Word: kikuyu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Africa's biggest slum, lines are being drawn. Morris Otieno, a trader and businessman, won't say if he is one of the Luo tribesmen in the township of Kibera, on the southwest edge of Nairobi, who have torched shops, battled riot police and dragged rival Kikuyu tribe members into the street to kill them. But he will say that the Kikuyu must go. "We have to move them away from our areas," he says...
...teetering on the edge of tribal war. By Jan. 2, after four days of rioting across this East African nation, some 300 people had been killed and 70,000 had fled their homes. In the town of Eldoret, a mob set fire to a church in which hundreds of Kikuyu had sought refuge, burning 50 of them alive. Police bullets have claimed dozens more lives...
...Kenya's political divisions overlie its tribal ones. Kibaki is a member of the Kikuyu tribe, Kenya's largest with 20% of the 37 million population, which has dominated the political scene since Kenya's independence from Britain in 1963. Odinga is a Luo - they make up 10% of the population. The two tribes have shared a tense coexistence, segregating themselves and rarely intermarrying. Luo have long complained that Kikuyu hoard political and economic power for themselves. And Kibaki never made good on his promises to stamp out corruption - a failing that has turned several other tribes in Kenya against...
Since independence, there have been outbreaks of violence between Kenya's 42 tribes, including in 1992 when 2,000 people were killed. But the ferocity of the anger directed solely at Kikuyu is new, and the church killing in particular has ominous echoes of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when moderate Hutu and Tutsi were also massacred in churches where they had gathered in the thousands to seek safety. "Maybe in Burundi or Rwanda," commented one U.N. official. "But I never thought this could happen in Kenya...
...reached a horrific level on Tuesday when 50 people, including women and children, were burned alive in a church in the country's west after they had sought sanctuary there from a mob infuriated over the allegedly stolen vote. The victims in the city of Eldoret were from the Kikuyu tribe, which makes up about 22% of the country and backed President Mwai Kibaki's bid for a second term. Kibaki had claimed victory by a margin of a little over 200,000 after several suspicious moves appeared to erase his rival's huge lead in the count...