Mungiki Menace

I have been emailing some friends in Kenya and keeping up with the news from East Africa on the BBC, and lately the stories surrounding the "Mungiki Menace" have dominated the headlines. Though my friends are off to the west in the highlands and are relatively safe, save a few isolated incidents that have happened earlier this year, there is a sect in central Kenya known as Mungiki which has been terrorizing the country. Mungiki which means multitude of Kikuyu, sounded a lot like the bloody Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950's, a wedding of religious zealotry with a land based political movement. However, Mungiki, though claiming to have followers numbering in the millions, does not enjoy the popular support of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and frankly I think that it is something to be just a little bit frightened of if you are going to Nairobi any time soon.

The sect is based around the goal of removing Western culture from the sacred homeland, but they are not yet targeting Europeans, they are targeting their fellow Kikuyu. Although I do not know much about the victims, they seem to be from the same slums that Mungiki was born from, the Matere slum in particular. The cult is very secretive, but what is known is that they take oathing ceremonies like the Mau Mau and worship Nagai, a deity who they believe lives in Mt. Kenya. The sect also sports dreadlocks which is another connection to the Mau Mau. Mungiki was outlawed in 2002 because of their belief in female circumcision but recently they re-emerged with a series of gruesome massacres which often involved machetes or "pangas".

Under my links is Kenyan message board that anybody who is interested should check out. Many Kenyans are so distrustful of their own government that they believe that the murders have some political purpose. It would be interesting to see how public opinion sways in the wake of the violent police crackdown in the Matere Slum. The unmitigated state violence used to root out Mungiki could prove countrerproductive and there is now way that the government is going to create a gulag to put down Mungiki like the British did against the Mau Mau, especially if Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, has the presidency.

For a different type of illustration, please willfully suspend your disbelief and take part in this excercise: Imagine a group of fundamentalist Methodists in the heart of Texas who got the idea of a ritually pure homeland from reading about the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites in Old Testament. Then imagine them gaining support among the faithful and enacting some of the laws they read in Leviticus, like stoning their daughters to death for looking at a man with a lustful eye. This patriarchal stuff eventually gets them outlawed by state goverment for but the fundamentalists are able to go underground and spin the defeat in their favor in the minds of their believers. They then couple their movement with a political purpose like throwing off the chains of agribusiness and start cutting people's heads off. That is what it would be like if we had the American equivalent of Mungiki.

It makes me wonder though, how far from the truth is what is being reported. I know that we have lots of sources of information, including Kenyans who could tell us about how Mungiki, but I wonder what goes unsaid. I also wonder about the number of political movements over the years who have used religion, from Sinn Fein to name your Jihadist sect. That is something worth studying, because once we are able to isolate some variables that foster violent religious fundamentalism for political purposes we can start to know what we are working with and how we can end all this hate and death.