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.