Everyday Kenyans Taking Stock In a Growing African Economy

The offering, intended to raise $8 billion Kenyan shillings, raised $26 billion and drew in three times the number of anticipated investors, many of whom immediately tripled their money.

"People pitched tents outside of our offices," said Anthony Wangari, a manager for Suntra. "Normally we'd see maybe 100 people a day. We would see about 2,000 a day during KenGen. . . . We had to move from the building where we were because the landlord was complaining that numbers were so big people were messing up the elevators."

These days, sharply dressed men and women swing through the heavy glass doors of the stock exchange building, cellphones glued to their ears. Inside, an array of people watch the returns scroll across a big screen in a theaterlike gallery -- university students, businessmen on lunch break and plenty of full-time speculators.

"I started with 30,000 shillings," about $500, said Hillary Wandera, 41. "I have over 700,000 shillings invested now. I come here almost on a daily basis."

Past a fountain and up a circular staircase, about 40 red-coated traders sit at rows of IBM terminals buying and selling via computers, which replaced the paper system two years ago.

"We're just coming out of sheer hell," said Cecilia Njoroge, head of trading for the exchange, referring to the old system in which traders would often take three days just to enter the orders that piled up. "It's like heaven and hell."

With Safaricom and other companies wanting to go public, investment banks are trying to cull customers not only in Nairobi, a city of 2.7 million, but also in rural areas. Wangari, the Suntra manager, has conducted seminars for sugar and tea farmers out in the hinterlands, where he tries to explain the benefits of investing in shares rather than land.

"I get questions like, 'What is a share?' " he said. "And, 'What is my evidence that I've bought something?' If it's a cow, you can see the cow. If it's land, you can see the land. With shares you have nothing to show. It's a big leap."

But in a country where wealth has been symbolized by land or cows -- or, in Nairobi, having one's name attached to a skyscraper -- the symbols of the upwardly mobile are changing.

More Kenyans are taking vacations abroad these days. Huge billboards around the city advertise the accoutrements of wealth -- weekend jaunts on Kenya Airways to Paris, slender cellphones, credit cards. Sleek bars and restaurants are packed on weeknights with young, well-heeled, cosmopolitan-drinking Kenyans. Glossy GQ-like magazines offer images of a glamorous life, sometimes alongside features on wise investing.

"We're becoming enlightened," said Nduta, the government worker, who said she has persuaded her husband to start putting money in stocks rather than land. "Land is just sleeping capital."