Geeks for PeaceBy MICHELA WRONG<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/author/michela-wrong/> Michela Wrong NAIROBI — In a tower block overlooking the leafy Nairobi suburb of Kilimani, nine Kenyans sit at computer screens, silently trawling Web sites, blogs, tweets and Facebook conversations. This could almost be an upmarket Internet café, only it’s far too quiet and no one is surreptitiously watching hard-core porn. But what’s going on in the iHub has its own element of titillation. LATITUDEThe Campaign for Kenya A series about the country’s first general election under its new Constitution. - More from this series»<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/author/michela-wrong/> The youngsters on the second floor are scanning Kenya’s online media for “dangerous speech”: phrases likely to foster paranoia, distrust, hatred and violence in the run-up to next week’s election. They work for the monitoring group Umati<http://www.ihub.co.ke/blog/2013/02/phase-1-oct-2012-jan-2013-umati-report-released/> and are part of a multi-strand high-tech attempt, much of it by volunteers, to ensure that Kenya doesn’t come tothe brink of civil war<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1574179/Kenya-on-the-brink-of-civil-war.html> as it did after its last election, in 2007. Working in five vernacular languages, Swahili and English, they are on the alert, in particular, for terms that reduce entire ethnic groups to the status of animals. “Cockroaches,” a favorite during Rwanda’s genocide, is also popular here. So are “worms,” “rats,” “vermin” and “jiggers” — a reference to a parasite that burrows under toenails. “The phrases are intended to hit you in the gut, and they do,” says Angela Crandall, research manager for Umati. Eighty percent of the inflammatory rants, Crandall says, occur on Facebook, and most of the authors make no attempt to conceal their identities. This suggests they are naive or cocky and believe there will never be any legal consequence for what they write — which probably is correct. Umati feeds its findings to Uchaguzi <https://uchaguzi.co.ke/> (Swahili for “election”), one floor below, where even more computer geeks tap at keyboards, fuelling themselves with espressos. Uchaguzi has prepared a Web-based, crowd-sourced map of Kenya that, starting this weekend, will track thousands of SMS messages, tweets, phone calls and emails from members of the public, civil society activists, election monitors and local officials, to build a picture of what is happening across the country. Uchaguzi has established a network of partnerships with grassroots organizations so that, anticipating trouble, it can send them warnings to prevent any escalation. “The partnerships are the key,” Daudi Were, one of the group’s founders, explained. He described how during the referendum on the Constitution in 2010, Uchaguzi had received a message about a group of young men with machetes gathering outside a polling station in Molo, a town in the Rift Valley. “Fifteen minutes later, although we are 200 kilometers away, two lorries of police drove up. That was because we had passed the information on to a local joint peace initiative with links to the security forces.” The geeks in the iHub — urban, hyper-educated and distinctly Western in their outlook — and their methods represent a generational challenge to an electoral system that feels sclerotic and stuck in the past, despite a new Constitution that reconfigures state structures. The main presidential candidates — Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta — are the sons of two men who dominated Kenyan politics in the 1960s<http://www.statehousekenya.go.ke/hist/1960.htm>. Most of the candidates vying for lower posts are wearyingly familiar. On parking lots and street corners in Nairobi, politics is done the old-fashioned way. Men bark orders at mustered volunteers, doling out T-shirts, caps and cash payments. In rural areas, where Kenya’s destiny has usually been decided, politics also dominates a sense of routine, with villagers meekly waiting to be told by tribal elders who to vote for. I left the iHub thinking that Kenya is clearly teetering on the cusp of change but that real transformation still depends on massive structural repairs entirely beyond the reach of those Internet activists. As Were readily admits, preventing violence in Molo depended in the last resort on the intervention of the Kenyan police, a force renowned for its venality and political partisanship<http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Kenya-Police-most-corrupt-institution/-/1056/962512/-/cj4a1cz/-/index.html>. “We can’t compel organizations to act. We can support institutions, but we can’t replace them.” It’s the dilemma that confronts every aid organization: No matter how dysfunctional, the state can rarely be bypassed. ------------------------------ * Michela Wrong has covered Africa for nearly two decades, reporting for Reuters, the BBC and The Financial Times. She is the author of “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.” *