They are mothers with bundles in their arms whose fathers they do not know, men who sweat their bread away doing a different job every day, boys who have been waiting for a month to return to their school hovel, girls for whom the abuse they have suffered now seems the lesser evil.
They are sons, brothers and companions in misfortunes and mischief, enemies who cut each other's throats for a plate of porridge, a favour not returned, an inch of space. They are mothers of naive, submissive, runaway daughters tending their fruits of sin, drunken husbands who in the dark of the evening beat anyone they consider family.
On that bridge in the Mathare slum are all the characters of a real series that will never land on Netflix, but is truer than reality. There are the thieves, the street vendors, the bootleggers, the volunteers of local associations, the drug dealers, the tinsmiths and the bricklayers.
There are those who collect and recycle rubbish, those who rummage just to find something to eat, there are the prostitutes, the murderers, the street artists, the rappers. And thousands of boys and girls.

They are alive, out of desire, anger or more likely a twist of fate.
They are there, looking at the little or nothing they have lost and may never reappear.
The Mathare river flooded a few days ago and swept over shacks, kiosks and every hovel of uncertain masonry and rusty sheet metal that was nearby. Many were unable to save themselves.
The old, the children, the pregnant women, the disabled, were unable to climb onto the roofs to escape the wave of water and mud that submerged a large part of one of Africa's largest slums.
Now, after the tragedy of the flood, a bigger one is approaching, for this people it is convenient to call 'the last': the government has decided, it says 'for their future protection', to clear and demolish what is left of their hovels, up to 30 metres away from the river. There are thousands of them and they stand on orally inherited land, negotiated with the local mafia, conquered by every subterfuge and never allowed to register, even by honest people who would have liked to, because the slum is not left if it is the only possible present. They are watching the bulldozers, the trucks. The army has formed a cordon, some exaggerated boys have thrown stones, opposed the demolitions. Three are dead, unintentionally hit by the crane.

So all that remains is to guard the nothingness.
That nothingness that has always meant home and that may now force them to go elsewhere. 'Better to die than to leave Mathare,' cries a man in his 40s. There are those who think that they might be satisfied with cholera and malaria, because a natural disaster in Africa is often not the worst-case scenario.
President Ruto came on patrol, assured the displaced people that they would be given new land where they could start again, and promised 10,000 shillings for each family.
That is about 75 dollars. People here live below the survival threshold of world statistics, which is $1 a day. What will they be able to do with $75? Above all, after being born and raised in the anarchy of Mathare, in the self-government of a Dantesque circle where the only consolation is not to be alone, where could they go? The future is unwritten, a strummer sang years ago, in Mathare they cannot even read the present, choked like a cry for freedom in their throats: the freedom to have nothing, which may now be denied them.

(Photo: Associated Press)