Nairobi, Kenya

WHEN you find yourself at a wedding discussing how more than 800 people have been killed and more than 250,000 kicked out of their homes for having certain ethnic origins, you know there is something terribly wrong with your country. Living in Nairobi the past few months has been like living in a relatively comfortable glass cave in the middle of hell.

What began in late December as protests against election irregularities has spiraled into killings based on which tribe your identity card and speech indicate you belong to. English and Swahili, the languages that were supposed to unite us, have now been rendered useless. In these times, when belonging or not belonging to a particular tribe can be the difference between not being dead or being seriously dead, what chance does a person like me have? I was born to a Luhya father and a Taita mother, but I speak the Kikuyu language of Kiambu, where I was raised.

The politicians no longer have the ability to stop the violence, despite their posturing that they could do so at the snap of their fingers. We see Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, posing with the rival contenders, President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, in photo sessions where the two antagonists shake hands and smile and call for peace. But the political rhetoric seems a joke; we know that revenge and counter-revenge are what the various ethnic groups really seek  to “do to what they did to our tribe mates.”

Daily life is a constant kaleidoscope of languages for those of us who are of mixed ethnic heritage. We must gauge what sort of street or village we are in and, like a chameleon, speak the “correct” tongue.