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Declan Galvin
United States International University
Kenya

I have been carrying out research with members of Mungiki for the past several months, while staying here in Kenya. Mungiki is a complex network of youth, most of who come from the Kikuyu tribe, which originated in 1987. However, the word “complex” proves to be an understatement and “network” is no more satisfactory in describing them either. Nonetheless, it is this complexity that intrigues me and is what brought me to carryout research with them.

Mungiki began in the late 1980s during what is considered to be the worst time in Kenyan history since independence. This period was the apex of Daniel Arap Moi’s draconian economic and security policies which alienated the entire population, including members of his own Kalenjin tribe; but times were especially hard for the Kikuyu who were among the first to fall victim to Moi’s oppression. Moi had developed nasty tendencies of dismantling the economic base of his political opponents, usually along ethnic lines, and jailing dissenters (especially youth) in the now infamous Nyayo House torture chambers. The research and interviews I have conducted suggest that this is the environment that engendered Mungiki.

However, Mungiki have proven to not fit neatly into the narrative that we may expect from these historical circumstances, i.e., a grassroots resistance movement aiming to subvert the repressive tactics of a dictator. Mungiki, rather, have travelled on a manic journey of faith, violence, and political attitudes showing little consistency or method over time. Mungiki started as embracing Thaaism, a traditional religion from the Mount Kenya region, only to later convert to Islam in the 1990s and Christianity in the early 2000s. They are most known for committing grotesque murders and acts of violence against civilians, including torture and dismemberment; while simultaneously providing social services and livelihood projects at the same communities they plunder. Mungiki have also been inconsistent with their political stances since their inception which includes organizing opposition to Moi, and later supporting him and his establishment.

My research is centered on understanding the rationale of continuous Mungiki transformation over time. I have found, preliminarily, that these transformations can be attributed to the particularities of the Mungiki bureaucracy. My investigation has focused on understanding why people join Mungiki, and what rewards (social or otherwise) they get from such membership. I have found, so far, that the most significant reason for joining Mungiki is to belong to a supportive community. If we build a membership profile of the typical Mungiki recruit, something I am trying to do, we find that most members come from volatile backgrounds including extreme poverty, marginalization, lack of formal education, and especially landlessness. The level of social detachment and alienation that these dynamics promote seem to bare down on the would-be recruits, most of whom cite during our interviews that they remain with Mungiki because of the community it represents.

Moreover I have found that many people early on (before 1994) joined because their friends of relatives encouraged them to join, which underscores that Mungiki was at one point a social project for its members. Furthermore, I have found that there is a history of volunteerism within the group where its members would pay their own travel expenses when attending the various conferences and meetings with other Mungiki members. In addition to this, Mungiki offered small loans to women and widows, designed communal farming programs, and developed various other income-generating projects for its members.

However I am also beginning to find that while these pro-social elements of Mungiki are very real, there seems to be a major distinction between the motives of “regular” Mungiki members and certain Mungiki leaders who seem to be motivated by wealth accumulation and power generation, especially toward the early 2000s. I am finding that this distinction is very significant to understanding the aforementioned faith, political, and violent transformations of the group.

It seems that the major transformations are more closely connected to political and economic gains for the Mungiki leaders than the aspirations of Mungiki members, per se. In other words the main reason for the growth and retention of Mungiki members throughout time is the livelihood and community dimension the group provides, which has remained a constant in Mungiki history; but the leaders will tout the vast membership and network (the most conservative estimates claiming it to be in the hundreds of thousands) and align themselves to various societal shifts in order to generate income or power. One respondent informed me that this was the rationale of Mungiki’s conversion to Islam in the late-1990s by claiming that doing so “the possibilities were endless.” He was suggesting the fear associated with militant Islamist groups in Kenya was at an all-time high because of the Al Qaeda bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998.

The leaders of Mungiki saw this as an opportunity to terrify the Kenyan government by staging mass conversions of its membership, and claiming that, according to Ndura Wariunge the then National Coordinator of Mungiki “harassing Mungiki would now be seen as a insult to all Muslims” and that they now called for Kenya to be a nation “guided by the Sharia [Law]” (Mungiki Leaders Convert to Islam, Daily Nation 2000). The Kenyan government became terrified and called for talks with the leadership, and the latter said that they would back-off the rhetoric if the Kenyan government (i.e., Moi) granted them the public transportation (matatu) cartel. Some Mungiki leadership are said to have become millionaires from this deal, making it one of the smartest strategic decision Mungiki made.

The calculus of Mungiki, as previously mentioned is to stage very bold and public spectacles in order to align themselves with the power opportunities of the day–but they could not do this without the vast and loyal membership under their command. The conversion to Islam, to force some kind of negotiation with the Moi government, is one example. But we see numerous other examples where the Mungiki allegiance has been contracted, mainly for the benefit of its leaders. Mungiki, it seems, is therefore a complex organization that attempts to satisfy and empower some of the most marginalized members of Kenyan society while simultaneously generating incredible wealth for the leadership. This form of social contract offers a compelling inroad to the study of human rights, where the machinery that orchestrates numerous projects addressing social and economic rights is the same machinery disempowering and alienating citizens.

Declan Galvin
United States International University
Kenya

The history of independent Kenya, not dissimilar to other countries in the developing world, has proven to be complex and often times misunderstood by outsiders. I vividly remember, during the now notorious 2008 Post Election Violence, the media continuously repeating contrived taglines like, “the once peaceful nation of Kenya has unexpectedly erupted into violence,” or “one of the most stable countries, and a symbol of peace for the continent, has devolved into tribal war amid the contested Presidential elections.” These misleading and devastatingly inaccurate statements by the media would have us believe that Kenya was somehow a beacon of stability, and that we (outsiders) should be shocked by the violence, because there lacked preconditions.

However, this could not be further from the truth as Kenya has had, to say the least, an underwhelming record on promoting human rights. My own personal opinion on the matter is that, despite the fact that the Kenyan state has been dreadfully oppressive since independence, it escaped major criticism because it was allied with the United States and the West throughout the Cold War and proved to be a reliable ally overall. Moreover, we find that numerous NGOs, international organizations, and tourists who visit Kenya; activities which cast Kenya in a positive light as a country both welcoming to visitors and stable.

In reality we find that Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, rarely tolerated opposition to himself or his policies throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and routinely assassinated political elites whom he deemed to be a threat. Matters became worse during the reign of Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second president, who staved out any sign of opposition by torturing thousands of Kenyans (whether they actually opposed him or not) in the infamous Nyayo House basement chambers, by continuing the use of political assassination instituted under Kenyatta; and later using state auxiliaries to intimidate and kill Kenyans to dissuade them from voting against him during presidential elections in 1992 and 1997. Moi’s tactics allowed him to rule uninterrupted until 2002.

The institutionalization of violence finally came full circle when, during the 2008 post election violence, regular Kenyan civilians began to plan and carry out violent attacks against ethnic opposition in response to the contested results of that election. This development is important to focus on because it shows how the use of violence, once nothing more than an elite tool, had permeated to grassroots level of society. This grassroots violence marks an escalation, and is quite distinct from previous forms of state sponsored violence including the poll violence in the 1990s.

However, Kenyan society has changed since the apex of Moi’s rule in the late 1980s. Today, we find a class of young Kenyan citizens who are more economically and socially empowered than any other generation since independence. These youth have been inspired by the macabre images of the 2008 post election violence, and have committed themselves to making social changes and reforms in Kenyan society needed to emancipate it from violence and oppression. The aspirations of these youth are beginning to pressure and confront a state which, historically, tortured or ravaged dissenters.

From my observations of a public demonstration (described below) it was clear to me that both civil society activists and the Kenyan state authorities are navigating this new democratic territory—very unsure about how to act, and trying not to rely on the old scripts of violence, detention, and torture by the state officials; or fear, retreat, and silence by members of civil society. Kenyan society, not what it was 25 years ago, is currently recasting itself and negotiating what dissent, democracy, and order behaves like.

On May 14th youth activists staged a demonstration dubbed Occupy Parliament, which began in Uhuru (Swahili for Freedom) Park. These youth, however, are quite different from the youth of previous generations because they are predominantly from middle-class backgrounds (activism in Kenya has traditionally come from poor/marginalized classes) and many of them are employed in the tech and artist communities springing up around Nairobi. The violent events during the 2008 presidential election have motivated these activists, and they have begun to pressure and humiliate the Members of Parliament (MPs) who they view as the major drivers to the social problems plaguing Kenya because of their greed, political manipulation, and corruption. The Occupy Parliament demonstration was organized in response to the MPigs, as they are called, who were trying to increase their salary and for trying to dismantle new provisions in the constitution to prevent such financial abuses (they are already the highest paid MPs/Representatives in the world, including US Congress and UK Parliament).

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets that particular day and we all proceeded from Uhuru Park to Kenya’s parliament, just a short distance away. More than a few people told me, as we were making our way to parliament, that this would never have happened 25 years ago and several people referred or pointed to Nyayo House (which was also not far from parliament) where most of us would have ended up. As previously mentioned Moi had no tolerance for dissention, especially for college-aged youth. The leaders of the demonstration are aware of how democratic space has widened—if only enough to allow the formation of these demonstrations—and are actively trying to push the bounds with the intent to widen civil and activist space in Kenyan politics.

The creativity of these demonstrations illustrates this fact, and was designed to draw in Kenyans who are too fearful to protest. In January of this year a tech-artist community, Pawa254, organized the “Official State Burial” and burned wooden caskets as an effigy for each MP in response to their vote to give themselves massive end of term bonuses. The May 14th demonstration, which I attended, had dozens of pigs trucked in to the parliament gates, and then the leaders dumped gallons of pigs blood into a puddle to represent the blood that MPs spill because of the greed and lack of attention to Kenya’s needs.

It wasn’t long before the Kenyan military were dispatched to fire water cannons, tear gas canisters, and beat hundreds of demonstrators. Civil society groups, and legal associations, have claimed that the police response was not only excessive but a violation of the constitutional rights of the Kenyan demonstrators.

Finding words to explain the excitement, uncertainty, frustration, and fear that Kenya is feeling during this time of transition is difficult to explain. And perhaps, as a foreigner, I am not really the one to characterize this new phenomenon. Nevertheless the shift in Kenya is palatable. The emergence of this class of defiant middle-income youth, convicted in frustrating the efforts of the corrupt elite, is entering into conversation with state authorities and pushing the bounds of acceptable dissent. While the future remains unclear (the youth leaders say that Kenyans are still too fearful to protest), it seems that Kenyans are beginning to wake up and trying to set events in motion to gain greater control of their destinies.

Declan Galvin
United States International University
Kenya

I wanted to dedicate my first blog post to discussing the human rights research I will be conducting this summer in Kenya. I am fortunate enough to be able lean on my prior experience living as a student and volunteer in Kenya, which has proven to be significant as I developed my research design with my advisor Rosalind Fredericks, the HR Fellowship advisor Vasuki Nesiah, and my classmates in our Human Rights seminar.

As I began to write the statement of purpose for the Gallatin Human Rights Fellowship application (which was nearly a year ago) I used that opportunity to reflect not only on my previous experience living in East Africa, but also on some of my frustrations with what seems to be many of the prevailing notions and discourses relating to human rights. Specifically, I have always been frustrated with the implicit assumption by some major international organizations and many donor nations that human rights is to be, first and foremost, viewed through and dealt with by “the modern state.” While I am not ignorant to the fact that the international system, particularly in the immediate aftermath of WWII, is primarily comprised of modern nation-states; I cannot help but recognize the growing importance of non-state actors (e.g., NGOs and non-profit organizations), civil society, and even business actors in reinforcing prevailing international norms, and specifically in this case human rights.

Moreover, and this is the line of inquiry that my research seeks to address, there are states which possess so little capacity that they cannot devise effective policies or standards of public health, safety, agricultural production, or urban planning; and thus, seriously affecting their capacity to promote the various economic and social rights so often invoked within human rights discourses. In other words, the state-centric emphasis implicit within conventional notions of human rights offers little guidance for states confronted with these circumstances and political realities (i.e., those in the postcolony, especially in Africa, parts of Asia, and South America) which are still expected, by threat of international law, to establish and maintain human rights within their sovereign borders.

It is this inconsistency—between international law, human rights discourse, and state capacity in the postcolony—that is at the center of my research. While in Kenya I will interview members of urban gangs and youth groups who promote the social and economic rights of “slum” dwellers by providing essential services like access to water, electricity, and protection; but who simultaneously use violence to exploit and intimidate these residents. I want to understand how these youth groups and urban dwellers, together, construct human rights in the informal settlements of Nairobi where consistent state authority is tepid or weak.

Within this, I am curious about what these residents and youth groups believe constitutes “human rights,” and whether their actions or behaviors reinforce or contradict their own notions of human rights, rather than simply comparing their behavior with an external concept of human rights (introduced in that case by the researcher). I hope that this research will inform our understanding of the construction of authority and power in the postcolony, some of the weaknesses of conventional human rights discourses in the era of globalization, and the use of violence in peri-urban settings.