I've been shooting a series of short stories - little documentaries, really - about people, youngish Kenyans, who have chosen to just get on with it and change their communities, not with donor funds, or nods from politicians but by themselves; who have decided to stop waiting for government, because for them waiting for anything, anyone, to listen, is to decide to die unheard.  This is pretty much the reason why I spent all day yesterday following a man who'd decided to do his tiny bit for change.  An artist called Solo 7: perhaps you remember newsclips of him from the post-election violence days.  Or maybe driving past, or around, Kibera you have seen his work, his graffitti: on posts, on burnt-out shells of buildings, on butcheries, on hair salons, on walls, and, at the height of violence, even on his own dog!

 AMANI NOW

Keep THE PEACE! Solo 7

PEACE WANTED ALIVE. Solo 7

KEEP PEACE AGAIN

 His scribbles are in many places the last remaining visual evidence that less than a year ago,  Kibera was on fire.

Who is this dude?  What was he thinking?  Why did he do this?  What did his fellow residents think? Well, first they thought this seventh son of nine, born on the seventh day of the seventh month in 1977, was insane. Some thought he was stupid.  But the more he wrote, the deeper he began to chip into the conscience of the neighborhood - or shall we call it 14 villages in search of a neighborhood - that is Kibera. And though so much of that time is no longer visible to the naked eye, this one-man army, armed only with a paintbrush and his very last cans of paint, continues to speak everywhere. Following his footsteps yesterday, from the heart of Kibera, along the railroad, past the chang'aa dens, and the roadside stalls, and the maize millers, past the Nubis and the Jakas and the Wasaperes down to the big rocks in the valley that separates Jamhuri Park from the slum, with a bubbling green sewage-laden river (that I almost fell into), all kinds of voices and views wandered into our path.  Many shouting out at the unlikely hero: "Hey! Solo Sven!  Mi ni Solo Six!!" and "Solo! Peace to you!"

And as we revisited his graffiti, many with an accompanying story ("Here is where I was writing and police were firing there", and "Here is where I wrote after a crowd burnt the petrol station down") we listened, asked and eavesdropped at it all - fury at Ruto everywhere for daring to appear on television and say (aloud!) that the allegation of maize being 120 was a media-fuelled rumor. In the "bases" that line the roads, where young men sit and debate politics and trade lyrics as they chew veve, the loud arguments about the children of the president and Prime Minister dining together as maize meal becomes a luxury.  A gaggle of Luyha taxi drivers, convinced that this was a plot hatched specifically to kill them.  The loud group of young residents who, spotting our cameras, took the stage presented by the lens to let it be known that the railroad was about to be lifted again should prices not come down. A sense of unity - an unstable unity of disillusionment and disgust at all the politicians with their salaries, and their refusal to pay taxes, coming a distant second to the empty tables and the UNGA prices. And already a rumble of tribalism fuelled by economics and hard times, haves already hated by have-nots ("we can't afford UNGA and the Nubians are eating rice!") And of course, everywhere, the smell of tar, as potholes are filled, by councillors and government officials, in excited anticipation of Raila's Homecoming.

 Yes. Tomorrow, on Saturday 29th November, Langata's MP, Kibera's MP, is finally coming home.  What took him so long? And why can he only come home to his constituency after the burnt-down businesses have been rebuilt and the potholes patched up like a series of broken truths? Nearly a year after all hell broke loose there?

At Mama Oliech's in Dago, where we lunched late with the crew, and Solo 7, lay an enormous snake-like fish with big human-size teeth on its lower gums, dying slowly in the sun. Mama Oliech came to tell us about it:  Komongo. (excuse the spelling!)   A fish so prized that by the time it comes to Nairobi, she retails it for 8,000.  It's rare to pull it out of Lake Victoria nowadays, hard to find. No feast to honour a wedding or even a homecoming is complete without it. And this particular one, dying slowly in the sun, was specially brought down for the homecoming this weekend.  Celebration.  Time to feast. To celebrate:  If Unga is unaffordable then let them eat Komongo.

 I guesse what I am saying is that it felt as though in this vast place, (nearly 2,500 acres) for whose residents words are not just newspapers, or announcements but lifelines - or, in the case of Ruto's insensitive declaration, death lines. And it's here, following the journey of one man and his paintbrush, scribbling lines, words, a sentence at a time on any available surface, where I was forced to reconnect with the power of words.  The words that tumble out of politicians mouths and those that spilled off Solo 7's brush.

Because if you can't verbalize, or express what's in your heart, how do your actions come to life, how do you mobilize and make voices heard when politicians so willfully stick ears to fingers, refusing, refusing to hear. Yes, there is a public with a shared understanding of what's wrong. But how does it articulate itself in a voice loud enough to be heard and prick the conscience of our so called leaders?  Is it through persistence, the kind of persistence that Solo 7 employed, with his paintbrush, sentence by sentence, kilometre by kilometre, till a handful listened? And then more?

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