The New York Times carried a headline about it. “Kenya’s Brutal Murders linked to Sect,” it read. But Njuguna didn’t read, and even had he been literate, no one he knew read the New York Times.

They showed the images of the two men on local TV. But Njuguna owned no such luxury, nor did his accomplice that night, so he never saw any of them. They heard about the TV coverage from Kihika, but he might as well have not told them about it, really it didn’t make a difference. They knew how everything had happened, down to the very last detail, who needed an image on TV?

But someone must have cared, because by week’s end it was all over the foreign news channels. They were talking about it on BBC, and even CNN had something on it, but neither Maina nor Njuguna saw or heard about those broadcasts.  Some minister did issue a statement, and that made it into the local press. After the statement many young had been swept up in police patrols. But there was nothing unusual in that, it happened all the time, and in any case, they were all released in a few months.

In itself their act had not been that unusual, well… Not anymore at least, just read the papers, it really does happen quite often. Such “gory events” as everyone seemed to call them, had been going on for quite some time now, but this one seemed to have struck a nerve. Maybe it’s because the foreign channels had showed interest and no one in government liked such bad press.

In any case, it had never been Njuguna’s plan to end up as world news. To be quite honest, he really had no plans at all. He was not what you would call an ambitious person.  Njuguna left the small dusty town of Ndumberi for Nairobi city on August 10th 2006, at 12 noon. He was 16 years old and he was fed up with the toiling.  If you have ever tilled through an “ibuti ”, you will understand why. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I will explain. An “ibuti” is a square area, ten feet by ten feet. Villagers use it as a measure of how much tilling a worker has accomplished. Njuguna had worked through hundreds of those ten by ten’s in his quite short lifetime. The reward was negligible, fifty shillings for each square, 200 shillings if you could squeeze four into a day’s work. The strain was killing him. He was tired of working, and bored. “There has to be a better way to make money,” Njuguna thought, and left Ndumberi in search of it.

Njuguna had landed at his cousin’s place in Majengo. It was a tiny mud shack whose roof consisted of tarpaulin and some rusted iron sheets. The roof leaked, and the smelly, dark and mildew filled room he shared with his cousin, Njuguna realized, was not much different from the one he’d left in Ndumberi. But it was too late to turn back, and he had no money to go back anyway.

His cousin sold chang’aa, an illegal concoction of the kind that only poor people drink – strong and fierce — so much so that it burst into flames if you struck a match near it. Such accidents routinely burnt down Majengo’s tin shacks. Njuguna didn’t mind the drink but he found the stench from its brewing both overwhelming and nauseating. He wasn’t much help in selling that. His cousin however, wasn’t about to let him hang around, idling. Njuguna soon found himself rolling out carefully prepared bhang  joints. Each sold for 25 bob, and Njuguna was in charge of debt collection. When people didn’t pay their debt on time, his cousin expected him to get the money somehow. It took a bit of learning how to do it right, but soon he was collecting reliably and not having to slog the whole daylong. “Things are looking up,” he thought. He had found a good job for himself.

Njuguna was not given to a lot of reflection, but he sure was nobody’s fool. Nairobi, he realised, was not for the weak of heart. Those that did well were often hard and merciless and at least, he figured, those were two qualities he had no problems cultivating. All that was driving him towards a collision with fate, but it wasn’t inevitable until December 10, 2006 at 1 p.m.

Njuguna was waiting for a minibus driver who owed his cousin some money. The man was of a type easily intimidated and could reliably be approached by day, “unlike others who were best approached at night, when alone,” Njuguna thought to himself. When the man brought his vehicle to the bus stand, Njuguna waited until all passengers alighted. The driver parked, waiting his turn to collect new fares and Njuguna strolled over nonchalantly. He opened the passenger door to the driver’s cabin and sat himself next to the surprised driver, who immediately recognized him. Njuguna beckoned to the man, and opened his jacket so that the man could see the knife sticking out of the inside pocket. Calmly, he leaned sideways, and in a low, cold tone whispered… “You have something that belongs to us.” The man paid up.

Njuguna couldn’t have known that the whole incident was being watched keenly by another. He had been spotted. The man that watched and studied him knew exactly how to recruit Njuguna’s type and approached the young man within days.

Njuguna liked how his new friends talked about education. He had always known it was a useless waste of time, but it was good to finally confirm that books were a white man’s creation, whose purpose was to deny the black people’s natural wisdom. He had always wondered why it was so hard for someone like him to be rich when there were so many people with a lot of money around him. Now he understood that people like him had been robbed of power. The rich were keeping young people like him down. “That is why you could never find good jobs. They kept them for their spoiled children and their kind. If you were poor you toiled endlessly for no money while they kept all the good things to themselves,” he thought. He liked it when they said there was need for young people like him to sacrifice if they wanted to bring the old ways back. He liked the meetings. He also liked the fact that there were so many other young people like him, all struggling, like him, and all now understood how they had been duped by the government and all the rich people around. Never had Njuguna felt himself to be part of something so powerful, so important, and so monumental. This was God’s gift to him. God had sent him from Ndumberi for this. After six months of listening and learning, Njuguna knew he was ready to take the next step.

It was July 12, 2007. Mochama woke up late that day. If he had known better, he would have stayed in bed and saved himself from what was to come. But we human beings live minute-to-minute, in total ignorance and unaware of whatever calamity or glory awaits us around the corner. It is just as well. We may not like what we find.

There wasn’t much to wake up to anyway. Mochama’s entire life revolved around his bed-sitter, located above a bar at Corner in the low income neighbourhood of Kayole, and his work place, a minibus. He owned a stove, two sufurias , several plates and spoons, a bed with old bed sheets and a handful of shirts and trousers that hang on a sisal string clothes-line in the middle of the room.

On that fateful day, Mochama got up and went downstairs, to backrooms of the bar, to haggle for hot bathing water and the use of a bathing room. The price changed daily. When the barmaids were in a good mood they gave him the bucketful of water and bathing room free, when they were cranky they made him pay for it. He was lucky, he thought, the girl on duty had only asked him for ten bob. Soon he was bathed and changed.  He didn’t know what to do yet, his ‘squad ’ didn’t begin until after noon when the morning driver handed over the minibus to him. But men like him are not used to sitting around indoors, so he got out and went to his equivalent of a workplace’s drinking fountain - the Kayole Corner bus stop.

Otich was already at work when Mochama woke up. He had dressed and walked half an hour from Kibera slums to KBS  bus station before Mochama had even bathed. One of the drivers was looking for a ‘konda’  because his usual partner had not yet arrived. “It pays to be early,” Otich thought.

He rarely stayed in bed beyond 5 a.m. And each evening, it took all his energy to will himself back to his house. It wasn’t so much that he liked being at work; far from it! He left early and returned late to keep away from wife’s vexing demands, complaints, and the children’s incessant squabbling. He hated looking at the tattered state of their belongings, the bed sheets stained by many nights of bedwetting by their young children, the haggard woman that had once been his young bride, and measly servings that masqueraded as meals. Never be cheated, nobody gets used to being poor, and Otich hated it. Just as he hated passengers who squirmed when he stood or sat close to them. Water is expensive in Kibera and Otich couldn’t bathe often. Each time someone cringed because of his body odour, he wanted to bash his or her head in.

The women irritated him most. But there were compensations. Like the mad rush of excitement he experienced when he came across a timid looking female. He could tell if they were by the way they avoided meeting his eyes, and the way they tried to make themselves look small and inconspicuous. When he met one like that he could barely contain himself. He would go out of his way to pick a fight and then insult the stupid female to his heart’s content. He had even managed to beat one up, and nobody even dared to intervene. “One of these days,” he thought to himself, “I will get one of them, one of the nicely dressed ones, and I will show them what a real man can do to them in the dark.”

It was 4 p.m on that very day as the rush hour kicked in that fate set her clock in motion. Mochama got his minibus after waiting most day; chatting and hustling fellow drivers. He should have started at noon, but was delayed because of the minibus owner, a local leader of the Matatu  Owners Association, was a stingy Kikuyu   man who never wanted to pay for anything. He had not paid the monthly fee that the Kamjesh enforcers demanded of all vehicles plying the route, and they were not allowing the vehicle to move until the fee was paid. No driver, not even Mochama dared to go near it until the matter was resolved. The owner, rather than pay up, had come to the stop, demanding to see the person responsible for denying his minibus the right to work. A man called Kihika stepped up.

The conversation between the two was lost on Mochama since it was carried out entirely in Kikuyu, a language he had never fully learned. But you really didn’t need an interpreter. As Kihika spoke he moved ever closer to the minibus owner, and his voice dropped lower and lower until one could barely hear what was being said, but you could see the minibus owner start to sweat profusely and his eyes dart back and forth like a caged rabbit’s. Whatever he was told must have been effective. He’d paid up.

Mochama was eager to get started. He drove to town with a konda who was ending his shift and as soon as he arrived at KBS bus station, asked if there was any other person available to fill the shift. At the same time the conductor Otich had been filling for had just shown up. Thus it was that Otich and Mochama met up and began the evening rush back and forth, from Kayole to the city, hustling to make money. All the while, fate awaited them patiently.

Ten o’clock came and went. Otich was in no hurry to go home, and Mochama had to make up for lost time. Eleven o’clock passed, then midnight.

At one o’clock, they caught up with fate. It was their last trip to Kayole.

They were chosen at random; partly because Kihika remembered the vehicle from the incident earlier in the morning, and partly because it was late, and the minibus was one of only four still ferrying passengers.

Njuguna and Maina walked stealthily in the dark. Kihika walked a few paces behind, staying clear enough so as not to obstruct their mission, but near enough so that he could be able to report their success or failure. Knowing Kihika was behind them doubled the tension the two young men felt. In the past, some recruits had been unable to keep secrets and had told others of their experiences. The information had gotten to the police, leading to arrests and some boys had even been shot by police. The new approach was much simpler; an older member went with you. When information leaked to police, the movement always knew who was responsible, and the came after you.

Kihika was not a man you wanted to be after of you. He’d dispensed of most emotions after serving a ten-year prison term with hard labour because of a girl he’d loved. She’d left him for another man, a wealthier man. He had found the new man in her life and killed him. And what did it achieve? Nothing except land him in prison where he had been beaten, sodomised, tortured and hardened. He’d come out a different person, determined to make money, get rich and live a comfortable life. “Everyone to his own,” was his motto since then. He had no qualms about killing if that is what it took to accomplish his goals and had little mercy for victims. “If you couldn’t take better care of your life then it was too bad for you if you lost it,” was his argument.  He was rarely interested in any details beyond that. That though didn’t mean he wasn’t a good student of human beings, especially the ones he recruited for the movement. In fact, he knew them all too well.

“Men like Njuguna could be counted upon to be fanatically loyal,” Kihika thought. They liked rituals and dark secrets; they were addicted to the tension and excitement. Hungry for companionship and a sense of belonging; such men could do anything for the movement and Njuguna was already showing more promise than most.
 
Kihika found some of the movement’s teachings ridiculous and knew the old men who gave the “culture” classes were being paid handsomely. Still, he liked to listen in every once in a while as the old men talked about the good old days before the colonialists came, and passionately urged the recruits to reclaim their past without fear, to re-conquer the land, and take back their rightful inheritance. They were stupid to buy that stuff, Kihika always thought, but without them, it would have been impossible for the movement to run its elaborate extortion enterprise. The recruits that believed the cultural nonsense took it seriously though, that he knew. The more convinced they were the more tirelessly they worked; they recruited others indefatigably and unknowingly helped create the religious veneer of the movement. A sect is what they had been called in the media. Kihika, however, knew otherwise. He had been there when they’d paid off third-rate thugs and killed them off when they had to. He’d been there when they’d eventually taken over the extortion rackets in the slums and in parts of the city. Businesses now paid them for security and that money was scrupulously being reinvested into buying more power, and creating new sources of cash. The movement even owned legitimate land and properties; and was making clean money from legal tenants. “You have to admire the men who set this set up,” thought Kihika; “it’s the perfect business, run by cheap or free workers willing to enforce any instructions.”

Kihika had occasionally met with some of the architects, mostly in the posh hotel rooms of some expensive hotels. Whenever he’d met them in public they’d introduced him to others as a needy member of their constituency, come into the city to get a scholarship for his daughter or in need of help to pay medical fees for his dying infant. Nobody ever seemed to suspect otherwise, not even when seemingly high profile government officials posted bail for arrested movement members.

Kihika tolerated those naïve enough to join-up thinking the movement was anything but a money making enterprise. But it irritated him that sooner or later such recruits always ended up needing some encouragement, an object lesson to make them understand why they couldn’t leave once they had joined.  He hoped Njuguna wouldn’t need such lessons. The boy was smart; he had the makings of a good enforcer. “Do you know how to read? Kihika had asked him when he was recruited, “No, I didn’t finish school.” The boy had answered. “Why?” Kihika enquired. “Nothing in school was interesting. In any case, one doesn’t need an education to make money in this country,” Njuguna had responded. It was a pity the boy hadn’t at least finished elementary, “good enforcers needed to at least be able to do math,” thought Kihika as he watched Njuguna and Maina board Mochama’s minibus.

He waited a few minutes, smoking quietly in the dark, and then as the minibus started off into the night, he jogged along it and swung himself inside, through the still open door. He noted, as he passed them, that Njuguna and Maina had sat themselves in the first right and left front seats respectively.

Kihika passed Otich unnoticed and walked to the back of the vehicle where he took an empty seat. He sat down quietly. His role tonight was to watch. Any other conductor would have recognized him instantly, and worried about his presence, but Otich rarely worked the Kayole route and knew of Kihika only by reputation, not by face.

Fate gave Otich a nudge that night, enough to make him alert. Usually he didn’t worry about much in life; but the nudge told his gut that things were not right. Several buses and public vehicles had been carjacked on Kayole route before, so he looked around to see if any of the passengers appeared armed. The two boys in front both had backpacks but looked ordinary and so did the rest of the passengers. Soon the vehicle passed all the known spots where robbers prefer to attack and Otich stopped worrying about theft. His attention now passed on to the sole female passenger. He’d decided that it was her presence that was making him uneasy.

“What right does a woman have to be out at this time of the night?” He thought to himself angrily. “She must be a prostitute,” he reasoned. “Maybe I should give her what she is looking for,” he thought, glaring at her. She caught his glare and quickly looked away. “Ah timid,” he thought, excitement flooding his body. In his anger and twisted lust, he forgot all about his earlier disquiet. It was a typical human error. Every so often, our ancient animal instincts, seeking to save us, tell us to flee, to abandon a path taken. We refuse to listen, thinking our fear to be irrational. So it is that we find enemies where they are not, and miss them where they exist. Fate’s warning was thus ignored and within the hour, the minibus entered Kayole and started disgorging its passengers one by one.

In the driver’s cabin, Mochama was feeling gleefully happy. He had made up for the time lost in the afternoon. Moreover, by overcharging the last two batches of passengers; claiming it was late in the night; he had made more money than he had anticipated. He was looking forward to a couple of cold refreshing beers before settling down for the night.

They reached Corner bus stop at quarter to two on the morning of 13th July 2007. It was the last stop and there were only four passengers left on board. Otich waited patiently for the woman get out. He got out after her, and followed her covertly as she walked towards the back of the vehicle. Few people were stupid enough to be walking about in Kayole at such an hour so he knew he could grab her and drag her into the darkness and nobody would see or raise any alarm. Then he would show her what women who walked around late at night were good for. He would make her scream. “Teach her to behave,” he thought excitedly as he marked the path she was taking so that he could follow her. He walked back quickly towards the driver’s cabin to get his money from Mochama hoping to catch her before she went out of view. So engrossed was he in his plan that he did not notice the two young men seated in the front getting out or that a third man remained inside the vehicle. He only had time to feel something looming over him before a sharp slashing pain burnt through his neck.

Mochama was mentally calculating how much money to give the minibus owner, how much to pay the conductor and how long he could afford to stay in the bar when a young man interrupted his thoughts, asking for directions. When he leaned out of the driver’s cabin to answer, Mochama was only partly paying attention to the person who had spoken to him. He didn’t even realize it when the blade severed his neck.

As Njuguna picked Mochama’s head, and Maina picked Otich’s, there was nothing but utter silence in the dark night illuminated by only a handful of dim streetlights that eerily flickered on and off in the distance. At Kihika’s signal, a grey Toyota that had been waiting in the dark approached the dimly lit scene.  Had there been good light, one would have seen a glazed look of shock on each boy’s face and the blood that splattered all over their clothes as they rushed to put the heads of the driver and conductor in plastic bags, and scramble into the waiting car. Neither boy protested when their eyes were blind-folded and neither boy said anything during the entire ride. The blind-folds came off early in the morning to reveal a dimly lit hut surrounded by a dense sisal plantation. The initiation ceremony began just before dawn. Njuguna and Maina were asked to drink blood from goats mixed with that taken from the two human heads. Blood was smeared on their heads and their hands and they were given bits of meat to eat. They couldn’t tell if what they chewed was human or animal. Then they oath taking began.

In another time and another age an oath, not unlike this one, at least in the wording, had banded a group of men and women together in the fight for independence and freedom. Now, strangely detached from its origin, modified to suit a newer age, and haunted by lives so crassly taken, it bound a new type of brotherhood together in the common pursuit of wealth, intimidation, power and control. But while Maina quaked, Njuguna felt elated. He felt complete. He belonged to this brotherhood now, he would fight along side them to the end, he would change this people, and he would teach them to go back to the old and better ways. He would teach them to live as they did before the westerners brought barbarianism and wickedness to the land. Once more they would make prayers to Mwene Nyaga. Money would be raised for this cause and those who didn’t pay would face his wrath. Kihika, watching Njuguna’s face, didn’t need to be told what the boy was thinking.

He could have said it himself.

“I am Mungiki.”




Ibuti - Pronounced ee-foot-ee
Bhang - Marijuana
Sufurias - Sufurias is the slang for pans
Squad - Squad is slang for busing shift. Minibus and public taxi drivers work in shifts called squads
KBS - KBS refers to the Kenya Bus Service and also the central bus terminal in Nairobi city
Konda - Konda is slang for conductor
Matatu - Swahili term for public taxis and minibuses
Kikuyu - One of the 45 ethnic communities in Kenya
Mwene Nyaga - Traditional God of the Kikuyu people