things you don't anticipate

Yesterday, I had lunch at the home of S, a Mombasa writer. I was just about to leave for a live interview on Mombasa's Baraka FM radio. Another guest arrrived with news that the Mungiki had just issued a public warning in Nairobi. Any "Asian" found on the streets after 6pm would be shot.

Then someone else showed up and said that young men in Mombasa city centre, also claiming to be Mungiki, were distributing leaflets with the same information. "Asians" had better be indoors by 6pm - or else.

It was more than bizarre. It was surreal. A flurry of text messages and phonecalls to find out what was really going on - had anyone actually received a leaflet? Seen the email warning? Did any of this add up? Make sense?

I texted a couple of Nairobi friends - progressive activists - to get their scoop. Their take was - this kind of racial targetting has never happened in Mombasa. And Mungiki have never had a presence in Mombasa.

Which confirmed my own sense of: this doesn't add up.

If you want to terrorize an ethnic minority, you don't hand out leaflets on the streets, like Jehovah's witnesses. You just go for them. The whole thing smelled like someone in power, with an agenda, paying unemployed youth to pose as Mungiki in Mombasa. Mungiki are the new Al-Qaeda of Kenya; mythical terrorists invoked to justify any level of police violence or suspension of human rights.

The crazy thing is, enough Kenyans have lived through ethnically-targeted violence to respond to any new threat with instant fear. We don't ask questions, think critically, interrogate the evidence. We just dive for cover.

Sure enough, at my 7pm performance last night, at Mombasa's Little Theatre Club, there was a palpable absence of the brown community of Mombasa. Including all the people who had promised to show up and bring friends. A journalist from the Nation came to the dressing room before the show and said: So now Mungiki have officially arrived in Mombasa.