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.
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