This week's wave of violence is a warning that Kenya's young democracy could topple into ethnic strife as political tensions reawaken tribal animosity, writes Rob Crillyin Kibera, Nairobi
Toi market stands as a smouldering, shattered scar in the centre of Africa's biggest slum. Piles of clothes lie scorched and ripped among the ashes of hundreds of tiny stalls that were once the lifeblood of Kibera's sprawling slum on the outskirts of Nairobi.
While the rest of the shantytown is bustling as business returns to normal, Toi is silent. Many of its stallholders are from the same Kikuyu tribe as president Mwai Kibaki, making the market a prime target for opposition gangs. Yesterday they were too frightened to return to claim their plots.
It is the latest warning that Kenya's young democracy could topple into ethnic strife as political tensions reawaken tribal animosity.
George Ahuga, from the Luhya tribe, was one of the few who ventured out to see if he could salvage anything from his stall.
"I used to sell socks and other used clothes but now I have completely nothing," he says, looking around at the blackened dirt where he used to earn his living. "I have completely nothing now and I don't know what to do. They have left me nothing, not even the poles from my stall."
Kibera was the scene of some of the worst violence in Nairobi on Thursday as opposition supporters took to the streets in anger at what they view as an election stolen by President Mwai Kibaki.
Mobs engaged in running battles with riot police. They torched shacks and closed off the slum with burning barricades of cars and tyres.
And mobs, made up of mainly Luos from opposition leader Raila Odinga's tribe, also targeted the Kikuyu stalls in Toi market.
"The target is political. It's a dispute about the election," says Ahuga. "But tribalism is also a part of the problem. It's political but it is spreading to ethnicity."
Many Kenyans thought the dark days of tribal and political strife were behind them. Five years ago President Kibaki took power on a wave of optimism that decades of corruption under Daniel arap Moi would be consigned to history.
He promised to clean up government and promoted politicians irrespective of tribe. But Kibaki's rainbow coalition gradually unravelled as his war on corruption faltered.
By the time of last week's elections, he was neck and neck in the polls with Odinga, once an ally and minister in his government.
AT FIRST THE vote was praised by international observers, but as delays and irregularities emerged, so tension grew. Returning officers disappeared for hours on end only to award their constituencies to President Kibaki.
A turnout of 115 per cent was reported in one district before being withdrawn quickly. Other constituencies said 95 per cent of registered voters had cast their ballots, figures ridiculed by opposition leaders who immediately declared the election rigged.
President Kibaki was eventually sworn in for a second term in a hurried ceremony on Sunday morning, prompting a wave of violence that swept from west Kenya to the Indian Ocean coast.
So far more than 300 people have been killed. In the worst incident to date, at least 30 people - mostly women and young children - were burned to death when a church was torched in Eldoret town. Medical staff at the Women's Hospital in Nairobi have also reported a sharp increase in the number of rapes of women and girls being committed by gangs and individuals as part of the post-election violence.
The worry is that the violence is being used to drive political agendas through.
"Political leaders must not explicitly or implicitly condone violence against supposed supporters of their rivals," says Erwin van der Borght, director of Amnesty International's Africa Programme.
Thursday saw a series of demonstrations as opposition leaders took their supporters on to the streets. At times the anger turned into violence as mobs threw stones at police lines, but the threat dwindled as the day wore on. By yesterday Nairobi was starting to return to normal. Shops reopened and began assessing the damage as plans for a second day of demonstrations fizzled out.
Expats - many of them aid workers and diplomats - returned to coffee shops and shopping malls where they stocked up on milk and other groceries while tyres still smouldered in some streets.
"We don't know what will happen next, but as the shops are open today we thought we should take a chance to fill the fridge," says one. "We were all really taken by surprise before. You don't expect something like this to happen in Kenya."
THE COUNTRY HAS a reputation as a haven of stability in a corner of Africa bedevilled by civil war and political strife. Kenya's rogues gallery of neighbours includes Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia. Nairobi's booming economy is the powerhouse that drives most of the region.
Yet much of the country still lives in abject poverty. Growth rates of more than 5 per cent for the past few years have not been translated into a better standard of living for many ordinary Kenyans. They still have to live on less than a dollar a day.
Two years ago, millions of people were forced to rely on food aid as a bitter drought cut a swathe through livestock and ruined harvests.
In that Kenya - a land of poverty alongside a land of affluence - the violence was far from surprising.
Kepha Ngito, who lives and works amid Kibera's narrow mud streets trying to prevent conflict, says: "To me it was inevitable. We knew the level of passion that people here feel so it seemed inevitable that people would confront the police and die rather than witness the kind of betrayal we have seen."
Rumours are spreading around the slum that the Mungiki - a Kikuyu criminal sect with a reputation for beheadings and extreme brutality - are organising themselves for revenge on the Luos.
"The worry is that the rumours in turn will inspire a gang of Luos to make things even worse for the Kikuyus," Ngito says, in between making mobile phone calls to contacts around the slum and organising meetings to try to talk the agitators out of further violence.
Thousands of people have fled the slums. The lucky ones have found transport out of the city altogether, in search of their tribal homelands. Others are sleeping under the stars anywhere they can find sanctuary.
Many have gathered at an army base close to Mathare slum.
"We feel more secure here," says 47-year-old Joseph, who carried an old suitcase overflowing with rescued clothes. He says he was forced from his house by a gang of thugs.
"They told me they will burn down our house. They had stones, pangas and sticks," he says.
AS WELL AS a business hub, Kenya is a vital centre for aid agencies delivering food, medicine and other vital supplies to conflict-stricken regions of Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Charities have begun pulling staff out of Nairobi and the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations says violence has blocked food shipments. Peter Smerdon, spokesman for the WFP, says trucks were stranded at the port of Mombasa. "There are delays in reaching the rest of the region," he says. "Some have left Mombasa but have been held up at checkpoints or roadblocks run by vigilantes, some drivers did not come back after Christmas and some contractors refuse to leave Mombasa without escort from the security forces." The WFP has been distributing food in Kenya through the Red Cross to 100,000 people displaced by violence.
But aid workers say that the post-election chaos has made it impossible to get the necessary resources.
"The situation is dire," said Kizito Odock, development co-ordinator for the Eldoret diocese in a press release from Catholic aid group Cafod. "We cannot turn people away who come to us for safe haven, but our capacities are overstretched to breaking point. If we don't get help, we are heading for catastrophe."
All this in a country that is a major draw for well-heeled tourists looking for some winter sun or a once-in-a-lifetime safari.
Thousands have seen their travel plans go up in smoke as European governments warned their citizens against travelling to Kenya.
For those already here it has meant days stuck in hotels or marooned at campsites. Some have managed to make it back to Nairobi to wait for flights. Many are camped out at the Panari Hotel, close to the airport.
The Stabler family from Scotland watched their two-week holiday turn into a vigil as they waited for a pause in the violence to risk the drive from their up-country campsite back to Nairobi.
They packed and left in 45 minutes on Wednesday evening when they heard that roadblocks were being dismantled around their temporary home close to the town of Nakuru, scene of several attacks on travellers.
"We went to Lake Nakuru on Christmas Eve and then Baringo, but after that we couldn't do anything," says Gail Stabler as she sips a mango juice at the hotel bar with her husband and two children. They used to live in Kenya and had returned for a holiday thinking that the days of civil strife were over.
"We were watching all the time, worried that it might turn into civil war . . . Our holiday has been messed up, but at least our friends are okay."
Tribal tension The Kikuyu and Luo rivalry
Kenya is home to more than 40 tribes ranging from the Luos around Lake Victoria in the west to the Swahili tribes along the Indian Ocean coast.
The Kikuyus are the most numerous - accounting for about 22 per cent of the population - and are seen as particularly dominant in political and economic life. Since coming to power in 2002, president Mwai Kibaki has been criticised for being in the pocket of the Mount Kenya Mafia, an influential clique of Kikuyus from the mountainous region.
Their main political rivals are the Luos, the third most populous tribe with about 13 per cent of the population, who feel it is their turn to provide a president. They believe their man, Raila Odinga, the son of the country's first vice-president, had a deal with Kibaki that should have allowed him to take up a new post of prime minister after the 2002 election.
Tension between the two groups dates back to the 1960s, when Odinga's father fell out with Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, shortly after independence from Britain.