“It’s my first time as a refugee. I can’t quite believe it,” he said, as he left a queue for maize handouts he could not have imagined needing before this week.

“I feel humiliated,’’ he added, adjusting the collar on his smart, blue fleece jacket. Kariuki is one of 250,000 Kenyans uprooted by days of riots, looting and ethnic violence that has convulsed Kenya after a controversial poll returned President Mwai Kibaki to power amid opposition accusations of rigging.

The violence has been worst in the Rift Valley, where gangs of disaffected youths supporting opposition challenger Raila Odinga have targeted Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe, seen by many as having a stranglehold on east Africa’s biggest economy.

Scores have been killed in attacks with machetes, sticks and fires. Hundreds of homes have been burned. The United Nations has rushed to get food to tens of thousands facing hunger.

Those lining up in a field in Tarakwa, seemed far from the stereotypes of ragged refugees in torn clothes. A teenager in a denim jacket and suede boots sat on a straw sack full of maize. “I was to apply to university for studying maths,’’ said Gad Mburu, 18. “But my high school certificate burned in my home.’’

Though hardly Kenya’s affluent professional class, Kikuyus were resented as having had it too good, dominating a government that scores poorly on corruption indices.

Other tribes suspect Kibaki’s people to have been fattened up on graft at the expense of their own neglect and had hoped Odinga would change that. Destroying property was a message.