Abysmal depths of aggression.

---

It’s been two weeks since I hobbled into Backpackers in the wee hours of the New Year, and it’s taken two weeks for me to get back on my feet. For most of the past fortnight my ankle was as fat and purple as a ripe eggplant, ensuring that 2008 gets off to the same sorry start as its predecessor. It’s no surprise, given my recent history of disappointing New Year’s celebrations. If nothing else, it’s allowed me to console myself with the fact that, after this, things are only bound to get better.

Unfortunately, it’s a rosy prognosis not everyone can share. In the days since the final votes were tallied across the border, post-election Kenya has erupted into chaos. What began with promising scenes of democracy at work - hopeful Kenyans rising before dawn, long lines of voters patiently waiting to cast their ballots - has unraveled in just a few days. In Kisumu, the opposition stronghold, confrontations between mobs of angry young demonstrators and riot police have left dozens dead. News crews capture one soldier shooting an unarmed protester in cold blood, pausing to kick his lifeless body on the street. Reporters inside a Kisumu morgue count more than thirty dead after a particularly violent day of protests. Most have bullet wounds in the back.

In Eldoret, another opposition city in the west, gangs of young Kalenjin and Luo men have taken to the streets with bows and arrows, with sticks and spears, with rusty pangas. There are reports of death squads going door to door, killing Kikuyus on sight. Bus passengers have been forced to present their identity papers at checkpoints manned by angry, drunken youths; Kikuyus are summarily rounded up and hacked to death or shot. In a village just outside the city, close to fifty people - mostly women and children - are burned alive inside the church where they took refuge. One hysterical mother managed to escape while a daughter was still trapped inside. Her other daughter - a wailing infant - was torn from her arms and tossed back into the flames.

The scenes, the images, continue ad nauseam: women marching along the road with bundles of household goods balanced on their heads; long, sorrowful lines of refugees shuffling through the rubble of towns; smoke piping from smoldering tea plantations; men swathed in bandages, machete wounds covering their heads and shoulders and necks; children huddled together in hastily built camps, queuing for bowls of rice, hunched over schoolbooks by candlelight; bodies burned, shot, hacked, heaped together in the grave; and the wreckage of cars and buses and homes and cities, a whole country consumed by rage.

With the clarity of hindsight, it all seems to add up: the economic disparity, the tribal rifts, the old grievances over land dating back to the post-colonial days. Even before that Sunday afternoon, when the head of the Electoral Commission announced results he later admitted to have no confidence in; even before President Kibaki was hastily sworn in for a second term; even before the government took the unprecedented step of banning live TV broadcasts across the country; even before the dead began to pile up in Kisumu and Kitale and Eldoret, before death squads looted and raped and killed in Kibera; even months ago, we should’ve seen this coming. In 1992, politically motivated violence tore through the Rift Valley; five years later, riots in Likoni, just south of Mombasa, crippled the tourism industry on the coast - a setback from which it took years to recover. Election cycles in Kenya rarely go smoothly - even if, by African standards, they’re a model of democracy at work. So why should this year be any different?

In recent months, as the rhetoric of the campaign trail grew more heated, reports surfaced of the incumbent PNU party buying up votes in Central Province; ODM began laying the foundations for vote-rigging allegations as early as November. Tempers flared during violent disputes over party nominations, with at least two candidates hospitalized for injuries they sustained. We could hear the commotion from the Backpackers compound, as angry mobs marched on the party headquarters nearby.

More troubling was the messianic fervor that followed Raila on the campaign trail. Here was a fiery, charismatic leader - a former political prisoner! - who promised to wrest the country away from the few and redistribute its wealth to the many. He would right the wrongs of Kibaki’s failed policy to stamp out corruption. He would give hope back to your average Jomo. For many of the young, disillusioned Kenyans that I met around the country - most of whom supported ODM - Raila was a symbol of deliverance. Few doubted that he could bring prosperity to places that knew little of it before; few asked if too much was being expected of him. Few were concerned that replacing the Kikuyu elite with the Luo elite would do little more than let a different group get its hands in the till. And few wondered whether Kenya’s countless poor might not remain just that, no matter how the political stars were realigned in State House.

The first tense confrontations came before the final results were announced, after Raila opened up a huge lead in opposition strongholds and results from the Kikuyu heartland were slow to trickle in. Raila supporters quickly suspected foul play; irregularities began to emerge, and international observers were barred from the counting rooms where the ballots were being tallied. As the hours dragged into days, violent flair-ups were reported around the country. And by the time Kibaki was announced the winner - and sworn in just minutes later - the whole charade had taken on the tragicomic air so common to democracy in the developing world and Florida.

It didn’t take long for the situation to gather a frightful momentum of its own, with tribal clashes quickly escalating into widespread bloodletting. Words like “civil war,” “ethnic cleansing” - even “genocide” - have suddenly made their way into conversations about what was, until two weeks ago, one of Africa’s most energetic and promising democracies. Kenya, long a home to refugees from neighboring Sudan and Somalia, is seeing its own population shift in a massive upheaval. Kikuyu are being driven out of the Luo-controlled west, toward their tribal homes in the Rift Valley. Luo are being chased from the Kikuyu strongholds in the country’s heartland. In a troubling report this week in the New York Times, Nairobi Bureau Chief Jeffrey Gettleman cites mounting evidence that much of the violence wasn’t a spontaneous reaction to the election results - the story line eagerly snatched up by the media - but was meticulously planned by politicians and tribal elders in the weeks before the balloting. He points to the discovery of a stockpile of pangas, spears, bows and arrows in the trunk of a western politician’s car in mid-November. It was a discovery that didn’t even make the local news when I was in Nairobi.

In Uganda, where the interruption of the transport line from Mombasa has caused a sudden spike in gas prices, camps are being hastily built around the eastern town of Mbale. Thousands of ragged refugees pour into the country before alarmed officials manage to close the border. The Red Cross and international aid groups warn that a humanitarian crisis is quickly spiraling out of control; already close to a quarter of million Kenyans have been displaced, with the number of dead climbing into the hundreds. The Daily Monitor reports that anonymous callers have threatened to send death squads into Uganda to hunt down Kikuyu refugees. Growing tensions inside the camps have pressured officials to segregate the refugees according to tribe. Another paper reports that a plot to poison the refugees’ food supply was foiled at the last minute.

It’s all made for riveting news around Backpackers, where we huddle around the bar to watch the latest images being broadcast by the BBC. There’s a good deal of grumbling about the exorbitant prices being charged by boda-boda drivers because of the gas shortage; more than a few haggard travelers roll in, anxiously trying to reroute trips that were supposed to be heading into Kenya before the country imploded. And as the violence spreads from opposition strongholds in the west, engulfing much of the country, I’ve been digging through my address book to reach out to friends I haven’t heard from in months.

From Diani, Joost writes to share the last sorry days of Nairobi Backpackers: Papa Ken elbowed from the picture - and spirited out of the country - as the landlord unceremoniously put a padlock on the front gate. Joost himself was caught up in riots in the capital - and teargassed in the process - before making it to the coast. Khadija, who’d been running the show at Backpackers in its last hectic weeks, left Nairobi in the days leading up to the election. She made it to her mother’s place in Mombasa, which has so far escaped most of the violence, though things aren’t much of a step up from the capital. “Stuff is really expensive right now and the guys are really acting crazy, breaking in, stealing stuff and so on,” she writes. She still has plans to return to Nairobi once things die down, but in the mean time, she’s hunkered down on the coast and, as she puts it, “hoping for the best.”

I also get a few text messages from Kristin, the Canadian volunteer from Kabale, who was determined to brave the turmoil for her long-planned Kenyan safari. Things were - not surprisingly - calm in the Masai Mara, with none of the usual traffic jams backed up along its tree-speckled plains. In Nakuru, though, it’s taken a turn for the surreal. While Kristin and friends enjoy their lunch buffet from a lodge overlooking the lake, plumes of smoke billow from the town’s ravaged slums. Apart from that, things feel eerily normal.

She adds, “Oh, and we’re on evacuation standby from the British High Commission.”

Basilio writes from Malindi that tempers have stayed cool, despite sporadic riots further down the coast. He sounds nervous, hopeful, grateful for my concern. Plenty of others write, too: people I crossed paths with months ago, suddenly eager to rekindle our fledgling friendships, asking after my health and my family and sending along the address of the nearest Western Union. It’s a terrible start to the new year.

It also brings back some of my best and worst memories of Kenya. For a few days I think fondly of the drug-induced stupor of the beach boys in Lamu, and the bouncing strides of the Samburu in Maralal, and the parade of tight, curve-hugging jeans around the posh haunts of Karen. And I remember, too, the anger and desperation I so often found just below the surface - and the feeling that for most Kenyans, left behind by the country’s steady march toward development, life was a high-wire act fraught with peril on all sides.

I remember a conversation I had with a man, a Luo, that feels eerily prescient now. I’d met him at Little Governors’ Camp, in the Maasai Mara, during my safari stint for Concierge.com. George was a chef, trained at culinary school in France, and hired by the camp to whip the kitchen staff into shape. When I met him he was warm, smiling, effusive. He pumped my hand graciously as we talked in the shade, and asked me to pay him a visit when he returned to Nairobi in a few weeks. He wanted me to meet his wife and one-year-old son, also named Chris. I promised to look him up as soon as I was back.

The George I met that mild afternoon in Nairobi, though, was a changed man. We’d sat down for lunch in a busy restaurant near the Sheraton. Chris was cooing and gurgling in his mother’s lap; George shifted in his seat, poking at a few hard leaves of cabbage and looking out the window with distress. He leaned across the table and fixed me with his eyes and spoke venomously about Kenyan politics - about the treacherous Kikuyus in the governing elite, about the nepotism that made it impossible for members of other tribes to get ahead. He spoke in sharp, hushed tones, looking nervously over his shoulder.

“This is a Kikuyu restaurant,” he warned. His eyes narrowed and he sat silently as the waiter cleared some plates from the table. When he was gone, George continued. “The Kikuyu are bad people. They are very bad people. They will cheat, they will lie. They will kill.” He made a stabbing motion with his hand, twisting an imaginary knife in the air.

The sentiment was, admittedly, not entirely surprising. Since arriving in Kenya, I’d quickly learned that the fat-pocketed Kikuyu was one of the country’s best-loved stereotypes. It was the Kikuyu, after all, who had dominated Kenyan politics for more than four decades since independence. When I met shop owners and hotel managers around the country, they invariably hailed from one of the tribe’s Central Province strongholds. I’d even incorporated that stereotype into my schtick: joking with Kenyans about all the weight I’d put on in their country, I’d slap my belly and say, “When I got here, I was thin like a Turkana. Now I’m fat like a Kikuyu.”

But George’s malice was still striking - an expression of what Saul Bellow once called such “abysmal depths of aggression.” Soon I found out that he was in bad shape: he hadn’t been paid in weeks, and he needed some money to hold him over until his paycheck arrived. I told him I was leaving Nairobi in just a few days; he nodded painfully and forced himself to smile. He apologized, not wanting to put me in such an awkward position. When we parted he was the same George I met at Little Governors’ Camp: warm, smiling, effusive. He put his arm around his wife - she cradled her son to her chest and wiped the spittle from his chin - and they disappeared down a busy Nairobi street. And I wondered what a man might do when he was hungry and desperate and had nowhere left to turn.

---