NAIROBI, Kenya

I WAS in the giant crowd in Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi in the run-up to the 2007 election when the presidential candidate Raila Odinga told his supporters they were tiny but fiery safari ants, who were going to drive the snake that had invaded the bird’s nest out of the tree.

This analogy comes from African folklore. Mr. Odinga suggested that his supporters, by their sheer numbers, were capable of achieving what the other animals of the forest were afraid of doing. The reformers who supported his democratic movement, which stood in opposition to the presidency of Mwai Kibaki, embraced the label of safari ants.

Fast forward five years and a bit. On the morning of March 9, I was on Waiyaki Way, a major Nairobi thoroughfare, when I came upon a throng of supporters of Uhuru Kenyatta, who was declared the winner — by the narrowest of margins — of the presidential election held five days earlier. The demonstrators brought the traffic on that busy highway to a stop. At dawn, the same mob had awakened me, as hordes of young people paraded through residential suburbs in an anticipatory celebration for Mr. Kenyatta, a son of Kenya’s founding president, Jomo Kenyatta. Seated in a minibus immobilized by traffic, I got a close look at them. These were no urbanites. If you have lived in Nairobi for as long as I have, you are able to tell country folk who are new to town just by their looks. Someone had bused them in.

What shocked me, though, was not that they were snatching cellphones out of open car windows. It was the expletives they were shouting through those windows. A nation of Kikuyu — Kenya’s dominant ethnic group, of which the Kenyattas are members — had triumphed once again over the Luo, the minority to which Mr. Odinga belongs. The tribal invective was ugly. But the shocking bit was watching kids of around age 6 wallow in the rhetorical filth, egged on by people I assumed to be their parents. We were drawing from the basest of our primitive reserves in the name of celebrating a victory that had yet to be confirmed. (Mr. Odinga has refused to concede defeat, and is challenging the results in court.)