Art From Kenya by a Company With Peace in the Name

Kenya's Graffiti Train Seeks To Promote A Peaceful Election

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  Kenyan graffiti artists received permission from the Rift Valley Railway to spray-pigment a 10-car commuter train with messages of peace. Here, true to his name, Swift9 finishes his slice before anyone else: a portrait of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai.

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  27-year-old Uhuru B has been a graffiti artist for 12 years. "What we're doing here now is part of a civic instruction, and also a way to advertise peace," he says.

  Marker Brecke for NPR

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  WiseTwo, 26, steps back to expect earlier adding finishing touches. "Where this train is going," he says, "a lot of people won't know who Martin Luther Rex is."

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  Kids from the Kibera slum have spent the calendar week spray-painting murals and performing poetry as office of Kibera Walls for Peace, a not-for-profit projection to promote inter-ethnic unity.

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  "Tuwache Ubaguzi" is role of a longer phrase written across the 10-auto railroad train, quoting the outset line of a poem equanimous by a thirteen-year-erstwhile girl from Kibera. The total text translates to "Down with tribalism, down with discrimination, let's live in peace."

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  Stephen Onyango Owino paints the train with the aid of kids from "Kibera Hamlets," a group that works with orphans and underprivileged kids in the Kibera slum.

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  The artists work into the dark to finish painting the peace train before information technology leaves for Kibera the next morning at 6 a.m.

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  Morning commuters at Kibera railroad train station board a train that became colorful overnight.

  Marker Brecke for NPR

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  U.S. President Barack Obama as rendered past the creative person Bankslave, who was born and still lives in the Kibera slum. During the previous ballot violence, looters spared his house when they recognized him as "the guy who paints murals" effectually Kibera.

  Mark Brecke for NPR

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  "This is something that's never been washed in Africa," says creative person Swift9. "People will have to pay attention. And they'll take to think about it, when they go to vote."

  Mark Brecke for NPR

Kenya's peace train is ready to curlicue.

Kenyan graffiti artists received permission from the Rift Valley Railway to spray-paint a ten-motorcar commuter train with peace messages and icons. It may be the first train in Africa with officially authorized graffiti.

The train volition travel through the massive Nairobi slum of Kibera, one of the largest in Africa, where young gangs torched, looted and killed in the spasms of violence that followed the 2007 Kenyan presidential election.

"What nosotros're doing with the train here at present, it's function of a borough education and a way to advertise peace," says Uhuru B, a 27-twelvemonth-old graffiti artist.

Many in Kenya take for granted that some level of violence will follow the March iv presidential election. The question is: How bad volition it get?

Volition it be comparable to the mortiferous only isolated skirmishes in the rural areas and poor districts that Kenya saw in 1992 and 1997? Or will there again be countrywide outbreaks similar to those in 2007-08, which left more than 1,000 people dead and thousands more homeless?

As Swift9, a 28-year-old graffiti creative person, recalls: "Information technology was chaos. Looting, fighting, the olfactory property of smoke and sounds of screaming day and dark. Mothers screaming — their kids are missing. People screaming, their houses going up in flames. And at that place'due south nada you can do. ... If you become exterior you might go shot or beaten up by a rival gang."

And then why spray-pigment a train?

"Because the people have never seen annihilation like this," he says. "They'll definitely accept to wait at it. And they'll have to think about it during the voting time."

With The Railway's Blessing

Swift9 laughs near the night two years agone when he virtually got arrested for breaking into the rail thousand and trying to tag a train machine.

"Personally, I remember it's every graffiti artist's dream to paint on a train," he says. "I've wanted to do this all of my life. But the final time I was here, it was impossible. We sneaked around but the guards were all over. We had to pretend nosotros were taking photos for a school projection."

So how did the railway authority and graffiti artists — enemies as eternal as the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote — determine to bring together forces?

Their collaboration came out of another one, betwixt Kibera Walls for Peace and Kibera Hamlets, two organizations that promote arts in Kibera.

Kibera Walls for Peace is the brainchild of Joel Bergner, an American artist and educator from Brooklyn who engaged kids from Kibera Hamlets to paint peace murals around Kibera. They approached the railway nearly letting them employ one of the commuter trains as a sail.

Information technology surely didn't hurt that authorities at Rift Valley Railway recall what happened afterward the previous election, when mobs of youth literally tore upwardly the train tracks and sold them for scrap metal.

Some other graffiti artist, Bankslave, 27, was born in Kibera and all the same lives there. He sees dozens of official billboards around the metropolis promoting peace but says they don't have the power to speak to Kibera youth like street fine art tin can.

In the last election, his own business firm in Kibera was spared when looters recognized him as the guy who paints murals effectually the slums.

Bankslave says this peace railroad train will be riding long past the March iv elections.

"We're trying to make the railroad train look cute so everyone likes information technology. It's not only nigh peace messages. I'm doing art as my career," he says. "In Kenya, not many people remember about art as something you lot can earn [money] from. So I'm just telling people, 'If y'all have the talent, become ahead and do it. Exercise art.' "

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/02/19/171916072/kenyas-graffiti-train-seeks-to-promote-a-peaceful-election

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