My brother Xan Rice is the East Africa correspondent for the Guardian. He is a good man, honest and passionate about Africa, and is based in Nairobi with his wife and three month old daughter.
My mom went up to Nairobi to visit her granddaughter three weeks ago at the start of the violence up there. She is due back in South Africa on Saturday and has been fairly blase about what is happening up there up until this morning when she sent me an email saying that she was confined to my brothers house, and that he had donned his flak jacket and gone out to report on the fresh wave of violence that had swept through Kenya yesterday.
He is no stranger to danger, having spent time in Mogadishu and Darfur, but violence in your home town is something different. He was the first English journalist on the scene of the horrific Church massacre a few weeks ago, and I have been following events through his writing on the Guardian.
If you have time, listen to his podcast from yesterday and his report about the army using Helicopters to protect refugees from a mob. It's a chilling reminder of the dangers of tribalism and just how quickly a stable country can descend into chaos. Countries need strong, principled leaders - I hope for all of our sakes that the next generation of South African leaders possess these qualities and that we don't follow the example of Kenya.