By Jack Kimball

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Swahili rap music thumps in the background as Bobby Gichoni tries to order another beer at a packed downtown nightclub.

Crowds of Kenyans throng tables with animal-print counters. It takes 20 minutes for the beer to arrive.

The post-election bloodshed in Kenya seems a world away.

Fighting has killed at least 1,000 people mostly in Kenya's slums and poor rural areas since President Mwai Kibaki's won a disputed Dec. 27 election. The crisis has cost one of Africa's most promising economies hundreds of millions of dollars, and middle-class Kenyans say they too are feeling the pinch.

"I was going to get a very promising job, and the next day the violence broke out and all the guests left," Gichoni says of his job offer at a coastal resort hotel.

"In the hotel industry, our concern is Maasai Mara and Mombasa. There is no violence there, but outsiders think the whole country is in chaos," he says of two of Kenya's most popular tourist destinations.

Middle-class Kenyans have been among the biggest beneficiaries of an economic boom since Kibaki came to power in 2002, which has seen east Africa's largest economy grow an average of 5 percent annually.

But some critics say they've opted for material comfort instead of flexing growing political muscle.

Several newspaper columnists have taken issue with the middle class silence during the crisis.

Nation newspaper columnist Tom Mshindi attacked them as "the most unconscious of their historical role as instigators of change."

"They have been lulled by a false sense of security, they have enjoyed sheltered in their homes and clubs where inevitably they whine about everything that is wrong with the system and its leaders and yet remain content to do nothing about it."

DIVISIONS EXPOSED

Commentator Tilan Lele, in a newspaper piece on why the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)'s plans for mass protest would fail, said it was because the middle class "does not have the guts to join the revolution."

Kenya is one of the few countries on the continent whose post-independence history has not been stained by coups or major ethnic conflict, but the now-exposed divisions over wealth, land and inequality stretch back to the British colonial era.

"A whole lot of people shed blood at independence, we don't need to do it again," Joan Walumbe said, seated in a trendy downtown Nairobi cafe.

Walumbe said despite the crisis and the ethnic bloodletting, she has not seen too much change nor have her friendships with people from other tribes been affected .

"Life has been back to normal except I try as much as possible not to be out very late," says Walumbe, who works for a non-governmental organisation. "We're going about our daily lives, but you pause and think things aren't normal."

Taking a bite of a chicken pie, Walumbe says she felt a change after she saw pictures of charred bodies burned in a church in the Rift Valley -- part of the ethnic violence that spiralled out of control with elections as the spark.

"Tears just came to my eyes. I used to think this was something I'd have sworn to you was something that'd never, ever happen in Kenya," she says.

Many in the middle class blame the media for giving a distorted impression of the violence.

"How do you say it's fair when business is back to normal, but the media is showing the worst images from weeks ago," says Chris Rwengo, a foreign exchange dealer in Nairobi.