In the first instalment of a series, Peter Swan recalls his service at an exciting time in Kenya's history.

Background.

Brought up a Catholic, my childhood was disrupted when two of my school years were spent evacuated away from city life in London to rural Newton Abbot in the County of Devonshire. My Christian upbringing continued, installing the belief that God monitored my every action, including my thoughts. Schooling in those days also emphasized the fact that the sun always shone on the British Empire.

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"Hamjambo wananchi wote pamoja na wageni wetu. Mimi ni Kisoi Munyao ninaozungumza nanyi kutoka kileleni cha Mlima Kenya. Kenya, Kenyatta, bendera imepepea. Kenya popote mwangaza umeenea." (Hello to all citizens and our visitors. I am Kisoi Munyao, speaking to you from the peak of Mt Kenya. Kenyatta, the flag is flying. All over Kenya, the light is shining).

On that day, in December 1963, Kisoi Munyao stood at the highest point of the new nation. He hoisted a brand new flag, at the dawn of independence; the birth of a nation called Kenya. A flag with red, for the blood that was shed that Kenya could be forever free; green for the land, that would forever be bountiful; black for the people, an African race that had finally won self-determination and dominion over their motherland; white for the peace that, after the war of liberation's proud yet painful legacy, would prevail within Kenya's borders. A flag that would forever symbolise national unity in this independent and sovereign state.

Read more from Njoroge Matathia here.

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I conclude therefore, and this is the premise of my previous article, that the international media has conflated the two issues - the ethnic and the political - and emerged with a gory picture of Kenya that many of us who have lived our whole lives there will find unfamiliar and disturbing. Think what you may about Rwanda, but regardless of what CNN tells you, there was a political issue at the heart of the genocide - poor representation of a section of the population in the government and other institutions coupled with exploitation and harassment, and their perceived involvement in the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana. This was then shrouded in ethnic terms - the community was Tutsi - which in turn led to the genocide. Kenya is not there yet, but if we continue to stretch the cloak of ethnicity over the mutually exclusive political issue we may just get there.

Read more from Nanjala Nyabola here.

The recent elections and post-election riots in Kenya bring forward great sorrow and also give one pause. Is this another situation where Africans tear each other apart, one may ask? How is it that people who have lived next to one another can go after each other in what appears to be the wink of an eye?

As odd as it may sound, I found myself, in reading about the Kenya crisis, thinking about an episode from Rod Serling’s legendary TV series The Twilight Zone. The episode is called “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” and it involves a power failure in a neighborhood that cuts the community off from the outside world and is completely inexplicable. A particular home, however, seems to continue to receive power. The family in that home has kept very much to themselves and has not been interacting with their neighbors. Suspicions fly that this family is either somehow connected to the power failure or knows something that they are not telling. The neighborhood ultimately erupts into violence. At the end of the episode, it turns out that aliens were behind the power failure, testing whether they can get humans to destroy themselves.

Read more from Bill Fletcher Jr. here.