Tuesday, December 25, 2007

By JOSHUA HAMMER

On Dec. 27, Kenyans are voting to choose a new president and Parliament; Lekuton was in the capital raising money and trying to decide whether to throw his lot in with the government coalition or with the main opposition party.

The election was promising to be the most democratic and unpredictable in Kenya's history: Polls showed President Mwai Kibaki just behind the challenger, Raila Odinga, a former political prisoner. The prospect of an incumbent president caught in a genuine electoral contest -- a nearly unprecedented event in Africa -- excited Lekuton. "There's never been anything like this in Kenyan politics," he told me.

But along with this democratic opening have come social stresses that Lekuton could not have anticipated when he entered public life. His association with America, where he has spent most of the past 20 years, is becoming a burden: his Muslim opponent, Abubakar Godana Harugura, has not shied away from asserting his Islamic identity, and Lekuton has found himself backing into the political role of a so-called anti-fundamentalist.

The son of nomadic cattle herders in Kenya's far north, Lekuton has compiled a three-decade-long winning streak. After finishing Catholic missionary school, he won a full scholarship to St. Lawrence University in upstate New York and earned a master's degree in international education policy at Harvard. He spent the next 10 years teaching American history at the Langley School in northern Virginia; wrote an autobiography for young people, "Facing the Lion," published by National Geographic; then came home in the spring of 2006 to run for Parliament in a special election following the death in a plane crash of a serving MP.

Partly on the strength of his U.S. connections, Lekuton narrowly defeated the MP's widow, and in his first year in office compiled an impressive record. He channeled public funds to construct schoolrooms and boreholes for wells, lured Western development agencies to his constituency, and distributed some of his ample salary to pay school fees and health-care costs for the indigent. Despite Lekuton's successes, he faces a very serious challenge from Godana Harugura.

A 38-year-old engineer and the former chief of the roads department of Marsabit District (which includes Lekuton's constituency), Harugura had no political experience. What he does seem to have is access to money and influence, in part because he comes from one of the area's most important clans and thus can count on the built-in support a network like that provides.

Just as important, perhaps, is that Harugura is also a convert to fundamentalist Islam -- he began reading the Koran in college in Nairobi, joined the Islamic student union there and adopted the Islamic name Abubakar around the time of his graduation. After announcing his candidacy this past spring, Harugura reportedly raised money from Muslims along Kenya's volatile border with Somalia by promising to "reclaim" the region for Islam.

Earlier, in Lekuton's apartment, I was introduced to three college students from Harugura's home village, Kargi, who told me that Harugura's austere manner, obeisance to Islamic law, Islamic dress, proselytising and questionable connections had earned him the mocking nickname al-Qaida. Indeed, in the view of some of Lekuton's supporters the election was shaping up to be a proxy confrontation between the West and Islam -- a clash of civilizations in the Kenyan bush.

Lekuton himself, however, was more reticent about the perils posed by "Engineer," as Harugura is commonly called in the north. "I've not seen his manifesto," he told me as we sat in the Parliamentary lounge. "The assumption is that with strong religious views, he's bound to step on people's toes. We'll know more as he continues campaigning."

These are some of the most extraordinary and unsettling times in Kenya's post-independence history. The country is in the middle of a boom, its 5.7 percent annual growth rate among the highest in Africa. And while the country is still plagued by corruption, tribalism and poverty, the one-party rule that gripped Kenya for four decades -- first under Jomo Kenyatta, then under President Daniel arap Moi, who voluntarily stepped down in 2002 after 24 years in power -- has given way to one of Africa's liveliest multiparty systems.

At the same time, militant Islam has also found a foothold. A sizable, largely poor Muslim population concentrated along the coast -- and proximity to the volatile states in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Sudan -- have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counterterrorism experts, to the call for jihad.

When I caught up with Lekuton in Nairobi, he had just finished a two-week fund-raising tour of the United States, where he raised alarms about the prospect of a devout Islamist taking charge of a remote corner of the country filled with jobless, poor youths.

But it was not clear in Nairobi whether the alarms were solidly grounded or more a bit of marketing. Harugura and his supporters deny that he has raised any money from Middle Eastern Islamic organisations, say he has put together a strong plan for economic development in the constituency and point out that a large number of Christians support him. Lekuton, they charge, was manipulating American fears about the "Islamic threat" to raise cash -- and Harugura was an innocent victim of religious profiling.

One morning just before the campaign began, I dropped by Lekuton's spartan apartment in the Hurlingham neighbourhood of Nairobi. There I met Ahmed Kura -- a short, stocky man of 24, Muslim by birth, who serves as Lekuton's driver, aide-de-camp and principal spokesman. (He is also Lekuton's brother-in-law.)

Kura has been close to Lekuton for more than a decade, during which time, he told me, he has watched alarming changes creep into Kenya's far north. Kura recalled that when the news of Sept. 11 arrived in Marsabit, the main town in Lekuton's district, "people were celebrating. Some Muslims were saying, 'They deserved that.' They felt that so many Muslims are being harassed in the world. This was a taste of revenge."

It wasn't always like this, Kura insisted. Religious identities in the northern bush have tended to be relaxed and fluid. Kura grew up a Muslim, though he liked to drink a Tusker beer or two with his dinner, and he seldom prayed or attended mosque. His sister, Sophia, became a Christian after attending a missionary school near Marsabit. "In our community almost nobody identifies himself according to religion," he told me. The defining loyalties, he said, were to "clan and tribe."

That was changing, he said, and he partly blamed Harugura for the hardening of attitudes. Harugura first attracted attention in the area a decade ago, when he began constructing roads as the chief district officer for the Ministry of Roads and Public Works, based in Marsabit.

Harugura's ascetic behaviuor rankled many people, Kura said. And besides encouraging local youth to attend madrassas and overseeing the construction of mosques, he had reportedly bankrolled a so-called Muslim village, near Kargi, where 20 families had settled. It was unclear where the money came from, though Kura claimed that the source was a Saudi charity.

It was the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- attacks that killed 224 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and injured 4,000 more -- that awakened U.S. officials to the dangers posed by militant Islam in East Africa. In the years since, the Horn of Africa, and Kenya in particular, has become a locus of U.S. counterterrorism.

The programs include the East African Counter-Terrorism Initiative, set up in 2003 at a cost of $100 million, and the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, a contingent of U.S. Marines and Special Forces based at Camp Lemonier in the coastal African nation of Djibouti. The area has also become, perhaps partly in response, a centerpiece of the global strategy of Osama bin Laden, who last year urged jihadis to take over Somalia.

The Islamic Courts Union, a loose affiliation of Shariah courts, controlled much of the southern part of Somalia in 2005. In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union militia defeated a coalition of U.S.-backed secular warlords in the capital, Mogadishu, began implementing Shariah law there and subsequently consolidated control across most of the country.

Ethiopia, which shares American alarm about the spread of fundamentalist Islam in Africa, moved troops into Somalia and, late in December 2006, backed by U.S. Special Forces, sent 4,000 troops into Mogadishu. Hundreds of fighters and other supporters of the ICU crossed the border into Kenya; between Jan. 2 and 31, 2007, Kenyan police officers rounded up 152 of these men and women from 21 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Yemen and Sudan.

Then, in the controversial practice known as extraordinary rendition, 85 were placed on three chartered aircraft and flown to Mogadishu and Baidoa, where they were turned over to the Ethiopian Army. According to Muslim human rights groups in Kenya, those flown out of Kenya included 18 native-born Kenyans, one of whom was transferred to Guantanamo; the rest remain under house arrest in Addis Ababa.

The renditions have become a rallying cry for Kenya's opposition parties and, for many Kenyan Muslims, a symbol of how their government has grown beholden to American policy.

At 3 one afternoon, Godana Harugura entered the lobby of the slightly down-at-the-heels

Hotel Boulevard

, a popular spot for young American backpackers and budget tourists. Harugura looked youthful, with a white knit cap and a wispy black beard, his dark eyes framed behind square, wire-rimmed glasses. He had assembled eight supporters to join us, including Al Amin Kimathi, the director of the Muslim Human Rights Forum in Nairobi, which accuses the Kenyan government of discrimination against the country's roughly 4 million Muslims (in a total population of 37 million).

Harugura told me that he became a devout Muslim during his four years at college in Nairobi in the 1990s, when an Islamic-consciousness movement was sweeping the youth of a number of African cities.

He said that my conversations with Lekuton's people had filtered back to him, and he was angry about what he had heard. He denied that people in the area had associated him with al-Qaida, jokingly or otherwise, calling it part of Lekuton's disinformation campaign. He said that simply mentioning his name in conjunction with the terrorist group was inflaming passions among his supporters. "This is hurting me as an individual and at the national level," Harugura went on. "Coming on the heels of these rendition issues, it is very sensitive. Next time maybe somebody will be stopping me and picking me up for being al-Qaida."

I asked Harugura whether it was true that he was accepting money from Somalis or from fundamentalist Islamic groups, including the Kuwaitis and Saudis, and he shook his head vigorously.

Lekuton, he charged, was ignoring the area's economic problems -- the barter-based pastoral system had been devastated by chronic drought and was no longer viable, he told me -- and relying on handouts to win people's votes.

The Engineer had little doubt about where the bulk of Lekuton's cash was coming from: "Lekuton is a teacher at Langley School. That is CIA headquarters. He's raising funds right in the heartland of the U.S. intelligence community." There is no connection between the Langley School and the CIA, although they are near each other in Virginia.

Later I met with Al Amin Kimathi in his office on the second floor of the Jamia Mosque, Kenya's largest, a multidomed complex in the heart of the congested city center. An affable former journalist for Kenya's Nation newspaper, Kimathi converted to Islam about 15 years ago. "The Muslim community has never been given a fair shake in this country," he told me.

Kimathi acknowledged that Harugura was trying to spread Islam through northern Kenya. But, he asked, what was wrong with that? Harugura was no jihadi, he insisted.

I asked Kimathi if Americans have reason to fear an Islamic awakening in the Kenyan north. "They have reason to fear," he replied. "But their means of combating the awakening is wrong. The hard manner with which they come down on so-called 'radical Islam' does not quell it; it actually propels it higher."

Both Harugura and Lekuton gave the impression of being caught up, not unlike Kenya itself, in a political narrative that didn't entirely make sense to them or fit their reality but that they were nonetheless unable to escape. It all seems likely to get worse. Lekuton had decided to run with the governing coalition -- which was coming under greater pressure for not standing up more to the American anti-terror agenda. President Kibaki was facing a tide of anger over renditions. The government's unpopularity on this issue would only play into the hands of the opposition, and Harugura's campaign was growing stronger.

•ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joshua Hammer spent six years in Africa as bureau chief for Newsweek. He is writing a book on German colonialism in Africa.