Small tour companies offer ‘walking safaris’ into Kenya’s slums

28th September 2009

Simon Harding

For East Africa’s 50m or so Kiswahili-speakers the word ‘safari’, understood in the West as a drive around one of Kenya’s world-famous national parks in an air conditioned four-wheel-drive, refers simply to a ‘journey’. In addition to the ‘safaris’ on the Masai Mara, tourists in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, can now take ‘walking safaris’ around one of the continent’s biggest slums led by local guides.

Whilst eco-tourism breaths new life into the tourist industry across Africa, Asia and Latin America, ‘slum tourism’ is taking off in the Nairobi’s Kibera slum, home to anywhere between 600,000 and 1.2m people. For around 2,400 Kenyan Schillings (£20), Kibera Tours offers tourists from the top-end hotels, which are just a stones throw from the slum, excursions through Kibera’s muddy streets with their open sewers and corrugated iron houses.

‘We want to demystify this place: that it is so dangerous and sad’, said Martin Oduor, of Kibera Tours. Born, brought up and still living in the slum, Mr Odour says the tours will humanise the residents because they show them going about their everyday business of shopping, working, eating and socialising. Stops at community projects, slum gardens producing fruits and vegetables and the slum’s cheap and environmentally friendly bio-gas cooking fires will show the progressive, enterprising face of Kibera. All the profits, Mr Odour states, will find their way back into the local community.

Critics of slum tourism point out that whilst tours of Soweto help teach the history of anti-Apartheid struggle, ‘walking safaris’ in Kibera rely on the poverty of the residents as an attraction. This makes the inhabitants little different from animals in a zoo, some claim. 

Kibera Tours has undoubtedly taken an innovative approach to tourism. It transforms the conditions which are normally a barrier to the industry into its selling point. There is obviously an element of voyeurism and spectacle to the tours, but they are far more representative of the urban culture and day-to-day life of most Kenyans than the ‘tribal’ dances and rituals staged by hotels and tour companies. 

Also see: ‘Kenya’s slums attract poverty tourism’, Xan Rice, Guardian, 27/9/09. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/25/slum-tourism-kenya-kibera-poverty