On the night of December 30, 2007, Kenya's incumbent president was sworn in by lamplight, hurried and almost furtive, hours after an electoral commission declared him the winner of a vote it could not fully account for. The commission's own chairman would later admit he did not know who had truly won. Within minutes of the announcement, a country that had prided itself on stability began to come apart. Over the next two months, more than a thousand Kenyans would die and hundreds of thousands would be driven from their homes, neighbor turning on neighbor along lines of ethnicity that politics had inflamed. This is the story of how a contested ballot became a national wound, and how the country pulled back from the edge.
The 2007 election pitted President Mwai Kibaki against opposition leader Raila Odinga, and as the count came in the result curdled into crisis. Early tallies showed Odinga ahead; then, as more results arrived, the gap narrowed and reversed, and the commission declared Kibaki the winner by some 232,000 votes. International observers were blunt. The European Union's chief monitor called the election flawed, noting that observers had in places been barred from seeing tallies before the commission announced them. Both campaigns, observers concluded, bore evidence of irregularities. The commission chairman, Samuel Kivuitu, said he had been pressured to announce a result without delay and did not personally know who had won. In a democracy that had managed peaceful transfers before, the sense that the people's choice had been overridden was combustible.
What followed cannot be reduced to a single cause, and it should not be reduced to a single villain. Some of the violence was protest met with live police fire; officers shot demonstrators, some on camera, and each death fed the next. Some was the eruption of older grievances, decades of resentment over land and political dominance dating back to colonial-era displacements in the Rift Valley. And some was organized ethnic killing. Much of the early violence targeted Kikuyu communities, the president's ethnic group, living far from their ancestral areas. Then came reprisals: in Nairobi's slums and the towns of the Rift Valley, gangs including the banned Mungiki attacked people from other communities in turn. Ordinary Kenyans who had lived side by side for years suddenly measured one another by tribe. The cruelty ran in more than one direction, and the victims on every side were overwhelmingly people with no power over the politics that doomed them.
The horror found its symbol on New Year's Day, in a village called Kiambaa outside Eldoret. Families, most of them Kikuyu, had fled their homes and taken shelter in a church, believing a house of worship would be safe. A mob set it ablaze. Mattresses soaked in fuel were thrown inside, and those who tried to escape the flames were forced back. Roughly two to three dozen people died there, many of them women and children, some infants only weeks old. The exact toll has been argued over in the years since, in courtrooms and commissions, but the number is almost beside the point. These were people who had run to sanctuary and found none. Kiambaa became shorthand for everything the crisis had unleashed, and for the long, unfinished search for justice that followed.
By the end of January, the dead numbered around 1,300, and as many as 600,000 people had been displaced, sleeping in churches, police compounds, and makeshift camps. The violence reached into public life and sport alike. The former Olympic athlete Lucas Sang was killed in Eldoret on the first day of the year. The marathon runner Wesley Ngetich died after being shot with an arrow. Two opposition members of parliament were shot dead within days of each other at the end of January, deepening the sense that the country was spiraling. Human Rights Watch accused police of a shoot-to-kill response to protesters and looters, and accused opposition figures and local leaders of organizing attacks on Kikuyu communities. There was, in the end, more than enough horror to refuse any single side a clear conscience.
Help came from outside, in the person of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who arrived about a month after the election and refused to leave until the rivals reached a deal. Earlier efforts had collapsed in mutual distrust, but Annan, backed by a panel of eminent African figures and pressure from capitals around the world, kept Kibaki and Odinga at the table through weeks of brinkmanship. On February 28, 2008, the two men signed the National Accord and Reconciliation Act. It created a new office of prime minister for Odinga and a power-sharing coalition government, sworn in that April. The accord did not resolve the deeper questions of land, ethnicity, and trust, and accountability for the killings would drag on for years. But it stopped the bleeding. A country that had stared into the abyss of civil war chose, instead, to govern together.
This is a national event rather than a single coordinate, centered on Kenya around 0.1 degrees north, 38 degrees east. The worst violence struck the Rift Valley and western Kenya: Eldoret, near 0.5 degrees north, 35.3 degrees east, where the Kiambaa church burning occurred; Nakuru; and Kisumu on the shore of Lake Victoria. Nairobi, the capital and political stage, lies to the southeast at about 1.3 degrees south, 36.8 degrees east. From the air, the Great Rift Valley dominates the landscape, a vast trough running roughly north-south, flanked by escarpments and dotted with lakes; the green highlands that the colonial era contested are clearly visible against drier lowlands. Principal airports are Jomo Kenyatta International (HKJK) and Wilson (HKNW) in Nairobi, Eldoret International (HKEL), and Kisumu International (HKKI). Weather in the highlands is mild and often cloudy; expect afternoon buildups and good visibility between systems.