African governments are so fragile that they sometimes shatter at the first blow. For much of the last half of 1969, Kenya seemed as if it were due to be an other case in the tradition of the Congo and Nigeria. The gunning down of Tom Mboya on a street in Nairobi last July aroused enough tribal hatred to tear the country apart. Yet somehow, Kenya survived the six months of bitterness. At the start of 1970, it had at least as good a chance for stability as any other country in this volatile, impoverished continent. Kenya’s troubles began with the assassination of Mboya. Mboya, who had been Minister of Economic Planning and Development and the General Secretary of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), was one of the rare African politicians who tried to stand above tribe. He refused to appeal to tribal chauvinism in his election campaigns. Yet, ironically, his murder unleashed Kenya’s greatest surge of tribal hatred since its independence in 1963. The aftermath of Mboya’s death mocked everything he stood for. The members of Mboya’s Luo tribe assumed immediately that the murder was the work of the Kikuyus. The Kikuyus, the tribe of seventy-six-year-old President Jomo Kenyatta, are the dominant and best-educated people of Kenya. Though they number only two million in a population of ten million, the Kikuyus have controlled the major ministries of government and the top civil service positions...

Professors in South Africa sometimes like to stand in front of a wall map and show a visitor the “natural” sphere of influence of their white supremacist country. Invariably, their pointers sweep as far as Zambia, locked inland with Rhodesia to its south, Angola to its west, and Mozambique and Malawi to its east. The professors’ casual gesture suggests one of the dramatic conflicts in Africa — the struggle of black Zambia to free itself from the economic web of the white regimes in southern Africa. Since gaining independence from Britain six years ago, Zambia has tried to turn from the South and reach the other black African nations. Psychologically, this has worked. Zambians talk and act as if their lines were all out to the rest of black Africa. Economically, at least so far, it has not worked. Zambia’s four million people are still dependent on the white-ruled economies south of them. But this dependence has dwindled recently. The Zambians are trying to open new channels to black Africa. The most important is the thousand mile railway that the Chinese Communists are building from the Zambian copperbelt to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The success of Zambia’s drive to the North probably depends on three factors: the strength of President Kenneth Kaunda, the health of the copper industry, and the acquiescence, no matter how reluctant, of white southern Africa...

Before the murder of Tom Mboya in July 1969, Kenya politicians could mute and obscure their country's tribal tensions. The tensions, of course, were always there, straining the fragile unity of the new country, but they did not pervade every side of political life. Personal rivalry counted; so did ideology. The assassination changed all that. For more than a year, Kenya was torn by a dangerous and blatant tribal conflict that colored all political activity. In a sense, this only followed what had happened elsewhere in Africa, where crisis invariably heightens tribal hatreds and suspicions. The results, as Nigeria showed, can be terrifying. But Kenya is not another Nigeria. In recent months, the fury has diminished, giving Kenya a time of calm to deal with its tribal problem. Its future depends on whether its politicians learn to do so...