Election fever

I was at a petrol station in Nakuru, a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley, when I experienced my first moment of genuine terror since arriving in Africa. I was standing in a queue, waiting to pay, when a crowd of about 500 locals suddenly invaded the garage forecourt. They were campaigning for one of the candidates in Kenya’s forthcoming election — a mob, in other words, and not a very friendly one at that. Some of them were clutching makeshift weapons — clubs, sticks and whatnot — and I looked on in horror as a breakaway group surrounded my Toyota Land Cruiser and started rocking it from side to side. My wife was sitting in the passenger seat and my four children were in the back.

I’d been warned not to travel to Naivasha, the other big city in the region, but that had been earlier in the week when various primary elections were held throughout the country.