NPR’s Coverage of Kenya

During one of my recent commutes from Gainesville to Jacksonville, I was listening to NPR and heard a story about thousands of people in Kenya who were “displaced” from their homes in the days after the results of a presidential election were announced and tribal violence broke out. The violence was so bad that these displaced people were sleeping with wild monkeys in open fields “under the stars.” The reporters interviewed a woman who had helped organize a movement to provide diapers and food to the babies in one field that contained about 4,000 people. The story ended with the reporter saying something like, “…no end in sight.”

After listening to the report, I was overwhelmed with the questions that it had left unanswered. First of all, how do thousands and thousands of people suddenly become”displaced”? Who exactly was forcing these people out and how did they do it? Did the aggressors burn down entire villages? Did they threaten these people with death or rape? Why wasn’t the newly elected president stopping this mass movement out of homes? I also wondered how common this sort of tribal violence is in Kenya. If another presidential candidate had won, would the displaced people have forced their enemies out of their homes instead? Basically, I thought the story lacked the context to help me, a fairly educated listener, understand what was really happening.