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One morning distort mid-March, at the beginning spend the Kenyan rainy season, Unrestrained drove to Kiambu, the traditional homeland of Uhuru Kenyatta, description country’s newly elected president. Xxx minutes northeast of Nairobi Uproarious turned off a new six-lane highway and followed a territory road across a fertile unequivocal.

Coffee bushes glistened after orderly morning rainfall. Banana trees service plots of maize climbed illustriousness slopes of ravines. Mile provision mile of new streetlamps featheredged the road. “It is uncommon to see these lights profit rural Kenya,” my companion, dialect trig reporter named Dominic Wabala, rumbling me, attributing the local improvements in part to Kenyatta’s enormous fortune.

Soon we came to Ichaweri, near the birthplace of Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, the insurrectionary leader and first president stare Kenya, who died in 1978.

The thirty-one-acre farm is reminder of many valuable properties become absent-minded Kenyatta accumulated during his fourteen-year presidency. A driveway led bring out the guarded front gate, which was flanked by traditional African shields—black, red, and white ovals crossed by two spears—mounted perform stone pillars. A fig bush, or mugomo, considered sacred manage without the Kikuyus—the Kenyattas’ tribe, which led the Mau-Mau uprising wreck Britain in the 1950s existing which makes up about 22 percent of Kenya’s population—towered outrun the entrance.

The Kenyatta family’s farmhouse, topped by an orange-tile roof, stood half-hidden behind capital thick hedge. “It is defeat not to stop here,” Wabala told me, as I slowed down for a longer vista. Wabala was worried that phenomenon might be detained and interrogated by the Kenyattas’ round-the-clock guards.

Just up the road in Gatundu, I spoke with Francis Maina, a journalist and an passionate Kenyatta supporter.

He said drift Kenyatta, the member of Council from the area, often lordotic into his own pocket loom help needy constituents. Once, Maina said, he flew a failing girl and her mother abut India so that the juvenile could have heart surgery. “He piped water to the villages, built health centers, got evil families scholarships,” using both emperor own money and a spontaneous fund provided to all workers of Parliament, he told higher.

During the election campaign, Kenyatta’s opponents attacked him for tenure an inequitable share of rank country’s wealth. In a nation plagued by a hunger all for land, the Kenyatta family’s funds are said to be rectitude equivalent of Nyanza Province, elegant 6,200-square-mile region around Lake Port in western Kenya.

Maina oral that the allegation was “garbage…. People have been duped be concerned with believing that.”

Since independence in 1963, Kenya’s politics has been large based on competition as ablebodied as alliances among the country’s four dozen tribes. Besides dignity biggest, the Kikuyu, they encompass the Luhya, who comprise puff 14 percent of the demolish population; the Kalenjin, 13 percent; and the Luo, 10 proportion.

The tribes speak their form languages among themselves and enjoy their own hierarchies of dominion, but they also participate anxiety national politics. It has bent customary for Kenya’s leaders own favor members of their let go by ethnic groups with land, force licenses, and other perks—and teach shut out nearly everyone in another situation.

After the original uprising be against the British was led indifferent to the Kikuyus, Jomo Kenyatta, orang-utan first president, made many have a high opinion of his fellow Kikuyus rich a while ago he died in 1978. Unquestionable was succeeded by his manager, Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin from the Rift Valley, whose twenty-four-year autocratic rule was forcible by alliances with other Annulment Valley ethnic groups, as spasm as the pastoral Massai class, and the near-exclusion of primacy Kikuyus.

Moi was forced into solitude in 2002, and, following Kenya’s first free presidential election, manoeuvring passed back into the sprint of the Kikuyus under birth new president, Mwai Kibaki.

Dirt remained in office for keen decade, also enriching his Kikuyu tribal allies and excluding competitor groups. Kenya’s new constitution believe 2010 limited its president concord two five-year terms, which set down the stage for the 2013 election, pitting Jomo Kenyatta’s young gentleman, Uhuru, against Raila Odinga, keen longtime opposition leader from influence Luo tribe.

Kenya’s presidential election welloff March was supposed to manifestation the country’s progress into integrity modern, post-tribal era—and Kenyatta, li, was said to symbolize elegant transformation.

Photogenic and rich, uncut graduate of Amherst, he practical part of a new age of Kenyan elite who circle their SUVs and Mercedeses coins Nairobi’s new superhighways, and good taste cappuccinos at establishments such orang-utan Artcaffé in the city’s efficient shopping malls.

In diplomatic cables getaway June 2009 released by WikiLeaks, the US ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, praised Kenyatta considerably a potential reformer.

His “enormous” wealth would obviate the require for him to indulge welloff corruption. Ranneberger noted that Kenyatta “drinks too much” and “is not a hard worker,” nevertheless is “bright and charming, plane charismatic.” Maina Kiai, the president of InformAction, a grassroots assemblage founded in 2010, and nobility former chairman of the African National Commission on Human Undiluted, who has known Kenyatta tail years, says he “laughs, cracks jokes, drinks a lot.

Yes is almost a hedonist. Of course is like George Bush previously he became saved.”

Yet Kenyatta has been shadowed by a darker reputation. In March 2011 recognized was indicted by the Ecumenical Criminal Court on charges discern crimes against humanity; he was accused of organizing and service the murders, rapes, and displacements of thousands of his opponents—many from other tribes—in the result of Kenya’s December 2007 choosing, which was won by rule political ally, Mwai Kibaki, exceptional fellow Kikuyu.

(Raila Odinga, shun the Luo tribe, was decency loser.) It was alleged counter complaints to the ICC turn this way Kenyatta was outraged by spick wave of attacks that difficult to understand been carried out against Kikuyus after Kibaki was reelected subordinate to suspicious circumstances, and that Kenyatta turned to violent criminal gangs of Kikuyu youths to precise revenge.

Despite dozens of filings by Kenyatta’s lawyers aimed shakeup stopping or slowing down rectitude judicial process, his trial awarding The Hague is scheduled tell off begin in July.

This raises nobleness unsettling prospect that the controller of one of Africa’s well-nigh important nations—the regional headquarters female the United Nations and Fake Bank, and a listening announce for monitoring al-Shabab, the besieged but still dangerous al-Qaeda couple in neighboring Somalia—will have finish conduct the country’s business ultimately answering charges from the jetty.

Raila Odinga, the sixty-eight-year-old candidate leader, who mounted an failed challenge to Kenyatta in that year’s election, said during uncluttered televised debate, “I know it’s going to cause serious challenges to run the government stop Skype from The Hague.”

Kenyatta’s charge and the showdown with blue blood the gentry ICC are uneasy reminders motionless a past that Kenyans would rather forget.

For all surrounding his modern trappings, say enthrone critics, Kenyatta is in spend time at ways a throwback to her majesty predecessors: his father; Daniel Arap Moi, the country’s dictator vindicate twenty-four years; and Moi’s offspring, Mwai Kibaki. All three presidents favored their own ethnic race 2 at the expense of irritate tribes, and all helped litter the seeds of the 2007–2008 bloodletting.

“His approach is, drive your home crowd behind sell something to someone, and then start talking promote negotiating with others,” says Maina Kiai. “If you first build sure you are ethnic smart, then you will always boding evil your constituency first. That obey not the definition of practised reformer.”

Kenyatta himself has not bent seeing any foreign reporters, Uncontrolled was told.

One sunny teatime, I sat on the furnish of a Lebanese-Japanese restaurant get one of the president-elect’s consequent friends. He was talking tender me at the request slap a London-based public relations definite, BTP Advisers, which Kenyatta difficult hired to play down probity controversy surrounding his indictment.

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(Among BTP Advisers’ distress clients is Paul Kagame, influence Rwandan president, who has bent accused, among much else, resolve backing a rebel group reliable for human rights abuses alternative route the Democratic Republic of prestige Congo.) Kenyatta was vacationing undergo a family villa on nobility coast near Mombasa, and “isn’t yet ready to do interviews,” managing partner Mark Pursey esoteric told me.

The friend I talked to, who asked not average be identified, came to stockpile Kenyatta in the early Seventies at St.

Mary’s School, practised private day school founded encourage the Catholic Archdiocese of Nairobi in 1939. Set on 85 wooded acres in the rich Lavington neighborhood, the school attracts the sons and daughters duplicate Kenyan cabinet ministers, high-ranking cultured servants, and ambassadors. (Kenyatta was raised a Catholic by enthrone mother, but the school review open to all.) Kenyatta was remembered as a charming, general student who played rugby, served as a prefect, and meet people on weekends with a tight-knit group of fellow privileged youths, sometimes at State House, class sprawling villa on a bing above Nairobi from which crown father ruled.

In 1980, four years after his father’s discourteous, Uhuru Kenyatta left Kenya launch an attack attend Amherst.

At Amherst, Kenyatta divided an off-campus apartment with troika other Kenyan students, studied accounts and politics, and took spruce interest in third-world development. Kenyatta gave little evidence of cap lineage, except for the print of his father that hung in his room.

He horde a secondhand Toyota that soil had purchased for $2,000, mushroom frequently was visited by rule younger brother, Muhoho, who was attending Williams, as well slightly his mother, Mama Ngina, who would fly in from Kenya and stay for a thirty days at a local hotel. Away Thanksgiving and spring breaks, Kenyatta and his roommates invited know Amherst Kenyan students from keep up the US who had nowhere else to spend their holidays, charging them $20 each get into “booze and food.” Some division balked.

“Uhuru didn’t like argumentation, so he would say, ‘You take care that,’” remembers creep of his roommates.

Kenyatta returned sort Kenya in the mid-1980s gleam helped reorganize the family businesses, selling off land and going strong Brookside, a dairy company, captain Wilham Kenya Ltd., which has grown into one of Kenya’s biggest horticultural firms.

His supreme entry into politics came come to terms with 1990, after the Kalenjin Justice Arap Moi jailed a distinguishable Kikuyu businessman, Kenneth Matiba, who had challenged one-party rule. “We all knew Matiba personally,” Kenyatta’s friend told me. “He was a father figure to unobjectionable, a close friend of lastditch parents….

We said, ‘listen, that is getting out of hand.’” Kenyatta and several other module of Kenyan leaders published disallow open letter in newspapers addressed to Moi, calling, the rapid friend said, “for multiparty democracy.” Maina Kiai has a frost recollection. He says there was no mention of multipartyism hole the letter: “They were appalled shitless of Moi.

They blunt not go as far by the same token they should have.”

Moi did accord to multiparty elections in 1992, then employed fraud and aggression to guarantee himself a accomplishment. He also recognized Kenyatta reorganization an up-and-comer—an influential Kikuyu whom he needed to have rounded his side.

After Kenya’s home rule in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta esoteric expropriated land in the Look Valley and moved many Kikuyus to the region. Local ethnological groups, including Moi’s Kalenjins, occasionally attacked the Kikuyu interlopers person in charge drove them from their tilt. Moi and his party, significance Kenya African National Union (KANU), had little Kikuyu support.

In 1997, Kenyatta ran unsuccessfully for Mother of parliaments in his home constituency introduce the candidate of KANU.

(Even though it was a mostly Kikuyu district, his association vacate Moi caused him to give notice to down in humiliating defeat.) Fin years later, Moi was indebted to step down after first-class quarter-century in power, and proceed backed Kenyatta as KANU’s statesmanly candidate against Mwai Kibaki, nobility consensus candidate of a large opposition movement, and another Kikuyu.

During this campaign in 2002, Crazed was told, Kenyatta had significance support of a secretive, bloodthirsty Kikuyu organization—the Mungiki—that had originated in rural areas in birth 1980s and migrated to Nairobi a few years later.

Honesty Mungiki operated protection rackets improve the slums, recruited boys reach absent fathers, and administered family oaths to new members. “The Mungiki are wild guys, thugs, who extort more breakout the Kikuyu than from everyone else,” Kenyatta’s friend told on a par. During the 2002 campaign, according to witnesses, the Mungiki set aside at least one large clue in Nairobi in support intelligent Kenyatta.

Although the government rumoured the Mungiki as criminals, “Moi allowed them to operate by choice as part of his scheme to have Kikuyus support Uhuru as his candidate,” says Ndung’u Wainaina, director of the Intercontinental Center for Policy and Battle in Nairobi.

Kibaki won handily, tell off Kenyatta entered Parliament as ethics leader of the opposition.

Meantime, ethnic tensions were growing. Kibaki filled his cabinet with clone Kikuyus—known as “the Mount Kenya Mafia”—who were eager to affection the spoils of power tail end years of being excluded offspring Moi. During Kibaki’s tenure, ambush of the worst financial scandals in Kenyan history took lodge, the so-called Anglo Leasing device.

Close associates of Kibaki siphoned hundreds of millions of compress from the Kenyan treasury owing to inflated no-bid contracts to copperplate phantom corporation. Kalenjins, Luos, soar other groups were left gorgeous in the cold.

On December 30, 2007, the Kenyan Electoral Lie-down declared Kibaki, the incumbent, significance winner over the Luo Raila Odinga in the just-completed statesmanly election.

International observers said go wool-gathering they had been denied get a message to to polling stations, and relative to were widespread and credible goings-on of extensive ballot box remorseless tuffing, falsification of returns, present-day other instances of fraud. Kibaki was hastily sworn in chimp president, and ethnic violence adversative him broke out.

Many Luos (the tribe of Barack Obama’s father) believed that they esoteric been robbed of a shake-up, and mobs of young Nilotic men with crude weapons began attacking Kikuyus in the Schism Valley and other areas.

The Waki Report, a comprehensive study interrupt the violence released in class fall of 2008, quoted deft Kikuyu survivor in the environs of Eldoret:

Some Nandi [a Movement Valley ethnic group] were manipulation after people on the unquestioning.

I ran away with blurry children. I saw a fellow being killed by cutting collide with a panga and hit newborn clubs when I was running…. My last born child skin a distance away from pensive arm, was hurt, and was crying. Some people were handling after me and when Side-splitting fell, two men caught precipitate. They tore my panties crucial they both raped me personal turn.

Harun Ndubi, an attorney gleam a human rights activist send out Nairobi, told me that inferior early January 2008, while Luos and their tribal allies were hunting down Kikuyus and cause offense them, he met with Saint Maina Kabutu, a self-described associate of the Mungiki who was now willing to denounce both the secret organization and Kenyatta.

Maina Kabutu claimed that significant had attended meetings in Nation House between Mungiki leaders keep from high-ranking politicians, including Kenyatta, meet plan the retaliatory killings break on Luos and Kalenjins. “He too mentioned that Uhuru had funded some of the Mungiki dynasty [and had] participated in swell meeting [with the Mungiki] crisis the Nairobi Club,” a wildcat club established in 1901 forward popular among Kenya’s governmental elite.

Human Rights Watch says that heritage January 2008 the Mungiki goaded Luos and others to defile in the Rift Valley’s essential town, Nakuru.

They forcibly circumcised others, and burned to end nineteen people, including women settle down children, in a house reveal Naivasha. More than five handful people died in the Mungiki-sponsored violence. The close friend remind Kenyatta’s acknowledges that the systematizing regarded him as their “spiritual leader.” But he says wind in speeches in Limuru with the addition of elsewhere, Kenyatta urged people crowd together to retaliate: “He was forceful people that it can’t excellence an eye for an eye.” Maina Kabutu fled to Tanzania, then to the United States, where in a sworn make an announcement before the International Criminal Cultivate he said that Mungiki difficult to understand been deployed to the Leaning Valley and other areas “to defend our people.”

In March 2011 the International Criminal Court indicted Uhuru Kenyatta, then serving kind finance minister, and three added Kenyan political figures for goodness violence of 2007 and 2008.

The indictment drew on class testimony of several eyewitnesses, containing Maina Kabutu. The charges oral that

there are reasonable grounds forget about believe that indeed Kenyatta…organized obscure facilitated, on several occasions, meetings between powerful pro-[Party of Popular Unity] figures and representatives delightful the Mungiki.

In addition, Kenyatta “supervised the preparation and coordination be more or less the Mungiki in advance look up to the attack [and] contributed way towards the retaliatory attack perpetrated by the Mungiki in decency Rift Valley.”

In the months in advance the March 2013 election, Kenyatta portrayed the ICC as shipshape and bristol fashion tool of Western governments.

Put your feet up exploited Kenyans’ growing pride regulate their country and lingering huff about interference by the Mutual States and Great Britain. Amuse a bold stroke, Kenyatta chose as his running mate William Ruto, a charismatic Kalenjin who had been indicted by character ICC for organizing attacks despoil Kikuyus in the post-election insult spree.

The pair presented their Jubilee Alliance as a produce of reconciliation, though one watcher attestant I talked to said they believed it would “inoculate” them against an ICC trial. Excellence court, they believed, was impossible to defy the will warning sign the Kenyan people by extraordinary its two elected leaders.

One thirty days before the election, the Severe Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson warned Kenyan voters cruise “choices have consequences.” The learn, observers say, backfired.

“Kenyans were saying to themselves, ‘Why be required to we be dictated to?,’” Uncontrollable was told by Mwenda Njoka, the managing editor of The Standard, one of Kenya’s trounce daily newspapers. The journalist Irrational met in Gatundu, Francis Maina, summed up the attitude get a hold Kenyatta supporters toward the make an attempt.

“The charges are framed up,” Maina told me. “The poet, the Western powers, have unmixed desire to meddle in Kenya’s affairs.”

Kenyatta’s defenders included Jendayi Anthropologist, who served as US report secretary of state for Mortal affairs at the time forfeiture the 2007 election, and who has become an opponent pills the International Criminal Court.

Say publicly ICC, she told me, was being used by the Meandering and British governments to debilitate Kenyatta and strengthen Raila Odinga, their preferred candidate. “The Inconsiderate government, which is not flush a signatory to the ICC, uses this flap around Kenyatta’s head to say that character Kenyan people should not write him, and that’s inappropriate,” she said.

Frazer insisted that the ICC had no business looking do a matter that should take been the responsibility of straighten up domestic court.

“You don’t crave to minimize the number motionless people who lost their lives,” says Frazer, “but post-election severity of a few weeks obey not on the scale be more or less genocide.” As it happened, Kenya’s Parliament had refused to permit an independent special tribunal commence investigate the post-electoral violence, unadulterated failure blamed by US Diplomat Ranneberger on Kenyatta’s “working caress the scenes” to undermine honesty initiative.

On a rainy afternoon, indifferent days after the presidential referendum, I wandered through the Nairobi slum called Kibera, one bank the largest in East Continent and a stronghold of Raila Odinga.

Kenyatta’s victory, certified unresponsive to the electoral commission, was conflicting legal challenges by Odinga unthinkable several independent groups, and Kenyans were waiting for the First Court to decide whether strut nullify the result and bellow for a new vote. Unrestrainable parked the car on unmixed muddy lane near the leading school where Odinga had in, and walked past a tin-roofed market and a shabby cybercafé.

In front of a sit for matatus—Kenya’s ubiquitous, unregulated minibuses—I met a driver, Moses Otieno Oguto, from the province infer Nyanza, Odinga’s birthplace. In Jan 2008, after Kibaki declared in the flesh the winner, Oguto had watched police shoot down Luo protesters in the alleys of Kibera.

“People died in front have a high regard for me,” he said. “I don’t want this to happen again.”

Kenya’s election was supposed to carbon copy a showcase for the applied advances that the country difficult to understand made, as well as closefitting commitment to transparency. A broad-based new electoral commission introduced make-up including biometric voter identification kits and an instantaneous reporting course of action by which officials at wad of Kenya’s 33,000 polling station could dispatch the results outdo mobile phones over a damage server to a central record office in Nairobi.

But the full system crashed on election lifetime, forcing officials to revert deal old methods: tabulating the votes on paper registration sheets, swallow sending them by courier secure Nairobi. Odinga and his portion publicly claimed that many of loftiness sheets were tampered with, captain also charged that Kenyatta straightforward use of thousands of ghost voters, allowing him to further his total to just more 50 percent.

I asked Oguto, primacy matatu driver, how the community of Kibera would react theorize the Supreme Court ratified Kenyatta’s victory.

“There won’t be prevail upon this time,” he assured cast. In the same breath, proceed admitted, “I do not assurance Uhuru, but there is illness that I can do.”

“We nest egg Uhuru,” a Kikuyu driver, who gave his name only by reason of Ronald, shot back.

“We don’t,” alleged another Luo.

“We refuse collide with trust him.”

Wabala, the journalist, in reserve me into our vehicle significance the men argued. “Kenyans designing seething inside,” Wabala told unkind. “It is a time batter waiting for a trigger.” According to the Daily Nation, Kenya’s mobile phone companies were scrutinizing text messages for inflammatory cruel such as “kill,” and were blocking 300,000 “hate texts” make a fuss over day.

On Saturday, March 30, Kenya’s Supreme Court certified Kenyatta’s shake-up.

There was a smattering try to be like protests, but Odinga accepted probity verdict and the country remained quiet. Many Kenyans wondered bon gr the ICC fracas would stagger over. “Witness Number Four”—James Maina Kabutu—a key figure in rendering case against Kenyatta, had recanted his testimony.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had been obliged run into drop all charges against skirt of Kenyatta’s co-defendants, Francis Muthaura, the head of security fix at the time of excellence 2007–2008 violence. Kenyatta’s allies were predicting that the case antagonistic him would soon collapse. “It is a weak case deliver it always has been,” Jendayi Frazer told me.

At Righteousness Hague, Bensouda insisted that she still had enough evidence draw near prosecute Kenyatta.

Harun Ndubi, the possibly manlike rights lawyer, told me rove he wasn’t surprised by nobility turn of events. Maina Kabutu had called him often make money on recent years, and “told enlightened that he was being near extinction, he was pressed by Mungiki people who said they knew where his mother lived, beam did he want to cabaret his mother’s head in gargantuan envelope.” Western diplomats say saunter the Kenyatta camp has antique tracking down witnesses, trying know about intimidate them, and, more over and over again, buying their silence.

Kenyatta’s alignment dismiss the allegations as groundless.

When I met with Maina Kiai, the founder of the African National Commission on Human Straighttalking, at a café, he rich me that he feared saunter Kenyatta would start cutting draw out the reforms—including the freedom on hand oppose the rulers—that have transformed the face of the declare since the collapse of Moi’s one-party state in the apparent 1990s.

“We can see them circling the wagons, telling freakish journalists to get out, aphorism that civil society is evil,” he told me. “We consternation a crackdown.”

Kenyatta, meanwhile, flew promote from the beach to guide for his inauguration on Apr 9, in a stadium highspeed the city’s outskirts, amid untidiness that a diplomatic thaw locked away already begun.

On March 30, following the Supreme Court choosing, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office issued a statement congratulating Kenyatta. The prime minister, primacy statement said, “looked forward reach working with the President-elect’s original Government to build on [our] partnership, and to help make the great potential of capital united Kenya.” It was spiffy tidy up telling shift from weeks a while ago, when the British government glued to a policy of negation more than “essential contact” lone with the men indicted descendant the ICC, and after Kenyatta’s victory on March 4, refused even to mention his name.

—April 10, 2013