Plot points

It seems like an awful coincidence. Two young members of Kenya's opposition party, one 39, the other 40, both recently elected for the first time to the parliament -- and both gunned down mysteriously in the space of three days.

First it was Mugabe Were, who had an unfortunate name for an African politician, but was an inspiring figure in his Dandora neighborhood in Nairobi, where he had established an orphanage for HIV/AIDS-affected kids. He was gone Tuesday morning just after midnight, shot point-blank in his driveway, by no one knows whom.

Today it was Kimutai Too (pronounced "toe"), killed by a police officer in the western town of Eldoret. Trying to keep opposition supporters from going apoplectic again, the government called this one a crime of passion and offered a strikingly thorough portrait of the relationship among the late MP, his late lover (a cop) and their assailant (another cop).

Suddenly Kenya's tight-lipped government was like a gossipy best friend. Within a couple of hours there was more public information about this killing than officials generally like to provide about the national budget or, say, the conduct of an extremely close election. The NY Times gallantly tries to sort it all out:

According to police officials and witnesses, Mr. Too, 39, spent the morning with Eunice Chepkwony, a policewoman who was dating another police officer, Andrew Moache. Mr. Too and Ms. Chepkwony were driving near the woman’s house on the outskirts of Eldoret when Mr. Moache pulled up next to them on a motorcycle. The police said Mr. Moache suspected his girlfriend was having an affair and was enraged to find her with another man.

Witnesses said that Ms. Chepkwony jumped out of the car and begged Mr. Moache not to kill them. He shot Ms. Chepkwony in the stomach and Mr. Too several times in the head. Mr. Too died instantly. Ms. Chepkwony bled to death in a hospital a few hours later. Police said they later arrested Mr. Moache while he was trying to flee.

I watched a press conference by the police commissioner, read a statement from the government spokesman and, in the late afternoon, flew to Eldoret with some colleagues and interviewed the local police commander. All of them gave pretty much the same version of events. The trouble for the government is in what a taxi driver told me in Nairobi before I boarded my flight: "We know them better. They never have so much information."

Clarification

The good folks at World Vision just wrote to clarify that the man pictured in yesterday's post is not, in fact, a World Vision employee. I didn't mean to suggest that -- charities often hand out t-shirts to promote their messages -- but I realize that might have been unclear.

A World Vision officer wrote:

"Due to the volatile security situation in Naivasha World Vision has requested its staff to move into hibernation mode. The person in the T-shirt is not a World Vision employee.  He could therefore be one of the community members who may have got access to the T-shirt at one of the Advocacy events supported by World Vision."

World Vision does important work in all eight provinces of Kenya. This guy hasn't gotten the message on his own clothing.

Mixed messages

The latest trouble spot in Kenya is Naivasha, a lake town about 90 minutes from Nairobi that's a favorite destination for weekend getaways -- Nairobi's answer to Palm Springs, with a better climate. Naivasha has been quiet to this point, but it exploded over the weekend. I drove up there early this morning to see hundreds of Kikuyus -- members of the president's tribe -- wielding stones, sticks, machetes and wooden planks studded with nails, and threatening to kill rival tribes like the Luos (opposition leader Raila Odinga's group).

There was a lot of angry talk. But every young guy with a crude weapon tried to sound sane, even thoughtful, when questioned by one of the international journalists there. A 20-year-old named Peter Mwangi told the AP: "We want peace, but we (also) want to fight them. We don't want Luos here."

Peace through war. Interesting tactic. Then there was the guy in the middle of the mob below, in the white t-shirt, who told me that some Luos would die today. His t-shirt, from the Christian charity World Vision, says, "Building a Better World for Children."

Just not all children, I guess.

My week in media

My colleague and sometime golfing buddy Rob Crilly at South of West has tagged me in the ever-expanding Week in Media "meme." I had to look up the word, which apparently means "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." Not wanting to let down the culture, here goes:

What I've read

The Nation and Standard, Kenya's leading dailies, are required reading these days to track the ongoing political standoff. I usually spend my lunch hours with the newsmags, especially the Economist, Time and Jeune Afrique, but there hasn't been a whole lot of time for non-Kenya stuff lately (or for lunch, for that matter). Still I've managed two good extracurricular reads: The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, a lyrical novel about Indians in post-independence Kenya, and Samantha Power's engrossing New Yorker piece on the late U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

What I've watched

I've been flipping through CNN International and Al Jazeera English all week, not only for their coverage of Kenya but also for each's take on the U.S. presidential campaign. (CNN's typically breathless replays of the Clinton-Obama debate tussle have provided a nice bit of escapism.) I've also kept one eye on the second week of the Australian Open, where as I write this Roger Federer is predictably dispatching the last American men's hope, James Blake. Full disclosure: the African Cup of Nations doesn't register at all on this Yank's radar -- though maybe I'll watch the final.

What I've listened to

Been too busy to find any new music lately, but at home and at the gym I've been listening to podcasts of Pardon the Interruption and the new season of Bill Maher's Real Time, not quite as sharp without writers but still entertaining. In the car, shuttling to interviews, protests or press conferences, it's always the BBC World Service.

What I've surfed

For news, the major U.S. papers, of course, and AllAfrica.com, the ultimate compendium of daily news from around Africa. Rob and Nick Wadhams are regular reading for the latest absurdities from Kenya. But where I come from, there is only one obsession this time of year, and that's anything and everything to do with the Super Bowl (as Wright shows, even guys who didn't make it are worth writing on).

I tag: Yat, Afromusing and Same Ole G.

Scenes from a crackdown

In a story last week I wrote (at the bottom) about a "theatrical" police raid on Nairobi's Kibera slum -- paramilitaries, trailed by journalists, sweeping in and wantonly grabbing civilians. A couple of readers wondered what I meant by that, especially in light of accusations by Human Rights Watch and others that the Kenyan police have been using "excessive, lethal force." (About an hour ago spokesman Salim Lone told me that the main opposition party filed a formal complaint with the International Criminal Court against the Kenyan police.)

What did I mean by "theatrical"? Basically, police and perhaps a hundred protesters were at a standoff for several hours that afternoon as journalists watched from atop a hill near the entrance to Kibera. Kibera is Raila Odinga's constituency, so support for him runs deep there, and the police had an interest in keeping them at bay. Still, at times it felt as if the entire exchange was being carried out for the benefit of the few dozen journalists camped out on the hill. Here are some images I captured that give a sense of how close we were.

Here a local photographer captures a cloud of tear gas fired on protesters from a police van on the hill behind him. That red billboard in the background is for the Celtel  mobile phone company, whose founder, Mo Ibrahim, is the brains behind the $5 million prize for African leadership. Talk about product placement.

Photog gets a closeup of the police van that was firing teargas and (we think) blank rounds to scatter protesters. The protesters would run away, then return a few minutes later, singing and dancing and taunting the police. This went on for several hours as journalists watched.

The troops sweep into Kibera and start looking for residents, especially young men, to make an example for other protesters. You can see photographers snapping away at the back of the frame.

They haul away a kid in a black shirt for no apparent reason. After roughing him up a little bit with sticks, they let him go. But the media had great access, and this raid produced some of the more compelling images on a day where not a whole lot of news occurred.

Annan event

Kenya is taking a short breath today and waiting for Kofi Annan, the latest and perhaps final contestant in "Who Wants to Be a Mediator," who is scheduled to arrive in Nairobi tonight. By my count, Annan will be the fifth international figure to try to get President Kibaki and Raila Odinga to sit down together. Every previous attempt has failed. And the odds are that this one will be no different.

In the papers today, Kibaki and Odinga floated their goals for talks. The government continues to say the opposition should take its election challenge to court. The opposition doesn't trust the Kibaki-friendly courts and, according to the Daily Nation,

said they would seek President Kibaki’s resignation and a rerun of the presidential vote.

It gives you a sense of how far apart the rivals continue to be after 24 days of uncertainty, and how difficult Annan's job is going to be. I was reminded of the Seinfeld episode at the car dealership where George -- having paid 75 cents for a vending machine Twix only to see it fail to drop, then taken by a mechanic -- lays out his demands for restitution: All I want is my 75 cents back, an apology, and for him to be fired!"

Good luck. On each side, the hardliners appear to be winning the day. Kibaki has consolidated power by naming half a Cabinet, convening parliament and appointing a commission to negotiate on his behalf. The commission is headed by his new vice-president, whose suspect credentials are laid out here by my friend Nick Wadhams, and a bunch of Kibaki loyalists. These guys aren't going to discuss anything that involves them losing their own positions.

A nasty little diplomatic spat has also surfaced after the chief government spokesman circulated a series of odd advertisements in the Kenyan papers that blamed the United States and other countries for fomenting violence with their sharp criticisms of the election. Today the U.S. ambassador, Mike Ranneberger, used a public commentary to reject those allegations and urged Kibaki and Odinga to negotiate one-on-one "in the interest of the entire nation."

On the other side, the opposition has reversed itself and called for another round of protests on Thursday, which are certain to be met with the same kind of police crackdown that led to some two dozen deaths last week. And there is pressure on Odinga not to let up in calling for Kibaki to resign. In the opposition heartland of Kisumu yesterday, Odinga spoke to an adoring throng that was heard chanting: "We Don't Want Peace! We Want Justice!"

In Africa, few men enjoy the stature of Kofi Annan, a son of Ghana who rose to one of the most prestigious jobs in the world. He's got his work cut out for him this week. But if he leaves Kenya without getting Kibaki and Odinga in the same room, it might never happen.

Now what?

As a general rule of journalism, if there are more reporters than participants, it's not a news event; it's closer to a publicity stunt. And yesterday, the first of three days of much-ballyhooed protests by Kenya's political opposition, largely fell into the stunt category -- at least in Nairobi, where I was.

Two weeks ago opposition protests paralyzed the city. Tribally charged battles raged in the slums, protesters faced off with riot police -- often with violent consequences -- and Nairobi looked like a garrison town. The opposition's call for new protests seemed like a last-ditch attempt to show it still had the support of the masses.

But there were no masses yesterday. The riot police were out in force, keeping an eye on the rowdy slum of Kibera and the downtown park where the demonstration was to gather. Even without the police presence, I don't think many people were ready to take to the streets again. Too much time has passed since the disputed election, and the hangover is finally fading. More and more people I talk to have come to accept the fact that Mwai Kibaki is going to remain the president.

The opposition Orange Democratic Movement, of course, is trying to shatter that veneer of inevitability, especially with Kofi Annan due into town in a few days for talks. So Raila Odinga's people continue to call the media to the party's suburban headquarters for press conference after press conference. Yesterday several dozen journalists showed up -- and together I believe we outnumbered the young guys hanging around the compound clad in orange, the protesters in waiting.

The press followed ODM leaders in their SUVs downtown, where smartly dressed people were going about their business as on any normal workday, and we watched to see whether police would allow the politicians and their aides to get near the park. They didn't. The closest they got was the five-star Serena hotel on the edge of the park, where about 100 red-bereted paramilitaries and stick-wielding riot police were standing watch.

The ODM leaders stayed inside the Serena's leafy garden, where they huddled with journalists and vowed to try again tomorrow. You have to sympathize with their claim that the government is suppressing free speech and free assembly, but it's clear that the "mass movement" they seek has run out of steam, as the AP points out in its early story today. I wonder what their next move will be -- they seem to have run out of options.

To get a flavor of what's happening, check out the following CNN clip from yesterday showing the network's reporter Zain Verjee getting pelted with a teargas cannister outside the Serena (0:38 into the clip). If you look closely at the moment where she is hit, there is nothing going on apart from some bored-looking journalists hanging out by the hotel parking lot, looking across the street at police. You wonder what prompted the forces to open fire. Zain, fortunately, looks like she's OK.

Rules of the road

The rest of my trip through western Kenya saw less action than we witnessed in Kisumu on Tuesday night. (Read about the political developments that prompted the protests.) The next day Paul and I drove down to Kericho, about two hours away, to visit people displaced in post-election attacks.

In normal times this is a typical Kenyan drive along badly potholed roads through some magnificent scenery. I'd been to Kericho (pronounced "ke-RI-cho"; it doesn't rhyme with "Jericho") just four weeks earlier, before the election, in my own car with a team from Nairobi. But getting on the road in western Kenya these days requires a new series of calculations. The way to Kericho ran straight through opposition territory, and was studded with stones and the tangled remnants of burned tires -- roadblocks hastily put up by opposition supporters in the crazed early days of the election unrest.

We had one thing going for us: Paul is Luo, which as nearly everyone now knows is opposition leader Raila Odinga's tribe. If we were stopped by Raila supporters along the way, Paul's last name would easily identify him as a brother. I tied my press card around my neck, which would also help.

A few miles outside of town we came upon about a dozen lean young guys carrying heavy stones and standing menacingly by the side of the road. A couple of them ran onto the road to stop the car and pounded on the windows. One stuck his head into my side and demanded 150 shillings -- about $2. His friends looked angry, but the way they were holding their stones, with two hands, it looked like they could barely lift them over their head, let alone hurl them at us.

I showed the angriest guy my press card. "Ahh," he said. "Press man! Press man!" The rest of the guys smiled and began chanting and jumping up and down. "You can go, press man!" Paul floored it.

Now who were those guys? Raila supporters, perhaps, but they had no political aims other than low-level extortion and chaos. This was not a movement; this was jobless youth who, thanks to the controversial election, suddenly had a license to cause trouble. Paul said that the vast majority of unrest in Kisumu was the work of hooligans like these, and I started to believe him.

Still, Paul wanted to be safer. We needed a sign that we were Raila men, he said. We drove up to a large house belonging to an opposition member of parliament. Paul knew the man well, having helped advise his campaign. At the gate, the guard didn't answer, but Paul noticed that there were several Raila posters stuck to the walls of the compound. So he helped himself to one.

Just as Paul was stealing the sign, the guard finally came to  the gate. I was briefly worried that we'd done something wrong. But the guard had bigger concerns. He had to relieve himself, and he pleaded with Paul not to tell his boss that he was slow to come to the door. Paul assured him that he wouldn't rat him out. He stuck the Raila poster under a wiper blade and we set off.

After a few miles the road began to empty out. Few cars were heading in either direction. The few vehicles we did see had bits of foliage stuck to the front -- makeshift signs of peace -- and I mentioned this to Paul. He decided we needed one of those as well. So we pulled over again and he went hunting in the brush and came back with a good-looking branch.

Properly outfitted, we reached Kericho with no other incidents, and after a few hours turned back to Kisumu so I could make the evening flight back home. (Read the story we did from Kericho here.)

The road remained eerily empty for a weekday. There was a brief moment where we left Luo-land and the road led through a patch of territory traditionally controlled by the Kalenjin tribe, blamed for most of the recent attacks on government supporters. And then there was the flat tire I had to change on the way back -- par for the course on roads like these. But apart for a few stones strewn on the highway here and there -- more abandoned roadblocks -- we weren't stopped again.

Website tracks post-election violence

In yet another sign of the positive role that the African blogosphere is playing during Kenya's election hangover, White African writes to tell me about Ushahidi, a new website where people can report incidents of post-election violence.

What a great idea: incidents can be reported via SMS to +447624802635 or e-mailed to tips@ushahidi.com. There are already a few dozen entries: a report of pro-opposition women being tear-gassed, a request for food and anti-malaria nets for displaced people, updates on the most volatile areas and more.

The site's name comes from the Kiswahili word for witness. You can find a link to the site on my blogroll, or just visit www.ushahidi.com

The Kenyans and friends of Kenyans behind Ushahidi have also started, for those of you into this sort of thing, a Flickr group of post-election images: http://flickr.com/groups/kenyaelections2008.

So much for that

I flew today to Kisumu, in western Kenya, the heartland of opposition leader Raila Odinga's Luo tribe. The city suffered heavily in the post-election violence. Looters took aim at businesses owned by Kikuyus (the president's tribe) and Indians (known here as Asians) and absolutely torched entire chunks of downtown. (See my earlier post for a glimpse of the mayhem.) Today you can't walk five feet in the city center without hearing the sound of crunching glass.

This afternoon, things were quiet. Yesterday had been a good day for those rooting for cooler heads to prevail in this crisis. Opposition leader Raila Odinga called off protests scheduled for today, saying he wanted to give negotiations a chance. Later, President Kibaki invited Raila to talks on Friday, and a spokesman for Raila indicated to me that he would be open to going. In Kisumu, while I met a few die-hards who were annoyed that Raila had cancelled demonstrations, most people voiced the message on the front of the Standard newspaper: "Signs of Hope."

Then came the surprise announcement, about 5 p.m. today, that Kibaki had gone ahead and started handing out seats in a new Cabinet. Not exactly the way to sweeten the invitation to negotiations. The news flashed on TV screens and across the airwaves here, and immediately protestors took to the streets. I was in the hotel but Paul, my local fixer, called and said, in characteristic understatement, "Some things are happening."

He'd been stopped by opposition supporters in his neighborhood, a slum with rough dirt roads and the thick smell of trash in the air. When they saw his press pass, they demanded 150 shillings - about $2.50 - and let him on his way. Paul came to pick me up. We drove a few blocks from the hotel and saw, in the distance, a fire on the road: burning tires. We turned around and a mile away came across another burning roadblock. No getting near those parts of town tonight. Paul said the protestors he'd seen were chanting anti-Kibaki slogans and vowing to burn down the houses of Kikuyus, members of his tribe.

So much for progress. The section where I am staying is safe tonight, but tomorrow will tell whether Kisumu can weather this latest bit of chaos. There is still a lot of tension here. Odinga supporters aren't ready to give up the fight, and there is growing impatience with the international community - and even with the press, which people believe should somehow be able to do more to end this.

It's a minor point, but a couple of times today, as I walked down the streets with my notebook and camera, looking obviously like a foreign journalist, I heard young guys telling me to go, ahem, amuse myself. Paul looked aghast. That kind of vitriol is unusual in a laid-back lake town like Kisumu, where foreigners are a common sight. But these are uncommon times in Kenya.

Only if the shoe fits

Not surprisingly, there is news footage on YouTube of some of the post-election rioting in Kisumu, a major town in western Kenya that's a stronghold of opposition leader Raila Odinga. It's worth checking out to get a real picture of the mayhem.

The video is from a local TV station and is pretty raw, but there was one moment that actually made me laugh. At about 2:50 into the clip, a guy looting a shoe store actually has time to try on the shoes he's stealing before he steals them. (On the theory that there would be no exchanges?) It makes me wonder where the police were.

Market day

Yesterday the Nairobi slum of Kibera was the staging ground for the Kenyan opposition's thwarted protests. Today it was a day for people to go to the market (some stores had reopened), for riot police to lay on the grass reading the paper (one guy looked like he was napping under his helmet) and for a couple of enterprising men to try to saw off parts of a rusted minibus (that had been positioned as a roadblock) for scrap metal.

It was a refreshingly normal day in Kibera, and indeed in much of Nairobi. A friend called to say how happy he was to be stuck in traffic at a hated roundabout. I went to my office for the first time since returning to the country because police were letting cars back into the city center. I could pull cash from the ATM, but only in small amounts. Tonight, after deadlines, some colleagues and I had drinks at a favorite bar that had been closed yesterday.

There had been talk of trying to hold the protest again today. But no one seemed into it. I've met several opposition supporters who are simply exhausted. Due to the insecurity in the slums, they've been sleeping in shifts, or not at all. With most stores closed, and staple good selling for a premium (a head of cabbage that had been about 10 cents goes for closer to $1 in parts of the city), people who aren't looting aren't eating that much. It's hard to have a revolution if you're hungry and sleep-deprived.

Let's see whether the calm holds. There seems to be a window for diplomacy before Tuesday, when the next protest might happen. Jendayi Frazer is due into town tonight, and the presence of the Bush administration's top diplomat for Africa could put slightly more pressure on Kibaki and Odinga to reach a political settlement. In a lengthy interview with CNN today, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who's trying to serve as mediator, indicated that both men were willing to talk to one another. The people of Nairobi will believe that when they see it.

Blogosphere reacts

A sampling of the blogosphere's reaction to the violence in Kenya:

Mental Acrobatics has a great array of photos from around Nairobi yesterday. He was one of the folks who tried to march downtown for an opposition rally that was blocked by riot police. Confronting members of the feared paramilitary group known as the General Services Unit (GSU, but pronounced by nearly everyone as "jishu"), Mental writes: "The GSU are not known for their conversational skills and they had one message for all the Kenyans in town, 'Rudi Nyumbani' – Go back home."

In a post from earlier this week, he urged people not to focus merely on the tribal aspect of the recent  fighting, which has dominated news coverage (mine included):

Whatever you think about the long term roots of the current situation, economic inequality, ethnic tensions or even perhaps that everyone has been possessed by “devils” we all need to recognise that what sparked this violence was a political crisis and that crisis is that we have what many Kenyans consider to be an illegitimate president. That is not a partisan statement, even members of Kibaki’s cabinet say that we simply do not know who won the election.

A prominent business and economics blogger, Bankelele, gives a good sense of the basic shortages facing people in Nairobi as roads are blocked, businesses have been closed and many people have generally stayed indoors for much of the week:

My personal hardships pale in comparison to most Kenyans - but include; no petrol for car, January funds being used to stock up/buy essential dry foods, no fresh foods, no cash as ATM's were empty/unplugged, lack of Safaricom [mobile phone] airtime and Internet access (except by cell phone).

Thinker's Room, which has been flooded with comments, has a long but worthwhile post on the allegations of electoral fraud. Most interesting, I thought, were his thoughts on what Kenya has really lost in all the chaos of the past few days:

Kenyans were told that they had the power to shape their destiny and choose their leadership. And so they turned out in colossal numbers and they voted. They were told that they had a voice and that it would be listened to. And when it came down to it their voice, the ballot was ignored. And so they had only one voice left — protest.

The protest that wasn't

A few months ago a young Ethiopian refugee named Med showed me around Djibouti, where several dozen women from the Ogaden region had come to escape a brutal military crackdown. For two days Med helped translate terrible stories of rape, hangings and other military atrocities against civilians.

I've called to check in on Med from time to time, but today it was his turn to call me. "Are you OK in Nairobi?" he asked.

Yes, the news from Kenya is so bad that Ogaden refugees are worried about me.

Today was supposed to be the day that things really got bad, when a planned "million-man march" by opposition supporters turned ugly. It didn't come to pass. Kenyan soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder formed a ring around downtown and kept pretty much anyone from entering. Protestors marched from a slum and got to the top of a hill leading toward the city center, about a half-mile away, and were turned away with tear gas and batons. Angry kids set fire to stuff, mostly tires and kiosks, but they eventually dispersed.

The opposition called off the rally. Yeah. More like it was called off for them.

It's hard to say where things go from here. There are some seething people in the slums tonight, and my Kenyan friends are worried about explosions in rough, ethnically mixed pockets like Kibera, Mathare, Huruma, Korogocho, where even police don't dare spend the night.

I spent much of the day around Mathare, which was a dangerous and lawless place even before the recent ethnic violence. We drove past a gas station that had been torched just minutes before, and we saw dozens of families who had fled to a nearby police station and were sleeping in the grass outside. A dead body lay in the dirt since morning. The guy had only his socks on, so we figured someone stole the shoes off the corpse.

Most of Nairobi was empty today as businesses remained closed and people stayed home, fearing the worst. The worst fear now is that the people who are angry at the election haven't had a chance to express that anger publicly. The opposition has vowed to continue protests, and the government has said it will continue to block them.

I listened to the two political leaders today for a hint as to which side would budge first. It was nice to see President Kibaki make his first public comments since the country began burning Sunday, but all he did was call for Kenyans to respect the law. (This would be a useful admonition from a traffic cop in a Nairobi roundabout; today called for more.)

Earlier I was in a pack of journalists who saw Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, after he took a brief tour of the city mortuary. It was a disgusting scene inside, by the way -- not the piles of dead, bloodied bodies piled up in lockers, but the Odinga flunkie who threw open the doors of the lockers to rabid photographers saying, "Fresh bodies! Fresh bodies!"

Outside Raila himself was no more inspiring. He blamed the murders on President Kibaki's crew and accused three of Kibaki's top officials of committing genocide. He used the "G" word several times, which made me cringe. Things have not degenerated nearly to that level, and those kinds of comments are textbook incitement. He lamented the violence but said he was powerless to stop it.

It was almost as depressing as the scene inside the morgue. But despite all the worries about violence today, a mortuary worker said that only one of the bodies had arrived in the past several hours: It was the guy I'd seen in Mathare a few hours earlier. I recognized him by his socks.

Empty

The first thing I noticed back in Nairobi was the lack of traffic. Normally trying to get home from the airport at 7:30 am on a weekday -- in a city which adds about 5,000 cars a month -- is enough to make me nostalgic for the red-eye that got me there. But today it was a breeze.

The post-election unrest in Kenya has stunned the country. And it has kept most drivers off the road. Our office driver, Thomas, left after the Dec. 27 vote to be with his family in rural Kakamega. He hasn't been able to return due to ethnic clashes in Kakamega, and the fact that few buses are running from there to Nairobi (the ones that are often charge double or triple the usual fare). Many people who went home for the holiday are stuck there, and those who want to get out of Nairobi can't.

Kenya is a place that's used to hosting refugees from ethnic violence, not creating them. The front-page editorial in the Daily Nation today began: "This madness cannot be allowed to go on." In the taxi home, the radio was tuned to a popular FM station, Capital. The DJ was reading out dedications sent in via SMS by listeners pleading for an end to the violence and requesting a song to match. Mary J. Blige's cover of U2's "One" was up first. Then came R Kelly with "Now That It's Over," which was either too optimistic or too apocalyptic.

The public mood hasn't been helped by the lack of food. First, a lot of rioters stole food from local markets. The remaining markets across the city boarded up. Today, people told me, was the first day that most shops were open, and with the city center closed to most car traffic, it was easier to get to the checkout line than to work.

In the middle of the day, there was a sea of cars parked at Nakumatt, the local version of Wal-Mart. People stocked up on flour, cooking oil, rice and other staples. In the butchery there were only or three lonely red hunks of beef, and I'd seen healthier vegetable stands in Zimbabwe.

As bitter as the post-poll hangover has been, it was surreal to see campaign posters everywhere, reminders that the election isn't resolved. The opposition is calling its man, Raila Odinga, "the People's President" and plans a major rally tomorrow in a park in the city center, but the government is blocking it for security reasons.

A mile outside the city center this morning, there was the first police roadblock, and as we climbed toward my house along the hill above the park, there were uniformed soldiers every few feet, a human chain-link fence to prevent a mass protest. Just a moment ago, at a quarter to 2 a.m., I got a text message: "The Government of Kenya advises you not to take part in any unlawful assembly that may result in violence."

Tomorrow many people expect a confrontation. It could be the worst outbreak of violence of the post-election period, or it could be another public demonstration quashed by an African regime.