What was most striking to me about the violence in Kenya in recent weeks was not how much the country resembles Rwanda but, rather, how much it resembles, say, Ukraine in 2004 or South Korea in the 1980s. Perhaps the real story here is not, as one headline had it, about "
The Demons That Still Haunt Africa" but about how Africa is no different from anywhere else.
As any student of revolution knows, popular uprisings generally take place not in the poorest countries but in those that have recently grown richer.
Thus there is nothing mysterious about the anger or the unrest, nothing that requires more Live Aid concerts or global outpourings of emotion, nothing especially "African" about Kenya's problems at all. Kenya needs a cleaner, more democratic, more rule-abiding government; it needs to eliminate the licenses and regulations that create opportunities for bribery; it needs to apply the law equally to all citizens.
The West can help Kenya change these things by encouraging these values through the nature of the aid it gives and the
strings attached to that aid.
Ultimately, though, Kenya's political elite will have to decide what kind of country they want their children to live in. Yes, there are cultural factors, and, yes, Kenya is unique, but in the end politics, not culture, lies at the heart of the country's current problems.
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