Kenya

I have more thoughts on the delegate math that I am winding up to share tonight or tomorrow, so check back for that, but in the meantime, I want to call your attention to Kenya.

I taught math for a semester in a rural school in Kenya after graduating from high school. I lived with a family in Western Province, not far from the Ugandan border, a few hours and 50 or so miles from Kisumu, which is the third largest city in Kenya, and the population center of the Luo tribe. My village was Luhya. I think of my friends and students every time I read about the recent violence that is mostly between members of the Luo and Kikuyu tribes, and I hope that the much smaller and more northerly Luhyas are staying out of it.

The Kikuyus have dominated Kenyan national politics since independence – Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent Kenyan President, is a Kikuyu. Raila Odinga, the challenger, is Luo. Kenya has been spared – has spared itself – much of the ethnic conflict that has burdened many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which is part of why it has been relatively stable and economically successful, by the neighborhood’s standards. But a hotly contested and legally questionable election in December has brought undercurrents of tribal tension to the surface, and the violence is real, ethnic, as brutal as it can be, and, despite a lull after the first surge in January, persistant.

In our society it’s easy to forget that mobility has not been the norm for most people throughout most of human history. When I took my family to lunch in the central city of Western Province, Kakamega, near the end of my time there – 25 miles and an hour or so from our village – it was the first time that my Kenyan grandmother had been there in 40 years! When I left my adoptive family at the end of the three months I spent there, they admonished me to come back, saying “we will always be here.” They meant it. As my brother David explained, there is a strong cultural bond between a family and the land on which they have long lived. That bond is not often broken.

Today’s NYT shows a picture of Luos in the back of a truck in Nakuru, about to be shipped off to their “ancestral homeland.” Nakuru is about 100 miles east of Kisumu. There is a really beautiful lake there. In the past, it was Kikuyu land. But those Luos live there now. Refugees have the worst public health in the world. This afternoon there is news of progress in talks between Kibaki and Odinga. Let’s hope so.