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A Block-by-Block Bid for Peace
As Kenya Erupted, Friends From
Warring Tribes Faced Down Machetes to Restore Order
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
NAIROBI -- On one of the most violent days of Kenya's
post-election crisis, Joseph Osodo's neighborhood -- a sprawling
maze of lean-to kiosks, rusted metal roofs and pounded mud paths
called Kibera -- had become an ethnic battleground with clearly
drawn lines.
In Kibera's pro-government quarter, edgy young men roamed with
machetes and bows and arrows; no one from opposition leader Raila
Odinga's Luo ethnic group could go there, and 10 who tried were
hacked to death.
A short walk away in Osodo's part of Kibera, an opposition
stronghold, young Luo men half-drunk on local brew readied
themselves with rocks and machetes and nail-studded sticks; anyone
from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group setting foot
there was as good as dead.
With the situation degenerating, Osodo, a Luo water vendor who has
lived in Kibera for 35 years, sat inside a mud-walled cafe where
he had often shared tea with Kikuyu neighbors who in all
likelihood now wished to kill him. He thought about them, he said,
wondering which would prevail -- the friendship, or the mob
mentality taking hold. He thought in particular about his best
friend and fellow businessman John Kyalo, who lived over in the
pro-government section.
So in a choice he considered more necessary than courageous, Osodo
decided to walk to see him, even if it meant facing down
bloodthirsty mobs.
"I felt so ill and very bitter," he said. "That is what forced me
to come out and try to stop it, to try to make peace. Someone said
'You will be killed,' and I said 'Then let me die.' "
Although Kibaki and Odinga officially reached a truce two weeks
ago, people such as Osodo had lost patience with them weeks
earlier. Even as former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan was
brokering a political settlement over tea and cookies at a posh
safari lodge, people in Kibera -- Africa's largest slum and a
flash point of the post-election violence -- were forging their
own kind of fragile peace, block by block and person by person,
often at the risk of death.
If it is easy to find horror stories in Kibera, it is also
possible to find Luos who hid Kikuyus in their houses, Kikuyus who
kept Luos from being massacred, and so many small gestures of
trust and urgent conversations between friends such as Osodo and
Kyalo that countered a violent momentum taking hold.
It is possible to find the work of an artist who spent weeks
painting slogans such as "Keep peace fellow Kenyans" across
corrugated metal, burned-out ruins, kicked-down doors and even the
white casts of a young man who broke both arms running from the
police.
"I was really scared about the violence. People would ask me, 'Why
are you writing about peace?' " said the artist, Solomon Muyundo,
31, who signs his work Solo 7. He kept painting anyway. He
recalled one night coming across a mob that had beaten a Kikuyu
boy he recognized. The boy had been stripped naked and was being
doused with kerosene.
"They asked me for a match," Muyundo said. "I was saying 'No,
don't kill this man,' " and in a panicked decision that he cannot
fully explain, he kept painting, this time writing a message to
the mob -- wacha, "leave" -- on the boy's skin. The young men ran
off. In the violence of recent weeks, it has been relatively easy
to count the dead, but more difficult to assess the collective
impact of what did not happen because of quiet decisions such as
Muyundo's.
It was afternoon when Osodo, a large man who is revered and
probably also slightly feared around Kibera, decided to walk into
a likely deathtrap to see his friend Kyalo, who is Kamba, a tribe
assumed to have backed Kibaki.
At that point, Kibera had been on fire for weeks, with gangs of
Luos burning down Kikuyu kiosks and businesses and Kikuyus taking
their revenge.
Then came the murder of opposition legislator Mugabe Were, and
Kibera sank to its lowest point since the disputed Dec. 27
presidential election, with the rival sides literally facing off
along their common borders.
"It was very dangerous," said Osodo, who nonetheless left his cafe
and walked across a short concrete bridge over an open sewer into
his friend's quarter, known as Laini Saba. Mobs taunted him. He
responded: "If you kill me, there is nothing you can gain,' " he
said.
Kyalo was in his house when he heard the shouts outside -- "Luo!
Luo! Luo!" -- and opened the door.
"Can you imagine?" Kyalo said, still incredulous at seeing his
friend on such a day. "There were people yelling at me, 'You're a
traitor!' and I said, 'No, this is my friend for a long time.' And
they said, 'This is not a time for friends.' "
Kyalo ushered Osodo inside. There the visitor suggested they call
a meeting of local leaders from the two sides and that he and
Kyalo should walk together through both areas in a show of unity.
"I had to trust him," Kyalo said. "He told me he could not protect
me from the mobs, but that he would try to talk to them. I just
took courage by the fact that he came to this side."
Amid flailing machetes and heckling, the two men walked through
Laini Saba and into Osodo's area, Mashimoni, where they tried to
find a place for the meeting. They inquired at a church, which
flatly denied them. They went to the owner of a maternity clinic,
who also refused. So they appealed directly to the clinic's
caretaker, Frederick Nandie, who risked losing his job and
possibly his life if he agreed.
"I saw the sacrifice of these two men coming here," Nandie said.
"And I had to put my fear aside."
At 2 p.m. the next day, the two and 24 other community leaders
convened around an unpainted wood table with blue plastic chairs,
gangs from their respective neighborhoods rowdy with machetes and
clubs just outside, ready to resume the bloodletting if things
went badly.
"It was very tense," said Peter Nduva, who took minutes during the
meeting. "People were out there with their weapons. It was no joke."
Like a shadow Kofi Annan, Kyalo acted as the mediator. He began
the meeting by asking Osodo, on behalf of the Luo community, and
the senior Kikuyu leader present to apologize to each other.
"They shook hands, and they each said they were sorry," Kyalo said.
"We admitted that everyone is guilty. We did shameful things,
which we really did not have to do."
As a sense of relief settled through the room, the leaders began
sorting through the reasons they were fighting. Among the
conclusions was that they were being used as proxies to serve the
interests of Kibaki and Odinga, neither of whom had set foot in
Kibera since the violence began.
Odinga's only gesture at that point had been to buy coffins for
the dead.
The men denounced rumors that had been flying via text messages
exposing alleged "informers."
As a kind of impromptu truth and reconciliation process extended
into the afternoon, people on both sides assessed their feelings,
Kyalo said. It wasn't always pretty, and the group decided that
for now there was too much anger for Luos to return to Kikuyu
areas and vice versa.
"We asked, 'How do you feel when you see a Kikuyu in your area?' "
Kyalo said. "And the leaders would say, 'I feel very fine, but
others don't.' "
"The fact on the ground is that as much as everyone wants to say
it's normal, it's not normal. You can't wield a panga and then the
next day be normal," he said, using a Swahili word for machete.
The leaders vowed to "preach peace" in their areas. Osodo began by
stepping outside the clinic to address the young men there.
"I told them to put their pangas away," he said.
They didn't do it right away, he said. There were shouts of "Traitor!"
and "We will not agree!" But somehow, slowly, temperatures cooled.
The next day, Osodo and Kyalo once again walked the mud paths of
Laini Saba and Mashimoni, past burned-out markets, along railroad
tracks where people had been hacked to death and up to a bus
staging area still guarded by young men with bows and arrows and
machetes.
"I told them, 'If you have an arrow, your customers are going to
disappear,' " Osodo said.
In that way, a sense of sobriety began to reassert itself in one
part of Kibera.
When Kibaki and Odinga announced their political agreement last
week, there were no major celebrations in Kibera. Instead, there
was the usual rhythm of life of a Thursday evening, of a thousand
vendors at a thousand tiny kiosks selling heaps of tomatoes and
roasted corn, of Swahili rap coming from painted barbershops and
columns of people making their way home along the railroad tracks
where Osodo and Kyalo had walked before them.
"Before Kibaki and Raila made peace, we made peace on the ground,"
Osodo said. "They called Kofi Annan, but me, I didn't call Annan.
I called my brothers."
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