There's more to the storm than its eye

[...]

I conclude therefore, and this is the premise of my previous article, that the international media has conflated the two issues - the ethnic and the political - and emerged with a gory picture of Kenya that many of us who have lived our whole lives there will find unfamiliar and disturbing. Think what you may about Rwanda, but regardless of what CNN tells you, there was a political issue at the heart of the genocide - poor representation of a section of the population in the government and other institutions coupled with exploitation and harassment, and their perceived involvement in the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana. This was then shrouded in ethnic terms - the community was Tutsi - which in turn led to the genocide. Kenya is not there yet, but if we continue to stretch the cloak of ethnicity over the mutually exclusive political issue we may just get there.

Read more from Nanjala Nyabola here.