Ndeda is 27, a Rastafarian and the father of three children. He knows unemployment well. He also knows the quieter kind of rejection that young Rastafari face when they look for work in Kenya, where dreadlocks have ended up in court. In 2019 the High Court in Nairobi ordered Olympic High School, a public school in Kibera, to admit a Rastafarian student who wore dreadlocks. Ndeda made his own work out of what the settlement throws away. He says the air around his plants is better than it was.
Kibera is often called Africa's largest informal settlement, though no one agrees on its size. NGOs have long quoted figures of up to a million people, and the 2019 census counted about 186,000. Its name is commonly traced to the Nubian word kibra, meaning forest. Very little forest is left there now.
On the border between Lang'ata and Kibera, Mophat Minishi farms half an acre with the Penda Mama Earth community group. Its members cut plastic waste into planting containers and fill them with native plants and cowpeas. In Kenya the cowpea's leaves are cooked as kunde, and the plant fixes nitrogen in poor soil. Since the plot was planted, Minishi says, the bee pollinators have returned.
The group runs a medicinal herb shop that serves more than 100 customers a week. Every month it brings more than 50 families to learn about the land they live on, and it has organised cleanups in the streets. Minishi was recently appointed ecology tourism coordinator for the Family Forest Association. Since 2025 the group has worked with Impact Steps, a Chinese organisation led by its executive director, Molly Yang.
On Saturdays, Ras Ng'ang'a Njuguna leads worship at the Rastafarian temple in Makina, one of Kibera's neighbourhoods. For these gardeners, faith and care for the soil belong together.
Water is still the hardest part. In the dry season the sources dry up and the group has to buy water for its plants. In Kibera, water often comes by the jerrycan and costs more per litre than it does in the city's wealthier districts. Money is short, and Rastafari youth still meet closed doors when they look for jobs.
The plants are still growing. Aloe and mint stand in containers that were once waste, and the bees have come back to the half-acre on the settlement's edge.