas, they end up many miles from work, without transport of any kind and forced to rebuild their home from scratch, without water or energy, or any other services. Meanwhile their previous homes, many with water and electricity laid on after long battles with the authorities, are torn down and rebuilt for the wealthy.

Indeed squatting, although the only answer to the penniless, is not necessarily cheaper than buying a plot of land and building on it. For squatters often have to bribe politicians, gangsters or police to gain access to a site. And these payments, ‘rents’ can continue for decades. But for those who spend every bit of money they can scrape together to live, buying is always out of the question.

Nor are these ‘peripheral’ slums made up only of evacuees from the inner cities. Often international and internally displaced refugees live in these places too. In Palestine for example, Gaza, ‘considered by some to be the world’s largest slum - is essentially an urbanised agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two thirds of the population subsisting on less than $2 per day.

Neoliberalism expels the masses

In the late 1950s and 1960s it seemed possible that the world’s urban poor might be properly housed by state intervention. Not only in Cuba, where many homes were built until the collapse of its banker in the USSR, but in Egypt, in Algeria and Tanzania, in Brazil plans were made, and some even carried out, to build public sector housing. But in most places even these minimal government interventions have been overtaken by neoliberal economic programmes, tying countries to indebtedness and their poor to squalor.

Meanwhile, Davis points to the increasing adoption by the middle classes of fantasy suburbs. Fleeing the inner cities, too close to slum dwellers, the wealthy are developing an ‘architecture of fear’: fortified lifestyles, high security gated ‘communities’, where the car can take you through the ‘dangerlands’ on your journey from one fortress to another. Los Angeles, discussed in a previous Davis book, City of Quartz, with its freeways flying over the sordid and dangerous precincts, has become the model for many a third world city.

Unwanted reserve armies of labour

Davis finishes his extraordinary book with an epilogue, ‘Down Vietnam Street’. He points to US and other governments’ warnings about the millions of slum dwellers. What was once a reserve army of labour has become a ‘permanently redundant mass’. The CIA in 2002 noted, ‘By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labour force, most of them in the south, were either unemployed or underemployed’: a real crisis of global capitalism. These slum dwellers are the twenty-first equivalent of the ‘dangerous classes’ of nineteenth century Paris. And the US has plans for them. Their experience in Mogadishu in1993, when, ‘slum militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite Army Rangers’, has forced a Pentagon rethink on Military Operations on Urbanised Terrain (MOUT). Sadr City in Baghdad is now just one of the recipients of this rethink.

Watch out for the sequel to this brilliant book - on slum-based resistance to global capitalism - which Mike Davis is writing with Forrest Hylton.

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Jane Kelly is one of the Editors of Socialist Outlook.

http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article288