Word: africa
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...Nairobi the epicenter of the violence was Africa's largest slum, Kibera, where a million people live in tin shacks and clapboard huts--without sewerage, hospitals or jobs--a five-minute drive from some of the city's most luxurious homes. Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in London, describes Kenya's poor as the "explosive dispossessed," ready to erupt into violence...
...wasn't supposed to happen in Kenya. Until a few weeks ago, this country of 37 million was a poster nation of the African renaissance, a term adopted by South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki to describe the continent's economic and political resurgence in recent years. After three decades beset by genocide, famine, AIDS and wars as obscure as they were endless, much of Africa is thriving. Soaring demand for resources like oil, timber and minerals--especially from China--has pushed annual economic growth for sub-Saharan Africa to more than 5% for four years running and is inching...
Kenya is one of the stars of this revival: it has held elections regularly since independence in 1963, its economy grew 6.4% in 2007, and it has been a stable exception to turmoil in East Africa. But the outbreak of violence there following last month's presidential elections threatens that progress. A potential implosion in Kenya is especially worrying to the U.S. because the White House sees it as a frontline state in the war on terrorism, a bulwark against its volatile, jihadi-infested neighbor Somalia. Terrorists have occasionally slipped across Kenya's border, as in 1998, when al-Qaeda...
Whether Kenya can be pulled back from the brink will reveal much about Africa's future. The nation embodies the best and worst of the continent--its vitality and economic potential but also its poverty, corruption and tribalism. So long as those conditions persist, crises like the one afflicting Kenya will continue to haunt Africa, stunting its growth and hurting its people. The outcome in Kenya may well determine whether Africa's renaissance sustains itself--or turns into another nightmare...
...causes are maladies that still plague other, less stable African states. The first is poverty. Despite Kenya's overall economic growth, 58% of its people are poor (defined as living on $2 or less a day). U.N. studies show that the gap between rich and poor is wider in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Despite the continent's recent economic growth, the number of its poor grew from 288 million in 1981 to 516 million...