There are 6000 people working daily in the dump, three quarters of whom live in it or were born and raised in the area. This is their habitat, their world. They specialise in the work they do; they only ask that it be recognised. Even prostitutes have union representation, why can't waste pickers have it? We are not ghosts, in fact we are useful to many, it is time to look at reality'.

Dandora, despite its name like a fantasy saga or a heroine from Greek mythology, is more real than ever. It rises in the northeast of Nairobi, beyond the densely populated Kariobangi district and the Korogocho slum and is reached by three main entrances. The first is the institutional one, formed by a large forecourt behind the Total petrol station, where the municipality's trucks overloaded with quintals of rubbish pile up.
On their route from collection to unloading, driving as if they were possessed, the drivers spill some of the rubbish onto the streets of the suburbs, which are already littered with all kinds of waste.

Upon arrival, they stand in line for hours in the sun, before pouring everything into the huge institutional sector of the dump. The second entrance, in Phase 2 of Dandora, behind the primary school, has been contracted by a private company that is supposed to take care of the disposal.

Nothing really happens in the municipal square. Men and women dressed in rags that also cover their faces and heads, with big boots, spades and rakes, rummage around looking for what may still be valuable to others (scraps of all kinds of metal, technological residues) and which may be edible for them.

There are those who clean cabbage leaves, check the remains of liquid in a tetra Pak of fruit juice. Everything ends up in the ample folds of what they wear, half dress and half sack. The third gate of hell is the one through which Didi and I enter. Everyone's entrance, the natural propensity of a neighbourhood that from the main road could resemble a thousand others seen on the fringes of Kenyan cities and towns. Shacks of mitumba, second-hand clothes, kiosks of Chinese tools and electronics, hardware stores and warehouses selling sacks of flour and cement indifferently, foundations and columns of houses that have never been finished, a few arable fields and a few football pitches.

Where there is a wall, the writing of a school or religious congregation appears. Where there is a widening, there are motorbike taxis, matatu and peanut vendors. Like a swamp fish, behind the spine, fishbones of irregular alleys unfold, and scales of plaster-less buildings and shacks alternate, divided by narrow, slimy, uneven walkways.

We approach the smelly head of the fish. From a small square where children play football and girls make up little jumps between the steps of a house and clothes being hung out, we descend into the dump of all, into the one big fishing reserve of those born and raised there. Waiting for us is Salomon, the person in the field, the Charon for whom Dandora has no secrets, ever since the first plastic wrecks stranded in the rivulet that loses itself in the desert of vomit.
Before joining us, Salomon accompanied a delegation of compatriots working for UNICEF to a sort of community centre. It is one of the many easy-take social projects that come this way: young waste pickers turned into rappers or graffiti artists, with the chance to show the world (what world?) their talent. The glittering UNICEF off-roader is loaded with bread and milk. At worst, the young people of Dandora will not have to search for lunch among the rubbish of the Nairobians today.

We make our way to the shacks of the residents, who live literally submerged in mountains of fabric scraps, plastic bottles, remnants of bags, backpacks and sandals, skeletons of toys, scalps of stuffed animals and various packaging. The hard-working freelancers of Dandora have accumulated sorted rubble outside their shacks. There is a corner dedicated to glass bottles.

A stout woman and a young man, perhaps her son, check for any leftover spirits and pour them into another bottle, then pile them into a mound and cover them with cloths also recovered from the valley and shatter the glass with large sticks. "The shredded glass is sold at five shillings per kilo," Salomon explains. "Every day these people manage to fill a hundred-kilo sack each and transport it to the entrance of the dump, where the brokers are ready to pay in cash. They arrive with their vehicles and already know where to go to sell it, to big companies that have embraced the recycling philosophy. It is a commercial chain of which we are the last link. We should be the ones to sell directly, or rather recycle the stuff we collect'. Four euros for a day's work amidst filth, toxic fumes, rat piss and all possible diseases. With no water to drink, so one must go back and forth from the spine, and washing clothes in the Mathare River, the most polluted river in Kenya. Sometimes eating and drinking what is found among the rubbish.

Until a few years ago, airlines landing at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, some fifteen kilometres from Dandora, dumped the remains of meals eaten by passengers into the facility, which ended up in bags carried by trucks to the dump. Many waste pickers were also feeding on the leftovers from the boxes, until general outrage stopped the disgraceful process. International solidarity says: better fasting or at least bread and milk once in a while to those who dance and rap.

(Excerpts from the book ‘Nairobi’ by Freddie del Curatolo and Leni Frau (OgZero Editions)
Winner of the ‘Volterrani - Narrating the World 2023’ literary prize
Translated into English with the title ‘Nairobi, The Visible City’.

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