The violent images piped out of Kenya these days is a “disappointment of such great proportion” to Stephen Seda, a native of Mombasa and Nairobi who has spent most of his adult life in Atlanta promoting economic development in East Africa.
“This puts Kenya back twenty, thirty years,” said Seda. “You’ll never be able to think of Kenya again without thinking about the pictures you see.”
For four decades, Kenya has been a beacon of hope and prosperity in Africa—an example of democracy on the rise and a strengthening economy. But President Mwai Kibaki, who came to power in 2002 amid the country’s hope for positive change, squandered the good will of his people and allegedly stole an election in late 2007 that looked to be a landslide against him. Since then, the country has devolved into violence, leaving more than 1,000 people killed and 300,000 displaced from their homes.
“On the precipice of new change, with everyone who had been voted out, to say the president had still won—the people just couldn’t take that,” said Seda. “The election would have been the showing of a tremendous democracy in Kenya. People spoke their minds through ballots, and then they spoke through violence.”
Growing up, Seda lived with his family above a large orphanage. His father, a social worker, was the orphanage’s head director, and his mother was an office manager for a large industrial company. Because Seda was accustomed to socializing with the orphans both at school and at home, their plight did not make an impression on him at the time. His family was like a family to the orphans, and there were many staff members that served as parental figures.
“(The orphanage) was pretty sophisticated, I think, for those days,” said Seda. “A lot of kids were sponsored for their education in Europe.”
In early 1980, when Seda was sixteen years old, his family moved to Atlanta so that his father could continue his education. Seda enrolled in the Atlanta public school system just after the movie Roots had come out, and Seda was shocked to find out just how ignorant some of his teachers were.
