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people of Kenya is a victory for all the people of Africa,’ South Africa’s first lady, Zanele Mbeki, pronounced at Kibaki’s swearing-in, and she was right. For Kenya is one of a handful of African nations which have always possessed a significance out of keeping with their size and population, whose twists and turns are monitored by outsiders for clues as to which direction the continent itself is taking. Somehow, what happens here matters more to the world outside than what happens in many larger, richer, more populous African countries.
    This pre-eminence can in part be traced to Britain’s colonial role and the astonishingly resilient memory of ‘a sunny land for shady people’, where English aristocrats swapped wives and downed gin-and-tonics while snorting quantities of recreational drugs. Long before Barack Obama’s ancestry came to intrigue the Western public, a pith-helmeted fantasy woven from Ernest Hemingway’s tales and Martha Gellhorn’s writings, the escapades of the Delamere family, stories of the man-eating lions of Tsavo, Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and the White Mischief cliché–all references irrelevant to ordinary Kenyans but stubbornly sustained by the tourism industry–guaranteed the country a level of brand recognition other African states could only dream about.
    But there are less romantic reasons for Kenya’s disproportionately high profile. The most advanced economy in the region–thanks in part to the network of roads, cities, railroads and ports left by the British–Kenya has held linchpin status ever since independence by mere dint of what it is not. It has never been Uganda, where Idi Amin and Milton Obote demonstrated how brutal post-colonial rule could turn; or Rwanda, mourning a genocide that left nearly a million dead; or Sudan, venue for one of the continent’s longest civil wars. In place of Ethiopia’s feeding stations and Somalia’s feuding warlords, it offered safari parks and five-star coastal hotels. Kenya’s dysfunctional neighbours have always made it look good in comparison.
    It had made the right choice in the Cold War lottery, allying itself with the winning, capitalist side. Kenya was the obvious place to train your soldiers, in the case of the British Army; to moor your warships, in the case of the Pentagon; to base your agencies, in the case of the United Nations; or to set up your Africa bureaux, in the case of Western television and radio stations. The road to the centre of Nairobi from Jomo Kenyatta airport–which services more airlines in an afternoon than many African airports manage in a week–said it all, with its industrial storage depots and hoardings advertising mobile phones and internet servers, beer and mattresses. ‘Nai-robbery’, as expatriates cynically dubbed it, might be potholed and crime-ridden, but it was the capital of a highly cosmopolitan, comparatively stable nation run, through the decades, by a series of administrations Westerners instinctively felt they could do business with. Like its former colonial master, Kenya had always punched above its weight, offering outsiders–wincingly sensitive to the continent’s darker manifestations–a version of Africa they could stomach.
    So when Kenya, in the latter part of the Moi era, appeared to veer off course, the world pricked up its ears. Moi, admittedly, had beennothing like as crudely predatory as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema or Cameroon’s Paul Biya–contemporaries all. But as diplomats repeatedly told government officials smarting at their criticisms: ‘We hold Kenya to higher standards than other countries.’ And when measured against what it could have become, rather than against neighbouring basket cases, Kenya, by the turn of the century, was beginning to look desperately unimpressive, the model pupil turning sullen delinquent. The end of the