Last Sunday, a church service in Nyeri County turned into a scene that felt more like a replay of colonial history. Police, some witnesses say, arrived in the company of goons for what could be described as a modern “punitive expedition” — the old colonial practice of collectively punishing a community for daring to host an “unwanted” person.
If history is any guide, don’t expect accountability. Goons have been with us for over 120 years, and we can bet that Douglas Kanja, the Inspector General of Police, will not be in a hurry to make arrests. Didn’t police look the other way when Rev Timothy Njoya was whipped in public for demanding constitutional reforms? Don’t we remember Safina Party’s Dr Richard Leakey being whipped outside a Nakuru court? In those moments, the brutality was not a breakdown of authority; it was authority outsourcing its ugliness.
Police lob tear gas at worshippers during church service attended Gachagua in Nyeri
That is why the Nyeri scene resonates so sharply and taps into an older lineage. In the colonial era, Richard Meinertzhagen honed the practice of pursuing ‘stubborn’ communities and individuals through proxies, armed auxiliaries and hired muscle, making intimidation feel like “administration”. The 1905 assassination of the Nandi leader Koitalel arap Samoei — shot at point-blank range — was not only a killing; it was a declaration of what “order” meant whenever empire met resistance. And Meinertzhagen’s so-called “punitive expeditions”, the sanitised idiom of pacification, were the routine mechanism by which force was laundered into policy, including campaigns directed at the people of Mbiri and Embu.
The same pattern appears in the story of Dagoretti chief Waiyaki wa Hinga : he was fatally injured after confronting Captain Purkiss over the molestation of women and the theft of food in his territory. These abuses were blamed on armed hangers-on (read: goons) operating under Purkiss’s shadow, an outfit that blurred the boundary between private thuggery and official power. It is a reminder that, in colonial spaces, violence often arrived through violent intermediaries: close enough to the state to act like authority, distant enough for the state to deny them when convenient.
Tear gas engulfs parked vehicles after armed goons disrupted a Sunday service at Witima ACK Church in Nyeri County on January 25, 2026.
Photo credit: Pool
Seen that way, the sight of police giving cover to goons to do the dirty work is not some shocking new development. It may outrage the public, but it hardly surprises historians. To understand why gangs can disrupt rallies, funerals and churches as police look on, we have to stop treating this as a new moral collapse. There is a long history in which police and goons share a common ancestor. They were born in the same rough workshop where authority was first assembled out of improvisation. These were auxiliaries, deputised strongmen, hired muscle and “useful” intermediaries who could do what the state wanted done without the state being seen to do it, as part of indirect rule.
It is worth understanding that Kenya’s security was built on a hybrid force: formal authority backed by informal violence. The colonial state that established itself in British East Africa did not arrive with enough European manpower to patrol every ridge and valley. It arrived as a thin administrative skeleton that depended on African muscle. Officials needed men who knew routes, languages and local politics. They needed men who could carry guns and enforce orders. Those men became the frontier’s first police-like presence. Long before a national police service existed, “law and order” was performed by armed escorts and auxiliaries who were not only security providers but also the first instruments of intimidation. Some of these became askaris (the modern-day police), while others became retainers for violence, or what historian Michelle Moyd calls “violent intermediaries”.
When Ainsworth arrived in Machakos as an official of Imperial British East Africa, we are told that he arrived with hired militia, armed with rifles, which made ‘quick strikes’ against any village or section that stood in his way. “He burned houses, captured stock and took prisoners,” especially among the Kamba. This authority was exercised through the use of goons, previously used in slave raids, or who had mastered the game of protecting trade caravans.
Entrepreneurs of violence
As Ainsworth began building his own askaris (who later became the Kenya Police), a wider cast of auxiliaries — levies, porters, scouts, informers and other enforcers — was allowed to proliferate. These were not quite state agents and not quite civilians: they occupied the space between government and society, operating as private entrepreneurs of violence — useful to the state, deniable to the state, and often accountable to a faceless authority.
There was the classic case of John Boyes, the self-styled “king” of Kikuyu. Boyes reportedly built an “army” of roughly 5,000 young men (read: goons) and extracted taxes, performing state-like functions without formal mandate. Even when colonial officials did not openly endorse such men, the state often benefited indirectly from the fear and instability they generated. When Boyes fell out of favour with the administration in central Kenya, he was accused of employing “military impostors”. If that sounds familiar, it is because that is how the state operates. The young men were arrested for illegally wearing military uniforms and for posing as soldiers. Boyes himself was arrested for masquerading as a government official and for illegally flying the British Union Jack.
The then Murang’a administrator, Francis Hall, framed the indictment: “I charge you, Boyes, that during your residence in the Kenya District, you waged wars, held barazas, masqueraded as a government official, went to six punitive expeditions, and committed dacoity by robbing Wakikuyu.”
One of the vehicles that were damaged after armed goons disrupted a Sunday service at Witima ACK Church in Nyeri County on January 25, 2026.
Photo credit: Gitonga Marete | Nation Media Group
Whether in Machakos, Fort Smith or elsewhere, the colonial state depended on both uniformed police and local militia that compensated for its thinness.
The Mau Mau Emergency took this architecture of intermediaries and expanded it dramatically. The British did not defeat Mau Mau through uniforms and barracks alone. They built a coercive network that depended on hired goons acting as loyalist militias, informers, or the Ian Henderson-led pseudo-gangs that had been hired to infiltrate the movement. Moreover, the Kikuyu Home Guard system was not simply a local security initiative, but an officially sanctioned militia embedded in local administration. At its peak, it was made up of tens of thousands and left a legacy of terror that included extrajudicial killings.
The Jomo Kenyatta and Moi administrations did not abolish the political usefulness of intermediaries; they simply changed the branding. The postcolonial era and multiparty competition opened new markets for coercion — outsourced, deniable and often cheap. The enforcers arrived as the Kanu Youth Wing, hired crowds and “community defenders”. They were deployed, at times by politicians, to do the work that official forces could not be seen doing — disrupting meetings, intimidating rivals, policing territory and disciplining dissent.
Politicians learned what colonial administrators had long practised: informal muscle is most valuable precisely because it is informal. Kanu secretaries-general used to arrive at their rallies with goons. They could surge into an opponent’s rally and turn it into panic. Other politicians use them to stone a convoy, trigger a stampede, smash windows, torch property and beat opponents in the open — and then dissolve back into the crowd before responsibility can settle on anyone. They can also be used to shape politics at the margins and help enforce gerrymandered boundaries. Simply put, goons have been used to amplify tribal chaos and trigger clashes, like those recently seen in Narok, as an electoral strategy. Such spectacle arrives as arson — burned homes, scorched businesses and evicted families.
A goon chases down a protester in downtown Nairobi as police officers in a van look on.
Photo credit: Reuters
In Kenya, this revolving cast has worn many names, each label a fresh coat of legitimacy over familiar functions. That is how we normalised living with Mungiki, Jeshi la Mzee, Taliban, Chinkororo and other violent intermediaries that are subcontracted by politicians.
That a Nyeri church was put under siege for hosting former deputy president is a continuation of this history, though Gachagua is not a paragon of virtues. Human rights groups and witnesses say police officers, accompanied by known goons, disrupted the service, lobbed tear gas and fired live ammunition. The National Police Service has, as usual, offered a different account, suggesting “unknown individuals” were responsible for part of the chaos and promising investigations.
The reason these goons won’t be arrested is that they share the same ancestry as the police. In Kenya, the use of goons is nothing new; like the history of policing itself, it spans more than 120 years, and the two are like Siamese twins — cojoined and content.
John Kamau is a PhD candidate in History, University of Toronto. Email: [email protected]
