Mungiki, Kenya’s violent youth gang, serves many purposes: how identity, politics and crime keep it alive

By Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Roskilde University

Kenya has scores of youth gangs known for their violence and links to the politically powerful. None is more infamous than the Mungiki movement, with a past membership estimated to be at least a million. Though banned, it’s constantly in the news as a tool or target of big political players. Bodil Folke Frederiksen, who has studied Mungiki as part of her field-based research on youth culture in Kenya, traces the origins, growth and persistence of the group.

What gave rise to Mungiki?

Mungiki emerged in the late 1980s in what was then Kenya’s Rift Valley Province. The province was the site of simmering conflicts over land ownership and rights between the indigenous majority (mainly the Kalenjin) and more recently arrived settlers (mostly Kikuyu).

The early 1990s witnessed the first bout of politically instigated inter-ethnic conflict intended to diminish Kikuyu influence in local politics. Mungiki emerged as a Kikuyu youth movement, defending the dispossessed: women, migrants and landless youth.

At this time the grouping also opposed the autocratic and corrupt government of Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin. Later, Mungiki groups were co-opted by Moi and used in election politics. He was the first of a series of high-ranking politicians to do so.

The politics of ethnicity laid the groundwork for Mungiki.

In the 1997, 2002 and 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, leading politicians mobilised violent youth militia in support of their campaigns.

After the disastrous 2007 presidential elections, Mwai Kibaki’s victorious Kikuyu-dominated Party of National Unity mobilised Kikuyu youth militia in retaliation against the gangs deployed by the opposition party, Orange Democratic Movement. Mungiki was central in the resulting violence.

By the turn of the millennium, Mungiki had become a mostly urban phenomenon. Poverty, youth unemployment and political disillusionment created fertile ground for the group. Young men in particular regarded themselves as a “no future” generation, seeing that they had few opportunities to establish themselves as successful adults with the economic means to sustain a family.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/mungiki-kenyas-violent-youth-gang-serves-many-purposes-how-identity-politics-and-crime-keep-it-alive-221791