Fortress Kenya: guards, tribes and political violence

I’m living in Nairobi at the moment-metropolitan hub of East Africa, city of a million honking cars, taxis and minivans-dusty, dirty, but ceaselessly engaging. This is a place where people guard their homes like medieval fortresses-surrounding themselves with high walls topped with razor wire and employing guards to man heavy padlocked gates 24 hours a day. Security lights buzz and flicker throughout the night, and night begins early. At six thirty, as if someone has flicked a switch, the bright sunlit safety of the day ends and the gently pulsing warmth of the tropical night takes over.

What are people afraid of to make them mount such a determined defence of their personal property? It is the people who live outside the luxury of such defences whose presence creates this culture of fear. They are the have-nots - squatters and slum dwellers who will come in the night and take what is mine, what I have worked my whole life to own, and now defend with all the means my money can provide.

There is a strange and unsettling violence that exists somewhere just below the surface of Kenyan society. The other day I met a man on the street who told me he used to be a primary school teacher from ‘up country.’ He had come to Nairobi after what he (and most Kenyans) referred to as ‘the fracas’ of February’s post election violence. I find this phrasing intriguing, as it seems to suggest that the violence that ensued was little more than a temporary period of bad behaviour, a moment of disorder in an otherwise ordered country.

I wanted to hear more, so I bought him a cup of tea. He told me that his school was near the town of Nakuru, and that during the violence 16 of his pupils had been killed when its main buildings were attacked with home-made firebombs. His house was also burnt along with many of his neighbours’ and he was now left homeless, jobless and destitute. He then told me that it was young men from the Kikuyu tribe who were the culprits. Spurred on by alcohol and drugs provided by local tribal and political leaders they committed such terrible acts believing their reward would be a greater share of Kenya ‘s wealth - a way out of the crippling cycle of day to day poverty.

At present I’m working as an academic researcher into issues of Kenyan history and in the day I read back issues of Kenyan newspapers - diligently researching riots, elections and court cases for a man from the university of Bergen called Jeremy. We communicate by email, writing cheery tongue in cheek messages about how lucky we are to be involved with a country so full of political excitement and volatility.

The story shocked me more than anything I had encountered in my research. You go to a country like Kenya with many high-minded intentions to ‘truly experience’ its culture and people. What you don’t always expect is to be so forcefully confronted by the country’s darker side.

When it was time to return to the newspaper archive the man asked me for money. I clumsily offered him fifty shillings (40p), feeling useless and patronising. That night I would be able to return to my comfortable house complete with razor wire and security guards, he would sleep desperate and vulnerable on the street. That’s the difference between the haves and have-nots in Kenya, and it goes some way to explaining why all the walls are necessary.