Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir.

• Author: Chege, Michael

For years, Kenya's image in the West was that of spectacular natural beauty, game parks over filled with wildlife, and safaris out of its handsome capital city, Nairobi. Close to a million tourists from Europe and the United States journeyed there each year, and Hollywood glamorized it in fact and fiction. Between 1963, when it became independent of Britain, and 1978, when the current president, Daniel arap Moi, took over, the economy grew at a regional record rate of 8 percent. The government had a reputation of sound fiscal management, a pro-Western foreign policy, and a marked political openness - though the latter had begun to buckle under intolerance and corruption by August 1978 when the founding president, Jomo Kenyatta, died.

All that had changed by the time President Bush named Smith Hempstone, a Kenya aficionado and former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times, to be the fifth U.S. ambassador to Kenya in 1989. As a result of rampant corruption, misguided investment policies, and administrative incompetence, average Kenyans were then poorer than they had been at independence in 1963. One-party rule had been decreed in 1982. The rule of law had become a thing of the past, as bona fide dissenters were hauled into jail, tortured, or bludgeoned to death. Moi, the man presiding over the desecration of Kenya, with profit to himself and his ethnic-derived coterie of fawning devotees, is an ex-school teacher and former vice president. He is also Mzee (elderly sage) to the political faithful, head of the ruling KANU party, the giver of cash bounty, allocator of state lands and top public offices, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and - he bragged to Hempstone - "the first African to fight communism." Among his more modest demands of his people is: "Kenyans must learn to sing after me like parrots."

Thanks to a naive and ethnically fragmented opposition, and a decidedly unlevel playing field, Moi was re-elected president by a minority (36 percent) of the vote in a 1992 election, a vote that he had resisted with marked tenacity and violence until 1991. The same scenario was repeated in January 1998. It is now touch and go whether the country will survive the institutionalization of criminality, economic decay, and the demographic explosion that it has suffered in the last two decades, or will implode like its neighbor, Somalia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of the rogue state has acquired currency: a state that specializes in a...