Milkah, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), arrived in Nairobi in 2021, accompanied by her three children: a ten-year-old daughter and two sons aged eight and three.
She was seeking to reunite with her husband, who had sought refuge in Kajiado; a county located to the southwest of Nairobi. After staying in Kajiado with her husband for a while, her family started receiving threats from their fellow Congolese in Nairobi. They did not report the threats immediately, since they thought the tensions would subside with time as they blended into their new community. However, the threats increased, becoming more aggressive every day, and Milkah and her husband decided to report these to the local police station. Nothing, however, was done, and ultimately, they gave up on the elusive “justice for sale” that was unaffordable to them.
With Kenya’s self-positioning as a friendly nation with working systems, most migrants arrive expecting it to be easy settling here, only to find a system whose cogs require being greased with money, due to widespread corruption. Inevitably, corruption becomes a tool that punishes the most vulnerable. This impedes access to services by erecting borders not at the periphery of the country but right within the cities: in the health-care system, in the judiciary, and in other critical sectors that migrants need access to.
Milkah and her family then decided to reach out to an organization that supports refugees. The organization intervened by relocating Milkah’s husband to Rusinga Island in Homabay County, about 400 kilometers west of Nairobi. Here, the organization offered shelter and a safe space for him, but it turned out to be an exploitation ring where he was overworked during the day, digging trenches without pay. He was exploited for his labor for a whole month, with food and shelter being his only remuneration. This, once again, separated Milkah’s family, as they had to survive in Nairobi while her husband lived miles away under very harsh conditions. During his time there, he was not allowed to see his family or even make phone calls. Contact with the community was rare, and he also was denied access to a phone.
Meanwhile, he made friends with a few people. It is one of these friends who would later allow him to access his phone to contact his family. Once he reached Milkah, he explained his situation. Stranded with no alternative, his wife then reached out to her neighbor, who referred her to our center—the Kayole Community Justice Centre (KCJC).
Milkah was longing to see her husband but did not have a pass that would have allowed her to travel out of Nairobi to Homabay. Her three children, a language barrier, and travel to a new territory that she was not familiar with made such a journey even more complicated. Despite all these challenges, KCJC managed, through cooperation with other organizations, to get her a one-month pass out of Nairobi together with her children. Once acquiring these documents, she was faced with another challenge: She did not know where exactly her husband was and had to wait for days before he would call again using another phone.
While Milkah waited anxiously for more than a week for a new number to call, she was afraid that her pass would expire before she could find him, doubting whether she and her children would ever see him again. She was also afraid that the hardships he was subjected to would cause him harm and, worse, death. Reaching out to the police wasn’t an option, and her only hope was pegged on human rights organizations that support migrants and refugees. Her other worry was how her and her three kids would survive without the support of a breadwinner.
Milkah’s constant fear for survival is no different from other migrants and refugees that we continue to engage with in our Nairobi communities. Both documented and undocumented, they must actively juggle everyday precarity in the areas they exist in, as they are exposed to layered forms of active and passive violence. Even though the exclusion is not always explicit, unspoken rules and culture peripheralize migrants as they continue to come from Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere.
At the end of 2024, we held a convening and legal aid clinic for the recent arrivals in our community. They poured their hearts out, and narrated stories of the vast injustices they continue to endure; the borders they had to cross when accessing basic services, the marginalization they had to cope with in some neighborhoods, and the constant fears they have daily.
These stories ranged from heartbreaking to horror-like narratives, yet all who spoke had faces that glimmered with hope. In one instance, Juliana highlighted how landlords discriminate against them and narrated how her rent was raised, without consultation or prior notice, just because she and her family were migrants. She also faced a language barrier and was clueless about the legal mechanisms available for redress. What’s more, the Kenyan nationals who were her neighbors paid only about 75 percent of the rent she paid. In sharing this experience, she expressed:
Nikiwa mgeni Kayole sikuwa najua Kiswahili vizuri, na mwenye nyumba aliniongezea kodi. Baadaye ndio niliulizia jirani tukiongea akaniambia analipa kodi kidogo kuniliko na elfu mbili.
When I was a recent arrival in Kayole, I didn’t know Kiswahili well and the landlord increased my rent. Later, I asked my neighbor and he said he paid rent that was 2000 KES ($20) less than what I was paying.
Juliana narrated how her friend, who is also a refugee, could not access justice for her daughter after she was defiled by a Kenyan neighbor. Kayole Police Station did not take the case seriously, which left the mother and survivor traumatized. The mother also highlighted how access to information was difficult; she faced many challenges accessing institutions where she thought she could get redress. After months of back and forth, to her dismay, the case was dropped, leaving her shattered.
Survival has become a big challenge for Kenyans and is more pronounced for migrants and refugees. In our neighborhood, Burundians are forced to wake up early in the morning to sell mandazi (buns) and chai (tea) for survival. As they engage in these hustle activities, most of them must grapple with corrupt law enforcement and county officials. The lack of permits to set up formal operations leads them to informal businesses, such as hawking and other small and micro enterprises, which are easy to start and operate.
While, for the most part, Nairobi residents coexist with each other, not everything is rosy. In the past, there has been friction between migrant populations and host communities in a few regions of the city, especially in working-class and poor neighborhoods. Due to the competitive nature of our society and the rising number of unemployed citizens, some community members see the surge in migrants and refugees as the cause of their unemployment. This has led, in some instances, to hostility from the communities that migrants live in. For example, in 2021, there was a weeklong conflict in the informalized settlement of Mathare, between Ugandan migrant dhobi (washer/laundry) women and Kenyan dhobi women working in Eastleigh. The Kenyan women accused their Ugandan counterparts of debasing the market by lowering working wages. Unfortunately, the Ugandan workers, who are mainly minors, accept very little pay for arduous work. As a result, most employers preferred Ugandans over Kenyan women for casual labor. This led Kenyan women to feel that the Ugandan women were taking over their workspaces and opportunities, prompting a weeklong conflict that extended to the entire community.
In light of all the challenges, we have to acknowledge that migrants and refugees are part of the rich tapestry that makes up Kenyan cities. They also innovate new pathways of resilience everywhere they go. As the saying goes, an African should not be a foreigner in Africa; we are all one, and all of us, whether documented or undocumented, should be able to access basic services, as these rights are inalienable to all humans.
Our communities should find ways of embracing diversity when it comes to our neighbors and beyond. Even while migrants and refugees seek networks among themselves to share opportunities and stand up for each other, when the government and human rights organizations fail to protect migrants, it is only the voices of the host communities that they can count on as the last line of defense. We must, therefore, intentionally cultivate the utu and ubuntu spirit, because that is the only way we can fight against an exploitative system that violently oppresses the most vulnerable amongst us.
