The Mwelu Foundation

Every time it rains in Nairobi, especially during the rainy season when the sky unleashes enough water for a small sea, I think of my friends in the slum around the edge of town. Trying to avoid the litter, sewage and shards of glass scattered across slum paths is hard enough in the day. “Try it in the dark, in the rain, and without shoes,” my friend Kim once said to me with a grin as we leapt across a blocked drainage pit.

Most of my friends in Mathare, Nairobi’s largest and poorest slum, survive without many of the things I take for granted. They do not have toilets, running water, electricity or a good pair of shoes. Working people are lucky if they earn sixty Kenyan shillings (roughly one US dollar) a day. Crammed into one-room shacks with sheets hanging from the ceiling as room dividers, families are large, with five to ten children. Single mothers run the majority of households. Many fathers have left or died, perhaps from AIDS or one of the other illnesses that plague the slum.

This is the Nairobi that most tourists do not see. Many local Kenyans, expatriates and wazungus (white people) do not see these areas either, because the slums are no-go zones. The only stories they hear about ‘notorious Mathare’ involve violence, drugs and prostitution.Most are told or written by outsiders. But as the kids’ photographs in this book show, this is not the whole story.

As a photographer, I have always struggled with issues of access, ownership and subjectivity within the documentary tradition. My reason for first visiting Mathare was a freelance job : an assignment to photograph a youth group which is also Africa’s largest youth football league – the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA). Just off of Juja Road, the main artery that links the vast Mathare slums to downtown Nairobi, I met a group of kids playing soccer with balls made of plastic bags, waste papers and string. They were obsessed with football and aspired to be the Zidanes of the future. Football could be their way out.

I started hanging out with these kids, watching young boys and girls play football barefoot on dusty pitches covered with rubbish and stones. I photographed their weekly community clean-ups and listened to their peer counsellors tell friends about the dangers of drugs and AIDS. I was struck by the quiet strength and hope of these kids who, despite dire living conditions, dreamed of becoming football stars, lawyers and doctors.

The promise of these kids inspired me to follow the lead of photographers like Jim Hubbard, Wendy Ewald and Nancy McGuirre, all of whom have demonstrated photography’s power with disadvantaged young people around the world. Their work has shown that kids have vivid and important stories to tell, and cameras are dynamic tools for this expression. I hoped to teach the MYSA footballers a new skill : shooting with cameras. Thirty-one kids who had never touched cameras before were given basic 35mm point-and-shoots and a roll of film per week. Some had never even heard of the word photography.

In September 1997, Francis Kimanzi – aka Kim – a MYSA youth leader and top striker on Mathare United, the professional slum football team – began working with me to teach photography and writing skills to a group of boys and girls, aged twelve to seventeen, selected from the MYSA youth teams. During our weekly sessions at the MYSA office, we watched shy kids bewildered by these strange plastic machines transform into confident young photographers, emboldened by their new talent and the attention their pictures have generated in Kenya and abroad.

Throughout this process, the Shootback Team has repeatedly humbled me with their vision and perspectives. Although I have spent three years working in Mathare, the intimacy and insight these youths have on their own lives is something I cannot replicate. Collins Omondi, a wry seventeen year-old, expressed it well when he wrote in his Shootback journal, “There is no difference between us and the other photographers ; The only difference is that they shoot and we shoot back.”

http://www.daneldon.org/inspired/wong/lanawong.htm

Shootback: Photos by Kids from the Nairobi Slums is published by Booth-Clibborn Editions, London (1999).

Lana Wong was born in New York and studied fine art/photography at Harvard University and the Royal College of Art, London. She moved to Kenya in 1996 and worked in East Africa as a photographer for various UN agencies. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and she has worked as a television presenter (BBC), photographic curator and teacher. She is currently based in Paris.