NAIVASHA (Kenya): Although they are from different tribes, Peter and Sospeter have much in common: they do the same job, are roughly the same age and practically share the same first name.
Now Kenya’s ethnic clashes have landed the two men one a Kikuyu of the tribe of President Mwai Kibaki, the other a Luo like opposition leader Raila Odinga in hospital. There, thanks to a shortage of space in the midst of a flood of violent injuries, they share the same bed.
Sospeter Odipo, a Luo, said he doesn’t mind sharing a bed with fellow flower-farmer Peter Ndungu, a Kikuyu, but he says he can no longer live alongside Kikuyus. He plans to return to Kisumu in his western tribal homeland.
Outside the hospital gates, their communities fire arrows and chuck rocks at each other in the latest post-poll clash.
A month or so ago, few could have believed the tension exposed by elections in a country best known for tourism would prompt conflict that has killed 1,000, displaced 300,000 and been called “ethnic cleansing” by the United States and others.
“It was there the whole time but people didn’t want to acknowledge it,” said Paul Brennan, a missionary who has worked in Kenya for the last 30 years.
“It is about land. It is about jealousy, exacerbated by politics the spark was the election.”
The trigger was disputed polls that returned Kibaki to power. Odinga says Kibaki rigged it. But the seeds of the conflict were sown long ago.
Politics, land and ethnicity have combined before to spill into violence. Clashes in the early and the late 90s also caused the deaths of hundreds, mostly Kikuyus, in the Rift Valley.
Resentment of the Kikuyu stems even further back, to perceptions that they were favoured by colonial power Britain and as shrewd businessmen and women then emerged from the country’s 42 tribes as the most influential, analysts say.
Crowded in central Kenya and encouraged by the independent nation’s first president, himself a Kikuyu, they moved on to and bought land from other groups in the Rift Valley.
“They say we stole their land. We didn’t. We bought it,” said Jane Nyaga, 55, a retired Kikuyu teacher, as she sat on her only remaining possession, a sofa, near a police station sheltering refugees. A mob from another tribe, the Kalenjin, burnt her house.
Brennan feels the current violence has taken on a new dimension: “Of course (previous clashes) were serious to those affected, but there wasn’t the targeting and the revenge we are seeing now.”
What started as the opposition’s rejection of the election has spread fuelled, many say, by politicians or elders mobilising gangs to protect their local interests.
Protests in urban areas were as much about the gap between rich and poor as they were politics, some Kenyans say. But they were met with a tough police response, igniting resentment.
When the violence reached Naivasha just north of Nairobi last week, it was mostly Kikuyus who were retaliating for attacks on their own in western Kenya after Kibaki’s victory was announced.—Reuters