Read the first part of Arno Kopecky’s Kenyan election report here.

DAGORETTI, KENYA—With the pre-event riggings complete and the ballots all in place, the stage was now set for widespread cheating and looting. Our crime site was Kirigu primary school, a square compound with an open-aired courtyard in the centre and a brown soccer field outside.

The field was packed with an assortment of elderly gentlemen wearing the only suits they owned, devilish children plotting assaults on each other from behind the vivid skirts of their mothers, the odd Masai with hula hoop earlobes, and several glassy-eyed teenage boys. Glue-sniffing is endemic in Dagoretti, a contagious parasite which seemed to afflict every young man in the crowd. Most added chang’aa, the local moonshine, into the mix.

Daniel disappeared in an ocean of handshakes, as I fell in with one underage drunk after another. They sought me out, introducing themselves to the most obvious target in the crowd as though to a long lost brother. I recognized one, a lanky teenager with a dirty ball cap and fresh stitches on his forehead seeping blood. Samuel was a graduate of the rehabilitation program Daniel ran for street children. In July, I’d visited the workshop where Samuel — then sober and engaging — built bed frames and furniture. But the workshop had burnt down a few weeks ago, and Samuel was back on the streets. He was so stoned his eyes were crossed.

I passed through a hall and entered the building’s courtyard, where a snaking queue of voters had formed. At its head was the classroom that held the ballots, guarded by two thugs wearing mirror shades.

I loitered outside the entrance. David, a young born-again who I had met once at a funeral, recognized me and made himself my bodyguard. Whenever a street boy came near, David would whisper a warning into my ear: “He’s not-born again.”

David explained that he’d been that way too, once. “You’re not from here, so you don’t know,” he said, “but I can see it in their faces when they’re not right.” A pattern developed whereby one or two boys would introduce themselves with a story that culminated in a request for money, at which point David would interrupt my apologies with an angrier statement than I was prepared to deliver. Then the boys would give him a dirty look, mutter “motherfucker” and regroup. At one point they tried to surround us, casually sitting nearby in ones and twos, and David insisted we move before they stole my camera.

No sooner had I relocated to the classroom than shots rang out; a collective scream arose. Through the window I saw riot police marching through the school compound, tear gas billowing, women sprinting every which way with their babies on their backs. An old man clutched his forehead and he sat down heavily against a wall; blood streamed through his fingers across his face. David was at the old man’s side, holding a handkerchief to his wound, and I gave him my half empty bottle of water. David had declined to drink when I offered him a sip earlier on, but seeing that there was some water leftover now, he said “You see, God plans for everything.”

Meanwhile, the riot police had incited a riot. A furious mob followed the police, hurling insults along with rocks as the well-armored troops retreated to an army truck parked in the soccer field. A single farewell round of tear gas burped over the crowd as the vehicle rumbled out the gates and disappeared.

Cheers went up, and the crowd started laughing. They’d enjoyed the mock battle. The old man with the head wound was the worst injured; having served briefly as a catalyst for group rage, he was driven to the hospital and promptly forgotten about.

I learned later that the police had been called by the sitting councilor, Daniel’s uncle. The general consensus was that this had been a tactic to sow chaos into the nomination process of his competitors. But given that it could hardly have prevented someone’s being nominated to run against him, and moreover that it affected all the competitors (or rather, their supporters) equally, it wasn’t clear what his precise intention was. In this, the event was typical of so many other seemingly random acts of violence that occurred throughout Kenya that day.

Our experience was mild compared to others. In the upmarket neighborhood of Westlands on the other side of Nairobi, a two-hour gang fight erupted between the supporters of rival competitors. In the western region of Mount Elgon, an MP was ambushed by militants and sent to the hospital with bullet wounds. Elsewhere, an elections officer was caught printing forged ballots in a cybercafé. Throughout the country, armed battles erupted as aspirants discovered their own parties had conspired to strike their names from the ballots, or handed the nomination papers to the loser, or that their rivals had hired outsiders to vote, or simply bribed locals at the polling booths. A herd of elephants stormed one station and destroyed the ballot, but elsewhere mobs of outraged humans took it upon themselves to burn, shred, or dump the disputed results into rivers.

But back to our peaceful Dagoretti. Voting had resumed and Gabriel, the well-muscled owner of a fitness club and a good friend of Daniel’s, was talking to me in the courtyard. “People are cheating,” he said furiously. “They’re washing the ink off their fingers and getting back in line to double vote for the opponent. See?” He showed me his hands, which were clean. “It comes right off with a bit of petrol. I’m going back in.” Having voted twice already, he was returning for a third attempt.

Eventually, Daniel won by a landslide. The assembled crowd went crazy — it seemed everyone here had voted for him, albeit some of them twice. We danced in each other’s arms and got soaked in the rain that had started falling again. Then Daniel emerged: he was hoisted to the mob’s shoulders and paraded out of the courtyard into the field, all the way to his car. Crushed by the press of his fans, he thanked us over and over, inaudible amid the shouts and songs.

Later, sitting next to him in his car as we inched away, still surrounded by hordes of inebriated youths who jumped on the roof, the hood, the bumper, unwilling to let their benefactor out of their sites, Daniel turned to me and smiled.

“I might have to borrow some money tonight,” he said. While he’d been on their shoulders, his supporters had picked twenty five thousand shillings, or about four hundred dollars, from his pockets. He touched his neck. “They got my chain too,” he said ruefully, then brightened. “But I saw who took it.” He reached forward and tapped the driver by the shoulder. “Paul,” he said, “remind me to call Shimo tomorrow. That chain was expensive.”

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Posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 12:35 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.