Mixed in among the grief-stricken parents who thronged the Chiromo mortuary parlour in Nairobi, seeking word on the fate of their children, on Friday afternoon were student leaders who had come to make a political point.

“We have one simple demand to relay to the government: we want the mass withdrawal of non-Muslims from the whole of the north-eastern region,” Titus Matata, 22, an industrial chemistry student at the University of Nairobi, told the Observer. “We are not wanted there, and the government must facilitate the evacuation of all non-Muslim students at once.”

The attack on Thursday, which took place in a town about 100 miles from the border with Somalia, in which gunmen smashed into a university in the half-light of dawn and massacred 142 students and six security officers, has rattled Kenya. Across the country from Friday morning, relatives began the grim task of identifying the bodies of the victims and burying their dead.

But analysts also turned to the question of the broader impact of the astonishing attack and its implications for the future of Kenya. The main fear is that the Islamist al-Shabaab militants could gradually widen the religious divisions within this east African country that was once seen as an anchor of stability and progress in a turbulent region, with the ultimate aim of imitating the success of the Boko Haram militia, which has taken over swaths of territory in Nigeria and imposed sharia law.

“This is a very serious situation,” says Tom Wolf, a political scientist who works at a polling firm that tracks public attitudes to the security situation in the region. “There have been media reports of collaboration in terms of training and exchanging ideas between Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, but it is essential to study the Shabaab’s aims in greater detail to see what their goals are.

“If they move more explicitly in the direction of fighting western education and seek to advance these goals consistently in north-eastern Kenya – as Boko Haram have done in Nigeria – that will obviously be very worrisome.”

In many ways Kenya is a land of stark contradictions. Its capital, Nairobi, is positively booming. Attracted by a young, well-educated and growing middle class, foreign investors have poured money into the economy, seeking to establish a foothold in what some Africa-watchers say is the country which could become “the new front door” of the continent’s economic structure.

Almost every month, a major international firm picks the Kenyan capital as its regional hub. General Electric, Google, IBM, Visa International, MoneyGram, Nestlé and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation are among those that have opened African or regional headquarters in the city in recent years.

A boom in the technology sector has seen Nairobi branded as Africa’s “silicon savannah”. Vodafone’s m-pesa payment system, which allows people to transfer money on their mobile phones, is comfortably the most successful scheme of its type in the world, with more than half of Kenyan adults using it to make payments for everything from taxis to hospital bills.

Yet there is another Kenya, far away from the swanky restaurants where the upwardly mobile youth enjoy freshly roasted coffee while using high-speed wireless internet. This other Kenya is marked by grinding poverty and a lack of opportunity.

And no part of the country is poorer than the vast, arid land next to the Somalian border, where al-Shabaab has seemed to enjoy free rein in recent years. In a statement on Friday explaining the rationale for the college massacre, the Somalia-based militants made a claim on this territory, saying non-Muslims should vacate what they described as “colonised land”.

It is easy to see why al-Shabaab has enjoyed relative success in obtaining recruits and receiving undoubted logistical support from some within the population in the north-east of the country. The economic disparities between Nairobi and the well-watered highlands near the capital on the one hand and the marginalised and long-neglected north are staggering.

In Central Province, Kenya’s wealthiest region and agricultural heartland, which neighbours Nairobi, there is one doctor for every 20,715 residents. In the north-east, one doctor serves 120,823 residents in a region where the situation is compounded by the fact that there are scarcely any paved roads. About 74% of people in the north-east live below the poverty line, compared with 30% in the central belt.

These disparities are rooted in Kenya’s colonial history and the failure of political leaders to alter the structure of the economy to make it more inclusive after claiming independence in 1963.

When the British came to Kenya at the start of the last century, the early settlers made their homes in the highlands near Nairobi, where malaria-carrying mosquitoes were scarce and the well-watered soils promised good harvests on their large-scale farms. The fine conditions (the weather around Nairobi is famously close to 25C virtually all year round) didn’t hurt either).

Like many frontier regions during colonial times, the arid north-east of the country was left largely ungoverned and served mainly as a buffer zone against the French, Italian and Ethiopian powers, which had seized other parts of Somali territory.

At independence, Somali elites demanded secession from Kenya in an attempt to rejoin the greater Somalia. The British were ambivalent about these calls, but Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was adamantly opposed.

After independence, far from seeking to integrate the north, the government launched a scorched-earth campaign against the rebels who sought secession, perpetrating a number of mass killings which implanted a near-permanent sense of exclusion and resentment.

To this day, someone leaving Garissa in the north-east to head to the capital is described by local people there as being headed “to Kenya”.

Al-Shabaab, a ruthless organisation which beheads opponents and organises public stonings of those who do not adhere to its harsh ideology, is being disingenuous by styling itself as a champion of Muslims. Almost every week it kills dozens of Muslims in Somalia in numerous suicide bombings and grenade attacks, including one attack that targeted a graduation ceremony for medical students in Mogadishu.

In Kenya, though, it has made a big show of sparing Muslim lives, and the great question is whether its careful attempts to milk the sense of economic exclusion in the north-east will work.

Recent moves by Kenyan authorities have been designed to prevent this outcome. There has been a huge outflow of funds to marginalised areas under the terms of the country’s new constitution, which mandates the distribution of significant resources from the centre to locally elected governors who, in turn, take charge of basic healthcare provision, water distribution and early education services. This devolved system of governance is considerably popular in previously marginalised areas and entrenching it against the quiet resistance of bureaucrats reluctant to give up power in Nairobi is essential to ensuring that locals perceive a stake in holding Kenya together.

Rashid Abdi, an independent Horn of Africa analyst, says the reaction by authorities in Nairobi to the latest al-Shabaab attacks will be pivotal. “The advantage Kenya has over Nigeria or Syria is that there is no incipient local movement demanding secession from Nairobi. People in the north, because of the experience of the war in the 1960s and 1970s, no longer have an appetite for conflict. But mass punishment of locals could tip the scale to the other side quite easily. The government should seek to make partners of the local population to help them fight the Shabaab, who currently extort loyalty through violent retribution on anyone that opposes them.”

The biggest danger, though, is that the two sides of Kenya will simply drift apart. The string of attacks by al-Shabaab has triggered the flight of dozens of non-Muslim professionals from the north-east. After a massacre of bus passengers in November, the teachers’ union ordered members not to report to work after the Christmas holidays.

Media reports yesterday indicated that non-Muslim staff at the Garissa hospital had launched a go-slow, complaining that they feared for their safety. Bowing to appeals from student leaders, the government announced that it would close Garissa university and that students would be transferred to campuses in others parts of Kenya. Students from other parts of the country were bussed out on Saturday, chanting “no more Garissa” at the locals. The irony was not lost on many that the college had been established in 2011 as part of measures to integrate the north-east into the rest of Kenya. The departure of trained professionals from this already impoverished part of Kenya will suit al-Shabaab’s ends perfectly, because it will only deepen the marginalisation and allow the militants space to spread their intolerant and anti-modern creed.

In his statement on the most recent attacks, President Barack Obama – who travelled through the country as a young student, exploring the land in which his father was born, and possesses a more nuanced understanding of the situation than most other world leaders – referred to the contest between the forces of progress and those advocating a more violent, anarchist vision for Kenya.

“The future of Kenya will not be defined by violence and terror; it will be shaped by young people like those at Garissa university college – by their talents, their hopes, and their achievement,” he said.

Most Kenyans hope he is right. But in a land whose confidence has been badly shaken by the worst atrocity in the country for about two decades, many, both in Nairobi and rural Kenya, are not too sure how this conflict will end.

Murithi Mutiga is a correspondent with the Sunday Nation in Nairobi

GUERRILLAS WITH EXTREMIST AGENDA

Al-Shabaab has emerged in recent years as the biggest security threat in the Horn of Africa, carrying out a series of spectacular attacks, including the four-day siege of the Westgate mall in Nairobi, which left at least 67 dead. Its attack on a university in Kenya’s strife-torn north-east last Thursday, in which 148 students and security officers died, was its most deadly atrocity so far.

■ Al-Shabaab – which means ‘the youth’ in Arabic – was the enforcement wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a group of clerics who took control of many parts of Somalia in 2006. The US and regional powers suspected them of harbouring an extremist agenda, and Ethiopian troops ousted them in a lightning advance into Mogadishu in December 2006. The group then turned to guerrilla tactics to reclaim territory in urban centres in south-central Somalia.

■ The group’s reclusive leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, declared allegiance to al-Qaida in 2012. He was killed in a US drone strike in September 2014 and the group has lost a succession of leaders to drone attacks, apparently due to divisions within its ranks and huge bounties placed on the heads of its leadership.

■ Although UN-backed African Union troops have pushed al-Shabaab out of most populated urban centres in the country, it retains the capacity to carry out deadly attacks. It advocates the Saudi-inspired Wahhabi strand of Islam, while most Somalis and many Muslims in east Africa have long embraced the more tolerant Sufi Islam. Estimates of the numbers of its members vary from 5,000 to 9,000, including an unknown number of foreign fighters.