NAIROBI, KENYA—Having spent most of the last week drinking and burning, breaking windows and inhaling tear gas, and behaving in just about every form of prohibited behavior imaginable, the youthful army of looters who turned what might have been a heroic protest into a national auto-da-fe are finally too tired and hungry to finish off what little they have left. The autopsy can now begin.

Precise figures remain impossible to come by. The initial vague estimate of around a million internal refugees, for instance, has been downgraded to somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. But a qualitative survey of Nairobi’s biggest slum illustrates the scope of the resurrection project now confronting Kenya.

Like the country they’re in, Kibera’s half million or so residents have arranged their neighborhoods by tribe. Just about all of these except president Kibaki’s own Kikuyu are fanatic supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga, a Luo; following Kibaki’s orchestrated victory, Kibera became a focal point for the violence which engulfed the whole country.

During my forensic wanderings of the ghetto over the last few days I was surprised to discover that what had seemed like a mindless spree was in fact quite systematically channeled. The charred remains of Kikuyu-owned shacks and shops stood inches away from untouched Luo residences; those Kikuyu homes that survived the blaze have been expropriated by opportunistic Luo families tired of living with the in-laws. The same story in reverse has played out in the Kikuyu-dominated zones. Meanwhile, anyone who has somehow managed to hold on to property in enemy territory is busy carting their belongings to safety.

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This has obvious implications for the future, but for now all that matters is getting enough to eat. Most of the people who live in Kibera are laborers who survive on a few dollars a day, which they spend before going to bed. A week’s interruption to this routine has proved devastating. I saw people sifting through the charred remains of push-carts and hawkers’ stalls for nails with which to piece their homes back together. Elsewhere, the burnt husks of overturned trucks had long ago been stripped to the bone. Listless Kikuyus now mingled with Luos or anyone else they came across in the search for a bag of flour, some potatoes, a carton of milk – anything at all to feed themselves and their children. People wandered unconcernedly into sections of the slum which would have been deadly a few days before. Others just sat on the curb and stared. The same warriors who had grabbed at my elbows, shouted in my face, slammed pipes against the ground in the first days of the new year now lacked the energy even to ask me for a few shillings.

“At first we survived by selling everything we’d looted, at double the original price” one young man told me. “Everyone was involved – you couldn’t tell common criminals from people just trying to feed their families.”

But as everything ran low except the moonshine, Kiberans were swiftly reduced to depending on the Red Cross for calories. That is who now keeps starvation at bay, but it has to be said that the standard maize flour delivery isn’t the most fortifying of meals. Unfortunately, the microbusinesses which had provided both jobs and affordable food supplements (that is, vegetables) are now largely a thing of the past. It turns out the economy was far more integrated than Kibera’s living arrangements suggested, meaning that it was impossible to burn someone else without burning yourself.

That isn’t the kind of consideration you would expect of a population raised in abject poverty. What these people knew on the night of December 30 was that their votes had been thrown in the garbage. To my mind there was something admirable in the rage this produced, in the refusal to sit down and be reasonable about it. Mr. Odinga missed a marvelous opportunity to channel his supporters’ fury into something more constructive than a battle of neighbour-on-neighbour; in the end, as he should have had the foresight to know, that has proven to be little more than a complicated way of battling themselves.

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Posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 12:55 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.