Mungiki

The Mungiki (= multitude in kikuyu) are a Secte Kenya in majority made up of young unemployed resulting from the community Kikuyu, principal ethnos group of the country.

The group was created with the beginning of the year 1990 in reaction with the activities of the " Kalenjin" warriors; ; the latter were partisans of the government of the president Daniel Arap Me who violently attacked the opponents in the Vallée of the Rift (above all the immigrants come from the center of the country).

Little by little, the sect of Mungiki gained in popularity, recruiting members also in the center from Kenya, in Nairobi and in certain areas of the Valley of the Rift: its principal attraction was that it offered to désoeuvrés young people a means of earning money by the control of the ways of Matutu (shared taxis).

With the years, the gangster trusts set up by Mungiki widened their sphere of activities to the racket of other categories of victims, in particular in the over-populated Bidonville S of Nairobi and in the provinces of the Center and the East.

Politicians of the opposition also used Mungiki to impress the potential voters during the last legislative countryside, in particular in the coastal regions (Mombasa, etc). But the relations since then worsened between Mungiki and their former guards from now on with the capacity.

In 2002, the government declares Mungiki outlaw after its members had decapitated 21 people in a shantytown of Nairobi, during the war for the control of the territory which opposed Mungiki to another group, called the Taliban and from which the members came from the community Luo.

The mungiki launched out since the beginning 2007 in operations halfway between the ritual criminality and crimes, making murders whose victims were found decapitated (this detail often being used for the police force to put a crime on the account of the mungiki). After one period of passivity, the police force undertook at summer 2007 to react and launched out in operations of repression against the mungiki: 22 members of this sect thus were killed with Nairobi on June 5th, 2007, following the murder of two disarmed police officers, and 11 others on June 8th, 2007. July 1st, 2007, the Kenyan police force announced the death of 12 men suspectés to belong to this sect. From June in August 2007, the operations of the police force cost the life 112 people at least.

The villages surrounding Nairobi are then plunged in a climate of panic and suspicion, because of the murders apparently random clerks by the mungiki but also because of the multiple raids of the police force. This one suspect indeed mainly the young people and has recourse to massive arrests.

Although the practices of the followers of Mungiki are little known, the villagers neighborhood describe them like monstrous, such as for example the separation of the members of the cut the throat of corpses then their scattering in the campaigns; certain testimonys also make state other ritual mungiki which can be connected with the practice of the cannibalism. Kikuyu still practiced other traditions kikuyu, like the sexual mutilation of the women and the prayers by looking at the Mont Kenya, remains of their supreme divinity. At the time of the attack of a camp of mungiki close to the coast in June 2007, a Tanzanian wizard was captured by the police force, but the public opinion remains persuaded that certain members of Parliament and of senior officials of the Kenyan government still have bonds with the mungiki.

Finally, a marked man to be with the head of Mungiki was stopped by the police force on August 21st with Ongata Rongai (20km of Nairobi). The group directed by Njoroje Kamunya from now on is shown to have killed 15 police officers between April and June 2007, but also 27 civilians since the beginning of the year. The brother of Kamunya, Maina Njenga, was also a founding member of the sect, but it since had taken its distances with the group which it denounced publicly; he was however condemned to five years of detention for possession of weapons and drug trafficking in June 2007.

External bonds

Lemonde.fr, June 5th, 2007

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