22 February,2009 06:42 AM IST | | Nik Gowing
HOW many Slumdog Millionaires might there be, not just in Mumbai but around the world?
Earlier this week I was in the slum location for a possible African Slumdog Millionaire, that is if anyone has the money and vision to make such a movie these days.
I wondered.
Who in Kibera's Jamal Malik generation might become Kenya's future Slumdog just one step from the East African equivalent of that unimaginable 20 million rupee fortune?
Kibera is Africa's largest slum, a short matatu bus ride and a few perilous, bone-shaking minutes from the city centre.
At least a million people and probably many more live there in near squalor under the corrugated roofs of mud and timber shacks.
Most are not built on solid ground. They are perched atop the refuse and rubbish that has accumulated on the steep hillsides over decades.
The narrow streets of dried, heavily rutted mud are more like mountain tracks than the arteries of a poor but vibrant urban community. It is not a place for vehicles, even the 4x4 I travelled in.
Stinking, open sewers zig-zag down the harsh gradients among the shacks. Open "flying" latrines are barely hidden behind flimsy screens. The air is filled with the heavy smell of carbon from open fires and oil cookers.
Animals graze the piles ofu00a0 putrid waste stacked up next to buildings. An outsider treads gingerly to avoid animal and human faces.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0
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It is shocking to see and smell. Except for the tiny, tumbledown kiosks where the proliferation of mobile phones can be recharged, Kibera felt like a hang over from a time warp
This is a community where privation and scratching a living to survive are a way of life. Last year it was racked by communal revenge during the furious, deadly violence that followed the disputed presidential election after Christmas 2007.
Justice here is often meted out in Kibera's own way with a gun.
A tough life which keeps attracting the rural young to this overcrowded city is getting even tougher now.
The global recession is badly hitting the daily casual work which pays for the expensive bucket of charcoal to cook that evening's meal or the handful of maize for tomorrow's breakfast.
For me, from my comfortable upper middle class home in a city suburb, it is always desperately hard to conceive of living here and appreciating the little I would have compared to now.
In my three decades of reporting, without exception I have always been racked with guilt and helplessness whenever I have had to parachute professionally into communities and private lives like this that have so little.u00a0 Unlike them, I can always escape on the flight out.u00a0u00a0
But as for Jamal Malik in Mumbai, this was home for a sizeable proportion ofu00a0 Kenya's 60% who are impoverished.
So what future for those I see around me, and those hidden inside their tiny, dilapidated homes or business shacks?
Wherever I looked in this 21st century version of a Dickensian world I could see the chirpy faces and personalities of Kibera.
Whether the weary, furrowed faces of elderly women or the fresh faces of kids, they gossiped, bantered and joked as any community would. In such adversity it was heartening.
Just as for Jamal and Latika in Slumdog, the teenage faces of the next generation here beamed both ambition and beauty in a place where you could easily expect neither.u00a0
And my mind kept echoing to the big questions from the book and movie:
"How does the boy from the slums know all the answers?" Then the question: "How did he do it?" with the four possible answers "A He cheated; B He's lucky; C He's a genius and D It is destiny."
I realised that must be the same roulette wheel of opportunity and luck for everyone I saw in Kibera. But most would never even qualify.
Yet, what about those with the Jamal-like potential which remains un-nurtured?
Might the young man selling over-priced cooking kerosene through a tiny window be Kibera's slumdog? Or the teenager pedlalling hard on the bicycle going nowhere because it sharpened knives? Or the chap with the broad grin rounding up hisu00a0 goats?
After all, while they live in what is now a well-ordered, organised squalor, there is one massive generational change. Most of them of all ages are connected digitally.
However rudimentary their home life, tucked in their shirt or trouser pockets is the single prized possession u2014 their mobile phone.
As the voice over in the movie asks: "What can a Slumdog possibly know?"
Community workers told me, this digital connectivity is producing a new empowerment and social mobilisation. The new potential and opportunity is not in the small number of electricity poles or the handful of fixed wire phone lines. It is in the cellphone masts on the horizons.
People can settle debts or business payments on their mobiles. They can track down new opportunities like work.u00a0
Everyone knows more, about themselves, their community and most critically about the possibilities beyond Kibera's still ever-expanding boundaries.
That is the kind of new opportunity that helped get Jamal Malik to Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
I realised how his emotive story from Mumbai could one day be mirrored inu00a0 Kibera too.
Many of the poor here might one day "know all the answers" just like Jamal and those that live in a better world the other side of the hill.u00a0
'World News Today with Nik Gowing' is on BBC World News Monday To Friday at 2130 Hrs.'
