'We have our own people to hire'
It was during his college years in Nairobi that Chwanya began to see himself as different from his Kikuyu friends, he said. He noticed that they received loans and scholarships but he never did.

Though he excelled in his studies and earned a marketing degree, he began looking for a job at the beginning of the Kibaki years and found that Kikuyu-managed firms tended to hire their own. He was finally hired by a British relief organization and went to work in Sudan.

When he came back to Kenya, he applied for public service jobs but was turned down so many times that he came to believe that only a Kikuyu could work for the government. Once, he said, a Kikuyu manager told him explicitly, "We have our own people to hire."

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He finally managed to land a job selling office products.

"The manager was not Kikuyu," Chwanya said. "Though he was married to a Kikuyu -- so you see how these things work."

In the office, most of the employees were Kikuyu and cliquish, often speaking to one another in the Kikuyu language, Chwanya said.

"There were three guys from Luoland who worked there," he said. "We were given sales targets that were different from the others -- they were trying to get rid of us."

He was let go after a year and, with mounting anger and bitterness, gave up on Nairobi.

He headed back to Luoland, where he worked as a taxi driver. Roaming around the towns and villages there, he saw things differently than he had as a boy.

He noticed that the roads in his homeland were worse than in the Kikuyu areas where he had worked as a salesman. His parents' homes did not have running water. There were few jobs. Sugar farmers who sold to Kikuyu middlemen were barely scraping by.

When Chwanya eventually returned to Nairobi, the only job he could get was with a foreign-owned company selling security systems. "The owner is British," he said. "So it's a bit different because he's not related to anyone."

Social networking or business savvy?
As Chwanya's frustration grew over the years, Samuel Mathu was feeling increasingly optimistic about his future, especially after Kibaki became president in 2002.

It was around then that he decided to leave his small pyrethrum farm in the town of Kipipiri, in the Kikuyu heartland of central Kenya, and start a business in Nairobi. He found a handful of Kikuyu investors and set off for the city. "A lot of people from my place were here," Mathu said, explaining why he landed in Kangeme. "So they told me what to do."

He started out selling imported secondhand clothes, a business dominated by a tightly knit Kikuyu network. A neighbor from Kipipiri sold him his first supply of clothes, he said, and after a year hawking old Tommy Hilfiger merchandise in the mazelike markets of Kangeme, he turned a modest profit.

Mathu got into the more lucrative electronics business when a Kikuyu friend, also from his home town, offered him a deal to take over his small shop in the market.

He now gets all his televisions, radios, DVD players and other electronic items from his hometown buddy, the sort of arrangement that is common in Kangeme, where Kikuyus own most of the shops and houses.

Mathu attributes that fact less to social networking than to hard work and business savvy.

"A lot of people, these tribes, they do not know how to do business," Mathu said. "They rely on being employed somewhere. The Kikuyu, they know how to do business."

As he sold watch batteries and cassette tapes to a steady stream of customers, Mathu said he never considered voting for Odinga because in his view, Kibaki had done so much for Kenya. When he goes home to Kipipiri, he said, he can see the difference.

"In my place, no cars were passing on the roads before," he said. "But now, even if it's dark, you can drive -- the road is now smooth. We were taking water from the river, and now we get water from taps. Now people are coming to our town to collect potatoes and vegetables. Kibaki has done a lot."

For that reason, Mathu said, he was certain that Kibaki would win a second term.

'Multi-tribes against the Kikuyu'
At the same time, Chwanya and millions of other non-Kikuyus across Kenya believed with an almost revolutionary zeal that Odinga would win and end the decades of Kikuyu dominance.

"This was multi-tribes against the Kikuyu, because we realize these people have led Kenyans for many years," Chwanya said. "We had no other means to speak."

In the two days after the election, exit poll numbers suggested that Odinga was headed for a decisive victory. But then disputed votes began pouring in, sparking charges of rigging. When Kibaki was declared the winner, Chwanya said to himself, "This thing is going to be done over our dead bodies," he recalled.

Meanwhile, Mathu and his Kikuyu friends were taking to the muddy streets of Kangeme to celebrate. Within about 15 minutes, however, they were being stoned by rioters in the first wave of the violence that eventually swept across Kenya, leaving more than 500 people dead.

Even now, his leg gashed by a stone, Mathu said he does not fully understand why his customers and neighbors have turned against him. "All these things that came, I don't know what I can say," he said. "I don't know what I can say."

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