A break from Kenya, for a moment, for another marvelous passage from Kapuscinski, also from Travels with Herodotus (my previous post here).

In this abridged account of the Algerian coup of 1965, he reveals one of the insights that made him such a marvellous journalist, author, and observer of humanity throughout his life.

A foreigner who might have arrived in Algiers on the same day as I did would not have realized that something as important as a coup d’etat had taken place the previous night.

One could not hear the shots or explosions in the city itself; there were no tanks in the streets, no marching troops. In the morning, people drove or walked to work as usual shopkeepers opened their shops, vendors set up their stalls, and bartender invited one in for a morning coffee.

I walked around crushed–and furious at Judi. Why did he encourage me to make this trip? What did I come here for? What would I write about here? How would I justify the expenditure? Dejected, I suddenly noticed a crowd gathering on the avenue Mohammad V. Unfortunately, they were merely gawkers drawn by the quarrel of two drivers who had collided at the intersection.

My notebook was empty, and I had not witnessed a single event worth describing.

But it was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosions, engulfed in flames and smoke, choked in dust and the stench of burning…

But might it not be possible to pierce that spectacular stereotype, to move beyond imagery, attempt to reach deeper? It seemed only practical to try. Unable to write about tanks, burned cars, and looted stores–having seen nothing of the sort–and wanting to justify my unauthorized journey, I went in search of the background and the wellspring of the Algerian coup, to try to determine what lay behind it and what it signified; to talk, to observe people and places, and to read–and in short, to try to understand.

Unfortunately a reporter in Kenya has plenty of shots and explosions and deaths “worth describing” today.

How then to pierce Kenya’s “spectacular stereotype” of tribal warfare? One is to recognize that tribal divisions in Kenya also map, to a large extent, to class and linguistic and regional divisions, and so we be careful not to overemphasize the tribal element of the divisions and conflicts we observe.

Another is to recognize that this election and the ensuing chaos presents an opportunity for positive change and institutional development (and not simply a risk of decline and conflict). The outrage of the population over potential election fraud, their demands for a recount and adherence to international norms, the (so far) mostly peaceful means by which the opposition party has progressed–all of these things are symptomatic of a change in expectations by the Kenyan populace. If they get their way, paradoxically we could see a strengthening of democracy rather than a weakening these next few weeks.