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. (more…)

Kibera is the Zsa Zsa Gabor of slums: famous for being famous (it was featured in The Constant Gardener), its beauties and blemishes endlessly exaggerated by local and international media alike, Kibera’s half-million or so residents play host to a small army of earnest NGO’s, exploitative religious groups, intrepid journalists, bedazzled tourists, and visiting celebrities eager to connect with the other side of the tracks—like Barack Obama, who passed by on his way to his grandma’s in 2006.

I like it, too. But it had been a couple months since my last visit (my appreciation for the place is predicated on not having to stay), so last weekend I decided it was time for another incursion.

Nice siding, was my first thought on arrival. Brand new sheets of aluminum glittered everywhere in the sunlight, formed into long lines of shack that had sprouted up to replace the hundreds burnt down in January’s violence. The old festival atmosphere I knew and loved, of fish cookers and CD pirates and preachers and hair-weavers all spinning a raucous economy out of thin air, was back. No more machetes and smoking ruins. The riots were but a dismal memory; now, the only people running amok with evil designs were barefoot toddlers. Even the alcoholics had cheered up. (more…)

NAIROBI—The good news is, Kenya’s new cabinet was finally announced on Sunday. It was the deal everyone had been waiting for, the one that would seal the agreement reached on February 28 in the presence of Kofi Annan. With political peace, there should now be real peace on the ground.

The bad news is, there isn’t. (more…)

NAIROBI—“Smile, it’s a New Kenya,” read the Wednesday headline of Kenya’s largest newspaper, the Daily Nation. Raila Odinga, the probable winner of the Christmas election, last week agreed to call Mwai Kibaki president; in exchange, the post of Prime Minister was created for Odinga, along with an agreement to split the cabinet 50/50 between the two rival parties. Now that the notion of cooperation has had a week to sink in amongst the belligerents, it’s okay to say it out loud: peace has returned to Kenya.
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NAIROBI—It’s been a hard-slogging month for Kofi Annan. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, who whisked in for a ten-hour visit last week, the former UN chief has promised not to leave until he finds a solution to Kenya’s intractable crisis. This means looking to the very people who provoked the last two months of violence to suddenly (or rather, oh so slowly) become reasonable, accountable, and amenable to each other’s point of view.

Small wonder that this has become the longest such engagement of his career, with no end yet in sight; after coming within inches of a deal over the weekend, mediation efforts sputtered to a halt on Tuesday. The Ghanaian sage looked frustrated as he announced a suspension in the peace process, pending an urgent one-on-one with Kibaki and Odinga. (more…)

NAIROBI, KENYA—In a conflict of endless complexity, one simple truth now stands out as the most salient feature of Kenya’s post-election crisis: the government has allowed itself to be overwhelmed by teenaged mobs whose most sophisticated projectile is a poison arrow.

An understaffed — and in some cases complicit — police force has been left to its own devices; gangsters are running circles round it while the army watches from the barracks. There may be several reasons for this, but the most likely is that authorities are afraid to acknowledge they’ve got an emergency on their hands. By withholding the armed forces, that’s just what they’ve created. (more…)

NAIROBI, KENYA—A Montreal professor arrived in Nairobi recently. He came here two weeks after the well-publicized chaos began, and it was interesting to hear him relate the impression outsiders have of Kenya as a country where burning buildings, mass riots, and dead bodies have become the norm. Once you’re on the ground, he said, the picture that emerges is a calmer one, “where a number of local disasters are embedded in a matrix of peace.”

We were sitting in cushioned chairs on the balcony of a middle class pub, surrounded by chatty locals and sipping malt beer as we waited for a meal of curried tilapia to reach our table. There was nothing in our situation to suggest that Kenya was, as I described it in the title to one of my previous blog posts, “on the brink.” Nor was our bar in any way the exception that night — the truth is, placid scenes of domestic routine far outnumber the more compelling images of looters kicking tear gas canisters out of the way, or grandmothers wailing outside the church their families were burned in. (more…)

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. (more…)

Nairobi, Kenya–As an exercise in traffic decongestion, Kenya’s fraudulent Christmas election was a huge success: The streets of downtown Nairobi have never been so clear. By any other measure it can only be seen, in the words of Red Cross secretary general Abbas Gullet, as a national disaster.

Within a week of the poll, over four hundred people have officially been bludgeoned, hacked, or burned to death — the real number is certainly many times higher, and as of this writing continues to rise. Throughout the country, police stations and churchyards have become desperate refugee camps populated by people whose neighbours who would now like to kill them. The Red Cross is unable to bring food or water to these refugees, estimated by Mr. Gullet to number more than a million, because Kenya’s highway system has been shut down by vigilantes manning armed road blocks. What began as a spontaneous eruption of political fury in response to a clumsily rigged election has degenerated into a national looting spree.

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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. (more…)

DAGORETTI, KENYA—The day began with a national downpour that turned the clay roads of Kenya into red rivers of mud. One could almost believe the party bosses when they claimed it was the water that caused the ballots to show up late at polling stations from Mombasa to Mount Elgon. The federal election was still more than a month away, but the parties had waited until now to hold their nominations. (more…)

Nairobi—More bad news, people. The (fourth) Global Environment Outlook has just been published by the UN. It’s an epic, 450-page tome, five years and 1,500 experts in the making. Their worldwide gaze looks every catastrophe you can imagine square in the face. (more…)