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The next day, Eric and I headed to the Rift Valley to find where the clashes started. We met up with Peter Njorege, who had a combi, a small four-wheel drive van. What the vehicle lacked in charm, which was lot, it made up in mulish stamina.

We sped north along the valley’s north-south highway, passing towns of single story cinderblock buildings and two- and three-acre shambas, or small farms. The climate is so benign and the volcanic soil so rich, the farmers can coax two harvests a year. But two acres is two acres. It’s not much of a living.

We also see tent cities perched here or there, the temporary camps set up for the IDPs, or Internally Displaced Persons. In less bureaucratic language, these are people who ran for their lives. By some estimates, 600,000 Kenyans fled their homes. Some camps are for Kikuyus, others for Kalenjins. Everyone assures you the situation is peaceful, but none of the camps are mixed.

We pull off at the village of Casino and bounce our way along a badly rutted track. The combi bottoms out in a pothole and the gearbox starts to shriek in low gear as we top the crest of a hill and see the Baraka IDP camp, a small huddle of ragged tents. At one end of the field, far from where the tents are pitched is a large rubbish pit.

The Baraka IDP Camp

When the three of us spill out of the combi, dozens of camp children run to surround us. They just stand there looking up in wonder as if we have just fallen out of the sky, which is pretty much the size of it.

Samuel Maina Wahiu introduces himself as the camp’s “chairman.” He is a slightly built man not much taller than five-foot-four. When he smiles, you can see ridges of brown stain on his teeth indicating a childhood marred by hunger.

When I ask about the fighting, he’s not terribly interested in the question. He has other worries, all of which revolve around the future. The Kenyan government doesn't provide much help, and the Red Cross has pulled out of the Rift Valley IDP camps. With so many IDPs looking for work, casual labor jobs are scarce and the pay is low. Even getting water is hard. The dry season sun has shriveled the closest river. A more distant one that is still flowing is polluted.

It doesn't take much to know the dozens of children around us will likely grow up to be not much taller than Samuel. And their teeth will be scarred also. Eventually, we steer the conversation back to how the fighting started.

“I think the Kalenjins were ready to fight because their leaders prepared them for war,” Samuel said. “We were not.”

There's more than anecdotal evidence like this to back up the charge. While the run up to the elections were peaceful, shops up and down the Rift Valley reported a surge in sales of pangas, hoes and sickles. For a time, you couldn't even find machetes to buy, and one politician was stopped by police with a trunk carrying more than 60 pangas. In retrospect, it's obvious the killings were orchestrated.

But at the time, the start of the fighting took most people by surprise. Samuel said he heard the news of the results on the radio, and the next thing he knew, two large gangs of young Kalenjin men stormed his village. The raiders beat anyone who opposed them, looted the houses, and drove off the livestock. They even wrenched the metal window frames from the walls and stripped the roofs of corrugated iron sheets. They burned what they couldn’t take.

 Samuel insists there is no trouble right now but when pressed on the matter, he points out that all the villages neighboring Baraka are controlled by Kikuyus, hardly an endorsement of trust. As for whether the fighting could erupt in the future, he shrugs his shoulders. “Who knows?”

***

 After hitting the pothole, the combi trails a cloud of black smoke behind it as it labors up the rolling hills into the heart of the farming country. At Baraka, we had picked up Francis Kisiaruki, a soft spoken man who has offered to show us where the fighting took place. As we pass one abandoned shamba after another, he tells us who used to live there. While the charred skeletons of the houses remain, the fields are freshly plowed. Have the farmers returned? Francis shakes his head. The Kalenjin have simply appropriated their neighbors’ fields.

Francis tells Peter to pull over near burnt out planks that jut up from the earth. Next to it, I can see the foundations of a small hut. As we walk among what had been walls, the wind tosses the wildflowers that have sprung up inside. Francis explains this had been a Roman Catholic church, but the church leaders split along ethnic lines until one night a group of armed men appeared. They gang raped the woman who lived in the hut and was the church’s caretaker before they burned the church to the ground.

Reflecting the chaos of the time, Francis doesn’t even know if the gang was made up of Kalenjins or Kikuyus or even some other group. Perhaps it’s not important because the message being sent was clear: Nothing is sacred.

Francis stands amid what’s left of his Roman Catholic church.

“Can you believe it?” Francis asks. “We had just rebuilt the church in 2003, and they start arguing. Then the church is burned, and now we have nothing. Not even God.”

***

 We head towards Total Junction, a town that sprouted like a weed in recent years. Francis leads me along row after row of destroyed buildings. The place looks like it’s been bombed.

The fighting lasted for days here, Francis explains, and by the end, even the police force had split with Kikuyu officers shooting at Kalenjin officers. A gasoline station at the cross roads ensured both sides had plenty of gas for Molotov cocktails. Who ultimately won isn’t clear. The town is almost completely abandoned.

What's left of Total Junction.

“I am very sad,” Eric remarks as we walk amid the wreckage. “When we first came here, I remembered how it was before the clashes. This was a vibrant town. And now…” He gestures with one hand at the scene around us suddenly at a loss for words.

We head back towards Nakuru to get the ailing combi to a friend of Peter’s brother, Kefa, who says he can fix it.

 ***

 In the cool of the evening, we sit in the bar of the Hotel Kunste. I’m having a tough time figuring out how the gangs of men could appear at night and then melt away during the day. Where did they come from? Who were they? Where did they go? Peter shoots a look at Kefa. Then Kefa explains.

Outside of Nakuru, lies the Menengai Crater, a vast caldera of a dormant volcano. Cave openings dot the outside of the crater wall, and one of them served as a hideout for a Kikuyu militia which launched revenge attacks in Nakuru. The next day, we take the combi, which after its repairs sounds marginally better, up to the top of the wall and head down through a series of forest logging roads to a large pit.

During the clashes, Kikuyu militia made this into a stronghold. The sacred fig is to the left.

Clambering down the sides, we come across the opening to a volcanic vent that is dominated by a strangling fig tree. The Kikuyus regard the fig as a holy tree because its seeds lodge in the branches of a host tree and send runners down to earth. The Kikuyu say the tree grows down from heaven.

Looking out from inside the cave. The blue atmosphere is caused by the smoke from the fire to the right. You can see the outline of two Kikuyus praying. Two other Kikuyus stand in the entrance, keeping an eye on our party.

Today, the path way around the inside of the pit is lined with Kikuyu men and women who have come to fast and pray. They sit and lie under rough shelters of plastic sheeting, lost in meditation, much as their ancestors would have been when they worshipped Ngai, the Kikuyu god who lived on Mount Kenya. Only now, the Kikuyu pray to Jesus. During the clashes, the militia would emerge at dark to set up roadblocks, the same ones Eric flew over. I'm not sure if the militia bothered to pray, but I bet their victims did, if they had the chance.