Mungiki

I learnt a lot about Kenya's Mungiki sect today. It started with a text message as I was coming home from dropping my eldest off at school: the playgroup for my youngest was cancelled because of Mungiki protests on the roads, and fears that mothers and children in SUVs might be caught up in them. My little one was most disappointed -- and explanations about the Mungiki -- which apparently means gang in Kikuyu -- and extrajudicial killings were just not going to cut it with a frustrated two-year-old. So I took her to Village Market -- still seeing no trouble on the roads. During the day, I learnt a little more about the Mungiki who seem to have a stranglehold on life in some of Nairobi's poorer districts and in towns in the Rift Valley and Central Provinces.

Today's protests were organised by the Mungiki to call for the implementation of a report by a special U.N. rapporteur, Philip Alston, on extrajudicial killings by the police. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jV9xNnrl729T0lEmOyfGN6bcQQIQ
Human rights groups and family members say many of the hundreds of people who have disappeared or been executed by alleged police death squads were suspected of being members of the Mungiki, and the political wing of the Mungiki has come out in the support of Alston's report. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/535856/-/u2ijkv/-/

The Mungiki are mostly young men -- some sporting dreadlocks -- who run protection rackets, mainly targetting drivers of the ubiquitous and crazily-driven matatus or minibuses. They demand a cut from the drivers, but also apparently run rackets in construction and other businesses. They draw their beliefs from traditional Kikuyu rites and are pretty fanatical. In some districts, I was told, they ban women from wearing trousers and have their ears to the ground on what goes on inside people's houses. They are violent, deadly, allegedly beheading some young men who refused to join their ranks. They are abstemious, shunning alcohol and drugs. You know who they are, but they don't always look dangerous -- they speak in low tongues, gather in groups but you know that if you cross them, "you will get it."
Clearly, Alston's report on extrajudicial killings has touched a raw nerve in Kenya -- some say he is just revealing what every Kenyan knows ie that the police act with impunity and that the judicial system is toothless. But others argue that faced with the threat from the Mungiki, the police have no choice but to shoot-to-kill. And critics like Alston, they argue, are at best misguided and at worst simplistically interpreting events of which they have no real knowledge.
The anger felt by residents of the neighbourhoods ruled by the Mungiki is clear: today two suspected gang members were lynched in Thika. http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144008118&cid=418

Today's protests mainly disrupted life for those people using matatus to get to and from work -- those who can least afford a day's lost pay.
But, like much else in Kenya these days, the Mungiki story is not just a tale of idle-boys-gone-bad. There is a political angle. Some say politicians have been more than ready to use the Mungiki during campaigning to add a little muscle to their message. It is difficult to put a genie of political patronage back into the box. The government said on Thursday that Alston had helped to spark the protests, basically by giving the Mungiki legitimacy. http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5240KZ20090305