Negotiating the Livelihoods of Children and Youth in Africa's Urban Spaces

15. The Trajectories of Survival of the Mungiki Youth in Nairobi

15 The Trajectories of Survival of the Mungiki Youth in Nairobi Susan M. Kilonzo Introduction The numerous socio-economic challenges facing the youth in developing nations today have meant that youth must find new approaches to address these challenges and utilize what is available in their surroundings to enable them survive. This is especially the case in the congested, poor living conditions of the sub-urban regions. In most of the developing nations, youth burgeon has been associated with increased crime in both urban and rural areas, activities that can be linked to unemployment and low literacy levels. In their effort to live within the limits of their surroundings, some youth in Kenya have formed groups, within which they identify and pool their efforts for wider recognition, besides enhancing their survival techniques in the midst of economic hardships. Some of these groups have been labelled as gangs, criminal groups and dangerous sects. Members of these groups, therefore, do not readily negotiate livelihoods with the general public but rather with their sect leaders, and they are sometimes known to make deals with political leaders to protect their interests. Youth gangs may function as residual social institutions when other institutions fail, and provide a certain degree of satisfaction, order and solidarity for their members. Such gangs are present in both socialist and free-market societies and in both developing and developed countries. To exemplify, the Japanese Yazuka, the Chinese Triads, and the Italian Mafia are organized criminal gangs with youth street affiliates or aspirants (Irving 1990:172). Youth and children have been linked to some of these groups. For instance, the Japanese Ministry of Justice reports that 52,275 gangsters were arrested in 1983. The number of juveniles identified Negotiating the Livelihoods of Children and Youth in Africa’s Urban Spaces 230 as members of gangster organizations who entered Japanese reformatory schools in 1983 was 713 or 12.3 per cent of the total 5,787 juveniles. In the African continent, juvenile and youth membership in criminal gangs has been evident. Writing on youth gangs, Irving observes that today’s gangs are a violent and insidious new form of organized crime. Heavily armed with sophisticated weapons, they are involved in drug trafficking, witness intimidation, extortion, and bloody territorial wars. Dowdney (2003), studying the involvement of youths in gang violence in Rio de Janairo, argues that many children who are armed with guns have few other options economically, educationally, and in terms of protection and status. Jensen (1999:76) in his research on the discourses of coping with violence in South Africa’s Cape flats mentions that no government has been able to solve the socio-economic crisis of her people or the high levels of crime and violence, and this inability has always been very highly resented. Jensen, borrowing from a number of researches and interviews, explains that the type of violence within a given group is dependent on a number of factors including age, gender, class, housing, and race. Different groups have been used to perpetrate crime and violence to benefit their members, and as Stephen Ellis (1999) explains, in the context of the discernible drift away from Western modernity towards the re-traditionalization of society, which anthropologists and social analysts have identified in contemporary Africa, youths have adopted diverse aspects of traditional cultures, including initiation rites and religious beliefs and practices, as ideological foundations of their resistance. These characteristics are typical of the Mungiki sect in Kenya. In adopting these features, the Mungiki sect followers claim to be fighting the ‘ills’ of the state. On a different twist, African states have at certain times used such groups to perpetrate crime and violence, especially when this is deemed beneficial to a particular group of leadership in the government. The membership of these movements largely constitute youth, and though in some cases they are in conflict with the existing legal frameworks, they have found refuge under existing corrupt leadership in some African governments, who shield them but on certain conditions. The crimes perpetrated by these movements deserve theoretical and practical analysis. As we explore the nature of these movements, we are not ignorant of the fact that there exist economic crises in most of the African countries, with the youth facing the blunt effects of poverty, unemployment, and non-literacy. As a contribution to this volume on negotiating livelihoods, this chapter takes the extreme perspective in which the youth may not be keen to negotiate the challenges facing their livelihoods with the...