These days Charity Bokindo, the district commissioner of Nairobi North, is taking no chances. Wherever she goes, she carries not one but two pistols, and she always travels with armed guards.
"The Mungiki," she whispered, "they threatened to circumcise me."
Kihara Mwangi, a member of Kenya's parliament, recently disclosed that he had been kidnapped by the Mungiki, a secret society that is part Sicilian Mafia, part Chicago street gang, with a little of the occult sprinkled in.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"These guys are devil worshipers," he said. "And no one knows what they want."
The Mungiki mystery is sweeping across Kenya, taking a lot of lives with it. In a month, more than 50 people have been killed in a crime spree and brutal police crackdown.
Police officials say the Mungiki aim to destabilize the country before the presidential elections in December and blame them for some downright ugly acts: chopping off legs, skinning heads and guzzling jugs of human blood. Government officials accuse them of running an extortion empire and hacking up victims.
The Mungiki Menace, as local papers call it, plays into many of Kenya's sore spots: tribal frictions, political shenanigans, poverty and crime. The flash point is Mathare, a giant slum and mountain of rust near Nairobi, the capital, where 500,000 people fill a warren of corrugated metal shanties.
On a recent afternoon, John Kinywa, 17, a passion fruit juice vendor, trolled his patch of Mathare, shaking a plastic bowl for donations for a friend's funeral.
"Just a shilling; can't you spare a shilling?" he asked passers-by, who, by the look of their ragged clothes and chopstick legs, probably could not.
Kinywa said police officers shot his friend, who he insisted was innocent, in a raid against the Mungiki early this month.
Mathare is one of countless slums in Kenya that the government does not quite reach. There are no police stations here, or fire hydrants or roads.
The Mungiki did not start here. They came from the Kikuyu tribal highlands north of Nairobi, that carpeted green, straight-off-a-postcard Out of Africa side of Kenya.
According to Hezekiah Ndura Waruinge, one of the Mungiki's founders, the group began as a local defense squad during land clashes in the late 1980s between forces loyal to the government, which was dominated by the Kalenjin tribe, and farmers who were Kikuyu, a rival tribe.
By the late 1990s, the Mungiki went urban, Waruinge explained, taking over the city's minibus trade.
Then they diversified into garbage collection, building materials and the protection racket.
But then the Mungiki made a mistake, Waruinge said, and dabbled in politics, supporting losing candidates in the elections of 2002 and falling on the wrong side of the government.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS