It sounds like the plot of an old Western movie. A posse of desperados gallops into a frontier town, burns the pub, robs the bank, guns down leading citizens and disappears into the dead of night before the sheriff gets out of bed.
That is what has happened repeatedly in recent days, in a small Kenyan town of Mpeketoni, south of the Somali border on the Indian Ocean coast.
Last week, a gang of armed men hijacked a small fleet of matatus (minibuses) and roared into the city centre, shooting as they went. They set shops and banks ablaze. In neighbouring villages, they went door to door, asking for citizens by name. Those who were Muslim and could prove it by reciting the Qur’an were spared. Others were shot or hacked to death.
The killers went about their gruesome business with an almost carefree attitude. The shooting began soon after 8.30pm and went on until dawn. Despite the resounding gunfire and frantic alarms, no security forces responded until the attackers were gone. Police at the local station, scarcely 100m away, fled into the bush, despite the fact that senior intelligence officials in Nairobi had warned regional commanders three days before that a terrorist attack would happen.
Buoyed by their easy success that first night, the assassins came back the next for a second round of mayhem – and again a few days later. A total of 65 people died.
The sequence of events has shocked the country and given rise to a smorgasbord of conspiracy theories. One is that Somali al-Shabaab terrorists had struck again. Since the group’s infamous attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the centre of Nairobi last year, Kenya has experienced a slew of smaller-scale incidents ranging from explosive devices planted in crowded markets to attacks on bars, police stations and public transport. Al-Shabaab claimed credit for the Mpeketoni massacre, but top Kenyan authorities pointed elsewhere.
Some said the attacks were home grown – the acts of an emerging local underground not unlike the Islamist extremists of Nigeria’s Boko Haram.
Over the past year, a number of radical Muslim clerics have been killed in mysterious circumstances in Mombasa, the major city on Kenya’s restive coast. The targeting of non-Muslims in Mpeketoni and surrounding villages, this theory goes, was payback by a new breed of extremists determined to mete out “justice” on their own.
A third explanation is darker still: the rise of a newly violent tribalism. President Uhuru Kenyatta has blamed “local political networks” and unscrupulous politicians for orchestrating the violence and fomenting a dangerous climate of ethnic hatred.
Clearly, there is an unsettling ethnic dimension to the killings. Decades ago, following independence, Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta sent thousands of his own Kikuyu tribesmen to settle around Mpeketoni. Those displaced were mostly Muslim. To this day, many harbour deep resentment towards the outsiders whom they regard as usurpers.
Ominously, all of this comes against a backdrop of ethnic tension elsewhere. In central Kenya, Kikuyu residents of the Rift Valley, the traditional home of the Kalenjin tribe, have lately been receiving anonymous leaflets inviting them to “go home”.
Just days ago in the north-eastern province of Mandera, men from the Degodia clan torched homes and businesses owned by members of the rival Gare clan. An estimated 75 000 people were displaced in the clashes.
To the outside world, it might seem as though Kenya is sliding towards an abyss. Without question, the past year’s insecurity has taken a toll. Some Western embassies are considering downsizing their staff. Tourism and investment have fallen.
And yet, obscured by the worries over security, there is ample reason for optimism about one of Africa’s most resilient countries. Amid the new tensions, the government has taken a firm stand against any smacking of hate speech by national or local political leaders. Security officials who failed to respond to the crisis in Mpeketoni have been fired; a similar shake-up looms within Kenya’s national-security agencies.
Meanwhile, a robustly independent media and an active network of civil-society organisations are reporting on corruption and lobbying for development and security for all Kenyans.
There was other good news, also lost amid the recent tumult: the success of a heavily oversubscribed $2 billion (R21bn) Eurobond issue; the discovery of the first major oil and gas field in Kenya’s coastal waters and yet another in north-western Turkana, promising to make the country a leading African exporter.
These days, Nairobi looks more like Los Angeles than the backward Third World capital of yore. Kenya’s security challenge is serious, and likely to become worse. But the desperados will not bring the country down, for all the lurid headlines they inspire.
* Meyer is Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.