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NAIROBI, Jan. 29 -- Just hours after an opposition lawmaker was gunned down in his driveway here, the fury that has swept over this country since last month's disputed presidential election arrived in his middle-class neighborhood.

The repercussions from the killing Tuesday morning of Mugabe Were, cast by opposition supporters as the first political assassination of Kenya's month-old post-election crisis, began in front of his house on a street of squared hedges and high gates. Mourners gathered there by the hundreds until police arrived and fired tear gas. The scene turned into an angry, tire-burning demonstration.

The anger spread quickly to a vast slum a few blocks away, where Evans Silingi, a shop owner from the Luo tribe of opposition leader Raila Odinga, soon picked up a heavy gray rock. "They have just killed the MP of Embakasi!" he shouted, referring to the district that elected Were last month. In the near distance stood several hundred machete-waving young men from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe.

News of Were's death spread by radio, TV and text message, fanning rage across the western towns of Naivasha and Eldoret. And in Kisumu, farther west, thousands of opposition supporters barricaded roads with bonfires, stopped buses and stoned a man to death.

"You started by killing us and now you're killing our leaders!" many demonstrators chanted in their mother tongue, according to a local reporter.

After weeks of violence by groups of anonymous young men, Were's death provided individual evidence of how volatile this once-stable East African nation has become since the Dec. 27 election. The opposition has accused Kibaki, the incumbent, of stealing the election. International observers found serious flaws in the vote tally.

Now Kenya's decades-old struggles over land, economic resources and political power are playing out as the election crisis appears to be worsening by the day. Kenya is a nation of 37 million people that, since its independence from British colonial rule in 1963, has had ethnic clashes before. But these are among the most severe.

With a cycle of revenge killings, the death toll has surpassed 850. More than 250,000 people have fled ethnically mixed areas in the west, turning Kenya into what increasingly appears to be a tribally segregated nation.

Even with former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan in Nairobi to mediate between Kibaki and Odinga, many Kenyans say their country is just a spark away from blazing out of control.

For a while Tuesday, it appeared that the killing of Were, a 38-year-old lawmaker from Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement, might provide it.

Were was shot once in the head and once in the chest as he was pulling into his driveway, his security guard said. Police are investigating whether it was a robbery, but his supporters immediately called his death a political assassination.

Were was a hero in his district, a mostly poor neighborhood of dirt paths and corrugated-metal homes where he funded an orphanage and paid children's school fees. As a successful candidate for parliament, Were also embodied the hopes Odinga's followers had to win political power.

A Nairobi councilman for years, Were became the first non-Kikuyu elected to parliament from his district. His backers said he stood up to local corruption. And with a Kikuyu wife and parents of mixed ethnicity, he did not tolerate the tribalism now poisoning Kenyan society, they said.
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"It's painful," said Odongo Ochieng, who was outside Were's home with dozens of others. "This is the method of killing democracy in Kenya."

From the perspective of many Odinga supporters, the post-colonial history of Kenyan politics is one of domination by the Kikuyu and the marginalization of would-be leaders from the Luo and the dozens of other ethnic groups in the country.

Ochieng and other opposition supporters instantly added Were's name to the list of Luo politicians slain in recent decades, most notably Tom Mboya. Luos blame his killing in 1969 on the Kikuyu government of Kenya's first president.

Outside Were's house, mourners waved his photo, celebrating him as a national martyr. In the opposition stronghold of Kisumu, where Were was born, they yelled his name like a rallying cry.

"There were text messages going around that he had been slain and it was just spontaneous -- people came out and the crowds grew bigger and bigger," said Alan Okomba, a journalist in Kisumu, about 200 miles west of Nairobi. "They were counting their leaders who'd been slain -- like Tom Mboya, and they were counting Were, too."

By early afternoon, the scene in one of Nairobi's most volatile slums resembled a battleground. Odinga supporters massed in one area with machetes, iron bars and rocks, and across an invisible divide, Kibaki's Kikuyu supporters provided a mirror image.

"If they kill one of ours," vowed Evans Silingi, the shopkeeper, "four Kikuyus will die."

A few moments later, police positioned on the Kikuyu side fired several shots into the air, sending Silingi and other opposition demonstrators running through the maze of dirt paths.

About an hour away in the tourist town of Naivasha, military helicopters swooped down and fired bullets on a crowd of thousands of Kikuyus threatening to attack a smaller group of Luos who had fled to the grounds of the Naivasha Country Club, the Associated Press reported. The gangs then ransacked the town, smashing and looting shops as police seemed to lose control.

But tensions relaxed later in the day as people who had earlier run for their lives, hurled rocks and hidden in houses gathered around radios and TVs to hear if Annan's mediation had produced any results.

At a news conference here, Annan said the two sides had agreed on a plan for talks that would seek to address the immediate political crisis within four weeks and the broader land and economic issues within a year.

"Death and despair are everywhere," Odinga said at the news conference. "The very foundation of the state is crumbling. Violence is spiraling out of control. . . . Yet we ourselves here resolve to act quickly to save our nation. If we don't, there might be no nation to save."

In a rare public address, Kibaki expressed "distress" at the news of Were's death, calling him "a gallant son of our nation." He added, "As leaders, we have a responsibility to preach peace."

The words filtered through a radio and into a crowd still gathered outside Were's house in the cool Nairobi evening.

Among the group of friends and supporters stood Were's father, Tony Were Amina, who said his firstborn son was "a quiet and intelligent boy."

"He was a peaceful person," he said, struggling to maintain his composure. "He hated violence."

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