African governments are so fragile that they sometimes shatter at the first blow. For much of the last half of 1969, Kenya seemed as if it were due to be an other case in the tradition of the Congo and Nigeria. The gunning down of Tom Mboya on a street in Nairobi last July aroused enough tribal hatred to tear the country apart. Yet somehow, Kenya survived the six months of bitterness. At the start of 1970, it had at least as good a chance for stability as any other country in this volatile, impoverished continent. Kenya’s troubles began with the assassination of Mboya. Mboya, who had been Minister of Economic Planning and Development and the General Secretary of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), was one of the rare African politicians who tried to stand above tribe. He refused to appeal to tribal chauvinism in his election campaigns. Yet, ironically, his murder unleashed Kenya’s greatest surge of tribal hatred since its independence in 1963. The aftermath of Mboya’s death mocked everything he stood for. The members of Mboya’s Luo tribe assumed immediately that the murder was the work of the Kikuyus. The Kikuyus, the tribe of seventy-six-year-old President Jomo Kenyatta, are the dominant and best-educated people of Kenya. Though they number only two million in a population of ten million, the Kikuyus have controlled the major ministries of government and the top civil service positions...

related Stanley Meisler articles by topic: