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.