Having been stationed for the New York Times in Kenya for more than six years, and having reported on Kenya’s amazing distance runners, its second-to-none safari business, and its golf-club-wielding middle class, I watched this country prosper as many other countries in Africa remained stagnant or, worse, imploded further. Kenya was different. It was the anti-Congo, the anti-Burundi, the anti-Sudan, the opposite of African nations where violence rules and the infrastructure is sinking back into the weeds. I used to get back from those countries, places where I feared for my life all the time, and want to kiss the tarmac at Nairobi’s airport. In Kenya, things work. There’s an orderliness here inherited from the British, manifest in the cul-de-sacs with marked street signs in neat black lettering and the SUVs driven by the wildlife rangers somehow without a speck of dirt on them. There are Internet startups, investment banks, a thriving national airline. It is still Africa, and most people are still poor, but even that has been changing. In the mid-2000s, the economy was growing by about 6 percent per year, far faster than those of Western Europe or the U.S., adding hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Kenya’s middle class—around four million people making between three thousand and forty thousand dollars per year—is one of the continent’s largest.
Which is all to say that when Kibaki’s men openly hijacked the vote-counting process and forcibly installed their man, I, along with most Kenyans, was astounded and then quickly appalled. Within minutes of Kibaki taking the oath of office that day, thousands of protesters burst out of Kibera, an enormous shantytown, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires, and hurling stones. Police poured into the streets to control them. In the next few days, gangs went from house to house across the country, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death. It was horrifyingly clear what was starting to happen—tribal war—and that promising GDP or literacy-rate statistics were no longer relevant. (...)
The election was the first time in Kenya’s history that tribal politics was dragged into the open and the first time that there was a hotly competitive race between a Kikuyu (Kibaki) and a non-Kikuyu (Odinga, a Luo). There are aboutforty different ethnic groups or tribes in the country, each with its own language and customs, and the stolen election ignited long-simmering ethnic grievances that many Kenyans had thought, or maybe more aptly, had wished were redressed. In all, at least one thousand people were murdered and about one million displaced. The police, the judiciary, the army, the religious leaders, and especially the politicians all failed their country at the moment when they were needed most.
In much of Africa, if not the world, geography and ethnicity correlate, certain groups dominating certain areas. This was the basis of South Africa’s apartheid-era homeland policy, which sought to relegate every black person in the country to an ethnic homeland. In Kenya, single ethnic groups often overwhelmingly populate a place, like the Luos on the shores of Lake Victoria or the Kikuyus in the foothills around Mt. Kenya. Not so in the Rift Valley. Here Luos, Kikuyus, Kambas, Kipsigis, Nandes, Ogieks (the traditional hunters and gatherers), Luhyas, Masais, and Kisiis are all packed together, drawn by fertile soil and the opportunity for work, making the towns and the countryside cosmopolitan. The multiethnic Rift Valley was the epicenter of the violence, and death squads swept the hills with elemental killing tools—knives, rocks, and fire—singling out families to execute (the stripes of destruction I saw from the helicopter).
Kenya’s portion of the Great Rift Valley seems to belong to another world and another time—lakes so full of flamingoes that the water is actually pink when you scoop it up in your hands, sculpted green mountains nosing the sky, and soils so rich that just about any fruit or vegetable known to man can grow, from mangoes to guava to snow peas to cucumbers to miles and miles of high-quality, disease-resistant corn. Kenya’s natural beauty, so undeniable in the Rift Valley, sent it down a path different from other European colonies: few African areas attracted so many white settlers. South Africa, yes, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) too, but they were qualitatively different, agricultural and mineral-based economies, with legions of working-class whites. Kenya, on the other hand, because of its wildlife and spectacular landscape, became a playground for aristocratic misfits. They came to shoot lions, drink gin, maybe try their hand at gentleman farming, and cheat on their wives. There was a famous expression from colonial-era Kenya: “Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?’’
by Jeffrey Gettleman, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Discovery Adventures
