But if faith is the oxygen of a young state, faith in a viable future, there is very little oxygen in Kenya right now. What these suits mask is an escalating free for all, as people use the fronts of respectability and institutional credibility to collect what they can before Armageddon.

THIS thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the British believed that their first job was to eradicate “tribalism.” What they really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made up Kenya. [...]

I am an African, born in Nakuru, Kenya. These days, many of us in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa have been rendered immobile by history: we stand, like antelopes in the dark, watching the fiery headlights of the future bear down on us. But there is one small African country, Eritrea, that seems to have [...]