At the same time, population pressures grew in rural areas. Kenyans found they had smaller slices of land to cultivate as the country's population rose by a staggering annual rate of 3.6 percent. Mbugua talks on a portable phone while leaning on his family's Mercedes. The rapid population growth wore down infrastructure in rural areas, overwhelmed public health facilities, left schools under-equipped and teachers underpaid. Those factors, combined with the distance many urban Kenyans must cover to reach their rural homes, have only deepened the disconnection between city dwellers and the countryside.
Some urban dwellers stay away from the countryside because of their children.
They fear disease and worry that rural relatives will foist superstitious teachings on their youngsters. Sometimes the children themselves, spoiled by the relative ease of urban living, cannot abide sleeping in huts, eating unfamiliar food, listening to an unfamiliar language, fetching water, using pit latrines or trudging long distances on foot. Kenyans who have grown up in Nairobi are often stunned by the tribalism in rural areas, where sometimes one's whole life revolves around tribal identity. In some places one's neighbors, work mates, the business owners and the government administrators are all members of the same tribe. In Kenya, and throughout Africa, tribes tend to dominate specific regions of the country.