Even in this new movie about Nairobi, we see the evil city, the bad city, the city that corrupts...

I must now repeat two important quotes from a previous post. One: from Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: "Cities do not have poverty because cities make people poor but because cities typically attract poor people..." Two: from Chengerai Hove's novel/poem Bones: “If the city is so frightening as you say… why are so many people living there?” Let me make sense of these quotes: Poverty in the city is better than poverty in the rural areas. The distortion of this truth, weirdly enough, can partly be blamed on the city itself. It stems back to the tradition of the pastorale; the sad business of playing shepherds and shepherdesses, of seeing authenticity in the mud. The city has long imposed this bad image/fiction on the harsh realities of rural life. Even today, we show/represent urban poverty and decay with no hesitation, but completely ignore and fail to represent/see the even more astonishing poverty and decay in the rural areas. Trust me, you are better being poor in Seattle than being poor in Nowhere, Montana; you are better being poor in Nairobi than Nowhere, Kenya.