SYLVIA MUDEGU knew she was in grave danger in the violent aftermath of Kenya’s disputed presidential election when there was a tremendous hammering on the door of her home.
As she heard the sound of wood breaking, she put her hand over the mouths of her children Esther, 18 months, and Rose, 3, and hid behind a curtain. “Don’t move. Don’t make a noise,” she whispered.
Minutes later the 20-year-old woman was begging for her life. Men wielding sticks and machetes poured into her house, a two-room tin-roofed shack in a malodorous slum on the eastern side of Nairobi, grabbed her hair and dragged her outside.
All around, she saw homes on fire and people fleeing as arsonists and looters tore through the slum taking vengeance on anyone perceived to have voted for President Mwai Kibaki.
Kibaki is a member of Kenya’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu, and the attackers went on the rampage believing he had stolen the election from his challenger, Raila Odinga, in order to stay in power for five more years. Odinga is the leader of the smaller Luo tribe.
Mudegu knew what to expect next. The men from Odinga’s Luo tribe would rape her. With other women, she was taken to a stream by the edge of the slum.
“They raped even the old women,” she said. The screams went on and on. “One girl was 12, and at 12 you know how to scream loudest.”
Mudegu tried to speak with detachment. But a tear on her cheek gave away the fact that she, too, had been raped.
One of hundreds seeking refuge on a piece of wasteland after their homes had been torched, she sat in the open this weekend, surrounded by pots, pans and bags of clothing salvaged from destroyed homes.
“We all worry about the children,” she said. “If they become sick we have no money to take them to hospital.”
As rival mobs were hacking each other with machetes the cruelty of the violence could be seen in the gaping wounds that nurses were washing and bandaging in Nairobi’s hospitals.
There was one teenage boy whose body was perfectly whole except for a calf severed to the bare bone. He had been brought from the slum in a wheelbarrow and his eyes were still wild with fear. Another had a wound in the back from a police bullet. The city morgue was heaped high with bodies.
On Wednesday, during a momentary lull in the fighting, a woman gave birth to a baby girl in the street amid the cheers of the crowd. She had been trying to reach a nearby dispensary but stopped for fear of being killed. Then the fighting began again.
“I cannot believe this is my country,” said a Kenyan businessman when he saw the misery. “We saw these pitiful scenes with refugees from the Sudan and Rwanda and now we are seeing them here in the heart of our own capital. It is unbelievable.
“Kenya has been held up as a model of stability and we Kenyans believed it. Now that has been shattered. I weep.”
The speed of Kenya’s unravelling has been breathtaking. In Africa, one country after another has been racked by political violence, massacres, corruption and civil war. For 44 years, since independence from Britain, Kenya was largely the exception.
It is true that Jomo Kenyatta, its first leader, and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, countenanced little dissent and plundered the national treasury. But viewed against the savagery that descended on its neighbours – Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and Rwanda – Kenya was a success story. It was an economic hub and a top tourist destination.
Hidden away were problems, however. Kenya is a mosaic of 42 tribes. But since independence the Kikuyu have dominated politically and economically.
Political patronage enabled them to settle across the country outside their densely populated traditional homeland near Mount Kenya. While poor Kikuyu drove communal taxis or ran street stalls, the wealthier ones owned the big businesses.
Their growing presence and economic power attracted resentment, especially in the Rift Valley in the west.
In the last elections many Kalenjin, the original Rift Valley inhabitants, backed Odinga. Other minor tribes threw in their lot with the flamboyant opposition leader, hoping for a better deal under a Luo president. This led to the closest-fought election in African history.
The violence has killed more than 300 people and the wider suffering has been terrible. Half a million need food and 180,000 have fled their homes. Reports from western Kenya said children were dying from exposure. The World Food Programme suggested that up to 100,000 people faced starvation.
The election was projected as a milestone in Kenya’s advance to a more mature democracy. In 2002 Kibaki had put down the first marker on this path when he won a multi-party election that ended Moi’s autocratic rule. Odinga helped in his victory. But the two fell out and became political opponents.
On December 27, Kenyans voted, with Odinga consistently ahead in opinion polls. He won a parliamentary majority, but two days after election day, delays in counting for the presidential contest and rumours of electoral fraud sparked riots.
Last Sunday, Kibaki was declared the winner by 231,728 votes, even though Odinga had led by a substantial margin in preliminary results. Kibaki was sworn in secretively as 152 European Union observers declared the election deeply flawed.
Aggrieved at having apparently been cheated out of power, Luos went on the rampage against Kibaki’s Kikuyu supporters. Even mobile phone text messages called for violence. “Let’s wipe out the Mt Kenya mafia,” they read, a reference to Kibaki’s power base. “Kill two, get one free.”
As the Kikuyu hit back, tribal clashes spread through the Rift Valley and beyond, as far as the teeming slums of Nairobi and on to Mombasa and the Kenyan coast. In the Rift Valley, the Luo were supported by the Kalenjin and another minor tribe.
The resurrection of two violent criminal gangs, the Mungiki and the Taliban, loyal to the Kikuyu and Luo respectively, added a gruesome dimension.
The Taliban were blamed for horrendous killings in which Kikuyu were hacked to death with machetes in the slums of Nairobi. The Mungiki, who are bound by secret rituals, were accused of hacking off heads and mutilating Luo men. It was reported that a number of Luos were admitted to hospital after forced circumcisions.
The Luo do not practise male circumcision, while the Kikuyu are one of several tribes in which it is a rite of passage.
On Tuesday, a new atrocity evoked memories of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people died. Attackers burnt alive Kikuyu women, children and elderly people sheltering inside a church just outside Eldoret in the Rift Valley.
After throwing stones at the church to make sure the refugees stayed inside, they blocked the door with mattresses soaked in fuel, and added piles of dried maize leaves. Then they set the whole lot on fire. Soon the church was a blazing inferno.
A few escaped, including a woman who broke out, her baby in a shawl on her back. The shawl caught fire. The baby fell back into the flames. The woman ran away with her hair on fire, screaming.
Late last week Eldoret was ringed with road blocks guarded by young men with clubs and bows. Passing cars were searched. Kikuyu were being turned back, fined or killed.
The town became a seething refugee camp. Officials said 60,000 people, mostly Kikuyu, had sought shelter in police stations and churches.
“We were beaten up and we are homeless,” said Esther Njoroge, 52, as she cooked a meagre dinner for her family in the shadow of the central police station. “Everything was burnt down. We can’t go back.”
Those who did were killed. Kikuyus said that members of the Luo and Kalenjin were pointing out Kikuyu homes to looters, who burnt them.
About 9,000 refugees were sheltering at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral. They said they could never return home, not only because they feared death, but because they could never live side by side with people from other tribes again.
“We don’t want anything to do with them,” said Daniel Paul, 35. “They have shown us that they do not want us. Some of us they burnt inside our houses.”
Susan Kiarie, 26, said: “They were saying that the Kikuyus have been ruling for so many years and they should not be given another chance to rule. We have no hope because as soon as we go back we will be killed.”
A wave of violence on the eastern coast also cost lives. A mob robbed the store of a prominent local Kikuyu businessman at Miritini, a cluster of houses and shops beside the Mombasa-to-Nairobi railway line 12 miles from Kenya’s famous beach resorts.
Yesterday, international peacemakers pushed Kibaki and Odinga to agree to power-sharing. Kibaki told the American assistant secretary of state, Jendayi Frazer, that he was ready to form a government of national unity to stop the violence.
But Odinga maintained his position that Kibaki had stolen the election and must step down. He wanted a rerun of the polls in three months, managed by an interim government.
Kibaki rejects this unless the courts order it.
Without a rapid solution, Kenya’s image as a haven of stability will be shattered. Thousands of western tourists have already been warned to keep away. The country’s billion-pound tourist industry is in jeopardy, and the unrest threatens Kenya’s impressive recent economic growth.
Although the violence softened at the end of the week, few expect the killing to stop until Kibaki and Odinga negotiate a compromise.
“The level of hatred is very high,” said a Red Cross official. “Violence of tribal origin is the worst. It knows no limits and is extremely difficult to quell.”
Additional reporting: Nick Wadhams in Eldoret, Rob Crilly in Nairobi, Tom Lyons in Mombasa and Hala Jaber
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