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venting grievances that had festered through the decades.
    The social contract taken for granted in so many Western countries, barely discernible in Kenya, suddenly began to make itself felt. ‘Damn it all,’ a Kenyan writer returning from self-imposed exile told me, with the air of a man making a possibly foolhardy concession, ‘I’m even thinking of paying tax!’ And just in case anyone was in danger of forgetting the past, the NARC government threw open the basementsof Nyayo House, an ugly beige high-rise on the corner of Uhuru Highway, in whose dank cells opponents of the Moi regime had been beaten, reduced to drinking their own urine and killed. When Gallup conducted a poll, it found that Kenyans were the most optimistic people in the world, with 77 per cent saying they had high hopes for the future. Reserved and inhibited, Kenyans are sometimes dubbed ‘the Englishmen of Africa’ because of their refusal to live up to the stereotype of boisterous, carefree Africans. After decades languishing in the grey fug of the Moi regime, they could barely stop smiling.
    And the new president kept hitting the right notes. When the country’s biggest companies took out fawning newspaper advertisements congratulating him, Kibaki reproved them for wasting money. He had no intention, he said, of following his predecessor’s example by putting his face on the national currency, streets and buildings. His pledge not to bring city traffic grinding to a halt with wailing presidential motorcades seemed to hold good. Across the land, the framed official Moi photograph, so ubiquitous it had become virtually invisible, came down from the walls, but was not immediately replaced with one of Kibaki. Shop owners propped the new official portrait against the walls, waiting to see how the political climate would turn. Perhaps Kenya had got beyond the point of needing such crude symbols of authority. As for the media, they luxuriated in a less fractious relationship with the new establishment. It had taken the dawn of multi-partyism in 1992 for any newspaper cartoonist to dare depict the president. Even then they had gone on tiptoe, initially showing no more than a hand with a rungu , Moi’s signature baton, then depicting the Great Man as a silhouette from behind, before cautiously shifting him round, image by image, to face the readership. ‘It was from simple fear, because they could come for you,’ recalled cartoonist Frank Odoi. But with Kibaki, who had been drawn for decades lazing at the golf course, such veneration would have been absurd. The new president was shown full-on, just as he always had been.
    The cabinet Kibaki unveiled on the lawn of State House–‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are in business’–rewarded allies who had madevictory possible. A member of the Kikuyu, 1 Kenya’s largest and most economically successful tribe, Kibaki knew his nation’s two-score smaller tribes needed reassurance if they were to stay on board. Announcing the line-up, he promised foreign donors, itching to resume lending frozen during the Moi years of mutual ill-will, that he would swiftly implement two anti-corruption bills dear to their hearts. There was less detail on the new constitution NARC had undertaken to introduce within a hundred days, expected to trim the president’s sweeping executive powers and force him to share decision-making with a prime minister. But few doubted this was on its way. A man with a reputation for soft living and hard drinking, Kibaki knew his younger coalition partners had in part rallied behind him because they viewed him as too indolent to want to do much, too old to attempt more than one term. They regarded him as virtually a figurehead, and there was no sign that he intended to renege on the deal.
    Things finally seemed to be going right for Kenya, and the news spread beyond the country’s borders like a warm glow. ‘The victory of the