meet the mungiki

*mungiki is big kikuyu gang in nairobi.

his name is george. he works at the kenya railway station on the mutatu line that i take to get home. hes about 22 (my guess), doesnt chew mira (local drug), and wears a georgia bulldogs baseball cap (looks puzzled when i ask him if hes a fan). he works weekends and morning-afternoons. hes kind of unnerved by interested muzungus but generally friendly. he reports to a 40-year old due who comes and goes, from what i can tell.

his basic job is to collect 20-50 shillings a day from each mutatu, tell them where police are stationed so they can pick up and drop off in illegal spots, and help funnell the masses of folks into mutatus and buses in a more or less orderly fashion. he says hes never done anything violent, or, for that matter, particularly illegal.

mutatu drivers tend to like the mungiki on my route (they only apparently work on routes where theres substantial enough payments being made - my town-kibera route has no mungiki working it) because they bring order and good information about where police are located. they joke with george and dont seem at all threatened by his presence. that said, ive only talked to mutatu drivers/conductors who pay him, so im working with a skewed sample.

on a larger level, it seems like the mungiki have a pretty informal/low key protection racket going for mutatus and street vendors and selected stores. if it stopped there, i dont think most people in kenya would care too much.

the problem is, it doesnt -- trade in drugs, untaxed imports, etc has driven them to up their levels of violence and levels of power vis a vis police, which creates tension. probably more worryingly, they have become tools of politicians to mobilize people for political violence and carry out behind the scenes thuggery more generally. police retaliation, citizen mobs, etc = escalation and you end up with this.

its hard to reconcile what you see in some aspects of mungiki (george and mutatu driver support), with what you see in others -- butchering police, public support for extra-judicial killings of mungiki members.

sorry i just read mcmafia so this interests me a lot more than it probably does anyone else.