Baringo

We're going to the former president's home, a place touched by his priority for education, evidenced by the schools on every bend but equally silenced by his intolerance for dissent. So much so that the only civil society that existed there for awhile was environmental. So much so that it was only when he left power that his people finally admitted that they were hungry.

I don't know how much of it is my own feeling or whether there really is a sense of loss in Kabarnet for the days when their man was in power. Every election cycle is fraught with the question of alliances and front-runners and in a country divided by ethno-political power and memory, the question I feel on their lips or anyone's lips who has not yet tasted power is whether and when it will be their time (again).

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We arrive in Kabarnet, five hours after leaving Nairobi and in the evening when we take dinner I notice the homogeneity of colour and laugh at the irony of what is black in Nairobi being brown in the Rift Valley.