RIFT VALLEY—Rift Valley: an apt name, it turns out, for a region that’s become a metaphor not just for Kenya,

RIFT VALLEY—Rift Valley: an apt name, it turns out, for a region that’s become a metaphor not just for Kenya, but for much of this self-conflicted continent. Originally named for the parting of two vast tectonic plates whose divergence left a deep chasm in Africa’s eastern flank, it is now the scene of an equally striking tear in the nation’s social fabric.

The picture above shows the scenery when I went there in early January. Thankfully, when I returned last week, such spectacles were nowhere in sight. The quarter-million or so targets of neighborly hate, most of them Kikuyu, had long been safely herded into refugee camps, their terror supplanted by boredom for the past four months. Here’s what the same spot looks like today, a few metres down the road:

Kenya is no stranger to refugee camps, having grudgingly operated several of them for years on behalf of its war-prone neighbors—the Kakuma refugee camp, for instance, which opened in 1992 along the northwest border, has by now become a permanent tent city with over 70,000 residents.

What’s new about the current situation is that the people inside all those Rift Valley tents are Kenyan—Internally Displaced Persons, as the saying goes. And unlike Kakuma, whose Somali, Sudanese, Ugandan and Ethiopian (among other) occupants are invisibly crammed into various remote corners of the hinterland, many of these new camps are visible from the highway. They range in size from a dozen tents parked in a churchyard, to the one outside Nakuru showground, where some 86,000 people have passed through since January; most have moved on, either to smaller camps closer to home or to the safe houses of relatives, but 14,500 people remain, making Nakuru the largest IDP camp left in the country.

Nakuru town is the Rift Valley’s administrative capital, and the camp it now houses (the tents are a ten minute walk from downtown Nakuru) has similarly become the unofficial capital of Kenya’s IDPs. A seldom-noted irony is that life in the camp isn’t all that much worse, in material terms, than it is for many of Nakuru’s homeless residents; for some it actually represents an improvement. The free food and shelter has led to an unquantifiable influx of city dwellers to the camp, “pretenders” whom the government accuses of seeking unearned handouts.

It’s an awkward situation for everyone but the children, for whom camp life resembles a permanent summer vacation, and a portion of the teenagers suddenly enjoying a vibrant social scene for the first time in their lives. The parents and elders I met were less enthusiastic; for them, the scant consolation of free accommodation (one tent per family) and food (maize flour and dried peas) is outweighed by the indignity of absolute dependence on an indifferent government. How indifferent? Not a single politician had even bothered to visit the Nakuru camp until the third week of May, more than four months into the crisis, when the Provincial Commissioner finally popped in to announce that the party was over.

His visit, greeted with much heckling, heralded the start of ‘Operation Rudi Nyumbani (Return Home),’ the government’s solution to this most embarrassing of problems. Nothing advertises a failure to govern like a big population of internal refugees, after all. So the president, eager to give Kenya back its harmonious facade, has enlisted the army to give all these black sheep an armed escort back to the farms and villages they were kicked out of in January. Thirty-seven new police stations, in various stages of construction, are sprouting like carrots at all the Rift’s flashpoints, but Mr. President is also using the stick to encourage the more skeptical IDP’s: water lines are being periodically cut off in the camps, food and medical supplies have been scaled back, and several prominent NGOs have been persuaded to pull out, thus depriving camp-dwellers of their only non-biased lifeline.

But the Nakuru camp, represented by a vociferous government of its own election, has so far refused to budge. Its chairmen are demanding cash payment for every family before moving on; they scoff at the government’s promise to pay up after everyone’s resettled. Many of these residents, after all, are still waiting for the compensation promised them in 1992—the first time a violent election kicked them out of house and home—and again in 1997.

But their collective stubbornness seemed to be the exception, derived, perhaps, as a result of their numbers and organization. Elsewhere in the Valley, moving north from Nakuru, across the equator, over Mau summit, through Burnt Forest (where in January I found the burnt corpse pictured above, among others), and up to Eldoret, Kenya’s displaced were busy, well, re-placing. Their mood was one of reluctant cooperation—up to a point. Most have returned to their original neighborhoods, but few people have actually gone all the way home. Instead, the big central camps are splintering into far flung mini-camps; families have packed up their tents and re-pitched them in fields adjacent to the new police stations, eyeing but not yet taking that final step to the vulnerable isolation of houses that lie several kilometers from the nearest armed guard.

It’s surprising how picturesque many of these new camps are; the Rift Valley serves up a lush panorama, its rolling hills just high enough to provide sweeping, postcard views from their tops. Seems like a nice place for a camping trip. But lest anyone be tempted to go for a bucolic frolic, it’s worth bearing in mind that three resettlers who did just that were killed not far from the camps I visited, on the very same day I spoke with policemen who assured me everything was fine—just fine.

Tags: international, kenya

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Posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 12:11 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.