NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands.

“By the time bodies start piling up, that’s just a detail.” — Ugandan journalist Kalundi Serumaga, speaking at the Kwani Litfest in Nairobi.

NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands. Binyavanga Wainaina—the next Achebe, or maybe just a good talker—going on about where’s a razor to shave his dreadlocks off: “I just want to see the shape of my skull.”

(”Ah,” said David Kaiza, Kampala’s neurotic genius, “you’re going to scalp yourself before someone else does it for you.”)

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai was describing the 1000-shilling bribe he’d paid the cops who caught him smoking a cigarrette on the street at four in the morning last night, while Kalundi was grumbling about everything in a very analytic way—that all the intelligence in this country had been trained outside of it, that everything we’d been talking about throughout the litfest was probably irrelevant, that the waitress had passed him three times without bringing him a menu and it took a blond mzungu to get her attention. “Hey man,” I said, “you could have lifted your hand too.” (more…)

NAIROBI—He wasn’t born here; the father who was didn’t raise him; and he’s only visited three times in his life. But now that he’s got a clear shot at the White House, Barack Obama is every Kenyan’s Kenyan. The country’s Luo community, robbed by that Kikuyu antichrist Mwai Kibaki last Christmas, suddenly has a new presidential candidate to cheer for. But for once in Kenyan politics, tribe’s got nothing to do with it. All forty-two of them are cheering Obama on, and who cares if this time no one gets to vote?

Obama’s confident visage beamed out the front page of every paper in the country this morning, his first as the official Democratic nominee. And why not? There’s been precious little fodder for the patriotic cannon around here lately; Obama may be a distant son of the soil, but he’s a son nonetheless. Or perhaps more accurately, a grandson—the lineup outside his grandma’s hut on Lake Victoria is four reporters deep, and counting. Whether or not her humble lifestyle or down-to-earth views on Barack junior can shed any light on how he might behave in the Oval Office is debatable, but that won’t stop journalists from scouring his genetic homeland (half of it, anyway) for insights into how Kenya has influenced the man who would be Prez.
And what of the effect that man now has on the country that would be His? My Kenyan colleagues and I had an interesting day at the office today, debating exactly what it is that makes this country so happy about Obama’s surging fortunes. (more…)

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…)

Earlier this week, Robert Mugabe announced that it would be “a wasted vote” for Zimbabweans to cast their ballots for anyone but him when they go to the polls this Saturday, March 29th. “It will never happen for Tsvangirai to take over government here—never,” the 84-year-old said of his chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. This wasn’t mere boisterous optimism; it was a military threat.

Zimbabwe’s army chief, its chief of prisons, and the commissioner general of the police had previously declared their refusal to take orders from anyone but Mugabe, regardless of who wins the election. The old man hardly even needs to rig the ballot.

In honor of the Zimbabwean leadership’s tenacious dedication to political inertia, here are…

Ten Reasons For Replacing Democracy With A President For Life:

1. Kenya’s 2007 election.

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(See Arno Kopecky’s first post about Zimbabwe.)

As Ralph drove me to his rose farm in Enterprise Valley, some thirty kilometres outside Harare, he explained how anyone with access to foreign currency and local credit can become a Rockefeller in the new Zimbabwe.

“I bought my farm in 2000 for the equivalent of $150,000 US dollars,” he said. “Paid for it in Zimbabwean currency, of course. Borrowed the whole lot from a local bank.” The bank charged thirty percent interest on the loan, which would be a lot if inflation weren’t outpacing it by several thousand percent. A year and a half later, Ralph’s debt had shrunk to the equivalent of USD$18,000 and he paid it off with the proceeds from a single truckload of flowers. (more…)

With even Kenyans starting to lose interest in the Kenyan saga, Zimbabwe looks set to become the next African media darling. This time around, though, coverage will be more spotty; president Robert Mugabe has banned reporters from ‘hostile’ Western countries—meaning all Western countries—from entering the country in advance of the March 29th election.

It won’t be easy for TV crews to get inside, and for those who do it will be even harder to operate. But writers (like the Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy, who recently paid Harare a surreptitious visit) should still be able to slip in on a tourist visa. I’m going to pass this time around. But Valpy’s dispatch reminded me of my own trip to Mugabe-land four months ago, when the biggest bill in circulation was the $200,000 (Zimbabwean) note. One American dollar fetched 900,000 zimbucks at the time, a figure which was approaching 1.5 million when I left two weeks later. By the time Valpy rolled in, the exchange rate was at 25 million and the government was printing 2-million-dollar bills. Welcome to hyperinflation.

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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…)

TANZANIA—The tropical island of Zanzibar, formerly an Arab slaving port and now home to the aging, labyrinthine city of Stonetown, survived a close brush with World Music last weekend when it hosted its fifth annual Sauti za Busara (Sounds of Wisdom) festival.

Well-tailored musicians and wrinkled hippies, travelers and tourists, muslims and rastas, black Zanzibarians and pink Europeans — for four days, thousands of us squeezed between the ramparts of Stonetown’s Old Fort to nod and shake and whistle at a continental assortment of musicians.

Years ago, the Old Fort was the spot where captured slaves were once herded for inspection, then auctioned off and hustled onto dhows across the seas from Arabia to Alabama. (Miniature relics of those same dhows now hustle tourists off to sandbars and coral reefs.) Their new lives consisted of toiling in cotton fields, but we all know the real work took place in the alleyways, abandoned staircases and ghetto hovels where no master cared to tread or listen. In those hideaway places, expatriated Africans concocted the sounds — of wisdom? of freedom? of plain old feelin’good? — that would eventually become blues and jazz, rap and hip-hop, hard-talking stuff that made for easy listening. If they left their motherland as slaves, one has to ask: who’s the master now? (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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