No Quick Fix for What Still Ails Kenya

It passes the immense, ill-gotten tract held by Moi's son and finally reaches Oljorai, a semiarid landscape of thorn bushes and little-leafed trees, where Machiria and about 10,000 other people evicted from better land over the past three decades had been resettled by the government -- "dumped like garbage," as Machiria put it.

About three weeks ago, local Kalenjin and other tribal militias finally heeded the populist rallying cry sweeping the Rift Valley and attacked Machiria's meager farm and 26 others also belonging to Kikuyus who had always considered themselves as luckless as their neighbors.

"I don't know why these people are chasing us," Machiria said. "The common enemy is not the poor man, it's the government and the rich people who took the land illegally. But we Kenyans do not know who the enemy is. "

At a row of low-slung shops at Oljorai last week, men who were gathered there happily admitted to expelling their Kikuyu neighbors, including Machiria.

"The Rift Valley is Kalenjin land -- this is where I belong," said William Kaitany, 55, a cattle keeper who had been Machiria's neighbor. "The Kikuyus, I don't know why they're here. Even the young ones must go."

But historians say that the prevailing sense of belonging to a homeland is rooted more in Kenya's colonial past than in any legitimate ancestral claim.

Creating 'Ethnic Reserves'

Before the British colonized Kenya, ethnic identity was a fluid concept. A Kikuyu living among the Masai could assimilate and become Masai over time. But when the British began taking over land for tea and coffee plantations -- the most fertile swaths of central and western Kenya -- they created a rigid system of "ethnic reserves" to control the population they displaced.

Mutable boundaries became firm, with ethnicities suddenly fixed and stamped on identity cards. The system was never fully dismantled after independence in 1963, and even today, Kenyans living in cosmopolitan Nairobi, for instance, carry a national identity card showing their so-called ancestral home, to which they would have been confined during British rule.

Although the Kalenjin claim Oljorai as ancestral land, it was originally occupied by Masai cattle herders. Later, it was a ranch belonging to a wealthy white Kenyan hotelier named Block.

In the 1970s, the government acquired the ranch, as it did many other colonial-era farms that have since been used for various resettlement programs and for political patronage.

Far from being privileged land-grabbers, the Kenyans who settled at Oljorai are mostly an ethnically mixed collection of people with long family histories of being booted from one piece of land to the next by people with more power.

Machiria and his neighbor James Karanja were for most of their lives landless, their families having lost their farms in central Kenya to the British in the 1920s and '30s.