The Famous Anonymous
Why are you bringing white people in here?” a man bellowed at us in Swahili. He was referring to me. I was following Monica, a Kenyan research assistant, as she led her team through the maze of dirt paths and metal-roofed huts that made up Kibera, a lawless swath of Nairobi that is Africa’s largest slum.
We arrived at a bar, in the room of a hut that was just big enough to fit a pool table and a counter behind a steel cage. Johnny, the bar’s owner, soon arrived, wearing a huge grin, a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Lost Soul,” and a pair of immaculate white tennis shoes that seemed immune to the slum’s pervasive dull-red dust. He was well-off by Kibera standards, thanks to the proceeds from his bar, a nearby boxing gym, and this gig as a fixer for scientists doing research in the slum.
Johnny’s client on this occasion was the Busara Center, a research institute supported by the American non-profit organization Innovations for Poverty Action.
