I spent much of 1990 in exile in Nairobi, Kenya.

I found Nairobi an enormously fascinating African city. Like no other city in Africa outside South Africa, Nairobi reminded me of Pretoria, save that it was a black African city, whilst Pretoria was viewed by the apartheid architects as a white European city in Africa. So strong was the juxtapositioning of Nairobi and Pretoria in mind that, upon returning from exile in December 1990, I soon penned a short story, which later the short-lived Johannesburg-based publisher, Justified Press, ran under the title "The Return of the Prodigal Exile."

It remains my only published fictionalized short-story; so powerful was the Kenyan experience on me. I peppered the short story with nuggets from Nairobi's urban legends like the "matatu" taxis and the rubbish heaps in infamous slums, a walking distance from Nairobi's CBD.

The short story helped me to put to bed my Kenyan experiences which populated my sub-consciousness, where they remained buried until rudely awoken this month, when the African Union (AU) took the important decision regarding Kenya's leaders and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

I have now reread my old short story to remind myself of what Kenya meant to me in 1990 - the smell, sound and sight of Nairobi -, and to contrast that with the Kenya on global display today, thanks to the global media, regarding the question of prosecution of its leaders by the ICC.

I deeply love Kenya. And I love to speak my broken Swahili even more.

Kenya and Egypt are the only two countries out of many African countries I have visited and or lived in, that had and continue to have a magical, almost mythical, pull on my imagination. Egyptians like to boast to visitors that if you drink from the celebrated Nile River, you are bound to be a repeat visitor to Egypt. So true. But so too is the majestic sight of Kilimanjaro, either from the Tanzanian or Kenyan side. The sight turns you instantly into a repeat visitor to East Africa.

Unfortunately these two great African powers, Kenya and Egypt, are going through their most difficult period in their long history. Kenya has just emerged from a vicious, deeply shameful civil war. Egypt seems determined that nothing will stop it from plunging into its own shameful, vicious civil war.

And now Kenya has grabbed the attention of the world for all the wrong reasons; civil war, controversial elections and now the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecuting its leaders. To add salt to injury, the recent Al Shaabab attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall made matters worse, exposing the weak underbelly of the boastful but clearly ineffective Kenyan state.

For many Kenyans, the penny has indeed finally dropped.

When I lived in Nairobi in 1990, Kenya struck me as the first avowedly African capitalist country I ever lived in outside South Africa. It was also shamelessly pro-western, and specifically pro-British and pro-American. Also, unlike her neighbors Tanzania and Uganda, who offered strong political and military support to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Kenya's stance against racist Pretoria was muted, by comparison and to put it delicately.

And already then, the nifarous tribal sentiment in Kenyan politics was very pronounced and shocking, especially the feeling among the Kikuyus and Luyos that then President Arab Moi's minority tribe, the Kalenjins, had overstayed their (un)welcome in political power and the State Houe. Being also the time of great anti-Soviet upheavals in Eastern Europe, the anti-KANU and pro-democracy movement seemed to be on the ascendancy, if not unstoppable, led by great Kenyan intellectuals like the lawyer Paul Muite. It finally came to nothing, other than a change of guard at the pigs' feeding troughs.

It was also clear then that there was general public awareness that the Kenyan state had fallen victim to alternating capture by a rapacious, ruthless and comprador Kenyan black, and often very tribalistic and violent, capitalist class, whose sole defining feature was ever-escalating state and private sector corruption and primitive accumulation, and the worshipping of Daniel Arab Moi's personality cult. Alongside this trend, 1990 was also characterized by the ever-growing pauperization of millions of Kenyans, and attendant outbreaks of violent, localized tribal clashes over grassing land, water and other limited resources, including between the Masaais and the Kalenjins in the Rift Valley.

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