Mungiki Massacre

Pictures don't lie but the dead don't talk and maybe that is why it is so hard to understand what happened in Gathaithi village in central Kenya on Monday night. The aftermath is clear: bloodied, battered bodies sprawled in the red earth, weeping women, blood-stained clubs discarded by the roadside.
Newspaper reports say about 30 villagers were killed by members of the criminal Mungiki sect, who were out for revenge after vigilantes killed around a dozen of their own members. As is often the case in the aftermath of violence, the details are vague: some reports say the Mungiki lured villagers to their deaths by setting fire to a house and hacking their victims as they came to help: some say Mungiki members simply came to people's homes and took away sons and fathers; some say a vigilante group set up to fight the Mungiki -- a brutal, mafia-type group whose members were exacting tolls from business people, taxi-bicycle (boda-boda) owners and matatu drivers around Gathaithi -- called itself "The Hague", other reports say the group was named "Bantu". What exactly was the role of the police? Some reports said a police patrol had just passed through the village before the killings began; some said there were rumours that the Mungiki were going to strike and so police patrols were stepped up; but others say the armed Mungiki arrived in full view of the police.
Maybe the full truth will never come to light. Maybe truth is always in the eye of the beholder -- I have been to villages in the Ivory Coast after people were massacred and heard so many different versions of what happened. I don't think anyone was lying but each witness saw different elements of the whole event and had their own interpretation based on personal experience and enmities. Perhaps that is inevitable.
But there are questions that go beyond this particular incident: why did the Mungiki exact such a headline-grabbing, brutal revenge? Have they been emboldened by official failure to crack down on their activities in central Kenya, Nairobi and beyond? Was this a desperate act by a sect that is being attacked on several fronts -- by an alleged shoot-to-kill police policy and now enraged vigilantes? Who, if anyone, gave the okay for the killings? The Mungiki reputedly have some very powerful backers and one imagines that there may be more to this than a simple though shocking act of revenge. How do we know that all the people doing the killing were really Mungiki? How do we know that all those killed by the vigilantes were really Mungiki? Is this incident a sign of anarchy spreading in the vacuum left by a rudderless administration? And what do the killings -- by both sides -- mean for the future? A land ruled by militias -- angry young men with no jobs and no prospects being manipulated by shadowy Godfathers seeking power and profit -- is a dangerous place at the best of times and a potential timebomb when the political class is riven by divisions, widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, and seemingly desperate to cling onto power by fair means or foul.