The bombing in Nairobi reveals that the dazzling, skyscraper capital of Kenya is vulnerable, like any city -- but tells us very little about Africa or Africans. The real Kenya can be found in rural areas, away from the reach of the capital, where the people have, on their own, embarked on a model development plan. PNS contributing editor Percy C. Hintzen is chair of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley and recently returned from an extended visit to East Africa.

Bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania seem to confirm strongly held stereotypes of Africa as violent and devoid of order and of Africans as helpless and in need of tutelage from the North.

In Kenya, nothing is farther from the truth. If anything, the bombing reveals how vulnerable the country is to the actions of global agents. Indeed, so deeply are they penetrated by powerful foreign actors that they have little control over their own affairs.

This is a legacy of over one hundred years of colonial domination -- a legacy that includes a population that is 66 percent Christian (Anglican and Roman Catholic), English as the official language, governmental institutions implanted from Britain, and a formal economy driven in ways firmly rooted in the colonial past.

The history of Kenya since its independence in 1964 reads like that of many African countries. Politics are tribally rooted, the regime has strong authoritarian tendencies, there is little regard for civil and human rights. What holds the country together is a highly centralized government administration, including a loyal military and police willing to maintain order with force.

Economically, the government is the linchpin in an urban-centered system geared toward making it possible for foreign investors and a small cadre of local elite in the public and private sector to accumulate massive wealth. Patronage and corruption are common, and the state serves as guarantor of access to wealth and authority. Members of the middle class act as educated functionaries.

There is nothing indigenous about this. It is an inheritance from the colonial past, modified to serve a post independence environment.

Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, embodies -- and elaborates -- the country's colonial past. It bristles with building activity, spurred by a recent influx of foreign capital, and is generally flourishing. The beneficiaries of this growth -- a relatively small group of urban businessmen, managers, and professionals -- live in lavish style. Mercedes Benzes, their transportation of choice, crowd the streets.

For most of the middle class, however, real incomes are declining. Unemployment is much closer to 50 percent than the official 38 percent figure. Nairobi and its suburbs, a metropolitan area of over 5 million, are a sea of abject poverty -- with islands that combine London cosmopolitanism with the lavish extravagance of Beverly Hills.

But despite the abundance of modern high-rises, Nairobi is not the face of the future but of a past rapidly spiraling downward. Its value in the global marketplace is cheap labor -- wages can average less than $50 a week -- which facilitates exploitation of the country's abundant resources, including markets provided by its 30 million population.

In contrast, rural areas reveal possibilities for the future. In the fertile plateau regions, far from the reach of the central government, the population seems bent on carving out a new model of development. In this region -- the breadbasket of East Africa -- people are spontaneously developing an agro-based rural model of development that can be the envy of the developing world. They are effectively taking over activities abandoned by the state for lack of funds or interest -- particularly education. More and more they are turning from cultivation of export crops such as coffee and tea toward produce designed for the domestic market. Many are engaged in producing handicrafts and other goods for tourists. Others earn a livelihood as tailors, shoemakers, mechanics and in other trades. Small retail and food establishments abound. These activities are funded with very little capital by western standards (usually US$200-300), lots of family support, and enormous "sweat equity". They get little encouragement from the state and the private financial sector.

But the future is uncertain. Population growth seems to be outstripping the capacity for indigenous development. From just over 8 million in the 1960s, Kenya's population has skyrocketed to 30 million, and by some estimates will grow to 43 million by the year 2010. This has produced a massive rural to urban migration, as evidenced in Nairobi by settlements quite possibly housing over a million persons that stretch for miles. Those who do not make it to the city move into the relatively arid regions between the coast and the plateau, where they eke out a marginal existence -- and compete for the land with the wild game that brings so much tourist revenue but in their increasing desperation becomes a source of food.

A crisis of population growth can be averted if the country's rural wealth is not siphoned off to support lavish urban lifestyles or exported away in super profits by foreign investors. What is needed is small and mid-scale, rural, capitalist development, domestic and export agriculture, agro-industry, and a tourism that involves much more of the local population in income-earning activity than it currently does. Kenya can never compete with the industrial world.

For many, including those in the middle class, survival is tied to an exceptionally strong kinship network of obligations and responsibilities and a deep and intense morality and sense of community from.

The common pictures of highly politicized tribal competition for power misses the point. The tribe in contemporary Kenya is necessary for individual survival for all but the Westernized elite. Local languages serve to protect local resources against outside intrusion. Tribal networks give individuals access to resources inside and outside ones region, and are necessary building blocks of a new Kenyan society.

Not surprisingly, tribal ties are weakest in Nairobi where ethnic diversity is highest. Their absence opens the way for individualism and consumerism -- for the greed, chicanery and criminality visible in today's modern cities everywhere.

Class and racial tensions are at their highest in Nairobi. The poor are openly disdainful of the extravagances of the elite. This has racial implications as members of the country's South Asian population possess a disproportionate share of its wealth and are highly visible in the more lucrative sectors of the economy, particularly the foreign private sector. The relations between black Kenyans and Kenyan Asians are uneasy, at best, and potentially volatile.

In addition, a privileged group of white foreigners is increasingly visible, and increasingly resented. It is not surprising, therefore, that some Kenyans see U.S. foreign policy as the catalyst for the bombing -- see American battles being fought on their soil. The truth is that Nairobi is far removed from the real Kenya and very much part of the new global reality that spawns this brand of terrorism. In this regard, Nairobi is little different from London or New York.

The real Africa is in rural Kenya. There city crises are replaced by a deep morality, a profound ethical sense, and a strong commitment to principle bred in a combination of communitarian and humanitarian commitment rooted in tribal values and a profound religiosity -- a meeting of traditional and Western morality. This is their shield against the legacy of colonialism and the new globalism. A bombing in rural Kenya would have no meaning. It would never happen.