KIAMBAA, Kenya — After another long day, Joseph Kairuri Mwangi walked back to his farmhouse shack, the late afternoon sun slanting behind him, his strides slow, his shoes muddy with rich, freshly turned earth.
It has been five years since his right hand was nearly cut off, but it still hurts.
“Right here,” he said, gingerly touching the scars. “I still feel pain right here.”
This whole area is a land of scars. On the shanties made from burned-up sheet metal, salvaged from homes set afire by mobs. On people’s limbs and faces. And in their hearts.
Five years ago, the Rift Valley of Kenya, a spectacularly verdant landscape of rolling hills, emerald green tea plantations and quilted farmland, suddenly exploded. A disputed election set off ethnic clashes that killed more than 1,000 people nationwide — more than 30 were burned alive in a church here in Kiambaa — and thousands are still living in shacks and tents, driven off their land with nowhere to go.
This was the seething center of Kenya’s upheaval, and now that the country is about to hold another major election on Monday, the first since the tumult of 2007 and 2008, the Rift Valley is still polarized, though some of the prejudices and poisonous feelings have shifted along with changes in political alliances.
“Those Luos,” said David Wanjohi Chege, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, speaking derisively about another one of Kenya’s major ethnic groups. “Those Luos won’t stop at nothing.”
Most people agree that preparations for this election are a vast improvement from the last time around. The creaky manual voting systems that promptly broke down have been replaced with state of the art digital technology, and nonprofit groups have devised social media tools to detect and parry hate speech. PeaceTXT, for example, is a text messaging service that sends out blasts of pro-peace messages to specific areas when trouble is brewing.
Donor nations have been holding Kenya’s hand much tighter this time around, advising election officials and contributing more than $100 million in election preparation. Investors big and small have shown their confidence that the vote will be all right, with Kenyan stocks edging up in the past week.
“I don’t think this time will be as bad,” said Bidan Thuku Mwangi, who runs a small bridal shop in the Rift Valley town of Londiani. On the floor are seven charred sewing machines, destroyed in the mayhem of 2008, but next to them is a sheaf of papers — an application for a new loan. “I’m waiting till after the election,” he said with a cautious smile. “Just in case.”
According to Human Rights Watch, Rift Valley politicians have been holding secretive night meetings, and more guns may have seeped in. Machete sales are sharply rising, other human rights observers in Kenya said recently, though it is not clear how much of this is fact and how much is fiction.
Some people are beginning to move out of ethnically mixed areas, frightened that there could be postelection reprisals, along ethnic lines, like what happened in 2008.
“All this is the mischief of politicians,” said Dominico Owiti, who lives in a new trouble spot, Sondu, a bushy borderland between the Luos and the Kalenjins. The two ethnic groups were allies during the last election, but because of opportunistic political alliances struck between Kenya’s leading politicians, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a very combustible political divide.
Similarly, two groups that fought so bitterly here the last time, the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus, are now political allies because their leaders have teamed up to run for president and deputy president on the same ticket.
“I don’t like it,” said Mary Macharia, a Kikuyu woman whose daughter was killed in the church fire in 2008, which was set by a Kalenjin mob. “But who am I to refuse?”
Kenya is considered one of the most modern countries in Africa, but ethnically charged politics is an Achilles’ heel. Colonial policies typecast certain ethnic groups — the Masai were the guards, the Kikuyus the farmhands, the Luos the teachers — and ethnicity has continued to serve as a stubbornly important basis of identity.
During elections, politicians use ethnic differences to stir up voters, and already 200 people have been killed in the Tana River Delta area of Kenya in clashes that both sides say have been inflamed by electoral politics.
In neighboring Tanzania, also a mosaic of dozens of ethnic groups, the government has instituted specific policies — like pushing the use of a common language, Swahili, and outlawing ethnically based political parties — to build a common Tanzanian identity. But here in Kenya, many people still speak their “mother tongue,” and interethnic marriage remains relatively rare.
“Everything has always been tribe-based,” said Christine Ololo Atieno, a Luo, who sells secondhand shoes in Kisumu, a big city in western Kenya.
