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My Kenyan friends confronted escalating violence, crime, corruption, and poverty- and yet did not despair. I wanted to find out why.

Our 13-year-old daughter was born in Africa, but before last summer she had no memories of that continent, since we left when she was one year old. My wife and I remembered blue skies and rampant bougainvillea, warm-hearted friends, and fascinating intercultural experiences. We wanted our daughter and our two sons to share such memories, so we thought about an extended visit back.

Yet we had fears. For the 12 years we had been gone, Africa had gone from bad to worse. Kenyan friends had written terrible news. Some had been imprisoned on political charges. Some had been beaten and robbed, their lives threatened. All had witnessed a violent coup attempt and had participated in an election characterized by tribal divisions and fraud. One friend's boss, a cabinet minister, was savagely murdered by political opponents. Another friend had witnessed his boss, an Anglican bishop, killed in a traffic accident that most people believe was arranged. A third friend had nearly died in prison, where he was held in solitary confinement on political charges.

I suppose most Americans barely notice the few African items that make the newspaper, but I follow them closely. They portray a place of war, savagery, disease, poverty, and corrupt government. Kenya is very much affected.

War.

Kenya borders on Sudan, which has had unceasing civil war for 20 years; on Somalia, with its murderous clans; on Ethiopia, where rebel armies recently overthrew a repressive Marxist government and split the country; on Uganda, where Idi Amin and Milton Obote slaughtered thousands of tribal opponents before the present, more benign government took power. Of Kenya's immediate neighbors, only poverty-stricken Tanzania, to the south, has been free from internal war. Kenya is just a skip and a jump from murderous Rwanda and Burundi.

No one in Kenya says, "It can't happen here." The last several years the government has (depending on who you believe) at best permitted, and at worst instigated, ethnic cleansing in the Great Rift Valley. Thousands of Kenyans have been driven from their farms. Many have died—no one can say how many, because the government has made the area off—limits to observers. Those cast out now live in refugee camps, while their lands lie fallow. Since many of the victims are from Kenya's largest and most influential tribe, the Kikuyu, the potential for more violence is great.

Disease.

AIDS is rampant in Kenya. Blood screening and disposable needles are not used universally or effectively, so everyone is at risk. At the same time, historic killers like malaria and sleeping sickness have come back with a vengeance, having acquired resistance to the medicines that target them.

Poverty.

Economically, Africa has gone wrong in every way conceivable. World Bank projections suggest that, even if African economies were to grow as well as hoped, it would take an entire generation to gain the level they enjoyed 20 years ago.

In Kenya, the economy has been stagnant while the population has been booming. Theft has become common, as the poor swarm out of their growing slums, and the well-off (meaning anyone who has a home, a car, even a stereo) protect their property with a small army of hired guards, with security alarms, walls, and barred windows. Women are warned never to wear jewelry in public places. (My wife, forgetting the admonitions, had an earring snatched off on Nairobi's main boulevard.) You cannot insure your car, I was told, unless it has at least two security systems protecting it.

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July 17 1995, Vol. 39, No. 8