Word: kiambaa
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...sunny afternoon this May, 16 months after the nation erupted in a tribal bloodbath, Kenya buried the last of its dead. The violence in early 2008 claimed 1,133 lives and displaced 350,000. Its terrible climax came on New Year's Day in the largely Kikuyu village of Kiambaa in the northern Rift Valley, when a Kalenjin mob surrounded a tiny village church where a few hundred people were sheltering, freed those who gave up cell phones or money or sex, closed the doors, heaped mattresses and dry maize leaves against them and set them alight. Thirty-eight people...
...union began falling apart almost immediately, as the old power struggle was simply transferred to inside the government. Nothing was done to address the simmering divide across the country. When Kibaki flew to Kiambaa for the funeral last month, he found himself without Odinga and addressing an almost exclusively Kikuyu crowd. The Kikuyus spoke of how Kalenjins were still plotting their slaughter. Hearing an account of the funeral, Adams Oloo, a politics lecturer at the University of Nairobi, nods and says: "There is no healing." That's often the case in Africa. Kenyans want peace. But their leaders thrive...
...funeral at Kiambaa - a ceremony of reconciliation that only one side attended - was not a source of hope. Among the mourners was John Chege, 38, and his partner Rosemary Chesang, 34. He is Kikuyu, she Kalenjin and the couple own a hut half a mile from the church, where Chege grew maize and potatoes and Chesang raised their six children. Chege never thought much about the divide that ran through their land yet somehow spared their home. But after 16 months in a refugee camp, being alternately called traitors by Kikuyus and Kalenjins, he realized "ours is a slightly special...
High up in the mountains of the northern Rift Valley is the village of Kiambaa, a place of maize farms and mud huts where the air is so light and pure, it is said to hold the secret of Kenya's world-beating distance runners, who train in the surrounding hills. On New Year's Day, a mob of several hundred people armed with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows surrounded Kiambaa's tiny tin-roofed church, where up to 200 men, women and children were huddled. The mob freed those who gave up mobile phones or money, raped...
...institutions remain weak. Like Kibaki, many African leaders have a hard time accepting an unfavorable verdict from the electorate and walking away from office. "Democracy in Africa is not what is understood in the West," says Catholic bishop Cornelius Korir, whose cathedral in the town of Eldoret, north of Kiambaa, has become a refugee camp for 9,000 Kikuyus. "Since their wealth depends on power, our leaders are never ready to admit defeat." Incumbents like Kibaki, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are among those who tried to alter their country's constitutions--some successfully--to cling...