For the three years after he graduated high school, Kennedy Odede ’12 of Kibera, Kenya carried rocks between a train and a factory for a dollar a day. The work was tiresome and unrewarding, yet Odede’s parents—like some 80 percent of the citizens of Kibera—could not find jobs, and so Odede was also responsible for feeding his seven younger siblings.
Odede dreamed of someday starting a center where the destitute people of his HIV-ravaged slum could resist the temptation of drugs, violence and the claustrophobic sense of inferiority that seemed to pervade everything. Yet as he walked home every day through the sewage-infested streets, he saw his people smoking marijuana and drinking changaa, an illegal alcoholic drink popular in Kenya (because it is cheaper than beer) that can result in blindness and even death since it is often mixed with methanol.
One day, Odede realized that he had 100 extra shillings, which is roughly $1.50. Though he worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., he routinely ate only one meal—if that—per day, so he considered using the extra money for a second meal or two. Perhaps he could even take a day off.
Instead of buying food, however, Odede decided to spend his savings on a soccer ball. Walking into the streets after his purchase, he recruited five children—three boys and two girls—for a football club. The small group, which Odede named Shining Hope for Community (SHOFCO), began playing everyday, and soon, as more people joined, they became contenders against the best soccer teams in all Kibera.
“Most of the boys were doing drugs,” Odede said. “We started the football club so they could do that instead of drugs. It was soccer with a reason.”
Encouraged by the success of the soccer team, Odede began to hold weekly gatherings in which Kibera residents could discuss their common emotional and economic problems. At the meetings, those who could afford it would donate 10 shillings, or about 15 cents, to a collective fund that totaled around 300 shillings. Every week, a different member of the group would receive the sum total.
Besides discussing job opportunities at the meetings, the participants would also discuss issues of HIV and sex. At one meeting in particular—a discussion about condoms—Odede realized the scope of the problem his community was facing.
“At the meeting we were talking about AIDS,” he said. “I took out a piece of corn and asked if anyone could put a condom on it. Everyone tried, but no one could do it.”
So Odede showed them how. One of the endemic problems of his community, he then realized, was that previous attempts to educate Kiberans about HIV had been poorly executed.
“The white people that come in tell us to use a condom but they never tell us how,” he said. “Some people at the meeting thought that you had to use two or three condoms to prevent AIDS.”
With that in mind, Odede began to organize a new initiative for the quickly expanding project that was SHOFCO: a children’s theater company that could connect with the people of Kibera and teach them about important issues such as HIV.
In the streets, Odede and other SHOFCO members would make a commotion—singing, clapping and laughing—in order to capture people’s attention. Then they would perform.
Their first play was about a man caught up in drugs and alcohol who picks up a prostitute. When he tries to sleep with her, he puts on three condoms and an argument ensues. Eventually the prostitute explains that he only needs one condom and she shows him how to use it correctly on a stick of corn.
“People were not educated, so they wanted to see something,” Odede said. “Theater was a way of communicating to uneducated people.”
The theater group was hugely successful, performing across Kibera to audiences in the hundreds, and consequently SHOFCO’s membership swelled. A new environmental cleanup program was formed, in which members would pick trash out of the streets and stop the flow of diseased water. All the while, Odede still worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., carrying heavy loads from the train to the factory.
Then, one day, a Catholic priest named Father Kizito came to town bearing good news: SHOFCO had been selected to perform at the upcoming World Social Forum in Nairobi, the annual anti-capitalist conference that is attended by tens of thousands of activists from around the world. While initially hesitant, Odede and SHOFCO agreed to go once they realized that they would be fed and that they could make money by selling t-shirts to the “wazungu” (white people).
At the Forum, the SHOFCO troupe performed a play about life in Kibera to an audience of mostly white officials from NGOs. Beforehand, Kennedy spoke to the audience, and impressed many of them with his words about the daily struggles of his people.
“I was extremely impressed by the way Kennedy spoke,” said Katie Savard, the Company and Tour Manager of the New York-based Hip Hop Theater Festival. “When I got back, I told my boyfriend that I felt like I had just heard a young Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. There are so many things blocking his way, but he doesn’t see it like that.”
Savard wasn’t the only one impressed by Odede’s speech.
“After the play, I was going down the stairs and everyone was grabbing me asking for e-mails, e-mails,” Odede said. “Other people were asking me to come back and speak every day at the World Social Forum.”
Odede was interviewed by local media, asked to return to speak on the topic of water privatization, and mentioned in the “The Nation,” a major U.S. weekly journal.
“The World Social Forum’s…significance…can lie, less visibly but no less powerfully, in serendipitous personal encounters—a member of the US Hip Hop Theater Festival falling into the opening day march next to the young director of a theater project in Nairobi’s infamous Kibera slum and forging an ongoing alliance with him,” wrote Alisa Solomon, a journalist and theater critic from the Columbia School of Journalism, in “The Nation.”
At the forum Odede also met a representative from the COADY International Institute in Nova Scotia, who asked him to come to school there; however, Odede says that he was denied a visa by the Canadian embassy because he was poor and from Kibera.
“I felt bad because Canada refused me a visa because of my poverty situation,” Odede said. “I told the people in Kibera about this. They were all mad, and I said that when we get power someday the Canadian embassy will answer to us.”
Back in Kibera, Odede became something of a political leader. Jessica Posner ’09, an African American Studies major who studied theater in Kenya on her semester abroad, said that Odede was often referred to informally as the “mayor” of Kibera.
“In a lot of African societies, your age is really important, but people call him the mayor of Kibera,” said Posner, who was told specifically to live in Kibera by theater professionals who had seen Odede speak at the Forum. “There is no official mayor, but people come to him with disputes. I lived with him for two months as part of my program and people would come knocking on the door all the time. His is the final word.”
As Odede’s influence grew, so grew SHOFCO. The organization managed to rent a bigger office and introduce a number of new programs, including a computer literacy program, a girls’ empowerment group, a newsletter (the only media organization in Kibera), a sex education program (aided by Matt Polodin ’09) and a number of small produce businesses. Also, the troupe, now co-directed by Odede and Posner, landed another big performance—this time at the Kenyan National Theater in Nairobi.
Eventually, some of Odede’s friends, including Posner, suggested that he should try to go to college, a dream of his for some time.
“Kennedy’s always dreamed of going to college,” Posner said. “When I first met him, he wanted to save up money from his job so he could go to night school in Nairobi. His favorite thing to do is to read.”
Though Odede couldn’t bear to leave Kibera, he still strongly wanted to apply to several schools, one of them being Wesleyan. As the fall semester ended and the college admissions deadline neared, Odede’s future looked more promising than ever.
Three days after Posner left, reports of the contested election between Raila Odinga and Mwai Kabaki began surfacing over the airwaves. Fearing a conflict, Odede raised money for train tickets, gathered the members of SHOFCO and headed for the polls.
After voting, Odede and his friends did not look back, fleeing nine hours to the city of Mombosa on the Indian Ocean. As they headed east, ominous reports came over the radio.
“On the train we heard that Odinga was ahead and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Kibaki was ahead,” Odede said. “The election was rigged.”
When they arrived in Mombosa, tear gas was pouring through the station entrance, and the sound of gunfire was everywhere. Ducking for cover behind one building and sprinting to the next whenever the shots would briefly cease, Odede and his friends managed to find refuge at a nearby school.
Finally safe, they turned on the TV. There were images of police firing into crowds, women crying and swirling infernos consuming houses. It was Kibera.