*All photographs of artwork or students are the property of Kaw Seng and may not be reproduced or republished without her consent.

MYITKYINA, KACHIN STATE, NORTHERN MYANMAR
Most of the artwork hanging on the wooden walls of Jubilee Café is painted with rudimentary strokes and bold colors. Haunting figures hover ghostlike within the frames. Faceless and emotionless, the subjects face the viewer as if to deliver a final message to the living before the past fades from memory.

The images emerged from the minds of children, and each is illustrated with disturbing symbols of enduring trauma and heartache. The Prussian blue background we see is not the darkening evening sky of dinner time, but a sea of corrugated roofs provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to shelter survivors from the penetrating sun, the monsoon rains, and the sight lines of those who wish them harm. The circles, squares and diamonds sketched in pencil are not random constellations of stars. They are bullet holes.

Jubilee Café sits atop a promontory overlooking the Irrawaddy River surrounded by clumps of bamboo, tropical flowers and mango trees. The coffee shop-gallery sits off Munkhrain Road in a quiet neighborhood of two-story residences—an unassuming sanctuary in a city whose future feels destined for discord and political violence. For the past two weeks, the café has hosted this exhibition of artwork painted by Kachin children who for seven years have managed to survive in IDP camps clustered along the Myanmar-China border. 

Beneath one of the paintings a caption reads: “The broken is not someone, but everyone. The broken part is in everyone. Light comes through the broken part into everyone.”

In Kachin State, where nearly sixty years of civil war and systemic disenfranchisement has left more than 120,000 ethnic Kachin refugees scraping out an existence in squalid, desperate conditions, hope can not be separated from heart-break.

Within hours of arriving in Myitkyina, we are informed that a meeting scheduled for later that evening would be postponed, and we're told to stay off the streets after 10 p.m. A spate of assaults, robberies, stabbings, rapes, and murders have taken grip on the city, and a soft curfew is in place.

During the day there are few signs of Myitkyina’s dark underbelly: the streets are lively in the commercial center, young people gather in Manau Park to practice traditional Kachin line dances, and the tree-lined city’s ubiquitous guard posts sit unmanned. But at dusk—as the smoke from burning leaves and trash wafts through the alleyways and night descends—checkpoints are set up along the city’s main roads and motorists are stopped, questioned, and ordered to go home.

Although Myitkyina has been spared the bombing raids of the resurgent war between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s armed forces), a wave of refugees from war-torn regions have descended on the ostensibly tranquil provincial capital of Kachin State. Mass exodus from rural war zones has led to staggering rates of unemployment, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and other manifestations of psychological trauma in the capital of Myanmar’s northernmost province.

In 2011, as the military junta prepared to relinquish control and transition toward democratic reforms, the seventeen-year ceasefire between Tatmadaw and KIA forces disintegrated. Bombs and mortars strafed the countryside as battalions maneuvered for control of strategic targets, sending tens of thousands of villagers fleeing toward the relative safety of Myitkyina, rural churches, and the IDP camps strung along the Myanmar-China frontier.

As the tenuous peace in Kachin State dissolved—reigniting one of the world’s longest-running and least-publicized civil wars—the Tatmadaw instituted its long-standing doctrine of “Four Cuts” designed to disrupt critical links between ethnic civilians and the armed wings of resistance movements by cutting off access to food, funds, intelligence, and recruits. 

In the case of Kachin State, the Tatmadaw’s strategy of attrition created the conditions to exploit the strategic humanitarian crisis.

The roots of the Kachin conflict can be traced back to the end of colonial rule and the 1947 Panglong Conference, where representatives from various ethnic groups gathered in an effort to unify the country under the banner of the newly-independent Union of Burma. Kachin chiefs, along with representatives from Shan, Chin, and Karen ethnic nationalities in Upper Burma, agreed to join the unified republic led by Burmese national hero General Aung San, provided that stipulations were included to ensure their political legitimacy and future autonomy. Foremost among these conditions were the “Principles of Equality,” which promised the voluntary right of secession to participating ethnic groups after a ten-year period. The negotiations failed, however, to include Arakanese, Wa, Mon, and Rakhine leaders, among dozens of other ethnic groups, which stoked resentment and gave rise to nascent ethnic rebellions.

The hopes of General Aung San (father of Aung San Suu Kyi) were short-lived, and he would not live to see independence. Just months after negotiating the Panglong Agreement, General Aung San was assassinated by agents of U Saw, a political rival and the former Prime Minister of British Burma. His death left the newly-formed Union of Burma without a unifying leader and gripped by fear that Britain would attempt to retake control of its former colony.

The Kachin conflict officially began fifteen years later in 1962, when General Ne Win led a successful military coup d’état against the democratically-elected government. He disbanded Parliament, declared Buddhism the national religion, ceded part of Kachin territory to China, and formed a military junta that would rule Burma for the next 50 years. In response to this abrogation of the Panglong Agreement, a group of Kachin students and young political leaders banded together covertly to form a rebel insurgency to fight the junta. That protracted war against the Tatmadaw continues today.

Kachin State is home to around one million members of the Jingpho Wunpong (Confederation), six tribes (Jinghpaw, Maru, Lashi, Rawang, Zaiwa, and Lisu) who have ancestral claims to the land. Until recently, the Jingpho lived mainly in upland agrarian hamlets, divided along clan lines and tribal affiliations.

“There are, strictly speaking, no Kachin tribes,” noted Reverend Ola Hansen in his seminal 1913 ethnology, 

. “They recognize only different families and linguistic traditions.” He explains that, for convenience, “we may call the group of families that speak the same dialect a tribe or a clan while we employ the name Kachin for the people as a whole."

Inhabiting a region of almost mythic obscurity, the Kachin dwell in the vast northern reaches of Myanmar, hemmed in by the frontiers of China to the east, India to the west, and the precipitous wall of the Tibetan Plateau to the north.

Only a handful of all-season roads exist in Kachin State, colloquially known as Kachinland, and they are mainly connected to Myitkyina, international borders, and strategic development projects. Vast swaths of the region are covered in dense jungle and are almost completely inaccessible for six months of the year. In 1942, construction began on the only “road” ever built across Kachin—the Ledo-Stilwell Road: a supply route carved out of the wilderness between British bases in Assam, India and allied positions in Yunnan, China during the dark days of World War II. Its purpose was to supply munitions, medical supplies, and provisions to desperate Allied fighters in western China to resist the Japanese invasion from Burma. When the Japanese took British Burma in 1941, the Allies lost their main supply train via the Burma Road and so devised an improbable plan to transport goods overland from India across loosely-patrolled Kachin territory to Yunnan. The U.S. parachuted a dozen soldiers into the Kachin jungles to make contact with local tribes and foment a resistance movement. In the ensuing months, thousands of Kachin joined the war effort as spies, saboteurs, and soldiers. Without the Kachin Rangers, as they would be known, China may well have become a Japanese colony.

The Ledo-Stilwell Road project was a notoriously brutal endeavor undertaken by a ragtag band primarily comprised of Kachin natives, Chinese laborers, and African-American soldiers. General Lewis A. Pick, who commanded the road-building effort, called it “the toughest job ever given to U.S. Army Engineers in wartime.” It took 50,000 men three years to complete and cost the lives of more than 1,100 American soldiers as well as countless thousands of Kachin and Chinese. The road was never utilized for its intended purpose, as advances in military aviation saw cargo planes able to ascend the Himalayan peaks, known as “The Hump.” Today, some portions of the Ledo-Stilwell road have been maintained and repurposed by the government, while others are impassable, having been reclaimed by the jungle.

Isolation has been a blessing and a curse for the Kachin. The unforgiving terrain has historically presented a deterrent to invasion, helping local clans resist the advances of powerful colonial neighbors: China, India, Lower Burma, and Tibet. Conversely, the vast expanses of wilderness, a dearth of infrastructure, and internecine conflict among the various sub-tribes has limited the Kachin’s ability to mount a unified defense of their land. External observers are rarely granted access to conflict areas, leaving the international community largely unaware of the war in Kachin. The consequence of inaccessibility has meant that the mist-shrouded mountains and dense rainforests have provided a perfect cover for the horrors of war.

There are no celebrated cultural monuments or glittering ancient capitals in Kachin State, and virtually no foreign tourism. For thousands of years, traders on the Southwest Silk Road steered clear of the malarial jungles and the “fierce Kachins" in favor of well-trodden paths connecting China to the Mogok gem mines and the cities of Lower Burma.

For all its mystique, it would be inaccurate to cast Kachin State as a remote, tribal hinterland. It is among the most coveted and contested repositories of natural resources on earth, possessing mineral wealth that holds the power to change the fate of nations.

The land is endowed with vast deposits of jade, gold, amber, teakwood, and rare earth elements valued in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Bananas, opium (processed into heroin), and hydro-electric power generate billions more. The promise of staggering profits has lured a cabal of government ministries, armed ethnic factions, drug cartels, and transnational corporations to descend on the land and invest in large-scale operations. Only a fraction of these commodities are taxed—the majority are neither reported nor intended for domestic consumption. They are instead smuggled across the Chinese border using a sophisticated web of shadow companies, corrupt agents and military-protected checkpoints.

Kachinland is marked by a resource curse that has borne fifty-eight years of ethnic violence, economic repression, land seizures, and cultural genocide. Still, it remains a symbol of independence, armed resistance to military rule, and opposition to Sino-Burmese suzerainty.

“The villagers were commanded to clap while the bulldozers destroyed their land,” says Tu Hkawng, a pastor from the Myitsone area.

Painfully, he recalls the sight of people from his village gathered near the banks of the Irrawaddy river in late 2009 for the “opening ceremonies” of the Myistone Dam project. Three villages were “invited” under threat of violence to celebrate the inauguration of the US$3.6 billion project that would ultimately destroy their livelihoods and transform their homeland into a bleak reservoir. They were obliged to feign enjoyment while their ancestral burial grounds were desecrated, their houses razed and their families sent into exile.

The villagers can only imagine the scene taking place inside the nearby dam headquarters: company men, government officials and military personnel sit around tables littered with bottles of beer and baijiu (Chinese liquor), platters of grilled Kachin delicacies and ashtrays overflowing with expensive Chinese cigarettes, while outside thousands of Kachin are organized in rows like prisoners awaiting their grim fate.

“Afterwards, they were ordered to leave their homes and march with the elders in front,” says Tu Hkawng. They were instructed by soldiers to walk in rhythm—right foot or left foot first—and told not to look back. “It didn’t matter if they were sick or too old to walk.”

Before the “ceremony,” villagers scrambled to pack all the possessions they could carry, stacking them on motorbikes, trucks, and boats along with their children, the elderly, and their cattle. Amid the chaos, much was left behind and families were separated.

“I heard a man packed everything he could move from his house onto a boat and made it downriver to the resettlement camp, only to realize he had forgotten his son,” says Tu Hkawng. “When he couldn’t find him, he ran back upriver many miles to his old house to search for his son and found him terrified hiding under a bush.”

Construction on the Myitsone Dam has been suspended for seven years, but the impact on the local population has already been catastrophic. “Of course, we need electricity,” he says, “but we do not need the dam. How can we believe this is good [for us]?”

Tu Hkawng’s concern is the ability of Kachin people to cope with the destruction of their spiritual center and the loss of their traditional way of life. He asks: “How do we account for the reversible and irreversible? The tangible and intangible things that could be lost?”

As animist traditions of worship, the “duwa” chieftain system, family structures, and farmland vanish—replaced by Christian dogma and Burmese customs—the cultural foundations of the Kachin also crumble. The loss of age-old traditions helps elucidate the spiritual connection to the river. To many, including Tu Hkawng, the Irrawaddy represents the last pillar of Kachin culture. Tu Hkawng speaks of the Irrawaddy river in sacred terms: “It is Myanmar’s treasure, lifeblood, sentimental value.” The Kachin believe their progenitors migrated from the Tibetan Plateau into the lowland basins of the Irrawaddy’s tributaries and settled in four ancestral villages. From these ancestral villages, familial lineages proliferated and clans were born.

Condemnation of the Myitsone Dam project, however, is not limited to the Kachin people. The Irrawaddy is the only major river located entirely within Myanmar’s borders, and an estimated forty million people living in the river basin depend upon it for sustenance, transportation and survival. Due to Myanmar’s complex demographics, the Irrawaddy is one of few unifying symbols of national cohesion, independent of the predominant Burman-Buddhist ethnoreligious identity.

Criticism is becoming widespread in large part because the economic, ecological, hydrological, and cultural ramifications of the Myitsone Dam leave too many unanswered questions, according to Professor Maung Maung Aye, Chief Advisor of the Myanmar Environment Institute (MEI).

There has been only one comprehensive environmental impact assessment on the Myitsone Dam. Known as the BANCA (Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association) Report, the study was commissioned by the China Power Investment Company (CPI) in 2009 and conducted by a joint team of eighty scientists and experts from Myanmar and China. Although the 945-page report has never been released in its entirety, excerpts became public in 2011. Those excerpts recommended the Myitsone Dam be scrapped in favor of building two smaller facilities with equivalent combined generative power on tributaries upriver.

The Myanmar central government in Naypyidaw nevertheless insisted on moving forward with the project, imperiling the seventeen-year ceasefire between Kachin and Tatmadaw forces. Border skirmishes broke out in 2010. Then, in March 2011, the KIA issued a warning to the Chinese central government in Beijing directly, stating that construction of the dam would sever peace in the region and result in the resumption of civil war, insinuating that conflict would reap disastrous results on Chinese investment. Three months later, Tatmadaw forces attacked a KIA stronghold near the Dapein (Taping) dam, a Chinese-funded hydropower facility on the Kachin-Yunnan border, officially ending the ceasefire.

China’s stake in the Myitsone Dam goes well beyond electricity. It is part of a larger tactic called “debtbook diplomacy” in which China uses “strategic debts to gain political leverage with economically vulnerable countries across the Asia-Pacific region.” Sri Lanka and Pakistan have already been forced to cede military bases and ports to China, while in Kachin, debt leverage has allowed China to gain unrestricted access to critical natural resources. Furthermore, by forcing the government to acquiesce to the Myitsone project, Beijing receives tacit assurance of Naypyidaw’s willingness to capitulate to its future demands. This strategy is a critical aspect of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an estimated US$1 trillion global trade route involving seventy-one countries and organizations that will “enhance regional connectivity” and fortify China’s economic supremacy in the eastern hemisphere.

The Myitsone Dam is a striking example of Beijing’s ambitions—and hubris—in Kachin State, where Myanmar’s government and Chinese companies have agreed to cooperate on eighteen joint venture hydropower projects.The Myitsone Dam is considered the crown jewel. It would be Myanmar’s largest hydroelectric facility to date, and the tenth largest in the world. Producing an estimated six thousand megawatts, it would have a greater capacity than any hydroelectric plant in Canada, and rank second only to the Grand Coulee dam in the United States.

There are no estimates as to how much, if any, of the energy or profits generated by the dam would be allocated to Kachin State. China Power Investment Company has reported that 90 percent of the electricity generated from the project will go to China, while 10 percent will be transmitted to the Myanmar power grid. China will receive 70 percent of the annual profits, 20 percent (USD $500 million annually) will go to the Myanmar government, the remaining 10 percent distributed as brokerage fees to development subcontractors, namely Asia World.

Despite the obvious benefits, however, Beijing seems to have been ill-prepared for the refugee crisis precipitated by the reignited war in Kachin. Villagers, whose homes became military targets, streamed across the border in search of safe haven in Yunnan Province, threatening Beijing’s delicately engineered neutrality. Shortly thereafter, in mid-2011, Myanmar’s Prime Minister Thein Sein officially suspended construction on the dam. That moratorium remains in effect today.

Although Beijing’s official position advocates peace and dialogue in Kachin, in early 2019, China’s ambassador to Myanmar, Hong Liang, stated: “If this issue [Myitsone] fails to be resolved…it will seriously hurt the confidence of Chinese entrepreneurs to invest in Myanmar,” going on to claim local political and religious leaders held a “positive attitude“ toward the project.

Semi-veiled threats may cause the government in Naypyidaw to balk, but the ambassador’s attempt to rewrite the narrative has been met with incredulity among Kachin leaders. “We oppose the project now and forever,” responded Gumgrawng Awng Hkam, President of the Kachin Democratic Party. “However, China refuses to give up and keeps trying [to build the dam]. They are giving the reasons that Chinese investors are hesitant to make new investments [in Myanmar] due to the failure of the Myitsone Dam.” KIA leaders have stated that they support the will of the people, who overwhelmingly demand the project’s permanent suspension.

When evaluating the proposed dam site from the banks of the river, the question that immediately comes to mind is: “Why here?” Few natural features suggest an ideal basin for a reservoir or the 500-foot-tall dam itself. The contours of the valley are rung by broken, low-lying mountains and rolling farmland. The area’s geographic features tell you this isn’t the place.

Perhaps even more problematic is the site’s proximity to the Sagaing Fault, which lies just fifteen miles to the west. A significant earthquake and subsequent breach of the dam could result in a catastrophic incident, potentially releasing a wall of water that would engulf Myitkyina with the force of a tidal wave.

Professor Muang Muang Aye’s team from the Myanmar Environment Institute found that “the conditions of the Myitsone area and its environs are actually not suitable for the construction of large dams and dam-cascade.” They point out that the area in question is largely composed of serpentine, which when exposed to water from the reservoir can become dangerously unstable.

Although Tu Hkawng advocates for Kachin State’s self-sufficiency, he agrees with the BANCA and MEI reports that call for a network of micro-dams to be built on tributaries of the Irrawaddy instead of one mega-dam project. As noted by CPI-commissioned scientists, this strategy would mitigate safety concerns surrounding the Myitsone Dam’s ecological and social impact.

Tu Hkawng believes opposition to the dam is growing across Myanmar and that the government should permanently suspend construction and allow local villagers to return home. Such a gesture could have a unifying effect politically and might help improve Myanmar’s global image. “The NLD [National League for Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi] is our elected leadership. If they refuse to listen, it will break trust and cause doubt among the people who voted for them [in 2015]. This will become a big problem for them [NLD] in the 2020 national elections.”

“We need the right to mandate it [micro-dam project] ourselves,” he continues. “But Kachin are not ready for this while we are still transitioning to a democratic system. It is not conducive to peacemaking.”

As the suspension of the Myitsone Dam continues into its eighth year, thousands of Kachin languish in IDP camps and resettlement colonies. Stripped of their land, livestock, and livelihoods, they live without political agency or viable economic opportunities. A grave, suffocating despair has settled upon these displaced peoples, and Tu Hkawng explains that the damage wrought upon the social fabric of Kachin culture is difficult too exaggerate. “One-third of the youth in the resettlement camps are drug addicts,” he says.

The entrance to the Aung Myin Thar resettlement village appears suddenly on the side of the main road that runs north out of Myitkyina. The shady two-lane road winds around green hills and past quaint hamlets marked by church steeples, tracing the contours of the Irrawaddy River toward the Tibetan Plateau.

A freshly-painted public health clinic situated upon a recently shorn lawn appears on the left, marking the entrance to the government-run displacement camp. Beyond the clinic lies a broad, flat, dirt plain and the hundreds of row houses where two thousand displaced Kachin villagers have been relocated, including Tu Hkawng’s brother and family.

Seven years ago, the government announced the mandatory relocation of six villages near the Myitsone Dam construction site, and subcontracted Asia World to build a makeshift town to house the displaced. The site has been constructed haphazardly with substandard materials, resembling little more than a Potemkin village built for show.

“The houses look almost identical to the traditional houses in our old villages,” Tu Khawng explains as he swings the car onto one of the side-streets of the gridded community. He drives past blocks of empty, lifeless houses until we approach a bamboo storefront framed by a clear-cut mountain in the background.

The two-story houses were constructed with poor quality wood and sit atop mounds of debris and loose clay soil that wash away in the rains. Built to last only three or four years, they leak during the four-month-long monsoon season. When the winds drive across the treeless floodplain, the houses sway and lurch. Fearing that they will topple over, families huddle together on kitchen floors, prepared to run should these shelters fail them during a storm. During the windy season, no one dares sleep upstairs.

There is little space between the houses and no room for vegetable gardens, nor land to graze livestock. No one in the camp actually has a deed to the land, nor do they have rights over their houses. They are forced to live here, but they are not permitted to truly set down roots.

“We are prohibited from building new structures,” says Seng Hkawn, a young mother of three. “The government only allows us to modify existing structures.” Lacking resources and viable sources of income, locals have few alternatives but to make their way back to their villages to collect materials from old homes to brace the new houses before they collapse.

Should gusting winds cause these structures to buckle and crush families, the news could tarnish public support and thrust the controversial Myitsone project into the global spotlight. This might compel the international community to pressure the government in Naypyidaw to take a harder stance against one of Myanmar’s signature infrastructure projects. Mitigating negative optics makes it critical for the government to maintain the veneer of humane living conditions in Aung Myin Thar, if suspension is to be lifted and the Myitsone Dam to receive final approval.

“Twice a year, representatives from the China Power Investment Company arrive to hand out rations,” Lahtaw Jan, an older mother with ten children explains. “For every six family members they give us three, 20-kilogram sacks of rice.”

There is no commercial life in Aung Myin Thar, just a smattering of corner stores stocked with the few precious commodities that make life here bearable: eggs, cigarettes, ramen noodles, alcohol. No one walks by the store during the hour we are there, nor does a single car pass. Sitting around a flimsy, low-lying plastic table, drinking tea, cartoons play on the television in the background. “People [here] don’t know what to do. They are wandering,” says Lahtaw Jan.

One can imagine parallels to the Biblical exodus being drawn during Sunday sermons in Aung Myin Thar, where ninety-nine percent of the population is Christian. Though the Kachin may wander like the Israelites, their prayers seem destined to fall on deaf ears.

Tu Hkawng believes that the mentality of the Kachin people is changing. “We used to work together, to help each other.” But as people are forced into unfamiliar terrain, “they struggle and don’t know how they will survive.”

Seng Hkawn explains that she lost her husband to a heroin overdose two years ago. “He did not use drugs when we lived in our village,” she laments. “It only started when we were forced here.” After he died, she found herself dispossessed, with no livestock, farmland, income, or support. To make ends meet, she runs a noodle shop in one of the twenty or so bamboo shacks set-up on a sandbar next to the confluence of the Irrawaddy during the dry season.

Each morning she leaves Aung Myin Thar around 4 a.m. and rides her bicycle an hour to work: she exits the resettlement camp, pedals over a series of small mountain passes, passes her ancestral village—taking stock of the house she once shared with her husband in better times—and makes her way to the riverside tourist destination popular with domestic tourists. Kachin clothing and textiles are valued highly throughout Myanmar, fetching exorbitant prices in the retail shops of Mandalay and Yangon. And so, to supplement her income, she rents traditional Kachin dresses to tourists who want to have their pictures taken dressed as locals with the source of the Irrawaddy in the background.

During monsoon season, when the sandbar vanishes beneath the river, Seng Hkawn packs up shop and moves to the semi-annual restaurant she runs near the headquarters of the Myitsone project. Concrete offices now reside atop villages that some of her neighbors in the resettlement camp once called home, while the burial grounds, churches, and gardens now buried under assembly halls and restrooms remain fresh in the peoples’ memories.

Imagining what comes next for the residents of Aung Myin Thar leaves little room for optimism. Will these displaced Kachin ever be allowed to return to their land? And if so, what will remain and how will they afford to start over?

Seng Hkawng tells us she hopes that the IDPs who fled to the camps far along the Chinese frontier can return to their villages. She dreams of the dam project failing—of returning home with her children to her land and the house she once shared with her husband. Perhaps there, the man who boiled up his despair and shot it straight into his veins can be buried with some dignity. And she can begin to heal.

Nkhum Brang stands before an awning-sized canvas outside the Manau Park Cultural Center. He is working with a group of assistants to create a live painting depicting the headwaters of the Irrawaddy from a photograph he took in the 1970s. Inside, dozens of high school-aged students pose for selfies in front of his paintings, while well-to-do locals peruse the cavernous hall filled with dozens of paintings propped up on easels. Nkhum Brang has displayed his work in Yangon and abroad, but this is the first time he has exhibited it in his home town.

The following day, we are driven to his house to meet him in his studio. Nkhum Brang’s son informs us that his father has gone back to the exhibition hall. He does not carry a cell phone, so he walks over to Manau Park where we find him at the end of the hall speaking with colleagues.

As his wife, a stately former Member of Parliament, brings us tea and sunflower seeds, Nkhum Brang explains his artistic motivation: “I see beauty in people and nature. But the beautiful things in my eyes are disappearing.” He points to the massive mural he co-created with students the day before, which now dominates the back of the exhibition hall, and speaks of lost ways, lost memories, lost youth, which he refers to as “rivers of no return.”

His works are vibrant, exotic reflections of a bygone era in Kachinland. He hopes that by sharing his art with young people “they will see and feel beauty and understand how people used to live and what nature used to look like.” Amid the harsh realities of life in Myitkyina and the difficult decisions facing Kachin youth today, Nkhum Brang sees engaging young people with creativity as his contribution to their “moral development.”

The erudite elder Kachin artist doesn’t conform to ethnic tropes: he is neither a resistance fighter nor a political artist. Nkhum Brang is simply a painter—one whose collection of work makes it clear he is desperate to ensure that what has been lost is not necessarily forgotten.

Nkhum Brang tells us he never became involved in the conflict, or with the KIA, because of his singular desire to create art. Thirty years ago, in the aftermath of the 8888 revolution, he watched his father get beaten with the butts of rifles by the military for speaking up on behalf of the Kachin. His father fell sick for five years and eventually died. He is well-aware of the consequences that come with armed revolt, and the risks of speaking out against the Tatmadaw.

“Many people in Myanmar want to make art or poetry. But it’s dangerous,” he says. “You can touch the government, but not the military.”

The future in Kachinland feels bleak to Nkhum Brang. “I have no idea what will happen tomorrow; I can’t tell what comes next. I feel like I’m in a box and it’s exactly the same size as my body. There is absolutely no space above my head. It feels narrow, heavy, dark.”

“In Myanmar, we cannot speak freely yet. In Myanmar, it takes time to reach the truth.”

In the meantime, he paints the vanishing touchstones of days gone by: a Rawang mother in traditional dress with her child strapped to her back looking over her shoulder; a feather-clad Lisu warrior holding an opium pipe with an impenetrable stare; elephants crossing a narrow tributary of the Irrawaddy.

East of Myitkyina, in the lowlands near the Chinese border, where farmland and forests stretch as far as the eye can see, agricultural communities have been reduced to ghost towns by bombings and landmines. The resurgent war has depleted the local populace in the border areas to the extent that once-thriving villages are now unable to resist the illegal appropriation of their land caused by a lucrative and growing black market trade in bananas.

Some of those who fled sought shelter in the nearby Zai Awng and Hkau Shau IDP camps, only to flee again after being bombed again in 2017. The few who have remained on the land do not have the manpower to cultivate the vast fields, even if they had the basic material resources.

In 2010, representatives from the New Democratic Army—Kachin (NDA-K), a communist faction of the KIA that broke away and allied themselves with the Tatmadaw as part of the Border Guard Force (BGF), began arriving in these villages. They struck a deal with Chinese fruit companies to profit from the vacant land. Villagers were handed seeds to plant in their quarantined fields, while farmland that had fallen into disuse, as a result of the disappearance of their owners, were allocated to Chinese investors. To sweeten the deal, the villagers were assured that everything they grew would be purchased.

In less than a decade, the eastern Kachin borderlands have been transformed into an ocean of bananas. The plantations are located almost exclusively in areas controlled by either the Tatmadaw, the KIA or the NDA-K, and the rule of law is lax, at best. Deserted villages have resulted in vanishing marketplaces. Debt and economic desperation have made ripe the conditions for forcible land seizures. Add to this, the constant threat of imprisonment or violent reprisals by BGF soldiers should villagers refuse to grow bananas, and it is hard not to see the eastern Kachin frontier as a post-colonial banana republic.

Kha Dau is a Project Coordinator for Metta Development Foundation, an NGO that provides social services and advocates for the Kachin people. He explains the mechanics of the industry: Chinese investors create dummy corporations based in Myanmar as front operations to conduct business. They pay off the BGF to coerce local land owners into ceding control of their farms. Forests are razed and subsistence crops eradicated to expand fields for banana cultivation, which cuts off villagers’ access to critical wild food supplies and destroys their source of firewood. This means villagers must travel even further to collect wood for cooking or to heat their homes during cold winter months. The land is mono-cropped, leaving no alternative source of income other than the sale of bananas to the Chinese companies who provided the seeds.

Once the bananas are harvested, they can be loaded and transported in trucks across the border to China in around nine hours. The “laundering” process takes place in Ruili, where the bananas are labeled Chinese-grown and shipped to markets in eastern China and exported to Europe. Masking the true origin of Kachin “conflict bananas” solves a few problems by eliminating tariffs, environmental regulations and labor laws. Chinese banana companies operating in Myanmar are never officially registered, so they leave neither a paper trail nor are they accountable for human rights abuses or public health violations.

Myanmar

Kachin

"I really think it's time to go,” our guide says as he nervously glances at his phone that glows half past five. Around us, as if on an unspoken cue, the air of urgency and anxiety thickens, and it strikes us that we have lost track of time and urgently need to conclude our assignment.

As the dreaded 7pm curfew looms, Faith Atieno and her team of artists from Art360 wind down the mural they have been working on since morning. It looks exquisite in the fading light with glints of eye-catching detail. Although it looks complete, Bernard Mavyuva, an artist involved in the project, tells us that work on the mural is far from over. They still have to include more details that could take another eight hours. But due to the curfew, they have to stop, head back home and live to paint another day.

Dusk approaches and in about an hour and a half the dreaded government curfew will kick in. If we don’t start moving, we will be trapped deep in Kibera and likely become sitting ducks for the notorious police patrols who infiltrate the slum at nightfall to enforce curfew. In tense and unanimous agreement, we quickly start disassembling and packing our camera gear into our backpacks, making sure we have all the memory cards from the day's footage. "Let's walk up to the junction and get the Uber from there,” our cinematographer suggests. We say our goodbyes to Faith and her team, bumping elbows rather than shaking hands or sharing hugs, as is the agreed upon new norm amidst the pandemic. We promise to return the next day to witness the unveiling of the completed mural.

Kibera bound by Royal Nairobi Golf Club to the north and Nairobi National Park to south. Downtown and Upper Hill are visible in the background. (Schreibkraft courtesy of wiki commons)

On the following day, our journey to Kibera begins at Nairobi’s central business district. As we drive to the southwestern part of the city, the wall of downtown skyscrapers gives way to well-maintained tarmac roads lined with trees and lush green foliage, as we drive through the upmarket residential district and shopping areas of Kilimani. As we navigate Upper Hill, the most visible site of Nairobi's property boom, and merge onto Ngong Road, hints of the sharp contrast that lies ahead come into view. One side of Ngong Road is home to the affluent, previously whites-only, Kilimani Estate, where modern high-rise apartments have elbowed their way next to colonial-era bungalows and gated estates. On the other side of Ngong Road lies a warren of tiny shacks huddled together in a maze of dirt paths that mark the entrance to Kibera, one of the largest and most densely populated slums in the world.

The contrast between the leafy suburbs and the grim adjoining shantytown is jarring. The northern border of Kibera follows the contours of the fifth hole of Royal Nairobi Golf Club—an exclusive colonel-era club built in 1906 for the leisure of officers serving in the King's African Rifles. The southern boundary is demarcated by the thin, polluted Nairobi river and large concrete walls that form a perimeter around an upper middle-class gated neighborhood—a none-too-subtle reminder of the physical segregation between the 

. Kibera is known euphemistically as Lower Karen, a sardonic nod to its diminutive socio-economic stature and proximity to its wealthy suburban neighbor Karen, named after Karen Blixen, the Danish expatriate and author of 

Before Kibera became a sprawling slum, it was a forested pastureland used by the Maasai to graze cattle. Towards the end of the 19th century, British surveyors arrived at Enkare Nairobi (“Cold Water”), a small watering hole on the high plains above the Rift Valley where they set out to establish a railway settlement. Their first objective was to expropriate the land by 

pushing out the Maasai to make room for white settlers

. Using Nairobi as a base of operations, the British used the Uganda Railway to finally yoke the interior of Africa to the coastal port of Mombasa. The Uganda Railway not only facilitated exploitation and overseas trade, it allowed the British to expediently deploy troops to remote British East Africa military outposts in the case of “native” uprisings.

By 1904, just five years after the railway reached Nairobi, British colonial administrators had established army barracks and a training ground for regiments of the East African Army a few miles southwest of Nairobi’s central railway station. A large forested area next to the barracks was allocated for the living quarters of 300 retired Nubian (Sudanese) soldiers who had served in the King’s African Rifles. They named the settlement 

(now Kibera) after the Nubian term for “jungle,” and lived rent-free as a form of “unofficial pension” for their military service.

3rd Battalion of the King's African Rifles, Kenya, 1902. (Image: UK National Archives)

Meanwhile, a succession of colonial governors passed legislation aimed at restricting Kenyan natives and immigrants of African descent from settling near the administrative centre of Nairobi. An example of colonial redlining was the 1922 Vagrancy Act, which sanctioned the 

 and led to the arrest and forcible eviction of thousands of “unemployed” Africans from the city.

Systemic racial segregation dates back to Nairobi’s first European settlements: Muthaiga Township was designated solely for Europeans, while neighboring Eastleigh was populated predominantly by Indians and well-to-do Somalis. But in 1925, colonial administrators went further, 

blacklisting “vagrants,” “vagabonds,” “barbarians,” “savages” and “Asians”

 as a pretext to curtail freedom of movement and 

restrict non-Europeans from enjoying public spaces

. Africans working in low-level positions for the colonial administration could only apply for temporary permits to live in “native reserves” situated on the periphery of the city.

By the early 1930s, increasing numbers of “unauthorized” natives from rural Kenya were drawn to the growing metropolis in search of work. Some settled in unoccupied sections of the city, despite the ever-present threat of arrest and eviction hanging over their heads, while others made their way to Kibera with the hope of renting plots of land from aging former Nubian soldiers of the King’s African Rifles, who held the original permits. Undeveloped land was rented on the cheap and new residents gradually constructed a makeshift shantytown out of mud, sticks, scrap metal and iron sheets—anything to fashion roofs over their heads. To this day, discarded building materials, soil, and branches remain the standard construction materials for both the hopeful and desperate who converge in Kibera.

The population of Kibera exploded post-World War II, and the settlement grew increasingly heterogeneous. By 1948, the colonial census reported more than 3,085 people living in the unauthorized township, of which only 55 percent (1,696) were Nubian. The majority of the new residents were Kikuyu and Meru, who came from the nearby Mount Kenya region. Kibera's allure continued to gain steam, and smaller numbers of Luo and Luhya were also drawn to the city. As the population boom strained available resources of clean water and sanitation, Kibera began its transformation into a slum. After numerous failed attempts to dismantle it and relocate the population, “the [colonial] administration adopted a policy of what can only be considered 'malicious neglect' in an attempt to force the burgeoning population out by rendering Kibera unlivable.” But the plan backfired. Depriving residents of their most basic human need—water—failed to compel inhabitants to leave. In fact, more arrived.

Kenya’s independence in 1963 lifted restrictions on freedom of movement, and a second wave of rural migrants set their sights on Kibera, choking what little space was at the time still unclaimed. Nearly 60 years later, Kibera remains the chosen destination for many who can’t afford to live in formal settlements due to its proximity to the city center, the industrial core, and affluent neighborhoods, which offer the promise of employment as live-in help. It is not surprising, however, that many end up in modern-day servitude.

“Relax. You have arrived,” a jocular Aziricome Popo shouts at us reassuringly from a distance, as we gingerly step to the side to make way for an animated group of young boys dashing towards us in the narrow alleyway outside his house. Despite the several trips we have made to Kibera, we are still ill at ease and on high alert owing to the notoriety of parts of Kibera as hotspots for petty and sometimes violent crime. Our apprehension is a depressingly familiar and stereotypical metaphor for life in Kibera.

Aziricome’s parents were part of the influx of Kenyans who flocked to the sprawling Kibera slum in the early nineties in search of, paradoxically, greener pastures. “We moved from a small farming village in Vihiga, western Kenya to Kibera when I was about five years old. Back then, things were different. For as little as three hundred shillings, or around 4 US dollars, you could get a one-room house,” he reminisces.

Aziricome is a self-styled jack of all trades and a master of whatever-entertainment need-you-may-have. He describes himself as a dancer, events MC, comedian, community mobilizer, actor, scriptwriter, filmmaker and a dance choreographer all rolled into one. “I studied mass communication in school for four years but afterwards I could not find a job, so I decided to start performing since it comes most natural to me,” Aziricome says. “I started doing skits and dances in church and not long after, people started hiring me to perform at their events.”

The year 2020 seemed promising for Aziricome. He had a couple of gigs lined up: a wedding to MC, dances to choreograph for schools and a performance to give at a community event. By mid-March, the novel coronavirus reared its ugly head and brought things to a grinding halt. With all events cancelled, schools closed, and public gatherings prohibited, he lost his sources of income. “A lot of artists in Kibera are struggling," he says. "They don't have money for food or rent but they try not to show it or ask for help because they are trying to protect their image.”

In April, President Uhuru Kenyatta issued an executive order directing the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage to disburse 100 million Kenyan Shillings (approximately $1,138,000 CAD) to cushion artists during the Covid-19 pandemic. With over 100,000 artists in Kenya lining up to get their share of the cash, Aziricome is skeptical that the money allocated will reach grassroots artists in Kibera like him. “That money will probably land on the hands of other privileged artists, not the artists in Kibera who need it the most,” Aziricome laments.

While life during the pandemic had slowed down, the resourceful Aziricome has found alternative ways of using his many talents to serve his community. With most of his gigs cancelled, he decided to turn to the internet and create satirical educational videos. In his videos, Aziricome infuses humor to address difficult subject matter such as domestic violence and crime. His motivation for wading into such issues stems from what he has witnessed in recent times around his community. “For the past weeks, we have witnessed more cases of people being mugged, violently attacked and killed. Most of these crimes are perpetrated by young teenagers who are supposed to be in school,” Aziricome says. His biggest fear is that many artists in Kibera will cave into the vicissitudes of economic hardship and resort to crime. By creating these videos, he hopes to reach the over 76,000 residents of Kibera that are part of a Facebook group dubbed 

 (Kibera is Our Home). All his videos are shot on location in Kibera, with a mobile phone and usually with a lively cast of young enthusiastic volunteers seemingly oblivious to the constricted “sets” of garbage-lined paths and overflowing sewage as they gleefully act out their scenes.

Aziricome has also created videos encouraging members of his community to take necessary precautions to avoid the spread of Covid-19. But he feels conflicted about the lack of situational nuance in some of the guidelines recommended by the government and the World Health Organization (WHO). For him, social distancing is an impractical demand in a claustrophobically congested area. “Our houses are very close to each other, our alleyways are very narrow. When you walk around, you easily bump into people,” says Aziricome gesturing towards the all-too obvious scene surrounding us. Kibera is one of the most densely populated places on earth with more than 200,000 people believed to be packed into a 2.5 square kilometer area. The colonial legacy of malicious neglect remains evident in the lack of quality of housing, accessibility to clean water and basic sanitation throughout Kibera.

Inside the one-room house that Aziricome shares with his wife and three children everything is crammed together. The kitchen, living room and bedrooms are partitioned from the same room and separated by long lace curtains. The room doubles as the family’s living quarters and Aziricome’s studio because dedicated space and “free" time to concentrate on his work are luxuries beyond reach. However, he seems oblivious to the cramped and often noisy working conditions. The bathroom and toilet his family shares with twenty-seven other households is 100 meters away. “The average house in Kibera has between seven and nine inhabitants cramped into a 10 x 10 foot space. There is no personal space, so if one person gets Corona, we all get it,” he explains.

Dozens of empty jerry cans are strewn around his house. “There is no water,” he says. “We have to go out there, queue for hours and buy water from vendors. When you’re standing in the queue, you come into contact with many people. You don’t know who has the virus and who doesn’t.”

At the time of this writing, there are 6,366 confirmed cases of Covid 19 in Kenya, including at least 200 cases from Kibera. The Ministry of Health has singled out Kibera as a Covid-19 hotspot and emphasized the need to strictly enforce the dusk to dawn curfew and encourage people to wear masks, social distance and practice regular hand-washing. But these measures, although essential, are virtually impossible to practice when faced with limited access to water, abysmal sanitation conditions, makeshift housing and suffocating human congestion.

Kibera has gained the ignominious reputation as the face of poverty in Kenya. Its confined, squalid conditions have made it a globally recognized case study and byword for urban slums that attracts "poverty tourists" from all around the world, much to the chagrin of its residents. Close to six decades after Kenya gained its independence from the British, the colonial legacy of neglect is still rife in Kibera in large part because residents of Kibera are perceived to be illegal squatters on government-owned land—an issue that has disincentivized authorities from providing basic social services.

Subsequent governments have made half-hearted overtures to attempt to rectify this insidious legacy. One such project was the Kenya Slum Upgrading Project (KENSUP) launched by the Kenyan Ministry of Housing in 2003 with the support of UN-Habitat and several other donor organizations. Dormant for years, the project was thrust to prominence in 2009 in an effort to replace Kibera's existing shacks with modern high-rise buildings and to give residents a chance to own an apartment in the new development. The flagship of the development was a cluster of concrete buildings called The Promised Land, which offered local residents heavily subsidized apartments at prices significantly below the market average and included all the services that were lacking in the slums—namely, water, sanitation, electricity, and security.

But no sooner had the project been launched than the stark reality of what it takes to dismantle a century of institutionalized and calcified neglect also emerged. A reverse exodus quickly took place, as residents who had been relocated to The Promised Landbegan moving back to their tiny shacks in the slum. Opportunistic investors from Nairobi’s middle class swooped in, finding the promise of investment in affordable housing through bribery and corruption too good to resist. It is also worth noting that investors were only able to secure the apartments intended for Kibera's residents because Kiberans themselves saw a business opportunity. They could rent out their flats at four-to-five times the subsidized rate and move back to the slums with money in their pockets. There were also allegations that certain officials had sabotaged the project and coerced Kiberans to move back by holding back services such as water. Ultimately, the well-intentioned but deficient logic of the multi-billion-shilling project was exposed due to its failure to address the root economic causes that drive people to slums.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have attempted to fill the gaps left by the government over the years, but with little success. Still, Kibera remains an attractive draw for NGOs and every year millions of dollars from donors are invested in a wide range of poverty alleviation initiatives. In 2000, there were over 200 NGOs located in Kibera and the number is believed to have passed well over the 500 mark in the last two decades. Though well-intentioned these humanitarian interventions may be, NGOs have had little substantive impact on the quality of life in Kibera. There is growing skepticism that expat NGO workers become enamored with turning charity work into lifelong careers, which ultimately perpetuates dependency syndrome. The comedy series "The Samaritans" has even taken a swipe at NGOs, cleverly playing on the widely held sentiment that donor funds end up financing administrative costs and paying for consultants, lawyers, and experts lined up for "their turn at the trough of ‘sorrow dollars’.”

Nestled between Kibera Town Center and Kamukunji grounds, a dusty field known for its checkered history of political rallies, we find an art gallery constructed of corrugated iron sheets painted blue and marigold. The gallery stands out from a distance. Its presence is audacious and somewhat of an oddity in a place where art is a luxury—a form of self-indulgence that only few can afford. To step inside is to be enveloped by a colorful collection of paintings on canvas, cardboard, baskets, bottles, and pots lining every wall and shelf. Although spartan and unostentatious, Art360 gallery acts as an oasis for young artists in Kibera looking to grow their skills and make a living through art.

On arrival, we find Faith, the founder of the Art360 gallery, and four other artists in an animated brainstorm over a sketch for a mural. Any attempt to keep a six feet distance is immediately thwarted, due to the minuscule size of the gallery.

We first heard about Art360 Kibera in mid-March shortly after the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Kenya. Faith tells us, at that time, coronavirus was still a distant phenomenon that seldom featured in the lexicon of the residents in Kibera. But now there is a lot of talk and misinformation about the virus. “We decided to create murals in highly frequented streets in Kibera so as to reinforce the message that Covid 19 is here and people need to take necessary precautions to keep the virus from spreading,” she says.

The thirty-one-year-old has lived in Kibera almost all her life. From an early age, she had an eye for the arts, especially abstract painting, as it allows her to express herself more fully. But pursuing a career as a visual artist seemed out of reach. She had never met or heard of any female painters from Kibera until a fortuitous encounter with a group of young, talented local painters inspired her to create a space where artists could develop their skills and earn a living. “Starting an art gallery in Kibera with little resources is a bold move,” Faith admits. “We make art with anything we come across or find interesting. We don’t have to paint on canvas,” she says, gesturing toward a shelf with paintings on cardboard, flowerpots, used bottles, shoes, and paper bags.

Before the pandemic, people from other neighborhoods would navigate the winding, congested paths that lead away from the 

 termini and find their way through the shantytown to the tucked-away gallery to buy artwork. But with Kibera being classified as a Covid-19 hotspot, and the government task force issuing pedantic warnings about what a full-blown outbreak would portend, people from outside Kibera hardly visit the gallery anymore. The pandemic has hit the meager fortunes of the artists at Art360 hard and wrought unimaginable economic uncertainties. “Most people are worried about where their next meal will come from. Getting a cute painting is the last thing on their minds,” says Francis Omondi, an artist at Art360.

Despite calls to self-quarantine, the artists at Art360 have chosen to keep the doors to the gallery open. “We cannot sustain ourselves if we decide to quarantine. It’s not easy surviving on paint and brush. But we still have to paint,” Faith tells us. Since the pandemic, the artists at Art360 have shifted their focus from selling art to painting murals. Several local non-profit organizations have commissioned them to create murals around Kibera that will help sensitize the community to the best practices of preventing the spread of Covid-19.

Self-quarantine or working from home is a luxury that few residents in Kibera can afford. The Kenya Bureau of Statistics estimates that 83.6 percent of Kenyans work in the informal sector, where a majority earn a daily wage that is contingent upon their physical availability at work. The government opted not to enforce a total lockdown as it would have adversely affected people’s ability to survive and, instead, put in place a curfew from dusk to dawn. Since then, the police have heightened surveillance measures in Kibera and actively used intimidation and brute force against residents found outside at night. During the first week of the curfew, social media platforms were awash with videos of police violently assaulting and harassing residents in Kibera. While police brutality is a constant feature of public life, especially in slums such as Kibera, the new powers bestowed on the police to "enforce the curfew" have exacerbated the arbitrary use of excessive force with devastating results. A report by the Kenyan Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) indicates that police have killed at least 15 people and seriously injured scores of others while enforcing the curfew.

After several hours of brainstorming and sketching, Faith and her team pick up brushes, paint cans and sketches and head out to their worksite, an iron sheet structure directly opposite the gallery, visible to the numerous pedestrians who pass by everyday. We watch from a distance as they wipe off dust and prime the grubby iron sheet wall. Each artist takes turns sketching and painting as music blasts from a portable radio. As the mural comes to life, the quotidian bustle of Kibera is in full swing—throngs of people walking in different directions, vendors manning open-air stalls, women selling food and secondhand clothes by the roadside.

At around 4PM, the mural is finally complete. Faith and her team begin to gather their brushes and paint cans while one artist stubbornly lingers for a bit to add a small detail to the mural. A small crowd of curious onlookers gather around the artist on the side of the road, eyes agape at the vivid and colorful mural that depicts a female health worker wrapping a frightening red creature in chains to prevent it from attacking the world below a caption reads "CORONA IS REAL." 

With this mural, we want to give coronavirus a personality because a lot of people in Kibera seem oblivious to the danger of the virus as they deal with more pressing issues,” Faith says as she gazes at the mural.

A stroll through Karanja, a small neighborhood considered to be the swanky section of Kibera, shows not much has changed. The narrow alleyways are bustling with vendors and people going about their business. Motorbike riders wearing heavy jackets with reflective stripes stand shoulder to shoulder with men in hand carts waiting for customers at major intersections. The only reminder that we are living through a pandemic are the ubiquitous masks covering 

people’s faces. Not everyone is wearing a mask, despite the mandatory requirement that could land one in jail for up to six months. At several points on our way, prominent billboards that usually advertise beauty products, beer, or instant riches from latest betting odds on soccer games now share space with 

("Eradicate Corona” in Swahili) public service announcements advocating residents to wash their hands, social distance and wear face masks.

David Avido, a 25-year-old fashion designer based in Karanja, is hard at work cutting, sewing, fusing and pressing fabrics to create face masks when we arrive at his house. As soon as the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in Kenya, he decided to start making face masks with leftover fabric from his previous designs and distribute them for free. “Most people in Kibera live hand-to-mouth and can’t afford face masks. Many have to choose between buying food or face masks,” Avido tells us. It is a tragic compromise that many have to contend with since the pandemic exacerbated food insecurity in the slums. On April 10, a stampede near the District Commissioner's office, where food aid was being distributed, left scores of people with serious injuries—an ominous warning of an impending food crisis.

“Things are not the same in other neighborhoods. There are those who can fill their fridges and cupboards with food and quarantine at home. Here in Kibera people don’t even have cupboards,” Avido says. According to a report by Oxfam International, Kenya suffers from extreme income inequality with less than 0.1 percent, roughly 8,300 of approximately 44 million people, owning more wealth than the bottom 99.9 percent.

The pandemic has significantly affected Avido’s work as a fashion designer. Meeting clients and taking measurements has become near impossible. Orders for designer clothing amidst the economic crunch have also dropped. Avido has suspended his usual work to make and distribute face masks. Since March, he has partnered with foundations in Kibera to distribute over 12,000 face masks for free. They stand out not only due to Avido’s striking, colorful African prints, but also because he adds pockets that allow users to replace filters, making the masks more effective and reusable.

For the soft-spoken Avido, the face masks are his way of giving back to the community. “Growing up in Kibera, we were extremely poor and would often go without food. Due to lack of school fees, I dropped out of school and began working at a construction site to support our family,” Avido reveals. He stumbled onto fashion serendipitously and for the past five years has worked tirelessly to build a successful fashion brand, 

 through which he designs and sells his trademark African-themed designer clothes across the world. He has dressed famous local and international celebrities and has been featured in 

 magazine and many other popular media outlets.

Avido describes his style as “street” and draws his inspiration from Kibera. “Fashion to me is not just about making clothes. I use it as a platform to express myself and inspire others,” he tells us. Fashion has opened doors for Avido, and he hopes to open more doors for his community Kibera. “People from Kibera work hard. They are talented but lack opportunities. My main goal is to expand my business so I can provide employment opportunities to the people in Kibera,” Avido says with a determined look.

As we leave Avido's home, which doubles as his workshop, it becomes apparent that his story of rags to modest riches is the exception rather than the norm. Journalist Abby Higgins notes that one can be forgiven for thinking that slums are "places of listless poverty filled with victims of circumstances waiting for outside intervention." Avido is evidence to the contrary; he’s proof that it’s harder 

 to notice that Kibera is teeming with thousands of small business ventures, both traditional and unconventional.

Many of those relegated to living in slums are entrepreneurs and innovators, constantly manipulating their surroundings to creatively address the problems they and their communities face while trying to escape the poverty trap. It is not uncommon to find many young entrepreneurs dabbling in several ventures simultaneously—running a video game arcade that doubles as a screening venue for football matches by night while selling boiled sausages called 

and operating second-handclothes and shoes stalls on the side.

Stories like Avido's lend themselves to survivorship bias, the logical fallacy that assumes one’s success tells the whole story. Thousands of entrepreneurs in Kibera are fighting a losing battle against an inhospitable and cutthroat business environment bereft of essential infrastructure and lacking access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, security, healthcare or credit needed for businesses to thrive. Unless the legacy of neglect is reversed at a systemic level, only a few will succeed in slipping through the cracks and escaping the poverty trap.

At the end of yet another day, we navigate the labyrinth of narrow, noisy alleyways towards the main road. Droves of people returning from the day's hustle hastily pass by heading in the opposite direction to get home on the safe side of the curfew. We locate our Uber with barely minutes to spare before the cutoff time for taxis picking up passengers, something the driver reminds us as we get in. He steers the grey Toyota Vitz onto Joseph Kangethe road, passing expensive residential homes lined with lush green bougainvillea hedges and interspersed with concrete walls and wrought-iron gates on both sides.

As we drive away from Kibera, I can’t help but think how Avido, Faith and Aziricome, all second-generation residents of Kibera, have inherited a legacy of neglect. While they strive to overcome a seemingly insurmountable challenge and lift themselves out of the poverty trap, the scale of their struggle grows, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, and becomes even more daunting. If governmental and “humanitarian” interventions are to do more than barely scratch the surface of systemic neglect in Kibera, they would do well to look to people like Avido, Aziricome and Faith for leadership and guidance.

Kenya’s Labor Market Wasn’t Made for a Pandemic

Law of the land: Ethnic patronage in Kenya’s slums.

Mukeku, J. (2018). Urban Slum Morphology and Socio-economic Analogies: A Case Study of Kibera Slum, Nairobi, Kenya. 

Oxfam International (2020). Kenya: extreme inequality in numbers.

East Africa

Kibera

As I wander along 7th Street, I take photos of graffiti—fresh, colourful, straight letters, burners and fill-ins. Along with all that remains of this once vibrant, pulsing cultural hub are commemorative plaques dedicated to artists and community leaders embedded in the sidewalk leading to the West Oakland BART station: a mural of activists Yuri Kochiyama and Angela Davis, a handful of nondescript historic landmarks and lingering mementos of the many great advancements that African Americans and immigrants struggled to achieve on these very streets. Battles lost, and won. And lost again.

The blade signs outside Esther’s Orbit Room are empty. Its rusting frames and decades-old hand-painted façade are well worn, barely catching the eye of passersby. This short stretch of road was for decades an essential cultural corridor for the growing African American middle class. Slim Jenkins Supper Club, Creole Café, Lincoln Theatre, and Ester’s formed the epicentre of this cultural ecosystem. Along with New Orleans and Memphis, 7th Street in West Oakland was a destination for jazz musicians and aficionados from around the country and world to make pilgrimage. On any given night at Esther’s you might have run into the likes of Al Green, B.B. King, Etta James, and Tina Turner.

“The Grand Lady of 7th Street” Esther Mabry opened the club in 1950 and remained at the centre of the West Oakland cultural scene until its shuttering in 2006. Walking along 7th Street toward the water, try as I may, it is nearly impossible to imagine the bustling splendour that preceded this abject desolation—the West Oakland that was once referred to as the “Harlem of the West Coast.”

A BART train screeches by overhead as an armada of 18-wheelers wait to enter the port—whistling and groaning belligerently as they start and stop, inching forward in painfully slow increments. Addicts and drunkards are scattered about, stumbling through a food desert paved with litter, never very far from the one local liquor store that happens to stock some basic sundries. Twenty-two Super Post-Panamax Cranes rise from the horizon, a roost of ominous sentinels guarding the countless freight containers stacked like coffins. They loom over the bay, casting a shadow over the clusters of ragtag homeless encampments.

The rise and fall of West Oakland has been shaped by the successive waves of migration from the late 1800s into the 1960s. The shipping yards and the railway depot attracted migrant workers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, China, Japan and from across Europe, who formed ethnic enclaves, of which there remain traces of influence today. In 1867, two years after slavery was abolished, the Pullman Car Company—the first luxury sleeper trains that carried well-to-do passengers across the country in grand style and comfort—was founded. The staff were almost entirely African Americans, and though the work was akin to indentured servitude, the job offered a stable paycheque and mobility. As the terminus of the continental railway system, West Oakland was the gateway to a coastal “promised land” for those African Americans wishing to distance themselves from the state-sanctioned violence and open racism of the South and create new possibilities for prosperity during the Jim Crow era.

Passengers on the Pullman sleepers, refusing to acknowledge their individual names, referred to all the staff as “George,” referencing their collective employer, George Pullman. A malignant practice presumably derived from the custom of naming slaves after their “owners.” Along with enduring second-class citizenship, ire was fomented amongst the porters, and in 1925 they formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the first African American-led labour union in the United States, laying groundwork for the Civil Rights movement that would explode decades later. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the BSCP served as connective tissue between African American communities across North America and at its height had a membership of 18,000 porters spanning the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It served as an above-board railway, circulating news of employment and emerging political ideologies from the West Coast to the east and south of the country and vice versa. The transcontinental rail lines formed an axis of connectivity and activism that integrated revolutionary internationalism and workers’ rights, and cultivated a broad-based coalition for progressive social change that sought to advance opportunity, prosperity, and quality of life for African Americans.

Beginning in the 1950s, this corner of West Oakland came to be known as the Lower Bottoms, following the construction of the Cypress Freeway extension that effectively severed West Oakland in two. Six hundred families were forced from their homes. Three years after its completion, 12 square blocks of Victorian homes on the south side of 7th Street were demolished, displacing another 400 families. The impact looms today in haunting, post-Industrial pockets of BROKEN WINDOWS and URBAN BLIGHT.

Under the guise of URBAN REVITALIZATION, public works projects advanced under the Housing Act of 1949 enabled and justified forced displacement and theft of minority home ownership via eminent domain, and, as always, in the name of the greater common good. Community efforts to lobby for subsidies to refurbish their properties were routinely ignored. As the national competition to modernize American cities commenced, deliberate incisions by way of new INFRASTRUCTURE were made. Block after block, aging homes were razed, dispossessing owners of their real estate and effectively dismembering West Oakland’s thriving African American middle class.

Blatantly prejudicial public policies, not well disguised behind the inherently racist framing of URBAN RENEWAL, were the mechanisms for casually uprooting and forcing entire neighbourhoods into cramped public housing with no further options for property ownership and accumulated wealth. Six city blocks and 500 homes were destroyed in the heart of the neighbourhood for the construction of the Oakland Main Post Office in 1960. The ACORN housing projects and the elevated BART rail line running above 7th Street, which followed suit, landed devastating blows to the community. As elsewhere, the BART was purported as a developmental advancement that would bring prosperity and employment to the neighborhood. Instead, it instrumentalized West Oakland’s geographic positioning as a through line of prosperity and employment between the predominantly white communities of San Francisco and sub/urban Oakland.

By the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing and URBAN PLANNING had been fully weaponized as a subversive measure to neutralize African American progress and demands for equality; a “kinder, gentler, machine-gun hand,” as Neil Young put it. It should come as no surprise that West Oakland in the late 1960s would be the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the larger Black Power Movement. It would also be the site of its symbolic death in 1989—amidst the ravaged backdrop of the crack epidemic—when co-founder Huey P. Newton was gunned down in West Oakland by a rival Black Power group in what was presumably a drug deal gone sour.

From its inception, the BPP was outmanned, out-resourced, and out-gunned by local law enforcement and undercover agents assigned to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had long pursued an aggressive campaign to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” prominent African American community leaders. In 1969, the FBI began targeting high level Black Panther Party members and set in motion a theatre of calculated subterfuge, political sabotage, unlawful incarceration, and planned assassinations intended to discredit the Black Power Movement as a violent criminal network and demoralize its members.

Through the 1970s, working in tandem with city officials, the federal government manifested a desperate landscape of disillusionment and immobility for African Americans, not much different than plantation life. And in its legal ambiguity and cultural opacity, an extension of white supremacy that commuted the delegitimized function of slavery to a legitimized system of mass incarceration.

West Oakland became synonymous with unemployment, addiction, mental illness, homelessness, violence, pollution, contamination, and in its final act, gentrification. There is no shortage of research and writing on the engineering of URBAN BLIGHT, through the mechanics of URBAN RENEWAL and facilitated by the brutal, invasive tactics of the WAR ON DRUGS: CRIMINALIZATION, VIOLENT POLICING, and MASS INCARCERATION. Yet, somehow this very recent history has been completely obfuscated (I, as a fairly well schooled individual, had never heard of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters at all), by a state and a news media that wilfully denies or sugarcoats the patterned brutality—physical, psychological, and systemic— inflicted upon working class people of colour in this country.

By the 1980s, the lustre of West Oakland’s cultural and socioeconomic heyday was being lost to unalleviated poverty, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and co-related violence. The neighbourhood today, with all its innate eccentricities and extraordinary historical value, remains an emaciated shadow of its former self and a case study of the insidious racism of urban development in the United States. Vagrants, descendants of a once-thriving citizenry deprived of opportunity and dispossessed by blatantly racist public policies, now roam West Oakland’s cold, damp underpasses and homeless shantytowns, muttering obscenities and summoning deities in post-industrial desolation.

Despite the litany of abuses that the Lower Bottoms has withstood, somehow there is a palpable kindness and camaraderie when walking these streets. Almost every person you pass shares an acknowledgement, simple head nods and hand waves, an easy "Good Morning." Even the addicts and the drunkards here are polite and friendly, offering a joke, a smile, or a story for a loose cigarette or change, with no angry rebuke for having neither to share.

United States

Lower Bottoms

At the outskirts of the township of Lugela, the paved road ends abruptly at a narrow dirt path—one continuous pothole, just wide enough for our truck to wind its way through the rippling hills towards Limbuè. Women and young girls carrying buckets of water, cleanly washed dishes, bananas, maize, and other essentials perfectly balanced on their heads walk to the edge of the road and duck into bushes as we approach. Some villagers lay idly in the shade of thatched roof huts, chatting in subdued tones, avoiding the intense tropical heat. As we gradually ascend towards the “Google Forest,” the cloud density increases incrementally. The amount of rainfall will determine how far into the rainforest of Mount Mabu we will be able to hike. It is early in the rainy season and we’re hoping our luck will hold.

Prior to 2005, Mount Mabu had been all but forgotten, save for the Indigenous communities and extractive entities looking to cultivate exportable crops around the base of the massif. Around the same time, Dr. Julian Bayliss, a biologist and researcher with the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, was scouring GoogleEarth when he noticed what appeared to be a mid-altitude, old-growth forest atop the mountain in northern Mozambique. In 2008, Bayliss and a team of researchers traveled to Mount Mabu to plant their flag and claim their “discovery” of the “lost forest of Mozambique.” Although his announcement was celebrated in a series of 

articles, the hubristic echo of Vasco da Gama's claim to have “discovered” the country itself over 400 years prior resonated.

Mount Mabu was protected from outside encroachment and industrial development by Mozambique's decade-long War of Independence from Portugal, the subsequent fifteen-year-long Mozambican Civil War, intertribal conflicts, geographic isolation, and harsh terrain. Proximity to the Malawian border meant that the region was used as for strategic munitions transportation for various revolutionary factions, as well as an escape route for combatants and communities under the gun. Mount Mabu was a transition zone between RENAMO (South Africa-aligned right wing paramilitaries) and FRELIMO (left wing Marxist revolutionaries) who were vying to govern Mozambique in the wake of independence from Portugal. Absolute devastation was wrought upon the land on the fringes of the rainforest during the armed conflict that lasted from 1977 to 1992.

Mount Mabu is the cultural and linguistic transition zone between the four primary Indigenous communities—Nangaze, Nvava, Namadoe, and Limbuè—that have been stewards of the rainforest since time immemorial. The vestiges of war are never far—scars in the earth overgrown and resigned to a quiet niche in history. There are residual traces of concealed clearings nestled between the crests of Mabu’s peaks and valleys, once gathering places for these neighbouring communities to hide in the shadows of the rainforest, evading opposition soldiers hunting them down in order to “liberate” them.

The Indigenous people of Mount Mabu have, over the course of generations, developed a knowledge system based on a peaceful co-existence with their natural environment. Their premise for navigating the forest is simple: dangerous, edible, medicinal, conspicuous, and common. Their hunting and trapping practices have been refined over time to have minimal impact on species populations and to reduce by-catch. Generation upon generation have compiled knowledge of the forest, and humans' place within it. This symbiosis is threatened by new waves of forced displacement by corporate agriculture.

Corollary to this knowledge system is a transportation and communications network that accounts for the vast distances hunters and foragers need to walk (sometimes up to 24-32 kilometers a day) to reach the remote corners of the forest, and to transport game, maize, sugar cane and other crops back to villages for consumption and sale. This requires extraordinary strength (porters can carry up to 35 kilograms of weight on their heads); agility (climbing steep inclines, and skipping boulders across rivulets and streams); stamina (sometimes hiking for four to eight hours nonstop under heavy sun, depending on the task at hand); and a familiarity with the almost non-existent forest paths—superhuman abilities to a city kid like me. Without the help of guides and porters, Bayliss and his team (like us) would never have found their way in or out and certainly would not have been able to transport their gear into the forest, so their claims to “discovery” are trifling at best.

The communities of Mount Mabu now find their land in the crosshairs of foreign and domestic extractive capitalist ventures, and themselves unwitting actors in an economic and socio-political imbroglio. In the now distant past, small Portuguese tea plantations spread out from the lower haunches of Mount Mabu. These days, local farmers have been pushed further up the mountain slope by the massive rubber plantations owned and operated by Mozambique Holdings Limited (MHL). Protected by private security and administered under the auspices of local government, the raw rubber is primarily for sale to the Asian market. It is common knowledge that MHL has indirect links to Mozambique's former two-term President Armando Guebuza, a central figure in the FRELIMO party and one the of richest people in Mozambique.

According to activists working with Justiça Ambiental (JA), a Mozambican environmental advocacy organization that has worked with the communities in and around Mount Mabu for the past 11 years, attempts at partnership with Bayliss have proven problematic over the years. The tendency toward strict environmental conservation ethics clashes with community needs and has resulted in contentious fall-out and a severed relationship. This shortsightedness has threatened to fracture the trust that JA had built with the communities over a decade and put them at odds with Bayliss and the scientific establishment.

On one visit to Mount Mabu, Bayliss and his team planted high-powered cameras to capture movements of new species in the forest over time. They did so without consulting or informing local hunters, community leaders, or chiefs who control tracts of the forest. Hunters discovered the cameras hidden in undergrowth and adorned with small skulls. The scientist had attempted to play off local superstitions, which he apparently hoped would prevent anyone from disturbing the skulls and removing the cameras. The hunters were not fooled, or amused; they were disrespected and insulted. The community informed JA that he was not welcome to return.

Most recently, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) signed a four-year contract with the Mozambican government to “manage” the rainforest and integrate local communities into the conservation plan. The government they rely on for permission to do their conservation work is comprised of the politicians that are benefiting from the imposition of corporate agriculture. It stands to reason that with few other avenues to achieve their objectives, Bayliss and WWF will join forces in what feels to be a new wave of environmental colonization cloaked in scientific inquiry and biological conservation. Time will tell if their conservation efforts can be integrated into an agenda of socio-cultural preservation, or, if they offer a convenient salve for the brutality of extractive capitalism.

Without foreign funding, there would be no NGO sector in Mozambique, a country that has consistently been listed as one of the poorest in the world since its independence. However, by putting forward an agenda that prioritizes environmental conservation over local community stability and cultural preservation, the WWF and Bayliss may find their interests aligned with those of Mozambique Holdings and the cabal of Chinese-cash-infused corporations looking to extract all manner of resources—timber, coal, fisheries, gemstones, etc.—from Zambezia Province. Tactics have already been deployed to criminalize farmers with no remaining options but to “slash and burn” fields further up the mountain slopes and to intimidate community members who refuse bribes or stand up to the coercion of MHL. The communities that have occupied the land of Mount Mabu for longer than anyone remembers are well aware that they are engaged in a hostile takeover. Whether the WWF and Bayliss agree to participate in meaningful consultation with local communities and coalesce their efforts, or bulldoze a neocolonial agenda, remains to be seen.

During my brief time in Mount Mabu, I was unable to discern (or they were unwilling to disclose) any definitive written history or visual culture. No one made claim to having a unique textile, ceramic, or any other traditional artisanal practice. Still, one imagines that 

must have existed prior to Portuguese occupation and the wars that followed. There are some written records from the region, mostly documents from the tea planters whose estates laid to the north and south of the massif.

According to our guides Manuel and Ernesto, who have spent their lives farming and trapping in the far recesses of the forests of Mount Mabu, oral histories are passed down from one elder storyteller to a younger person from the community who exhibits a strong memory, as well as the capability and desire to carry on the tradition. These traditions are passed on through a process of selection rather than blood lineage. Much of this has to do with the transmutation of the tribal social structure into the cosmological system centred around Mount Mabu and its two younger siblings: Mount Muriba and the River Mugue.

At night, Mabu becomes a mesmerizing aural bounty: crickets, frogs, the slow crumpling of leaves by termites, their counterparts sliding down the smooth exterior of our tent, the sporadic barking and yelping of dogs, our guides snoring. The crescent moon glows blood orange like the embers that scar nearby mountain slopes, remnants of fields slashed and burned to plant anew. The same colour as the eyes of the “bush baby” peering out and cackling from up on high, chucking unripe mangos that plummet from a great height crashing into the brush nearby. The sun begins rising at 4:30 a.m., the roosters preempt their call and response an hour prior and carry on long after daylight has broken, the village comes alive, and work begins. Somehow all perfectly syncopated.

As a city-dwelling outsider, I caught myself romanticizing this seemingly peaceful, primordial existence. Notwithstanding the stunning natural beauty of Mount Mabu, these communities, like everywhere, have their complications and contradictions: polygamy, underage marriage of young girls, high infant mortality (often during low yield harvests), inter-communal fighting, and corruption vis à vis theft and betrayal. The sudden infusion of cash (the average monthly salary in the region being 80 USD) administered by an outside authority—through the WWF—will have a divisive effect on communities that are barely surviving while commuting to higher, more treacherous parts of the rainforest for their basic subsistence. A little bit of money goes a long way in Mount Mabu, and the effects of its allure—and influence—are potentially catastrophic.

Population displacement to make way for industrial agriculture is pushing the communities of Mount Mabu down a treacherous slope. The felling of trees to make way for expanding rubber plantations had already affected wind and rain patterns in the area, which normally receives the highest rainfall in Southern Africa. The compounded effect has expedited the process of erosion and led to recurrent mudslides and widespread destruction of property, particularly during storms at the peak of the rainy season.

During a meeting of village representatives, someone remarked that maybe things were better under colonial rule, back in the days of the tea plantations. The Portuguese had little interest in combatting their labour force and understood the value of a community that was able to feed itself, and thus cut overhead costs, unlike MHL and other multinationals, who place maximum profits over any form of even relatively peaceful co-existence. And FRELIMO, once a bastion of independence and a movement of the people, today, with its nepotistic political dominance and corporate deference, has lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

It is clear that the activists of JA feel the strain of an uphill battle with formidable and ruthless opponents, and the frustration with how financial desperation can turn valuable community leaders into corrupt politicians overnight. But this has not slowed their determination to withstand the hostile takeover. They hold steadfast in the belief that a deeper survival instinct, one that values Indigenous land sovereignty and political autonomy, will ultimately prevail over the allure of immediate and fleeting gains.

No perímetro da povoação de Lugela, a estrada pavimentada termina abruptamente num estreito caminho de terra – um buraco de terra contínuo, suficientemente largo para que a nossa carrinha percorra as colinas onduladas em direcção a Limbuè. Mulheres e jovens raparigas a carregar baldes de água, pratos lavados, bananas, milho e outros bens essenciais perfeitamente equilibrados nas suas cabeças caminham à beira da estrada e escondem-se nos arbustos assim que nos aproximamos. Algumas mulheres deitavam-se ociosamente à sombra das palhotas, conversando em tons suaves, evitando o intenso calor tropical. À medida que subimos gradualmente em direcção à “Floresta Google”, a densidade das nuvens aumenta incrementalmente. A quantidade de precipitação determinará o quão para o interior da floresta tropical do Monte Mabu seremos capazes de caminhar. É o início da estação das chuvas e esperamos que a nossa sorte se mantenha.

Antes de 2005, o Monte Mabu estava praticamente esquecido, excepto para as comunidades locais e entidades extractivas que procuravam cultivar culturas exportáveis em redor do sopé do maciço. Por volta da mesma altura, o Dr. Julian Bayliss, biólogo e pesquisador do Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, estava a vasculhar o GoogleEarth quando reparou no que parecia ser uma floresta antiga de altitude média no topo da montanha no norte de Moçambique. Em 2008, Bayliss e uma equipa de pesquisadores viajaram para o Monte Mabu para fincar a sua bandeira e reinvidicar a sua “descoberta” da “floresta perdida de Moçambique”. Embora o seu anúncio tenha sido celebrado numa série de artigos do 

, o eco hubrístico da afirmação de Vasco da Gama de ter “descoberto” o próprio país há mais de 400 anos ressoou.

O Monte Mabu foi protegido de invasões externas e do desenvolvimento industrial, devido a uma década de Guerra pela Independência de Moçambique, de uma década, de Portugal, a subsequente Guerra Civil Moçambicana de quinze anos, os conflitos intertribais, o isolamento geográfico e o terreno acidentado. A proximidade com a fronteira do Malawi fez com que a região fosse utilizada para o transporte estratégico de munições para várias facções revolucionárias, bem como uma rota de fuga para combatentes e comunidades sob fogo. O Monte Mabu era uma zona de transição entre a RENAMO (paramilitares de direita alinhados com a África do Sul) e a FRELIMO (revolucionários Marxistas de esquerda), que estavam a lutar para governar Moçambique após a independência de Portugal. Durante o conflito armado que durou de 1977 a 1992, as terras em redor da floresta sofreram uma devastação absoluta.

O Monte Mabu é a zona de transição cultural e linguística entre as quatro principais comunidades locais – Nangaze, Nvava, Namadoe e Limbuè – que têm sido guardiãs da floresta tropical desde tempos imemoriais. Os vestígios da guerra nunca estão longe – as cicatrizes na terra cobertas e resignadas a um nicho silencioso na história. Há vestígios residuais de clareiras escondidas entre as cristas dos picos e vales de Mabu, outrora locais de refúgio onde estas comunidades vizinhas se escondiam nas sombras da floresta tropical, fugindo dos soldados da oposição que as caçavam para “as libertar”.

Curse of Geography