Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are 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.

As a boy, though, Chwanya said his Kikuyu neighbours didn’t seem any better or worse off than his family. He grew up in an area of western Kenya known as Luoland and had Kikuyu neighbours.

It was during his college years in Nairobi that Chwanya began to see himself as different from his Kikuyu friends, he said. He noticed that they received loans and scholarships but he never did. Though he excelled in his studies and earned a marketing degree, he began looking for a job at the beginning of the Kibaki years and found that Kikuyu-managed firms tended to hire their own. He was finally hired by a British relief organization and went to work in Sudan.

When he came back to Kenya, he applied for public service jobs but was turned down so many times that he came to believe that only a Kikuyu could work for the government. He finally managed to land a job selling office products. In the office, most of the employees were Kikuyu and cliquish, often speaking to one another in the Kikuyu language, Chwanya said.

He headed back to Luoland, where he worked as a taxi driver. Roaming around the towns and villages there, he saw things differently than he had as a boy. He noticed that the roads in his homeland were worse than in the Kikuyu areas where he had worked as a salesman. His parents’ homes did not have running water. There were few jobs and he returned to Nairobi.

... contd.