That was my introduction to the world of Kenyan street kids, a phenomenon you see worldwide in un-developed nations. And they were everywhere. Once these kids knew my name, I'd hear it called in city streets miles from that field were we went every morning. Scholar Tobias Hecht, who works with street kids in Brazil, observed that street kids "subvert" the "social apartheid" that keeps the poor out of sight and out of mind (qtd. in Kilbride, p. 3). They go to the places where the rich and the tourists congregate in order to beg. They are a constant reminder-if one is willing to look at it-that there's something terribly wrong in the world.
Yesterday, I read Street Children in Kenya, an anthropological treatise on the subject that explored all aspects of street children's lives. It brought back a lot of memories. I haven't found any histories on the phenomenon of street children, but I would guess that in African nations, street children emerged with the advent of colonialism.
Prior to contact with Europeans, African communities were stitched tightly together. Although there was no "welfare" or "orphanages," the social structure of the society had a system for taking care of those needs. If a man died, his wives and children would be cared for-possibly by his brother, possibly by her family. With colonialism came a cash economy and cities. Men had to leave their wives to go to the cities to make money in order to pay taxes that were now required of them. Women had to go to cities to make money to help their families out; often, these women ended up in one or another form of prostitution. Sometimes they had children, who were raised in the city streets. I imagine from such sources, street children were born. From the rural areas, children might migrate to the cities in search of work or because one or both parents had gone.
