ORODHA ORACLE

The photograph depicts three individuals with sacks held close to their bodies or placed on the debris. A dull fog obscures the view, creating a peculiar illusion. This is an image of the Dandora dumpsite enveloped in noxious smoke, while marabou storks stoop over the grim, reeking waste, defiant to decay.

The foreground, awash with waste, stretches to the horizon and merges with the sky. It’s a sombre view, representing both excess and incompleteness in equal measure.

This is the image that inspired the research and creative process of the Orodha Oracle project, which began as a response to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic and the degrading health of humanity and the environment. In the project, concerns for the scale, extent, and imperishability of the waste in the area are raised. The birdlife and the people depicted are all part of the dumpsite ecosystem; they have lived their entire lives in a state of emergency, and will continue to bear the brunt of such conditions if appropriate action is not taken.

The Dandora landfill, which covers approximately 30 acres, is the destination of about 850 tonnes of solid waste gathered daily from all parts of Nairobi. Despite being declared completely full in 1996, it is still used as a dumpsite to this day. The hazardous contents, coupled with the spontaneous combustion of pent-up methane, emits a stench and thick carbon smoke to the Dandora sky, which residents are forced to inhale daily.

At the dumpsite, anything that can rot, does, and anything that may be burned, is. Over time, heaps of mostly plastic residue stiffen into non-degradable sediments that cannot be processed by the incinerator. What remains –– juala (polythene paper, plastic bags), shards of glass, debris, torn enamel fragments, human hair, shreds of old fabrics, etc. –– is preyed on by the marabou storks, who turn the waste over and over as if to speed up its decomposition.

The dumpsite was established by the city council in the mid-1980s. It sprawls over grounds that were once allocated for the construction of Dandora, a World Bank-supported low-cost housing project. The final phase, “Phase 6,” never took off, and instead it became a dumpsite. Exhaustive reports of the dumpsite were published by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 1998 as part of a solid waste management study in Nairobi. The report cited environmental health hazards and threats of groundwater pollution by a foul-smelling liquid called leachate, which most likely seeps into the adjacent Nairobi river.

Orodha Objects

Tempo Arts Centre in Ruaraka, Nairobi, is located in a rehabilitated quarry between Nairobi river and the Dandora landfill, which functions as a green space for the both the dumpsite and Lucky Summer communities. Every morning from Monday to Friday, a group of acrobats from the centre help with river clean-up activities, bamboo propagation, and tree planting along the riverbank, with the intention of curtailing the impact of plastic waste and river pollution, through a community-based activity. To date, over a thousand trees including bamboos have been planted at Tempo Arts Centre and along the riverbank towards the Dandora waterfall.

Around Spring 2020, the tree planting and river clean-up activities morphed into the Orodha Oracle project, an artistic exploration on bodies, plastics, and river waters. This culminated as a series of photographs, videos, and object installations, as well as a performance, which was presented at the Goethe Institut Nairobi in March 2023. During the creative process, the term orodha became an invaluable concept for understanding the objects found at the dumpsite and their symbolic relationship with the dumpsite community. In Swahili, orodha translates to modes of categorising, classifying, or listing things. In the context of the dumpsite and surrounding communities, orodha objects are items that have been picked from the dumpsite, washed, repaired, and then reintroduced into the commodity cycle at cheaper prices for slum residents. They are the leftovers in a world defined by consumption, where everything is fit for commodification. Orodha objects are the scar we are leaving on the Earth’s surface, a mark that runs so deep it will long outlast the human race.

The adoption of this concept was not so much to disregard the negative impact of the waste, but rather for the community to expand their artistic vocabularies, and generate new ideas for their performances and choreographies. During rehearsals, terms such as “touch” and “care” became useful references connoting the ways chokoras (a Swahili word that loosely translates to pickers or scavengers) handled orodha objects, to whom they serve as an extension of their environment and bodies.

The installations were built from orodha to address the project’s focus on questions around waste and pollution, materiality and temporality, and time and substance, and not –– as is the argument peddled by big polluters to justify their over-production of plastics –– to romanticise making art from waste..

In developing the project, a deep understanding of the character of the chokora was necessary, not least to ensure that they were accurately represented, but also to understand how art’s communicative potential could be used in building our capacity for empathy. Chokora are not considered individuals as such, but rather a collective of people; hence the nickname, which more closely resembles the category of orodha objects than it does humans. This is particularly palpable when one of the chokora dies; the dead become part of the debris, as faceless in death as they were in life: anonymous and tribeless. The dumpsite, too, renders them visible but in a negative light, highlighting their lack of basic human needs such as housing, sanitation, and privacy. Tempo Arts Centre has played an instrumental role in changing the lives of chokora through acrobatic training. Many earn their livelihoods by performing in entertainment joints in the city and at various cultural venues internationally.

Without empathy, one can never truly understand chokora. It is “in empathising, that we enter actively and imaginatively into other’s inner states to understand how they experience their world and how they are feeling within a context in which we care to respect and acknowledge their human dignity and our shared humanity.’’¹