Suddenly, it was Kenya that was on fire. The ethnic cleansing was so utterly ruthless that a shocked world drew in its breath. Women and children from one ethnic group were burnt to death in a church. Outside stood a mob and ”warriors” from another ethnic group armed with pangas and machetes and stopped any attempt to flee the flames. Neighbour drove off neighbour with fire and violence in villages and cities. The roads were closed off by barricades where people were stopped and killed if they had the wrong surname, that is, one that gave away their ethnic affiliation.

In a region where conflict and civil war have prevailed for decades, Kenya had symbolized stability, development and security. As it turns out, at least 1,500 people were killed because of their ethnicity and 600,000 were driven from their homes.

There was considerable surprise around the world. There was also some in Kenya as well; at the start of the conflict, young Kenyans told the world media that ethnic hate was completely foreign to them.

Tribe and tribalism are words that we Scandinavians in particular often find denigrating, indeed racist. Taboo words. We have no problem talking about ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. But we have a hard time where Africa is concerned. To speak critically about tribalism and the ruthless favouritism Africans show their own ethnic group is to place the burden on a continent we mainly feel sorry for, an innocent, exploited and afflicted part of the world. Our bad conscience over the damage caused by colonialism has got its claws in us all.

Nonetheless, these taboo words were relevant and totally appropriate in Kenya. They have always been, even though no Kenyan politician would ever own up to it in public. Every Kenyan politician who is hoping to play a role as statesman regrets and condemns tribalism. In truth, they are often ensnared by and dependent on it because Kenyans, like many other Africans, vote according to their ethnic affiliation.

Ethnicity in Kenya is a question of culture and tradition, an affiliation that delimits social networks and determines political influence. But it is not always easy for an outsider to see.

It is understandable that the world was shocked by the bestiality of the ethnic cleansing in Kenya, as was the alarm over the vulgar, simplified arguments used to justify the violence. It is more difficult to understand the great surprise that Kenya too is a nation divided by ethnic loyalties.

Afterwards, they emerged among the golfers at Karen Country Club, smiling like Cheshire cats, as one observer wrote. The two who finally emerged after protracted negotiations over the sharing of power were Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga – a Kikuyu and a Luo.

Both had declared themselves victors in the presidential election three months earlier – an election that observers criticized and that the sitting president Mwai Kibaki’s men had rigged. So, basically, a fairly normal African election. But the Kikuyu elite surrounding the president failed to consider either the discontent over the perpetual corruption that penetrates all the way down society and poisons the everyday lives of the poor – or the ethnic explosive force arising from the fact that the challenger, Raila Odinga, was a Luo. Or else they could completely care less about it. The fraudulent election results released a flood of pent-up ethnically-tinged discontent.

The two self-satisfyingly smiling leaders at Karen Country Club had both played a high-stakes game and both now appeared to be winners – an equal number of ministerial posts for the two parties in government and at the executive level. One was president; the other prime minister. Still, both continued to try to undermine the real power of the other.

In the camps, with their long rows of tents, no one felt like a winner. There were just people who no longer had any home. IDP – internally displaced people – is the latest term for them. Here, the bitterness and fear are much more deeply seated than the pragmatically polished conscience of the elite.

There are some twenty major ethnic groups in Kenya. The richest and most powerful of them is the Kikuyu, who have dominated the economic and political scene since independence in 1963.

Jomo Kenyatta is the prominent figure; he was the leader of the Mau Mau Uprising against the British. His people, the Kikuyu, were forced out of the temperate highland that was excellent for coffee and tea plantations. During the uprising, Luo, from the western part of the country, and Kikuyu fought together. To quell the uprising, the British recruited warriors from other ethnic groups that already had an aversion to the Kikuyu so that the ethnic conflicts were further exacerbated.

Kikuyu were the ones who lost the most land to the farmers under colonial rule. But they were also the group that the British used most often as low-ranking civil servants on the local level, the group that got an education. When independence came, it was also the Kikuyu who had the most influence and appropriated the greatest economic compensation. As a result, they could become established in areas where other ethnic groups were found, like the Rift Valley, the long, fertile fault fissure where the Kalenjin traditionally dominated.

Jomo Kenyatta, who succeeded in uniting the major tribes in the struggle against colonialism, quickly became a despot who awarded land and contracts to his own group, the Kikuyu. Under Kenyatta, corruption rapidly became a part of Kenya’s economic life and has permeated all political activity since then. Today Kenya is also one of the most corrupt states in the world. Very few contracts or agreements are signed in Kenya without a large percentage going directly into the pockets of those holding power.

The current president, Mwai Kibaki, was part of Kenyatta’s innermost circle. When Kibaki was elected in 2002, it was in part because of his promise to fight corruption. It turns out to have been an empty promise. Oginga Odinga was a Luo and the vice president. He was the father of Raila Odinga, one of the two main figures in the current power struggle. That is how close-knit Kenya’s political elite are, and yet it has been fifty years since independence came within reach.

Oginga Odinga could not bear the naked robber mentality that Jomo Kenyatta allowed and which favoured the Kikuyu most. Oginga Odinga quit the ruling Kanu Party as a protest against the growing gaps in society and between ethnic groups.

When the respected minister Tom Mboya, a Luo, was murdered on the open streets of Nairobi in 1969, the ethnic tension intensified further. The Luo were convinced that Kenyatta was behind the murder. Kenyatta basically ran the country as a one-party state, before it in fact became one as a result of the constitution, supported by his closest associates, all Kikuyu.

When Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, he had seen to the elimination of his strongest political rivals. His vice president, Daniel arap Moi – believed by many to be a political lightweight who would not threaten the Kikuyu’s power – succeeded him. Moreover, Moi belonged to the Kalenjin, a smaller ethnic group. Yet he came to hold power for 24 years. He had far more political shrewdness than people around him thought. He survived attempted coups, recurring student riots and Oginga Odinga’s stubborn refusal to conform to the Kanu Party again.

Daniel arap Moi’s shrewdness did not exclude brutal methods. The dirty yellow high-rise along Uhuru Highway in Nairobi called Nyayo House contained the cells where journalists as well as opposition politicians and activists were beaten and tortured. It is located so close to the Parliament and the Intercontinental that sometimes I thought I should have been able to hear the screams from my hotel room when Nairobi’s narrow little city centre fell quiet at night. Raila Odinga was imprisoned there for six years during this period.

In 1989, the foreign minister, Robert Ouko, a Luo, was murdered. It was assumed that Ouko had considered trying to intervene against the shameless corruption of other ministers, especially the notorious Nicholas Biwott, who was close to the president. Most people thought the murder carried all the way to the top; the Luo were convinced of it.

The demands for democracy and a multiparty system began to grow in the early 1990s, even though Africa’s numerous despots-for-life fought against it. More parties would encourage tribalism at the cost of nationalism, they claimed – an argument they used mainly to hold onto power, but which was to a large extent true.

Just before the election of 1992, President Moi had to give in; other parties besides Kanu were allowed to take part. Oginga Odinga joined in and pressed for democratic elections. He was one of the founders of FORD, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. I was to follow him for a day during the election campaign.

It was my first African election, and it took place in an atmosphere tense with ethnic animosity. Close to a thousand people had already died and tens of thousands had been forced to flee. The ethnic fighting also took place this time largely in the Rift Valley and western Kenya. The Kalenjin, President Moi’s ethnic group, tried to eliminate the Kikuyu, and they were of course encouraged from above to do so.

Oginga Odinga had thick glasses, a chequered cap, shirt, tie and sweater under his jacket, perfectly creased trousers and freshly shined shoes. He would probably have blended in on a London street, perhaps as a retired teacher. But we were headed for dusty villages and towns. He was just over 80, still enthusiastic.

Our little caravan of cars started out early, and it was still morning when we came to the first village. All the posters that were not for the ruling party had been torn down. We drove into the sandy little marketplace, where Oginga Odinga took out a megaphone and began to speak. Slowly, a few tentative listeners approached. After fifteen minutes, several hundred had rallied; there would probably be no more showing up.

That is when they hit. I could not understand how they could turn up so suddenly. Baseball bats hammered with frightening force at heads and backs; the sound as they hit made me nauseous. Long, black wooden batons swung relentlessly over anything that moved. There was total panic. Totally unprepared, I fell to the ground, fortunately behind an imposing tree trunk that served as a watershed for this rushing throng of humans.

It was over in a minute or so, the listeners vanished, so too the police officers in civvies with their baseball bats and the ruling party’s violent political hacks. A cloud of dust swirled around the marketplace after the turmoil; there were traces of blood in the sand.

We climbed into our cars and rode on to the next place, where the exact same thing was repeated. Seven times that day, Oginga Odinga got out of his car and began speaking with his megaphone; each time it ended with attacks, pounding baseball bats and wild flight.

When evening fell, dusty, tired and rattled but with no serious injury, I sat down next to Oginga Odinga. The chequered cap was not even dented; he chuckled and his eyes twinkled behind those thick glasses. He thought it had gone well – the ruling party was worried, the one-party system was singing the last verse. It was, I realized, a fairly normal day in an African election. These are rarely fought out simply in ideas and arguments. The ban on meetings, sabotage and violence were part of the picture, even in elections described as free.

The ruling party won, of course.

During the next election campaign, I followed a woman politician from the opposition party. She had just been released from the hospital after having been beaten unconscious and left to die on the street. As we now sat in a car on the way to a meeting, she suddenly began to scream in horror and covered her face with her hands.

”That black car,” she sobbed, ”that black car, they’re the ones that did it.”

A big black Mercedes with men in dark suits and sunglasses slowly drove past us. It was Vice President George Saitoti’s henchmen. We were in his district. He did not intend to lose. George Saitoti was a Kikuyu but sometimes claimed he was a Masai because that was the largest ethnic group in his district. These were not exactly picture-postcard Masai that he sent out to beat and frighten other politicians. Or to attack people who took part in meetings in central Nairobi. The Masai attacked with frightening brutality on Saitoti’s orders. In the hotel vestibules, tourists waited for their safari, indulging in their Out of Africa dreams and romanticized Karen Blixen atmosphere. They loved the stately Masai.

The groups accounting for the violence this year do not have advanced weapons either, and that makes the killing even more bestial. Machetes, pangas, clubs, poisoned arrows and especially fire – that’s good enough for the common folk.

The militia, which are not simply groups of angry young men quickly cobbled together but have instead been involved in paramilitary activities for years in their various fields, often get direct support from people at the top level of their ethnic group. So, for instance, Mungiki is Kikuyu, the Kalenjin Warriors are of course Kalenjin, Sabaot Land and Defence Force is a subgroup of the Kalenjin, Chinkororo is Kisii, Taliban is mainly Luo and active in Mathare in Nairobi’s slum, Baghdad Boys Luo, in Kibera – the other major slum area in Nairobi – and Kosovo, which consists mostly of Luo and Luhya, also in Kibera.

For many years, I visited Nairobi on a fairly regular basis. It is the junction of East Africa; people have to pass through in order to reach the major conflicts that have grabbed more attention: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda.

Each time I arrived, it seemed that a new high-rise sheathed in glass had been started. And each time I thought the streets and pavements had developed even more life-threatening holes and cracks. Money from the large-scale corruption is invested by the elite and laundered in these big projects. But there are no general funds to repair the streets.

At the same time, I could also see how Nairobi’s slum simply grew and grew. Not many decades ago, Mathare Valley was a brook hollow close to Nairobi’s narrow city centre. It had rapidly become one of the most densely populated slum areas in Africa – a conglomeration of corrugated metal and narrow, winding muddy paths. Close to half a million people in a few square kilometres. The number of people infected with AIDS was frightening, and unemployment sky high. Street children sniffed glue and often died before they could move on to more expensive drugs. In the morning, tens of thousands of people poured out from the holes between shanties and headed for Nairobi, a long, snaking river of people who had no job but hoped to find something, at least for a few hours.

I kept in contact with a football club, Mathare United. I was impressed by their work with youth. The club had been formed from slum children and in a short time had become Kenya’s football sensation, playing in the top league. They sent youth teams to the Norway Cup. At first, the players were housed in Brumunddalen, known as one of the more xenophobic, not to mention, racist, neighbourhoods in Norway.

One day on one of Mathare Valley’s dusty, sandy fields, I heard the players shout Brumunddalen over and over. That was the name, it turned out, of one of the players on a boys’ team. He had taken it after travelling there and winning in the Norway Cup. Perhaps he felt his stay there had changed something. Families from Brumunddalen, so full of prejudices, had come wide-eyed to Mathare Valley.

Had some kind of victory been won there in the fight against racism? And who then would not want to be moved by a story like that?

I asked some of the players on Mathare United, who it seemed to me thought they were living in a different world than the one traditionally divided, whether ethnic values had nonetheless forced their way into their everyday lives. The old big-league teams were still dominated by ethnic groups, Gor Mahia by Luo and AFC Leopards mostly by Luhya.

”We’ve become the people’s team because we’re completely beyond any ethnic boundaries conventions,” Alfred Chege, a defensive player, told me. ”Here in Mathare Valley, poverty is just getting worse and worse, and we’re all the same in the face of it.” Every time they televised shots of burning shanties in Mathare Valley and Kibera around the world, Chege and his words reverberated in my head.

The ethnic cleansing was as brutal and merciless in Kenya’s urban areas, where 40 percent of the population now lives, as it was in areas where there were land disputes. And it was worst in the slums.

When conflicts like the one in Kenya break out, there are inevitably attempts to explain how it is not at all a question of ethnicity. Usually, it is experts in the West and Africans in exile who want to explain that it is really the fault of the economy or the constitution. As if they want to protect Africa from once again coming across as brutal and lacking democratic refinement.

A question that people often find themselves pondering in Africa is whether people identify first with their ethnic group or their country. Is a person first Kikuyu or Luo and then Kenyan? If I ask the question as a foreigner and a European, the answer is usually that, obviously, they are Kenyan. But I am not sure that the answer would be the same in other contexts.

A black professor once said to me when we were discussing nationalism and ethnicity: Don’t forget that it was only recently that the nearest marketplace was the central focus of most Africans’ lives and view of the world.

In today’s Africa, where urbanization is happening incredibly quickly and more and more people have access to new, fast technology, the marketplace has become much wider – yet is still characterized by tribalism.

It is perhaps a cliché that Africa lives both in my age and in another, but it is difficult to resist for someone who has lived in Africa a long time and has been forced to observe that our conceptions of the world often run along different lines.

Translated by Susan Long