Don't be alarmed

Some of you are likely to pick up Saturday's New York Times, where you'll see an article by my friend Jeffrey Gettleman about the recent spate of murders in Nairobi. Last weekend two women -- a missionary and her daughter -- riding in a U.S. Embassy car were killed in a carjacking in broad daylight. The same weekend, the top regional official for the charity group CARE USA was murdered in a nighttime carjacking.

The shrugs and gallows humor about "Nai-robbery" aside, the news from last weekend shook the hardened community of Nairobi expats. As Gettleman points out, "something seems to be in the air. Either there is more crime or more publicity about it, perhaps because many of the recent victims have been diplomats." He mentions the best known case, of the American defense attache who was shot by carjackers last fall outside his home not far from the U.S. embassy.

Something is in the air, indeed. Today's Washington Post carries a story by Craig Timberg about the recent crime wave in South Africa, which counts some leading entertainers and other well known figures among its victims. South Africa might be the most crime-ridden country in Africa - certainly the most violently so - Bhargavi and I agree that we both feel safer in Nairobi at night than we do in Johannesburg at dusk. Increasingly, Timberg reports, the the feeling of being at risk of violent crime in SA straddles color lines - both blacks and whites feel like they could be next.

My gut reaction to all this (after the feeling of relief that my parents live in L.A. and don't read either the Times or the Post, or this blog) is that it's worth noting that both these stories were written from the two biggest media, business and humanitarian-aid hubs in Africa. There are other dangerous cities in Africa, to be sure - I've heard you walk alone at night in Dar es Salaam at your peril - but Nairobi, Johannesburg and Cape Town are famously so.

There is tremendous inequality in these cities between the elite/expat community and the 90-plus percent who we as journalists, aid workers, advocates and others are there ostensibly to help. And so we should be saddened, and chastened in our own actions - but we should not be surprised. The elites probably aren't targeted for their skin color or their countries of origin; the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, as well as Kenyan police, were quick to point out that they didn't consider the attack on the women an act of terrorism. But they - or should I say we - are targets because of what we are not, which is part of the vast suffering majority.

The Embassy put out a "warden message" to all Americans in Kenya that urged us to be vigilant and, in the case of a carjacking, to comply with our attackers. It also said that the four people who attacked the missionary and her daughter were riding in an SUV that had been stolen in an earlier carjacking. Driving to a carjacking in your carjacked car - that's either the height of brazenness, or stupidity, or desperation, or maybe all of the above.