What was he trying to do in this book, which has drawn comparisons with Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks? Both novels begin with a celebration and close with the end of an era brought to its knees by inner decay. The mass of characters around Tellkamp’s triangular set of protagonists is certainly Tolstoyan and many scenes burst with Kafkaesque madness. People queue up at shops just because everybody does so, even though no one has a clue what might be on offer inside. Bananas? Fabric? Tellkamp depicts the grotesque idiosyncrasies of the GDR’s bureaucracy. He speaks with the slowness and sobriety that comes with growing up in a system where the wrong word at the wrong time can set one’s existence ablaze.

If his protagonists Christian, Richard and Meno do not quite choose inner emigration, they are certainly very far removed from the hardship and humiliation most citizens of the GDR suffered from. Hence The Tower:  a social set retiring into an ivory tower, not wanting to see, not wanting to know whatever might be going on outside. The title also alludes to the Tower of Babel — man asking impossible things and stubbornly trying to achieve them against the odds. Finally the Tower, Der Turm, is a real neighbourhood of quiet, broad, leafy streets and crumbling, grand villas in Dresden. However, Tellkamp creates a fictive version of that still-beautiful city: divided by the River Elbe, his Dresden morphs into a new Eastern and Western Rome, where his characters live. Christian — the author’s alter ego — is a pimply youth who writes poetry and dreams of becoming a doctor, like his father Richard. For this he has to display absolute loyalty to the Party, which he just about manages to do, until reality catches up with him in a most brutal manner during his military service. The pursuit of happiness and dreams while maintaining personal integrity was an almost insurmountable contradiction in the GDR. Richard himself, whose 50th birthday celebrations open the novel, seems to lead a fulfilled and happy life. He only discloses his dark secret and second private life when put under ultimate pressure by the Stasi, the omnipresent secret police. Last but not least, Meno, Christian’s uncle on his mother’s side, is an editor at a publishing house specialising in fine editions, struggling with both a lack of supplies such as good quality paper as well as with censorship and compromises. In his salon talk can get very candid — much too candid — and here Tellkamp displays masterfully the intellectual shackles and the sheer suffocation the younger generation of intellectuals must have felt in the twilight of the GDR.

Even though each of the men has their gripping story, Tellkamp devises his own system of time, which lingers on some episodes, just to speed up others and offer them relatively little space. If there is a plot it wears thin over the hundreds of anecdotes he weaves into the beautiful, rich and capricious language of his narrative. Though the heavily populated novel and its many directions threaten to lose focus, Tellkamp still offers a vast survey of life in the GDR, seeking a documentary as well as a philosophical truth. Nevertheless, he steers clear of “Ostalgie”, nostalgia for the good old days of the GDR that some of its former citizens still feel. “There is no Ostalgie. That is something for the former hippies of the GDR, who could scrape by on next to nothing. The Social Democrats themselves feel no Ostalgie. They are energised, as they keenly feel their loss. Let us never forget what really caused the demise of this country: The SED [East German Communists] and the Soviet System,” says Tellkamp. “Look at Bulgaria, look at Romania, who did not have a Federal Republic who was there to sort them out.” Still, he chose “Tales of a lost country” as the book’s subtitle. “It is a lost country. Its colours, its smells and fragrances, its sounds, brands, codes and ways of behaviour are forever gone. The period from after World War II, which ended in West Germany in the Wirtschaftswunder — the economic miracle of the ’50s — just continued in the East until the end of the ’80s.”

The end of the ’80s: a sad decade dominated by fear — how would things end? “We had no idea what would happen. Nobody expected it so soon, and nobody expected its utterly peaceful way.” Have extra supplies of blood ready: this blunt message is sent in Tellkamp’s novel from Berlin to Dresden, as the protests grow and grow. The end of Tellkamp’s tale basks in light and hope: “All their faces showed the fear of the last few days . . . but also something new: they shone    . . . already full of pride that this directness was possible.” He evokes the moment when the chant of the candle-lit Montagsmärsche — the peaceful demonstrations taking place in Leipzig and Dresden every Monday night — turns from “We are the people” to “We are a people.” Here one almost wishes that the translator Michael Mitchell — and translating The Tower must have been a Herculean task which he has tackled bravely and diligently — had chosen the word “folk”. The German original statement “Wir sind ein Volk” expresses in all its simplicity everything there was and is to say about the demise of the GDR and German reunification.

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Sudeley has dominated the Cotswolds scenery for a thousand years; on a clear day the views reach to the Black Mountains in Wales. Katherine Parr moved here after her somewhat hasty marriage to her true love Thomas Seymour, Baron of Sudeley, just one month after Henry’s death. Her brother-in-law Edward, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector, stripped her of her royal jewellery and properties, yet this did not diminish her passion for her husband. Original love letters to Thomas are on display and are quite racy for Tudor days. Katherine, a slim and elegant woman, was highly educated and had a way with words: her two books were bestsellers. 

The castle was slighted by Cromwell during the Civil War: today, ten different gardens frame its ruined walls as well as the surviving wing. Sudeley’s garden adviser Sir Roddy Lewellyn dotes with vagabond charm on his pet projects, such as a 16th-century-style knot garden and the Tudor herbarium. 

Katherine, with four husbands England’s most-married queen, did not enjoy life as châtelaine of Sudeley for long. During her only pregnancy she had to watch the ambitious Seymour wooing Princess Elizabeth. On September 5, 1548, just seven days after giving birth to her only child, Lady Mary Seymour, who survived but probably died aged two, she died aged 36 of puerperal sepsis. A short walk leads to her tomb in St Mary’s Chapel. Parr’s sarcophagus was only discovered in 1782. Thanks to its lead coffin, her corpse was found to be in perfect condition before the tomb was repeatedly pilfered. A re-enactment of her splendid Anglican funeral is the final highlight of the festival.

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Take Francis Monk-Mason, for example. The gregarious seventysomething bachelor lives peacefully with two Labradors in the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen. Come August, as he has done for many years, he will be on the plane to Germany to see the latest staging of Wagner’s masterpieces in the maestro’s very own opera house.

The classical building on top of a green hill (it is even known as Der Hügel) dominates the friendly, unhurried Bavarian town of Bayreuth. Richard Wagner himself chose the peaceful location because he wished his music to be enjoyed free from distraction. The Bavarian King Ludwig II obliged. 

Since 1876 Bayreuth has performed — with some notable interruptions — a cycle of ten “music dramas”, the most famous of which is undisputedly Wagner’s masterpiece, The Ring. Germany’s rich, aristocratic and famous as well as a tightly-knit global commune of Wagner lovers, the so-called “Friends of Wagner”, who are also generous donors, descend upon the festival, to see and be seen. 

With only a couple of weeks to go before  the premiere of this year’s Bayreuther Festspiele on July 25, the mother of all opera festivals resembled a sleeping beauty. Flowerbeds needed weeding, windows were dusty, doors locked, while a stray handyman prepared one of the seven rehearsal stages. 

The peace and quiet are deceptive. As it should be for any theatre, life behind the stage goes on in all its twists and turns. The Wagner family has never let Bayreuth and the festival out of its grip. Even after the festival’s rebirth in 1951, when the brothers Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner decided to clear away the cobwebs of Bayreuth’s close association with Hitler, who had been an ardent admirer of Wagner’s oeuvre, it was their personal fiefdom. Only their mother Winifred, a close friend of the Führer, was excluded from the hill. The Wagners’ jus soli (“right of soil”) had become inextricably  entwined with their jus sanguinis (“right of blood”). 

In 2008, the decision regarding the hotly disputed succession of the patriarch Wolfgang Wagner made headlines. The Richard Wagner Foundation appointed the half-sisters Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner as joint directors of the festival.    Because of  the acrimonious divorce of their father from his first wife, Eva and Katharina had never met or spoken before. The sisters are separated by more than 35 years in age and a huge gap in experience: Eva has worked at houses such as Covent Garden and the Opera Bastille, while Katharina had been heavily criticised for her own staging of Meistersinger from 2007-11. 

They are, however, united by a powerful name and calling. “We get along just fine,” says Katharina somewhat defensively, perhaps tired of the endless speculation about their intellectual inheritance and personal relationship. “We don’t scratch each other’s eyes out. People just have nothing to gossip about and are unhappy with that.” Just get on with it, she seems to say, yet it is clear that the joint governance can’t be an easy one. 

Their task is undoubtedly monumental. Together, and nolens volens, they had to transform the €25 million-a-year  festival into a modern theatre company in order to justify public subsidies, which amount to 40 per cent of the annual cost. Reforms started everywhere at the same time and are riddled with problems, which is not surprising given the scale of the operation. Contracts had to conform to the demands of trade unions. This means a steady increase in wages as well as regulated working hours — a nightmare for any cash-strapped artistic enterprise. The widely criticised ticket distribution system had to be made more transparent — the longest wait for tickets was 13 years and demand still exceeds supply by five to one. Since 2010 it has been possible to place orders on the internet, although which performance and on what date is still up to the festival’s discretion. In 2013, the year of Wagner’s 200th anniversary, this is to change. For the first time, tickets for one of the operas are to be sold online — first come, first served. Bayreuth wants to make itself more democratic, and that, too, isn’t easy. On August 11, the staging of Parsifal is to be streamed to cinemas throughout Europe.

The former principal sponsor, Siemens, pulled out of the public screening of the operas on Bayreuth’s Marketplace last September. A Facebook page exists, yet seems untended — it mainly reports about ongoing building work. 

Katharina Wagner concedes: “Our main problem is the building. At the moment, style reigns over substance.” The critics of the Wagner sisters devour words of such Delphic nature, especially ahead of the anniversary year of 2013 and in light of the fragile balance of power between the Richard Wagner Foundation, owner of the concert hall and the Wagner residence, Villa Wahnfried, and the wealthy Friends of Wagner. They are tapped for the most urgent renovations, which are rumoured to cost about €20 million, yet are often on the conservative side artistically. In their opinion, Bayreuth productions are often too avant-garde and detrimental to Wagner’s spiritual inheritance. Is a trade-off between the Wagner sisters and the Friends imaginable — funds for the renovation in exchange for a less brave new Wagner world? In public, the Wagners insist that their artistic freedom is untouchable, as are the ideas of their chosen directors and conductors. 

Bayreuth is proud of its close co-operation with Christian Thielemann, who conducts The Flying Dutchman at this year’s opening. Many people, especially the Friends, want an even closer co-operation with him. The Wagners have cast Lance Ryan as Siegfried in 2013 and Eva Maria Westbroek as Isolde in 2015. These are big names. However, it took an extensive search before the anniversary Ring in 2013 was assigned to Frank Castorf, artistic director of the Berliner Volksbühne, who is relatively inexperienced for such a  production, which is nothing short of colossal. Wim Wenders turned them down, while other candidates, such as the film director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (of The Lives of Others fame), were far-fetched. Furthermore, there are still a lot of gaps to be filled for 2013 as far as casting is concerned. 

Not surprisingly, Eva Wagner-Pasquier has been criticised for her very speciality, the choice of artists, and here, too, her inheritance and the unwritten rules of Bayreuth take their toll. Artistic directors and conductors have to arrive for their five or six weeks of rehearsals well prepared and with a concept already in mind. There is little or no room for learning by doing or much creative licence and inspiration once work has started. One Tannhäuser conductor called the circumstances during the run-up to the opening a “suicide mission”. The changing line-up of the orchestra is a further burden: the musicians turning up for rehearsals are not necessarily the ones who perform in the late afternoon.

The Wagner sisters brush off all such criticism and speculation about their future and that of the festival after 2013, when talks about a renewal of their contracts are due. Officially they end in 2015, which invites all sorts of speculation, both friendly and hostile. Will the young, ambitious Katharina try to outmanoeuvre her half-sister and even  banish her from the hill? Or might their cousin Nike Wagner stage a third attempt to gain the Richard Wagner Foundation’s vote? Nike is currently artistic director at Weimar and has twice unsuccessfully tried to seize control of the  Bayreuth festival. Or, shock horror, is the festival  imaginable without a Wagner family member at its helm? Is Wagner without Wagner still Wagner? You have to earn your inheritance in order to own it, as Goethe wrote. 

Wagner is never easy, either for insiders or outsiders. The seats in the concert hall are famously uncomfortable and demand extraordinary steadfastness on the part of his admirers. For Katharina Wagner, Bayreuth lives, despite all its problems. As long as her great-grandfather’s operas are staged here, from the more accessible productions right through to the heavyweight Ring, and as long as his audience feels his compositions as much as it hears them, the show will go on. 

Meanwhile, Francis Monk-Mason has just booked his tickets for 2013 with a Nairobi travel agent. To Wagner or not to Wagner, is never the question for Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner, as well as for the master’s countless admirers around the globe. 

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The best things in life are free. But a good education in Britain is, in most cases, an exception to the rule. In the struggle to secure a place at an above-average state primary school, the parents’ location, location, location is often crucial. However, as many of the best primaries in inner London are denominational, church attendance also counts. 

If you are from the Continent, the idea of struggling for education in a G8 country seems ludicrous. Parents in the rest of Europe  happily send their children to the local primary school and later to the nearest equivalent of a grammar school. When our second son was on his way, we moved from a tiny third-floor flat on the rougher edges of Notting Hill to a hidden mews in the even rougher middle of Bayswater. It was 2004, the housing market was flat and somehow we were able to afford this gem of a house. It was like a bit of southern Italy in the heart of big, grubby London. 

Schooling was then the least of our concerns. The day our eldest son would turn four seemed an eternity away. The social housing estate of Hallfield at the other end of Inverness Terrace had an integrated primary school. Hallfield’s inhabitants reflect Britain’s imperial heritage. I had grown up in Kenya, where we pupils sat cross-legged on the bare earth. The foundations of knowledge were laid by rote-learning. We repeated the words written on the blackboard after the teacher, who was my mother. Play time and outdoor endeavours, such as tunnel-digging, were important. Every child received an old metal spoon and off we went into the bush. I was the only white face in my class, which was OK in Africa. But was it OK for my sons in London? 

The Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens was our second living room. I started to listen to the other mums there, which is the easiest way to be driven to despair and madness. One little Hugo was three months young and already down for 12 schools. Would Poppy be happier in Pembridge Hall or Faulkner House, one mother wondered (she had opted for a Caesarean to meet the deadline for Pembridge Hall, which Poppy had been “down for” since birth)? Faulkner House offered circus lessons, essential for hand-eye co-ordination. George’s mum felt that no school was really up to him — and he was only 15 months old. He had a Chinese nanny, who kept up a relentless stream of Mandarin in order to expand the little boy’s brain. You could hear George’s synapses screaming. How on earth did Leonardo ever become Leonardo, I wondered.  

I temporarily gave in, even though we couldn’t really afford to. I had chosen to end my career as a TV presenter — the glamour of which had waned very fast — and was now a full-time novelist. My husband was building up his own company in healthcare IT. Success came painfully slowly. My boys’ names were on the waiting list at both Wetherby’s and Hawkston House. I cringed while paying the £50 administration fee for each boy at each school. 

Wetherby’s headmistress informed me curtly that a visit to the school was not possible until she felt that either boy had a real chance of gaining a place. Given the length of the waiting list, this would be at their retirement. 

I remembered my compatriot Immanuel Kant and decided not to listen and not to follow, but to have the courage to apply my own reasonable judgment. It was then that a friend said: “Well, that church at the other side of the park, opposite Barkers, has a very good school attached to it. You’d have to attend, though.” Faith had always supported and helped me. During my studies in Paris, I was surprised to see how open and casual people were about faith.
Believing was an acceptable and done thing, even among the young. When visiting cities abroad, I make a point of entering the churches. I sit silently in the benches for a moment, before lighting a candle to give thanks for a rich and fruitful life. The idea of a Christian education for the boys was close to my heart. Both were christened, knew the stories of the Bible and were to attend St Peter’s Nursery on Portobello Road. They could choose not to believe later, but first they had to know what it was all about. At worst, a Christian education could help them appreciate three quarters of humanity’s greatest works of art. 

I did my homework. The Anglican church and school on Kensington High Street were called St Mary Abbots. A child had to attend services and a crèche there regularly for at least two years, before it could be considered for registration at the school. I told my husband, who belongs firmly in the “big bang” camp as opposed to the “creationist” one, about the link between school and church. He said: “That’s great. We’ll attend, and you can have a lie-in.” What was a young mother to say? It sounded fantastic. 

Things went well. The crèche, my husband told me, was a small group of mostly British children. Every Sunday, he now talked to more English people than he had done in our previous five years in London. Few foreigners in this international city have British friends. The crèche was run by fun and dedicated volunteers. The boys made arts and crafts, sang and played. Oh, and had I heard about the Friday morning playgroup? “Hm,” I said. Weeks and months went by. My husband started to greet people in the street I did not know, among them an attractive blonde woman. “Who was that?” I asked. “Her name is Mariella Frostrup. She’s a writer and TV presenter, just like you,” he kindly said. Next was a couple out shopping with their three children on Portobello Market. Their eldest seemed to be severely handicapped. My husband greeted them and we walked on. “And who was that?” I wanted to know. “That was David Cameron,” he answered. “Don’t you know him? He’s the leader of the Conservative Party.” To his endless amusement, I am, despite a prestigious PPE education, unable to identify key politicians. “Why don’t you come along to church next time?” he said. 

We crossed Kensington Gardens on a clear Sunday morning. The air was crisp and the vast green lawns were empty. The waters of the round pond lay still. The powerful sound of the church bells came rolling towards us. We slipped in through a side gate. I settled next to my husband. Both boys were dressed in their Sunday best, which for me means lederhosen. 

The Vicar, Gillean Craig, entered wearing the splendid gowns of the High Church of England and looking like an older and kinder John Malkovich. I was smitten. He was followed first by the choir and then by all the children. My boys settled on the stairs of the High Altar and then followed the playgroup leaders out of church. At coffee, talking to other parents came easily. At St Mary Abbots, you find all sorts: an Iranian heart surgeon, whose father was an eminent Persian poet; an English lawyer-turned-sculptor and mother of three, who shared her weekend cottage with a gay couple. I also saw the Camerons again. Samantha Cameron looks much better in the flesh than in photos, a real English beauty with a wicked sense of humour. Her husband would hold Ivan, their handicapped son, for two hours on his lap, talking to him and caressing him while checking his BlackBerry. His table won quiz night hands down and when he came to a “meet-the-parents night” he patiently listened over salad and lasagne to an old lady’s vision of healthcare. 

I started to muck in. I attended playgroup on Friday mornings in Vicarage Gate. Mothers of all backgrounds and all nationalities brought tea and coffee for themselves and healthy snacks for the kids. Father Gillean would pop in and know us and our children by our names. I ran the Sunday crèche, which grew rapidly. The media had heard of the Camerons’ attendance and people flocked to the church to be close to impending greatness. Still, it was fun to involve the children and to make Christianity come to life for them. 

It was then that the same friend who had initially recommended St Mary Abbots said to me: “It must be such a pain to suck up to the vicar every Sunday.” I just looked at her. She had got the wrong end of the stick. St Mary Abbots, its vicar and its congregation had performed a miracle. As a foreigner in London, I now felt that I belonged. We had become part of something bigger than just everyday life. 

However, reality bit otherwise. Our mews was no longer a safe haven. Neighbouring Queensway brought rats in the night and discarded syringes in the morning. Pickpockets left the plundered wallets of tourists in our bushes. Every night, a drifter came into the mews. He yelled in Italian and was obsessed with cleanliness — he’d wash himself in the mews using a standpipe — and with lighting and extinguishing matches. One of our neighbours suffered a nervous breakdown and started relieving herself in full view of my fascinated boys. 

One of the houses was renovated and rented out to Russians for £1,500 a week, more than our monthly rent. Property prices were booming so we were asked to leave. We were unwilling to live in a two-bedroom flat on some third floor again. Hallfield was still a threat, as St Mary Abbots had become so over-subscribed. We could not be sure of obtaining a place. “If we stay, the boys will go to the German school in Richmond later, won’t they? We might as well move there now,” my husband decided. In May 2007, a van with all our belongings left the mews. 

On the boys’ last morning at St Peter’s Nursery I was in tears. A month later, when we had just unpacked the last boxes in Richmond, the allocation of primary school places in Kensington & Chelsea came through. Our eldest son was invited to join reception at St Mary Abbots, “the most sought after primary school in England,” as the Sunday Times gushed. A commute was out of the question. Richmond offered us a house with a garden, the park, the river, its very own intelligentsia — a relaxed set of people — and, last but not least, a place in reception at the brilliant Vineyard School. 

My husband took the decision as I was unable to. Richmond it was, there was no moving back. I confessed to Father Gillean and at least I knew that our decision made another family on the waiting list of St Mary Abbots very happy. We now have a lovely life in Richmond. Yet each time I pass St Mary Abbots, I slip inside for a quiet moment. I still feel that I belong. London has forever become a much better place — thank God. 

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The Village Market is one of Nairobi’s most elegant shopping malls. Nestled between the jungle-like Hills of Muthaiga, an old and expensive part of town, it bustles with life on a Friday afternoon. The weekend starts early and the parking lot is full of Toyotas, Mitsubishis and Peugeots, as repairing them in the case of a breakdown is an easy DIY job. Prices in the cafés and the ice-cream parlour are high, but most of the punters are Kenyans – and not of the white or Asian variety. “Going to the shopping mall on a Friday afternoon sets a signal. I show everybody that I have made it. I can afford to pay 100 Kenya shillings (about £1) for a bottle of Coke instead of 20 bob at the kiosk down the road,” says Stella Wamuyu, before she is off to shop at Nakumatt, an African supermarket chain, which offers shampoo from Paris next to Chilean wines. Nakumatt’s business was up by $250 million in the past year.

Stella works as the manager of a luxury hotel on the island of Lamu, where she heads a team of 23. They cater to the whims of tourists paying $500 a night. Her husband lives in Nairobi together with their eldest child. He is a manager at a local foreign exchange branch and for one week a month Stella joins him in the capital. She replaced a “Mzungu”, a white man, two years ago and she relishes the opportunity. She was born one of 11 children and grew up in Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria. For her, the choice of a career in the service and hospitality industry was a natural one. Tourism contributes about ten per cent of Kenya’s annual economic output. “I started in the kitchen, ten years ago. Today, I am the manager, but I still empty a full ashtray when I see it.”

Stella leads by example, and certainly many young Kenyans would wish to follow her footsteps. Education is important here: about 85 per cent of children attend school regularly. Even in the remotest area of northern Kenya, you will see children on their way to and from school. Their shirts are spotless and their shoes, hand-me-downs from Europe, polished. You’d never guess they had just left a mud hut, in which they live without electricity and water. The number of Kenyans enrolled in colleges has doubled in the past 10 years to almost 100,000. The University of Nairobi is considered the best in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa excluded. Kenyans still hope to study abroad, but now exchanges are increasingly two-way.

Graduates seek jobs in international businesses, such as the two-year trainee-scheme that Barclays Bank offers in Kenya. Education and work allow them access to the life of their dreams: their own house, one or two cars, private education, holidays and gadgets, such as mobile phones and plasma-screen TVs. The BlackBerry remains a symbol – nobody is quite that busy yet. They will join the ranks of small-business owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and civil servants who are fuelling a construction boom in Nairobi-600 new cinder-block condominiums, complete with landscaped gardens, gyms, pools and broadband internet. However, Kenya is still Kenya. In order to get the contract, the construction firm had to offer a large “present” to government officials – “chai”, or tea, as it is called in local slang. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. New neighbourhoods develop, such as Ngong Town, at the foot of the Ngong Hills made famous by Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. The neat red roofs of the new houses clash with lumber-yards, hairdressing salons and internet cafés, on which advertisements are painted in garish colours.

Rebecca Kinoti, a clothes and bags designer who has ten other women sewing for her, says: “If I can afford to rent, I might as well buy.” Barclays Bank is there to help people like her; it now has 32 branches in Kenya. A mortgage with Barclays ties a Kenyan customer in for 20 years at an interest rate of 15 per cent, with a 10 per cent deposit and no maximum loan limit. A lot of Kenyans have the confidence to agree to such terms. The middle classes believe in their future. Is their confidence justified? Rebecca Kinoti shrugs her shoulders. “You have to be fast in making decisions. Prices rise and life is short.” A Kenyan economist estimates that of the population of about 37 million people, about four million are middle class, earning between $2,500 (£1,700) and $40,000 (£27,000) a year.

Until the December 2007 election the middle classes were the factor that made Kenya different from other sub-Saharan African states. Kenya seemed not to be consumed by ethnic conflict. However, the election changed all that. It pitted the two major ethnic groups-Luo and Kikuyu-against each other. The mainly Luo supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement fought against the Party of National Unity, led by the ruling President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyan. The middle class, however, identify themselves as much by where they live, work and went to college as by their tribal ancestry. Stone-throwing, machete-clutching mobs with mud-smeared faces threatened to turn their lives upside down. During the violence, the middle class tried to act as an agent of peace: executives of multinational and local companies met both Kibaki and Odinga to push through a power-sharing agreement. “They just forced the government to get on with it,” says Richard Leakey, the son of the famous paleoanthropologists and head of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

The violence that tore the country apart caused almost $3.5 billion worth of damage to the Kenyan economy and growth fell to 2.1 per cent at the end of 2008, down from 6.3 per cent the year before. On the bright side, the ratings company Fitch revised its outlook on Kenya’s long-term foreign and local currency issue default ratings from “negative” to “stable”. When the World Bank recommended last October that the country seek alternative financing, the government revived a plan to sell $500 million worth of sovereign bonds. The decision should be taken before the end of the fiscal year in June, said the Economic Secretary, Geoffrey Mwau. Such a sale is in the interest of the Kenyan middle classes, who like to assume their share of responsibility in the country. When the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) offered shares to the public, they were over-subscribed by 233 per cent. Scan Group, a privately owned company which was floated on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, was over-subscribed by 521 per cent.

The middle class seems to know that the current dependence on the export of raw materials offers no future for the country. Local entrepreneurs want to diversify their industrial base and offer their products in a wider market. Remove trade barriers, harmonise trade licensing procedures, reduce time taken at border checks and improve the judiciary, and Kenyan business could supply the wider African market. This is a strategy that could be replicated in other African countries, thus creating a larger African middle class. Of course, this is much easier said than done. But how else can the creation of a larger African middle class as well as an increase in international investments be encouraged?

An important role in expanding the middle classes via investment falls to the Kenyan diaspora, whose most famous member is Barack Obama. His father, a goatherd-turned-economist, serves as an early example of how well Kenyans do when they live abroad. In the US, no other group of immigrants is as well educated. Almost a quarter of them hold post-graduate degrees, in a larger proportion than the Chinese, Hispanic or Asian immigrant communities. No other group sends so much money home, according to the Kenyan writer and academic Binyavanga Wainaina, himself a fellow of Bard College in upstate New York. The diaspora owns property, is involved in improving the Kenyan infrastructure and helps pay for the education of the younger generation. Obama has encouraged these African-Americans to boost Africa’s development, thereby helping further growth of its middle class as a backbone of society and of democracy.

Africa still only plays a modest role in global trade because of the harder facts of daily African life, such as the unreliable energy supply. “Nothing rains on your day like a power cut in the morning, when you are just about to send that important email,” says Tom Njoroge, who works for a telecoms company. Electricity blackouts are a big problem in Kenya, but there might be a solution to it. Some experts say that the relatively thin volcanic crust of the Rift Valley, which stretches down from the Red Sea to Mozambique, is ideal for geothermal power, which runs whatever the weather and emits negligible carbon. The Olkaria station outside Naivasha is a pioneer project and Kenya already used up its whole capacity before reverting to diesel generators during one of the frequent power cuts.

Before the Kenyan middle classes think global, they prefer to think African. Kenya is in a unique position. It acts as an incubator for business people for the benefit of the whole continent. In other countries, too, there are signs of hope. Kenya’s neighbour, Rwanda, and its president, Paul Kagame, are often cited as good examples for Africa’s future. In Ghana, fair and peaceful elections were held in January 2009. In Botswana, President Ian Khama is implementing careful and sensible policies. In Mali, President Amadou Toumani Touré is regarded as an able peace negotiator, as is Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete.

The Kenyan middle class need not be an exception. Perhaps in time the whole of Africa will share dreams from their fathers – dreams of prosperity, democracy and peace.

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