Meshack Onyango was at work when the bulldozers came, but his neighbours rescued his mattress and paraffin stove before the demolition crews ploughed his ramshackle home back into the red earth. The tin roof of his shack was stripped off by thieves before the wrecking started, but he counts himself lucky to have saved a few possessions. More than a third of a million people living in the slums around Kenya's capital, Nairobi, now face a similar fate as the government prepares to clear shanty settlements which have encroached on to the borders of railway tracks and on land reserved for road building.