"The skin of enlightened self-interest is very delicate, easily eroded, and the human capacity for unspeakable barbarity lies just beneath its surface. Africa's horrors are chilling examples of what people are capable of doing to one another when short-term exploitation has taken over from long-term regulation, when the notion of accountability has been swept aside and the promise of the future is hidden by the trials of surviving in the present."
-John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent
after a long ride into Nairobi from Nakuru, the third largest town and center of the Rift Valley region of Kenya, sick and fatigued from an unknown bug, the final stretch to the outskirts of Karen were being taken on a local bus when we approached mayhem on the road; a burning roadblock filled with some of the multitudes of unemployed young men seen all over Kenya, listlessly gathered on the sides of roads, watching life pass by. the tension was palpable; and as one young man ran up to the bus with a large cement block and threw it at the windshield (of which I was sitting directly behind), I could see hatred burning in his eyes. There is much tension lying directly beneath the surface here; a political machine that thrives as much on divisiveness as it does on corruption. The "skin" Reader mentions so easily pulled back, as occurred in the last elections when over 2000 innocent people were slaughtered because they had the wrong tribal affiliation, with hundreds of thousands displaced. It is painfully ironic that the cradle of civilization has been home to so much dehumanization in the recent past.
