Defection

• Kenya has scores of youth gangs known for their violence and links to the politically powerful.
• None is more infamous than the Mungiki movement, with a past membership estimated to be at least a million.

What gave rise to Mungiki?

• The early 1990s witnessed the first bout of politically instigated inter-ethnic conflict intended to diminish Kikuyu influence in local politics.
• Mungiki emerged as a Kikuyu youth movement, defending the dispossessed: women, migrants and landless youth.
• At this time the grouping also opposed the autocratic and corrupt government of Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin.
• In the 1997, 2002 and 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, leading politicians mobilised violent youth militia in support of their campaigns.
• In Nairobi’s shantytowns, Mungiki activists and militia competed with other militias like Kamjesh, and the Taliban in Mathare Valley.

What are the group’s practices and beliefs?

• Mungiki operates primarily in urban neighbourhoods where it combines vigilante, welfare, cultural and criminal activities.
• It reaches back into Kenya’s pre-colonial and colonial history for the origins of its beliefs and practices.
• The values underlying these practices continued during Kenya’s anti-colonial struggle in the 1940s and 1950s, in the liberation movement known as Mau Mau, which was predominantly Kikuyu.
• These values, although modified and expanded, still form the core of Mungiki’s practices and beliefs.

Why was it banned?

• Throughout its existence, the organisation has resorted to violence to recruit and keep members.
• At the political level, national and local leaders may see the popularity and persistence of the movement as a threat to stability and their own hold on power.

Though banned, it hasn’t really gone away, has it?

• He made public his conversion to Christianity in 2006, and on his release in 2009 he declared the movement finished.
• It has a moral appeal to young men and women for stressing “clean living”, without loose sex and alcohol.
• Kenyan politics are still violent, the domain of elderly, entitled men, and ridden with mistrust and corruption.

Bodil Folke Frederiksen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.