A note on the political violence of 2007, tribes, and inequality.

In school we have been learning about the political violence that happened late last year in Kenya surrounding their presidential elections. In addition, I have been constantly asking my host mama and baba about what happened.

Granted, this is a very complicated and racially/tribally-charged issue. My point of view is skewed because I stay with a Luo family. Nearly all the information I receive, even in school, is biased towards or against one tribe or another.

Tribes are very important here in Kenya. It dictates what the family eats, the language they speak, the province or even neighborhood they live in. Even being here less than a month, I am learning who likes and dislikes whom, and how to identify the tribe a person is in based on their physical characteristics. It's disturbing how quickly this knowledge is passed on to us. To me, at first, everyone appeared to be similar but there is a lot of ethnic strife.

Colonial leadership partly contributed to this. The British leadership here never encouraged a united Kenyan identity. In fact, they prohibited political parties that were based on the national identity, and only permitted ones which stood for a tribal identity and platform of issues. Anyway, onto what actually happened.

So, the President in 2007 was named Kibaki, who is a member of PNU and a member of the Kikuyu tribe. The Kikuyus are the largest % of the Kenyan population and also one of the richest. They are situated in high populations in areas that are the most fertile, like the central highlands.

Raila Odinga was the challenger, with the party ODM. Odinga is a Luo, which is the third biggest tribe in Kenya (Luya being the second). So the papers, polls, and most people speculated that Odinga would win. The night of the election, as information began coming in, it was clear that Odinga was going to win. Then, the results stopped for a little while and then, the numbers drastically changed. In areas where there were not many Kikuyus, or even many people, a ton of votes came in that were for Kibaki instead of Odinga. According to my host dad, the numbers were so obviously fake because not even as many people lived in the areas compared to the numbers of votes that were coming out.

When the President was to be announced, the announcement took a while and the person announcing it was in a very special and secure location. When Kibaki was announced, the violence started. Again, according to my family, Kikuyus were targeted in areas where they were minorities. Then, they were targeted where there were larger populations. I think eventually it was sort of everyone targeting their enemies... In addition, foreigners, like Indians and Arabs were targeted as well.

Nairobi, and Kenya for that matter, is a very two-faced place. There is the coffeeshop I'm sitting in, with very nice chairs, tables, food, and a lot of white people. There are nice cars and houses and even a couple shopping malls. Then, there are the slums. People living in tin shacks, 7 people to a small room with no running water or electricity. There is trash all over, human waste all over, and water pooling with mold and mosquitos. People actually crap in a bag, then throw it onto the street. Now, here there are practically no drainage systems and so things flood quickly and water goes every which way. Imagine the quality of this water, that many people get onto their food and their bodies. It's not a pretty sight. These types of conditions, with no work to be found for the common person or for even the educated people makes people very angry, especially when they see the President giving millions of Kenyan shillings to already-millionaire athletes, or that every one of his ministers and top employees has guard-dogs, security officers, and multiple Mercedes'. It's scary. This also breeds the crime that has already hit MSID, with one bag stolen and some other dangerous incidents.

Apparently the poverty is also striking in rural areas, although in a different way. There is also not a lot of electricity there, and the food quality is low. I will see this when I go into the field in October.

We're still learning about the refugee status here in Kenya, since many people had to leave their homes as a result of being targets of ethnic violence. It's a very complicated issue and I certainly have a lot to learn...