The Demons That Still Haunt Africa

By Alex Perry/Eldoret, Laura Blue/London

High up in the mountains of the northern Rift Valley is the village of Kiambaa, a place of maize farms and mud huts where the air is so light and pure, it is said to hold the secret of Kenya's world-beating distance runners, who train in the surrounding hills. On New Year's Day, a mob of several hundred people armed with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows surrounded Kiambaa's tiny tin-roofed church, where up to 200 men, women and children were huddled. The mob freed those who gave up mobile phones or money, raped the women, then closed the doors on the rest, heaped mattresses and dry maize leaves against the entrances and set them alight. The Kenyan Red Cross pulled 17 bodies from the ruins. Survivors put the death toll at 35.

At least one body, that of a young man called James, lay in a nearby field, where he collapsed after running out of the church with his hair and face on fire. Daniel Mwangi Nganga, 37, whose disabled brother was hacked to death in the family home as the crowd approached the church, recognized the killers as friends and neighbors. "We went to school together," he says. "They used to come to our homes. We prayed together." He searched for an explanation. "We just don't know what happened."

It wasn't supposed to happen in Kenya. Until a few weeks ago, this country of 37 million was a poster nation of the African renaissance, a term adopted by South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki to describe the continent's economic and political resurgence in recent years. After three decades beset by genocide, famine, AIDS and wars as obscure as they were endless, much of Africa is thriving. Soaring demand for resources like oil, timber and minerals--especially from China--has pushed annual economic growth for sub-Saharan Africa to more than 5% for four years running and is inching toward 7%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Conspicuous activism by Western politicians, philanthropists and rock stars has helped relieve the continent's debts and deliver billions in development aid. There is less war and more democracy. Peace reigns in the old battlegrounds of Angola, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Almost all African countries have held multiparty elections in the past 15 years.

Kenya is one of the stars of this revival: it has held elections regularly since independence in 1963, its economy grew 6.4% in 2007, and it has been a stable exception to turmoil in East Africa. But the outbreak of violence there following last month's presidential elections threatens that progress. A potential implosion in Kenya is especially worrying to the U.S. because the White House sees it as a frontline state in the war on terrorism, a bulwark against its volatile, jihadi-infested neighbor Somalia. Terrorists have occasionally slipped across Kenya's border, as in 1998, when al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, another neighbor. In 2007 the Bush Administration gave the government of President Mwai Kibaki about $1 billion in military and other aid. And there are special-operations soldiers based in Kenya at Manda Bay, on the coast just south of Somalia. The instability in Kenya has so alarmed the Administration that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reached out for help to an unlikely ally: Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, whose father was from western Kenya and who has relatives near the city of Kisumu, the scene of some of the worst violence. Obama recorded a message, aired on the Voice of America, calling for calm. On Jan. 3, the day of the Iowa caucuses, he spoke with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had flown to Nairobi, the capital, to see if he could negotiate a peace. In the days since his Iowa victory, Obama has had near daily conversations with the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger, or with Kenya's opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Obama was trying to reach Kibaki as well.

Whether Kenya can be pulled back from the brink will reveal much about Africa's future. The nation embodies the best and worst of the continent--its vitality and economic potential but also its poverty, corruption and tribalism. So long as those conditions persist, crises like the one afflicting Kenya will continue to haunt Africa, stunting its growth and hurting its people. The outcome in Kenya may well determine whether Africa's renaissance sustains itself--or turns into another nightmare.

Roots of the Rage

The psychology of the bloodletting that has killed more than 500 Kenyans and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes may remain a mystery. Other questions are easier to answer. The immediate cause? A civilian coup by Kibaki, following a close race with challenger Odinga in the Dec. 27 general election. Three days after the vote, on live television, paramilitary police stormed the Kenyatta International Conference Center, where the vote was being counted and Odinga had a substantial lead. Minutes later, the head of the election commission declared Kibaki the winner. Kibaki was sworn in later the same day. That decision fanned simmering resentment against Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu, the largest of Kenya's 42 tribes. Though Kikuyus make up only 22% of the population, they dominate government and business. A 2005 report by the Society for International Development, a civil-society monitoring group, catalogued how Kibaki had packed his Cabinet, state corporations, the judiciary and provincial administrations with his tribesmen. The tribal animosities have been festering at least since 1963, when British colonial farmers sold their properties to wealthy Kikuyus, allowing them to encroach on the ancestral land of Luos, Kalenjins and others in the Rift Valley. Some blame also goes to the father of the nation, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who founded the ruling Kikuyu cabal.

In Nairobi the epicenter of the violence was Africa's largest slum, Kibera, where a million people live in tin shacks and clapboard huts--without sewerage, hospitals or jobs--a five-minute drive from some of the city's most luxurious homes. Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in London, describes Kenya's poor as the "explosive dispossessed," ready to erupt into violence.

They did. Starting on New Year's Eve, tens of thousands of Kalenjin and Luo tribesmen tore through the Kikuyu sections of Kibera, mirroring violence across the country. Few seemed to care whether Kibaki and his tribe would fight back. "If there's civil war, it is the Kikuyus who will lose," says Titus Odiambo, a Luo fish trader. "It's their buildings that will burn. We don't have anything at stake." Some Kikuyu gangs struck back, but tens of thousands simply fled to the central highlands, where they are the majority tribe.

After a week of violence, Kibaki and Odinga came under heavy international pressure--and intensive lobbying by African leaders like Tutu and Ghanaian President John Kufuor and by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer--to reach some sort of compromise. But the question of who would rule was unresolved, leaving many Kenyans worried that the furies unleashed by the stolen election would lurk close to the surface, ready to break out at any time.

As Goes Kenya ...

What makes the unrest in Kenya most alarming is that its root causes are maladies that still plague other, less stable African states. The first is poverty. Despite Kenya's overall economic growth, 58% of its people are poor (defined as living on $2 or less a day). U.N. studies show that the gap between rich and poor is wider in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Despite the continent's recent economic growth, the number of its poor grew from 288 million in 1981 to 516 million in 2001.

The second malady is corruption. Kenya ranks eighth from the bottom on the list of the world's most corrupt countries, compiled by the watchdog group Transparency International. Kibaki's government and that of his predecessor Daniel arap Moi have been dogged by allegations of dirty deals running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Kibaki's former anti-corruption czar John Githongo went into self-imposed exile in Britain in 2005 after he became disillusioned by the President's lack of commitment to fighting graft and faced death threats. The government, he tells TIME, had "abandoned promises to equitably share power and economic opportunity, reform the constitution and fight corruption." Fixing the election result, he says, was "like throwing a match into a fuel drum."

As in Kenya, so in Africa's other powers. Africa is the also the world's most corrupt continent, with 36 out of 52 countries afflicted by rampant graft. In Nigeria the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says the country's rulers stole $400 billion from 1960 to 1999. In South Africa barely a week goes by without a new corruption scandal among the business and political elite. A week after he was elected leader of the ruling African National Congress, Jacob Zuma was indicted on one charge of racketeering, one of money laundering, two of corruption and 12 of fraud in connection with bribes paid by a French arms company. (He denies all the charges.)

Finally, Africa's democratic institutions remain weak. Like Kibaki, many African leaders have a hard time accepting an unfavorable verdict from the electorate and walking away from office. "Democracy in Africa is not what is understood in the West," says Catholic bishop Cornelius Korir, whose cathedral in the town of Eldoret, north of Kiambaa, has become a refugee camp for 9,000 Kikuyus. "Since their wealth depends on power, our leaders are never ready to admit defeat." Incumbents like Kibaki, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are among those who tried to alter their country's constitutions--some successfully--to cling to power. African voters are to some extent complicit in the undermining of democracy. When given an opportunity to vote out one corrupt leader, they often elect another, hoping he will be more generous with his ill-gotten gains.

Reason for Hope

So what can be done--for the people of Kenya and their 788 million fellow sub-Saharan Africans? For the West, part of the answer lies in holding African governments accountable for the graft and misrule that sow popular disgruntlement. The West largely contents itself with the appearance of democracy in Africa, not the reality, and gives billions of dollars in aid to corrupt governments. "The World Bank runs around establishing anti-corruption commissions," says Joel Barkan, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who was in Kenya for the vote. "They have been singularly ineffective." In Kenya the IMF and the World Bank suspended aid in 2006 but later resumed it. Threats to withdraw U.S. and other aid appear to have persuaded Kibaki to offer to share power with Odinga.

Ultimately, the emergence of a more peaceful, prosperous Africa depends on Africans themselves. That provides the strongest case for optimism. Some of Africa's most thriving states are places that recently seemed beyond hope. Rwanda, where tribal violence escalated into genocide in 1994, is reviving with relatively little corruption and subsiding tribalism. The IMF expects Liberia, shattered by civil war from 1989 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2003, to post economic growth of 13.3% this year. There is hope for Kenya too. After all, the majority of Kenyans chose not to join in the tribal violence. Many civil-society institutions are strong and cut across tribal lines. Journalists, church leaders, women's groups, lawyers, tourist operators and even some politicians have united to condemn both the mobs and Kibaki, calling for an end to the killing and for the President to quit.

Still, memories of Kenya's unhappy New Year's Day won't fade easily. On Jan. 2 in Mathare, another Nairobi slum, a mob of people torched a gas station, burned three buses and two jeeps and slashed a Kikuyu man in the head with a machete. They chased another down a narrow mud alley and, when he slipped, beat him to death with rocks, then stole his wallet and shoes. There was nothing on the body to identify him, no one in the area knew him, and within hours he joined hundreds of corpses at mortuaries across Kenya, awaiting claim. Unknown. But not forgotten.

Mixed Picture

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With reporting by Joe Klein/New Hampshire