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Friday 18 July 2008

Rural poor

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

‘What will you do?’ I asked Gabriel’s brother Javan, who had come to help out with the funeral. ‘We are in trouble,’ he replied. The local chief predicted there would be an inheritance quarrel.

The Barasa family’s story is repeated countless times across western Kenya. When a friend’s grandfather died last year, the funeral programme estimated he accounted for more than 750 descendants. They own a few acres. The impact of joblessness on the countryside has been catastrophic. Returning to Trans Nzoia for the first time in years, I hoped to see once again well-tended fields, farming people in quiet villages, mighty forests, open spaces with wildlife. Instead there is only this: endless avenues of tin shacks, garbage, bicycles and gangs of idle youths. The land cannot cope with all these rural poor. But they are on the land because there are no options in life, even for intelligent and qualified people.

A young woman in Eldoret told me, ‘I am a university graduate and I can’t get any sort of job. The only future for me is to go and sit on the farm with old men and women and dig.’ Others have no farms to return to. They do not have land enough even to build a shack on.

No wonder Kenya exploded in January. In three weeks of travel I saw a huge swathe of damage from arson and looting. Western newspapers explained the clashes in terms of tribal hatreds and election politics. The country, the hacks claim, went up in flames because of rigged polls, or because politicians had planned campaigns of ethnic cleansing. But it’s much scarier than that. Ordinary people burned down their neighbours’ farms and stole their cattle purely out of jealousy. Huge gangs of youths destroyed schools, clinics and fields of crops as if to prove that if they were left behind, then they would destroy life for everybody else, too.

Up the road from the Barasa farm, on Mount Elgon, people were killing each other for a year before the elections. They’re still at it. In a circle of burning huts I found pools of blood where militias supposedly fighting over land had decapitated a group of mothers. In the ashes of one home I was horrified to find myself stumbling on a child’s burning skull. As we left Elgon the army was launching a punitive operation against the militias. But Kenya will not see peace until its leaders find jobs for all the young people. Time is running out, but even now politicians are bickering over allowances, cabinet portfolios and the length of their personal motorcades.

Channel 4’s Unreported World series will broadcast Aidan Hartley’s report on Kenya in April.

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