By Andrew Ehrenkranz

Where to first, the driver asked:  Baghdad, Somalia or Darfur?  Even as a hypothetical, it’s not the easiest question to answer. But along a hectic stretch of highway just outside the west Kenyan city of Kisumu, I learned, all these places could be visited in a couple hours on a Friday afternoon.
Kenyan nicknames often seem odd choices for an African nation. Gangs are named after Muslim groups like the

Taliban-even though its members are Christian-and after fighters in remote Kosovo.
Naming places after some of the world’s more troubled areas, though, has a curious logic.  “Baghdad” is an intimidating sprawl of ramshackle houses and shops known as a no-go zone even for police, who keep watch there only during the daylight.  A few hundred meters down the road, you hit the “ Somali Base”, a small roadside of enclave where a large pack of touts and hustlers looking for any way to survive assemble en masse each day.  “We call it Somali base because we don’t have a leader,” says a teenager in a camouflage ball cap named Steven, citing the lack of a government in Somalia as the inspiration for the area’s name.  Crossing into a vast dirt parking lot, a burned-out metallic blue Bedford pickup truck lay wrecked, the words “South Sudan” graffiti on its side door. “You are in Darfur now“ says Ojijio, a curious passerby pointing towards another overturned car with, what else, “Darfur” painted on its hood. Nearby a group of men argued over their pay for transporting a coffin, moving the body from the back of one flatbed truck to the other, to the bereaved family’s dismay.

Life in Kenya’s Darfur is always a struggle, but today, as Kenya stands yet again on the brink of bloodshed--only six weeks after a brokered peace deal ended months of tribally-fueled post-election violence that killed more than 1,500 people and drove close to 300,000 from their homes--things could soon get much worse.
What began as a small sticking point--the balance of power in the government’s cabinet left unresolved in the Kofi Annan-led peace mediations--has put incumbent President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga back at testy loggerheads and the country back on edge, raising enough concern today for  U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger to warn that cabinet stalemate threatens to unhinge the entire power-sharing agreement.   Since Tuesday, small bands of protesters have begun returning to the streets around the country, infuriated by the government’s unwillingness to honor the peace agreement and grant both parties an equal share of key Cabinet positions. 

Kenya’s Darfur took its name shortly after the violence became rampant across Kisumu, a political stronghold of opposition leader Odinga and home to some of the fiercest clashes between Kenyan riot police and protesters during the violence that erupted over the disputed Dec. 27 presidential poll.  After the police started to go on the offensive in dealing with demonstrators, their neighborhood became the only “refuge from police attacking us”, said Freddie Odiambo hovering amongst a crowd of Darfur residents.  There’s also a tribal connection with the people of Darfur; according to Odiambo, the Luo in Kenya originally migrated from South Sudan, and speak a similar mother tongue. “ They are Luos like us” he says, “ We are in solidarity with them.”  While Kenya’s Darfur hasn’t suffered the level of violence and devastation as its namesake in Sudan, suffering is relative.  “We have no money, no jobs, everything is at a standstill”, bellowed a   truck driver  named  Crispin Otiendo, adding that virtually all  building construction in Kisumu is on hold  until there’s no longer a threat of war.  Until then, he believes, things will remain tense and could explode again at anytime. “ Forming a cabinet that is even, 50-50, only that one can make this end,” he says.