Heaping Kenya’s present strife back onto ethnic land grievances is a “real stretch”, Colin. Much of the violence is occurring in Nairobi slums and west-Kenya city suburbs among people who have long ago lost access to cropland. If land was the primary grievance country-wide, why should Luos attack Kikuyus in the sprawling slums of Mathare Valley? — do Luos really want their neighbor’s pieced-together mabati roof and a half-dozen sukuma-wiki plants in the ditch by the outhouse? I don’t think so. I would argue that maintaining high levels of democracy in a country with chronically deep ethnic divisions, a large youth bulge (more than half of all Kenya’s adults are aged 15 to 29), and very few job prospects is risky business. Instead, I would argue that under such conditions, and in a contentious ethnically charged election, it was not very difficult to mobilize violence — and somebody did.