Word: eldoret
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...village church where a few hundred people were sheltering, freed those who gave up cell phones or money or sex, closed the doors, heaped mattresses and dry maize leaves against them and set them alight. Thirty-eight people were burned alive. It took scientists at the morgue in nearby Eldoret more than a year to separate the remains. But while DNA tests could distinguish body parts and even piles of dust, they could not name them. At a mass burial on May 14 beside the scorched earth where the church once stood, 18 of the coffins were pasted with strips...
...Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe and a group widely resented for its dominance of government and business since independence in 1963. Opposition leader Raila Odinga, a Luo from western Kenya, accused the Kikuyus of trying to keep power for themselves. His supporters, mainly Luo and Kalenjin from around Eldoret, set the country on fire. The killing ended in March last year when former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan brokered a national-unity government, with Kibaki as President and Odinga as Prime Minister. (See pictures of the post-election violence in Kenya...
...Eldoret, for example, some locals accused William Ruto, a leader of Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement and a Kalenjin, of hate speech in the run-up to the vote. "He's the main inciter," said a man named Benjamin, who refused to give his last name for fear of punishment. "He said that if we are not going to win as ODM, we will not accept to stay with the Kikuyus. They will have...
...begun to change summer plans and to collect donations for humanitarian relief. For others, the violence has hit closer to home. Kenyan student Kipyegon A. Kitur ’09 remembers the first day of the new year. That day 50 people were burned alive in a church in Eldoret as they fleed from a mob incensed over the results of the election two days earlier. Kitur, who was spending winter break on campus, called his brother in another Kenyan town. “He said people were screaming,” Kitur recalled. The death toll currently exceeds...
...Africa's democratic institutions remain weak. Like Kibaki, many African leaders have a hard time accepting an unfavorable verdict from the electorate and walking away from office. "Democracy in Africa is not what is understood in the West," says Catholic bishop Cornelius Korir, whose cathedral in the town of Eldoret, north of Kiambaa, has become a refugee camp for 9,000 Kikuyus. "Since their wealth depends on power, our leaders are never ready to admit defeat." Incumbents like Kibaki, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are among those who tried to alter their country's constitutions--some...