Travels in the Riel World

For most Westerners, any mention of Kenya as a tourist destination will spark images of safaris. But for those who know of Lamu, Kenya is a very different place. A small island off the Kenyan coast, Lamu contains a quaint old town and miles of deserted beaches that have enchanted many a traveler. In this article, Sophie Lam writes of her own captivating experience on Lamu.

Omar beckoned with a sweep of his arm: “Come, come!” And with that he disappeared around a corner and out of sight again. I trailed him as quickly as I could, but he had vanished. Left or right? The tangled alleyways of Lamu Town served only to confuse and disorient me. The town had looked as small as its transport inventory implies (one car, one donkey ambulance, no roads) when our boat pulled up at the docking jetty of the island’s main port that morning. Yet, like a hall of mirrors, once I ventured into the web of passages it seemed to expand with every corner I turned.

As I stopped to compose myself in an airless alley, my guide Omar’s beaming face reappeared and we continued on our way, deep into the heart of the town. Some passages were barely wide enough for overtaking people; add the town’s itinerant donkeys to the equation and you can imagine the tailbacks. On either side of us, thick-walled, lime-plastered houses soared towards a ribbon of blue sky above. These 600-year-old coral stone buildings form East Africa’s oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement, now part of the Unesco-recognised maze.

Like the shell of a pearl oyster, the rough but resilient exteriors conceal beautifully ornate interiors. A step beyond a wooden door might lead you through to a sun-drenched inner courtyard, hung with jasmine and frangipani, or splashed with tropical fronds.

The city of Fes, Morocco, has enchanted many a traveler. Tahir Shah was spellbound by the medieval magic of Fes and wrote about the city for the U.K. Guardian.

Walk through the bustle of Fes’s medina and it’s impossible not to be catapulted back in time. It is as if the old city is on a frequency of its own, set apart from the frenzied world of internet and iPods and all the techno clutter that fills our daily lives. Abdul-Lateef and his magic-medicinal stall are a fragment of a healing system that stretches back through centuries, to a time when Fes was itself at the cutting edge of science, linked by the pilgrimage routes to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand.

These days the low-cost airlines shuttle the curious back and forth to Europe. And everyone they bring is tantalised by what they find. Fes is the only medieval Arab city that’s still absolutely intact. It’s as if a shroud has covered it for centuries, the corner now lifted a little so we can peek in. Once the capital of Morocco, Fes is one of those rare destinations that’s bigger than mass tourism, a city that’s so self-assured, so grounded in its own identity, that it hardly seems to care whether the tourists come or not. Moroccans will tell you that it’s the dark heart of their kingdom, that its medina has a kind of sacred soul.

Wander the labyrinth of narrow streets and you can feel it. It’s all around you - in the meat bazaar, where shanks of mutton nestle on fragrant beds of mint, and it’s down in the most ancient quarter, at er-Rsif, where the seed of Fes fell more than a thousand years ago.

Eritrea is not a well-touristed place, nor even a very well known country. But Jeffrey Gettleman went there recently with his wife and found it to be a rather interesting destination, with a taste of old Italy mixed with Africa. He wrote about his trip for the NY Times.

Eritrea, for better and for worse, is a nation locked in a time capsule. Visiting here is like spending your vacation in a vintage shop. Old men in dapper Fedora hats and antique Italian shades haunt Harnet Avenue, the palm-studded main drag in Asmara, the capital. The city itself is a showcase for some of the world’s boldest, most whimsical examples of 1930s Art Deco architecture, perfectly preserved by the thin desert air…

Asmara the architectural marvel is not so much the purposeful result of a hard-fought preservation battle. No. There were battles, real ones, and it was Eritrea’s bloody history of conflict and civil war that has kept this little-known sliver of a country along the Red Sea hermetically sealed to the outside world. The result is a surreal, out-of-body tourist experience, where you feel dislocated from just about everywhere else, but euphoric and inspired by what is in front of you. Africa? The Mediterranean? The Middle East? South Beach? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Eritrea feels like.

Cross-cultural trainers and theorists often talk about the differences between hierarchical and egalitarian societies, or they rank cultures based on their power distance. For instance, a country with a large power distance would be fairly hierarchical and would contain large inequalities between superiors and subordinates. If you want a perfect example of how this plays out in an extreme case, check out this article from the International Herald Tribune about the king of Swaziland who, apparently, can do no wrong. Here is an interesting and relevant excerpt:

As a local saying goes, “A king is a mouth that does not lie.” The government is bad, people tend to conclude, but the king is good. “Others in authority abuse their power, not the king,” explained Ncoyi Mkhonta, the acting chief of the village of Mahlangatsha.

Corruption is bleeding the treasury, but His Majesty’s exalted status has complicated the work of law enforcement. The finance minister has publicly estimated that $5 million - and maybe as much as $8 million - is siphoned off each month. Various anti-graft bureaus have failed to exact justice.

The latest corruption-fighting commission is headed by H. M. Mtegha, a retired judge from Malawi. He is not optimistic: “If we go after someone high up and he says the king told me to do this, what can I do? To be satisfied, I’d have to ask the king himself, and this cannot be done. The king is immune.”

The best travel experiences are often the most unexpected and they frequently involve chance meetings with locals. Christopher Vourlias recently traveled through Uganda, where he found himself having a conversation about writing and life with a farmer. He wrote about the experience for World Hum.

They met on a local bus…

I’d met Colin a few days earlier, squished together in the back row of the Horizon bus from Kampala. We’d struck up a conversation on the outskirts of town, as I’d fiddled with my iPod and waited out the bumpy ride. Curious eyes followed my thumb as it whirled in circles, heads poking over seats and craning into the aisle, when the man by the window—lean, bookish, scratching at his wiry moustache—leaned toward me and cleared his throat. He asked about the storage capacity, and we soon got into a heated discussion about file-sharing and intellectual copyright law. This was not, I suspected, your typical conversation on the Horizon bus from Kampala.

And continued their conversation in Colin’s farmhouse…

He opened the mango juice and passed a muffin to me and asked about my travels. We talked about my long odyssey since leaving home almost two years ago. He smiled and sighed and shook his head as I described Barcelona and Beirut, London and Damascus. Then he told me about his own journey five years ago, when he quit his job as a lawyer in Kampala to travel through Africa. He went south, through Rwanda and Tanzania, making it as far as Malawi. Soon he was low on money. He grew lonely.

“It is all the same, wherever you go,” he said.

Returning to Uganda, he came west to look after his father’s farm. Life here was hard. Money was scarce; often, he had to ask his sister and an elder brother for help. The neighbors were guarded, suspicious.

“They see this house, and they think we must have so much money,” he said. Even years later, he had few people he could trust. He was bothered to see friends and neighbors hobbled by bitterness and petty grudges.

“We have a saying: nohandika ha maiise,” he said, tapping each syllable on the tabletop. “It means ‘like writing on water.’” He laughed at this, amused and resigned. “You cannot change how people are.”

Outside he showed me around the farm. It was a small plot of land; in just a few minutes we’d crossed through the brown stalks of maize, pausing to stop in the shade of a flowering tree. It was a sunny afternoon, and the heat rose from the dry grass crunching beneath our feet.

The southwestern African country of Namibia may not be well-known as a tourist destination, but travelers who have been there often return home raving about the desolate beauty of the place. Elinor Burkett is one of those travelers and she wrote about her Namibian experiences for a recent NY Times story.

As the first rays of the sun pierce the thick darkness of the Namibian desert, sinuous ridges of quartz sand ignite in a firestorm of seared orange. Then the sky lightens to the new day, revealing the sea of sand mountains, their crisp edges and perfect curves wrought and polished by the expert chisel of the Kalahari and Atlantic winds.

With the tracks of yesterday’s visitors to the Sossusvlei dunes burnished by the breeze, you can’t resist trudging — perhaps plodding or crawling — up at least one of the pristine hills, some towering to 1,000 feet, instinctively looking for shimmers of water. But from the top, there’s no sign of the sea; it retreated millions of years ago, back when continents were drifting wildly.

What’s left is a dazzling geological display of possibly the world’s highest sand dunes, extending for 400 miles along the coast and more than 80 miles inland. Those naive enough to believe that a dune is a dune is a dune are faced with a dizzying array of sand configurations: parabolic dunes with dynamic slip faces, long and narrow transverse dunes, dunes petrified by ancient climate change, and star dunes formed by winds that buffet them from all sides…

Such a forbidding panorama hardly seems the stuff of a compelling journey. But Namibia, a country of stark beauty and riveting contradictions, should be at the top of any serious traveler’s want-to-visit list.

The landscape is otherworldly, from the ocean of blood red crests along Dune Alley at Sossusvlei … to the gravity-defying rock formations and petrified forest of Damaraland, in the country’s center. Even beside the main highway, there are enough elephants, giraffes and springbok to satisfy those who can’t imagine a southern African trip without big game.

The best designed governments are those that build upon the culture of a country, rather than those that try to impose foreign ideas and systems on a people. So I read with interest this recent story in the International Herald Tribune about a movement to re-design the government of Somalia in a way that would emphasize the traditional role of clans and elders.

Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia? After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless - and many say hopeless - as ever…

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based…

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”

The Chicago Tribune has been asking their foreign correspondents for travel tips and for lists of their favorite destinations. One recent installment focused on places in the Middle East and Africa. An excerpt:

Liz Sly on the Middle East:

My favorite place: The Old City of Damascus, Syria, a warren of ancient cobbled streets, mosques and churches that evokes the Orient of the imagination.

Don’t miss: Petra, the majestic, rose-red city carved 8,000 years ago out of inaccessible mountains in the Jordanian desert. It’s too breathtaking for words and too old to wrap your head around.

Joel Greenberg on Israel:

When friends come to visit I always take them to … The beach, either in Tel Aviv or the beautiful strand at Beit Yanai near Netanya. The Mediterranean is warm and inviting most of the year, and there is ample opportunity for long strolls on the sand and viewing brilliant sunsets.

Best photo-op: The stunning view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, or, from another angle, at the Sherover Promenade, preferably a little before sunset.

Laurie Goering on Africa:

My favorite place: It’s nearly impossible to choose just one place in a continent so diverse and wonderful, but Madagascar’s lemur-filled forests, Namibia’s silent deserts and Chapman’s Peak scenic drive in Cape Town, South Africa, are contenders.

Best place no one knows about: The Matapos Hills outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a conservation area that is home to some impressive cave paintings by the ancient San people. The hike to the paintings, through gorgeous bushland, can’t be beat either.

The Washington Post has a sad story about the state of women in the poorest parts of Africa. When food is scarce in some countries, the culture dictates not that the meager amount should be shared equally among all members of a family, but rather that men and children should eat first, leaving the women to eat last and sometimes to eat hardly anything at all.

The article is worth a read, not only for insights into a culture but also for a look at how a food crisis is affecting wide swaths of an entire continent.

After she woke in the dark to sweep city streets, after she walked an hour to buy less than $2 worth of food, after she cooked for two hours in the searing noon heat, Fanta Lingani served her family’s only meal of the day.

First she set out a bowl of corn mush, seasoned with tree leaves, dried fish and wood ashes, for the 11 smallest children, who tore into it with bare hands.

Then she set out a bowl for her husband. Then two bowls for a dozen older children. Then finally, after everyone else had finished, a bowl for herself. She always eats last.

A year ago, before food prices nearly doubled, Lingani would have had three meals a day of meat, rice and vegetables. Now two mouthfuls of bland mush would have to do her until tomorrow.

Rubbing her red-rimmed eyes, chewing lightly on a twig she picked off the ground, Lingani gave the last of her food to the children.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

In poor nations, such as Burkina Faso in the heart of West Africa, mealtime conspires against women. They grow the food, fetch the water, shop at the market and cook the meals. But when it comes time to eat, men and children eat first, and women eat last and least…

“It’s a cultural thing,” said Herve Kone, director of a group that promotes development, social justice and human rights in Burkina Faso. “When the kids are hungry, they go to their mother, not their father. And when there is less food, women are the first to eat less.”

When most of us think of vast deserts and mountainous sand dunes, our mind wanders to the Arabian or Sahara deserts. Few people think of Namibia and sand dunes in the same sentence. But this country on the southwestern coast of Africa is, in fact, known for some of the most stunning sand dune landscapes in the world. Nathan Lump wrote about his experiences in the Namib desert for the NY Times travel magazine.

By the time I reached Kaokoland, I’d been in Namibia for a week, and had grown accustomed to wonder. I’d hiked up the gigantic sand dunes of the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei (said to be the world’s highest), by far the country’s most famous attraction, and found them suitably astonishing. It is hard to overstate the power of seeing these dunes in person — pyramidal with serpentine ridges, tinged red from iron oxide and standing hundreds of feet high so that from a distance they look like mountains.

The silence in this sea of sand is mesmerizing, and it is strange how the repetition of form creates a kind of dramatic monotony, one that makes minor shifts in perspective somehow seem momentous. At sunrise I was struck by how the play of light and shadow emphasized each dune’s individual geometry, while later, as the full sun marked them in sharp contrast to a cloudless blue sky, I suddenly became conscious of the entire network, of how the dunes relate to one another in shape and size to form one of the world’s most surreal dreamscapes.

Although the outcome is still far from certain, there are now scattered whispers of hope that the two sides in Kenya’s ongoing electoral dispute may soon be able to reach some sort of power-sharing agreement. But regardless of any future political reconciliation, it’s hard not to feel that something irretrievable has been lost in Kenya, which until recently had been considered one of Africa’s most stable and tourist-friendly countries. The outpouring of violence has torn communities apart (for some eye-opening on-the-ground reporting from Kenya, check out this blog by Anne Holmes) and it will take a massive and lengthy effort to stitch everything together again.

For a sense of just how much everything has changed in the blink of an eye, first check out these short excerpts about Kenya from my recent book. First, driving through Kenya:

Only occasionally during the next week did we run into a small city, at places like Nakuru or Narok. On this day, we drove north past wheat-colored fields, banana and acacia trees and coffee plantations. The road took us through rolling foothills of green trees and deep red soil. These colors, and especially the red hue of the earth, became my lasting images of Kenya.

 

One of the biggest things I noticed as we drove were the number of people on the streets. Everywhere, even in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere between towns, we passed dozens of locals going about their daily lives. Many of them, especially the children, would wave as our van drove past.

And then at Lake Nakuru National Park:

We weren’t prepared for the full impact of seeing tens of thousands of pink flamingos strutting around the perimeter of a single lake. This was one of the most visually interesting spectacles we saw on the safari. From a distance, it appeared the water was ringed with stretches of pink sand. But as we approached, it became apparent this was an illusion, caused by the presence of more pink flamingoes than we ever knew existed, all living together on the edge of a lake…

 

We walked along the beachfront and gaped in amazement at the thousands of pink flamingoes squeezed together in front of us – feeding, walking, flying, landing…Interestingly, as we walked towards the birds, who formed a ring perhaps 15 or 20 feet deep along the perimeter of the lake, they edged away from us in unison. They moved calmly, and not in panic, but a giant pink wave would invariably form opposite whichever direction we moved…

 

It was raining fairly steadily at this point, but we were entranced and didn’t want to leave the flamingos. So we stood there for long minutes on the edge of the lake, hoods pulled over our heads, no sound but for the clamor of birds and the drumming of raindrops, thousands of pink flamingos forming a dreamlike picture in front of us, and we breathed in the sweet smell of rain on a warm African afternoon.

Now, compare those scenes with this recent description of the current situation in Nakuru, Kenya: 

In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity.

On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks…

One month after a deeply flawed election, Kenya is tearing itself apart along ethnic lines, despite intense international pressure on its leaders to compromise and stop the killings.

Nakuru, the biggest town in the beautiful Rift Valley, is the scene of a mass migration now moving in two directions. Luos are headed west, Kikuyus are headed east, and packed buses with mattresses strapped on top pass one another in the road, with the bewildered children of the two ethnic groups staring out the windows at one another.

How sad.

There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the Himba tribe of Namibia and how they are being affected by nearby urbanization. Within the story, there are interesting insights into the tribal culture of the the Himba. Reading something like this, it’s easy to see how indigenous cultures can feel disoriented when confronted by a rapidly encroaching outside world.

It’s a half-hour drive from Opuwo – first along rolling dirt roads, then on an all but unmarked turnoff through a patch of short mopane trees. Soon, family compounds come into sight – fenced areas, each with a kraal for animals, a holy fire for ancestors, and a hut for each of the patriarch’s wives.

In one compound, Kakuindjowe Muharukua introduces herself as the first born. She explains that her father has five wives and says that the dozen or so women working on beaded necklaces and ankle bracelets here are all related. There are no men around – they’re out watching the cattle, the lifeblood of the Himba.

“Everything has a meaning,” she says, when asked why one woman had her hair tied on top of her head with an animal skin, while a younger girl had thick, mud-coated locks falling in front of her face.

Hairstyles symbolize different life stages, she explains. Boys have ponytails, but when they marry, they pull all of their hair up in a cloth. Young girls have their hair plaited at the back of their head. When girls reach puberty they comb their hair over their faces; after they start menstruating they reveal their faces. Then, when a mother decides her daughter is ready to start having babies, she puts her hair up with a skin.

It is acceptable in Himba culture for women to start having babies before marriage – to get started early, she says. “You should have at least six children,” she says. “If you don’t have six children, people wonder what is wrong.”

Mt Kilimanjaro. It’s a mountain adventure that is accessible to people without mountaineering skills and is one of the great dreams of many travelers. This Tanzanian peak can also lay claim to one of the world’s most famous images, the “snows of Kilimanjaro.” Neil Modie decided he wanted to climb Kilimanjaro before melting glaciers removed most or all of the snow from the mountain. He wrote about his weeklong hiking experience for the NY Times.

Given Kilimanjaro’s snow, glaciers and volcanic upbringing, it didn’t look all that different from peaks I’ve climbed in my native Northwest. From my living room in Seattle, I can gaze at Mount Rainier, which I’ve climbed a dozen times. Even in the dead of summer, it retains a mantle of ice that makes it seem like a hulking life form. Kilimanjaro is almost unimaginably bigger: nearly a mile higher, it covers 1,250 square miles abutting Kenya.

And yet, unlike Rainier, climbing Kilimanjaro required no real mountaineering skills, no ice axes, ropes or crampons, merely strong legs, hearts and lungs for trudging more than three and a half vertical miles above sea level. That, and a supply of Diamox, to fend off altitude sickness.

Our approach was on the Machame, the most scenic and second-most heavily traveled — a distant second — of the six designated routes to the summit. Even so, our six camps along the way, five on the ascent and one on the descent, were 200-tent metropolises.

The most heavily congested approach is the Marangu, called the “tourist” or “Coca-Cola” route, a reflection of its overcrowded, touristy ambience and the ubiquitous soft drink, which is sold at camps along the way. Our longer, more macho Machame is known as the “whiskey route.”…

We passed through ecological zones of spectacular diversity: equatorial rain forest, followed by misty heath and moors dotted with outsize, otherworldly flora, then alpine high desert and finally the frigid, dry summit zone. It was all on trail, but several steep stretches required grabbing handholds on near-vertical rock.

A few weeks ago, I had some posts (here and here) about the Kenyan elections and the influence of tribalism in that country’s politics. Now, the Washington Post has an excellent article that explores that topic in more depth and examines the role of tribal identity in shaping the political and world views of many Kenyans. A key excerpt:

Tribe in Kenya is a matter of culture and tradition, a designation — often invisible to the casual observer — that defines social networks and political power and at times serves as the foundation for stereotypes used by politicians to manipulate and divide the electorate…

Of the dozens of tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu and to a lesser degree the Luo and the Kalenjin…have remained the primary political forces since independence. At the same time, there is a public consensus that tribalism undermines the founding idea of Kenya as one nation. Any politician hoping to appear as a statesman deplores tribalism in public, even though Kenyans tend to vote in tribal blocs. In certain circles, it is considered rude to ask someone’s tribe because it is not supposed to matter.

Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are virtually indistinguishable physically — so much so that during recent election violence, rioting gangs often asked Kenyans for their national identity cards. It is possible to identify a person’s tribe by his or her name.

But neither ethnicity nor religion, which does not divide the groups, explains the sharply divergent perceptions that Kikuyus and Luos have of their place in Kenyan society. Tribe, woven as it is into day-to-day life, is the way many members of each group explain their successes and failures in a country that until the recent elections was considered the most stable in East Africa.

There is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about cell phone use in Africa - not only the dramatic increase in the number of cell phone users across the continent, but also some of the unique ways in which people utilize the phones as compared to the way they are used in the West. An excerpt:

Over the past decade, the number of cellphone users in Africa has grown faster than anywhere else in the world.  According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles unit, the continent’s cellphone usage has increased about 65 percent annually for the past five years – from about 63 million users in 2004 to 152 million in 2006.

“Cellphones are in the deepest rural areas in Africa,” says Saadhna Panday, of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. “More people have access to a cellphone than a land line.”

And the way people use and care for their mobile phones is different than in the wealthy, BlackBerry-addicted West. Here, people send text messages to friends, but also use their cells to do banking and organize political rallies. In areas with no TV, farmers use phones to get agricultural news and weather reports. (The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange, for instance, sends text messages with up-to-date market prices.) In townships, entrepreneurs will set up cellphone booths, where passers-by can use airtime for a slightly inflated price.

In all these ways, says Panday, cellphones have increased networking among Africans and have lessened the global “digital divide” between haves and have nots.

Kenya has erupted into violence after a disputed election. The Pakistani political party of Benazir Bhutto has named her 19-year-old son as the party’s new leader.  This post is not meant to judge the politics of other countries. After all, the U.S. faced some problems of its own with a hotly disputed election seven years ago and, as Andrew Sullivan notes, we’re also dealing with a few American political dynasties at the moment.

Rather, what is interesting about both of these stories is that it emphasizes the role of culture in the government and politics of every country. 

In Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was named his mother’s successor at only 19 years of age, but in keeping with the dynastic traditions that are common across South Asia. His mother had herself taken over the reigns of the Pakistan Peoples Party from her father. As the New York Times writes:

The decision to place burden of blood and history on the son reflects … an abiding dynastic streak in South Asian politics — three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have dominated politics in India, and hereditary politics pervade Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well.

In Kenya, meanwhile, the eruption of violence is not only over a disputed election result, but also over tribal grievances that have spilled into politics. The Washington Post reports:

But an undercurrent of tribalism ran through the campaign season, with Odinga accusing Kibaki of favoring his own ethnic group and raising suspicions that his inner circle would never relinquish power…

As the sun set Sunday, thousands of ardent Odinga supporters raged through the muddy, foot-worn paths of Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, wielding nail-studded sticks, heavy rocks, hammers, machetes and flasks of alcohol, setting ablaze a market run mainly by Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, and continuing on…

The head of Kenya’s Red Cross Society, Abbas Gullet, told AP that the homes of many Kikuyu families had been attacked around the country and some of the residents were seeking refuge in police stations.

Two countries, two political systems, two sets of issues. But scratch the surface and you find cultural issues underpinning both stories.

Tribalism is an inescapable undercurrent of life throughout much of Africa and the Middle East. And, as this Washington Post article notes, one’s tribal loyalties have also played a significant role in democratic elections in Kenya, even though many voters deny it is an issue.

Although many issues are at stake in Kenya’s presidential election Thursday — by all accounts the most open and competitive since the country’s independence in 1963– one theme has pervaded the campaign season like no other: tribalism, considered the bane of African nation-building.

In some ways, Kenyans have adopted a political system in which leaders tend to trust and favor their own ethnic groups with appointments, contracts and other spoils of power in exchange for votes and, increasingly, campaign contributions.

Kenyans tend to deny being tribalist, though national voting patterns have often suggested otherwise.

In the current election, for example, the two main contenders are expected to draw 80 to 90 percent of the vote from their respective communities — among the largest in Kenya — and duke it out for dozens of smaller ethnic voting blocs in this country of 36 million. Yet in interviews around this politically important city in Kenya’s western Rift Valley region, Kikuyu and Luo voters explained their choices in terms other than tribal.

That’s the title of an interesting article that appeared recently in the Boston Globe. It focuses on some of the success stories coming out of Africa, despite the poverty, hunger and corruption that still plagues much of the continent.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy…According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS. It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story. By many standards, Africa is doing better than it has in decades. The number of democratically elected governments has risen sharply in the past decade, and the number of violent conflicts has dropped. African economies, and African businesses, are starting to show impressive results, and not just by the diminished standards the rest of the world reserves for its poorest continent…Last month, the World Bank reported that average GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 5.4 percent over the last decade, better than the United States, with some countries poised for dramatic expansion.

“For the first time in a long time, you have the potential that a handful of countries could break from the pack and become leopards, cheetahs, or whatever the African equivalent of an Asian Tiger would be,” says John Page, the World Bank’s chief Africa economist.

What are some these success stories? The story provides a few examples:

Entrepreneurs in Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal are opening call centers and document-processing facilities to service the developed world. Mills in Madagascar and Lesotho, aided by favorable terms of trade, are making textiles for the US market. Stock markets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana, while minuscule by Western standards, are booming. And earlier this fall, global banking giants Citigroup and UBS helped Ghana raise $750 million on the international bond market, the first sub-Saharan government bond offering outside South Africa in 30 years.

It all suggests that much of Africa, after decades of sclerosis and strife, may have turned a corner. Economists believe that several African countries have made the sort of fundamental changes in governance and economic management that could buttress them against swings in commodity prices and the other global economic shocks that in the past have been so devastating.