Kenya city simmers with rage after post-election violence
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Oginga Odinga Street, the main thoroughfare in town, is a testament to rage.
Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters, then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb had blown up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled.
People say this is just the beginning.
"We will never surrender!" yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday.
"We want guns, guns!" another man said.
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While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya's third largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence.
With Kenya's leaders at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi Frazer, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time.
Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he was cheated out of the presidency, and the town's main street is named after his father, a local hero.
Raila Odinga called Sunday for more rallies, raising the threat of more bloodshed, but he also indicated that he was willing to share power with the government he accuses of rigging the presidential election on Dec. 27, The Associated Press reported from Nairobi.
The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour on Dec. 29 when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya's president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory.
The town exploded and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga Street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And about 2,000 members of Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, desperate to leave because of a wave of revenge killings.
"If I stay here, I'll be lynched," said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.
Trucks evacuating Kikuyus and Kisii, another tribe that supported Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out. The people doing the jeering are mostly Luos, of Odinga's tribe, who live here in great numbers.
"Traitors!" some Luos shouted on Saturday as a truck passed.
People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya's political leaders refused even to speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election.
Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food.
In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues. There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone.
Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job. No after-Christmas sales for her.
"I'm angry at everybody," she said.
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