In December 2007, immediately the results of the general elections were announced, Kenya descended into anarchy.
And in the small village of Miritini Station in Jomvu, Mombasa county, a young Catholic man helplessly watched as eight of his neighbours screamed for help, their house engulfed in an angry ball of fire, with plumes of thick black smoke, unable to come out.
Their desperate screams were in vain. No one could help them. They had been locked in and those who locked them in stood guard around the house, not letting anyone in or out.
Julius Wanyama swears he heard his close friend’s voice calling on him to save him, as if he was standing in the next room.
“Among those burning was my deputy head teacher called Mr Maendeleo. He was also the presiding officer of the nearby polling station. We tried to go help them but the arsonists kept repulsing us,” Wanyama says.
All eight died. He was traumatised.
“I could hear their voices calling for help long after the incident. One of the community leaders who knew I had done a course on community development, told me to apply my acquired skills to handle the situation,” Wanyama says.
He was unsure on how to approach the matter, with the country still in a tense mood.
Finally, he decided he would use religious leaders as his entry point.
He mobilised religious leaders ostensibly to conduct prayers and last respects at the burnt house. He also used that opportunity to address a bigger issue, conflict resolution.
“I could feel a certain push to act but I did not know how to handle it or even begin. A huge crowd came. We collected the ashes and gave them to the family members,” Wanyama says.
Later, the religious leaders came back to Wanyama, wanting to know how he was able to pull such a huge crowd for prayers.
“They asked me to ensure there is continuity in the conversation, which we had started on interreligious co-existence since there was tension across the country still. The main aim was to bring the co-existence among the community in Miritini,” he says.
It is from this dialogue that the Miritini Peace Initiative was formed, to deal with issues of community interest and bring peace.
Wanyama says his main work was to coordinate the initiative.
He later organised a huge demonstration against the Kenya National Highways Authority, because of the frequent accidents in Miritini on the Mombasa-Nairobi highway that claimed many lives.
The demos made him a marked man by the police and he was summoned several times to explain his interest in organising the protests.
Unintimidated, he stood his ground and explained why he organised the demos.
Kenha officials later called him and, surprisingly, they used his designs to erect speed bumps in the area, leading to a significant reduction of accidents in Miritini.
This made the community label him ‘Wanyama the activist’.
He had gone from organising prayers to calling for cohesion to activism.
“I didn’t know that at that point I was doing activism. I had awakened the activist in me that I didn’t even know existed,” he says.
When an opportunity arose, he applied for and got a job at Haki Yetu Organisation in 2013.
His main task and responsibility was to build a peace programme in the institution and look for avenues that can bring an element of mediation, active non-violent mechanisms and alternative justice system as a tool to handle the other components in the institution.
“The departments are interlinked. Sometimes you find a situation where there is a land matter but the disputing parties are so violent that they cannot sit down and agree on how to divide their land or to share boundaries. That is where my skills come in,” he says.
Born and raised in Mombasa, Wanyama, a father or two and married to one wife, says his involvement in leadership roles since his childhood prepared him for the work he is doing now.
“All along, since my childhood, I have been a church boy. I grew up in the Catholic church, brought up in a Catholic family, went to Catholic schools from nursery to secondary before joining Technical University of Mombasa, where I did my diploma in community development,” Wanyama says.
He then did short courses on peace and conflict resolution in Kenya, before flying to Germany, where he did more short courses on peace analysis and, peace and conflict.
“I went to Strathmore University for mediation, where I was accredited and was then trained at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Now I am a qualified accredited mediator, who can handle cases professionally,” he says.
Wanyama has been involved in leadership positions since childhood. In church, he was the leader of the altar boys and later leader of the senior youth.
“In high school at St Charles Lwanga, I was the leader of the Young Christian Students. After high school, I became the chair of the Catholic Youth at the Archdiocese of Mombasa under the leadership of Archbishop Njenga,” he says.
He then was sent to Nairobi to work as a member of the Youth Council at the national office, where he was later elected as the Catholic chairman of Youth in Kenya from 2008 to 2011 based at the Queens of Apostle (Mji Wa Furaha).
“My main work then was to gather issues affecting the youth all over and present them to the Bishops’ Council for bishops to address them,” he said.
He learnt great values of fact-checking here, "because bishops are serious people, you do not take information to them, which you do not have facts with”.
Through his work, Haki Yetu Organisation expanded to Kilifi, Kwale and Tana River counties.
It is in Kilifi and Kwale counties that he came face-to-face with realities on the ground.
“Since I was raised in a Catholic setting, I did not believe much in witchcraft and assumed it was all to scare children,” he says.
Alas, in Kilifi and Kwale counties he started getting and forced to handle cases where elderly people with grey hair are lynched on allegations of practicing witchcraft.
It was a whole new world to him.
“The first day I ever handled such a case, I had gone to Kilifi and found two elderly men had been beheaded on suspicion of practicing witchcraft. I was traumatised once more and opened the 2007 incident I had witnessed that had been pushed to the back in my subconscious,” Wanyama says.
The two elderly neighbours had been accused by their own children and brother that they were practicing witchcraft and were blocking their success.
Wanyama developed deeper interest in trying to understand the real reason for the action of the sons and sibling.
“In many of our traditional set-ups, the elderly people were respected and held in high esteem. Why would these be killed? And by their own trusted family members?” Wanyama asked himself several times.
He developed questionnaires and distributed them to various stakeholders in Kilifi and Kwale counties in a bid to find out whether the issues the elderly people were undergoing had been addressed in any way.
He found out that many civil society organisations had kept off that subject for fear of being labelled witch sympathisers.
“Witchcraft is a kind of faith that is based on traditions of many communities. I found out this was purely violations of the human rights of the elderly and that is how I came up with the alternative dispute resolution mechanism programme,” Wanyama says.
The programme involved finding ways to resolve matters that had for a long time made the elderly people lose their property and lives to lynching, using non-violent means, acceptable both constitutionally and traditionally.
When the programme started, Wanyama says, there was a significant reduction of killings of the elderly.
“In many cases, community actors were now tackling the underlying causes, which most of the time, as we found out, were land conflict, jealousy among siblings, and get-rich-quick schemes by youth who wanted to inherit their fathers’ lands quickly,” he says.
He has been on the programme for nine years now, and has from time to time been forced to see specialists for debriefing and counselling sessions.
“The images I have seen affect me. Sometimes I would get edgy, moody and inadvertently take out my anger on my family subconsciously. But Haki Yetu has been taking me through counselling and debriefing, which helps me overcome my issues and be able to handle more cases,” Wanyama says.
Haki Yetu last year released a report titled 'The Aged on Edge', which shows there were 138 killings of elderly people on allegations of practicing witchcraft between 2020 and 2022.
“And these are only the figures that we have verified. There are others that we could not verify because the security agencies were reluctant to give us the figures,” Wanyama says.
Though the problem has reduced since Haki Yetu’s interventions, it is still rampant.
The latest National Crime Research Centre report of 2020 indicates Kilifi county leads in the number of reported murders of elderly people at 58.2 per cent of the crime reported in the county, against the national average of 24.8 per cent.
It is followed by Kwale at 31.9 per cent, then Kisii at 29.2 per cent, Nairobi at 23.9 per cent, Mombasa at 16 per cent and Kisumu at 2.2 per cent.
Wanyama says there is a link between the high percentage of murders reported in Kilifi, Kwale and Kisii counties.
“Most of these killing are related to witchcraft allegations,” he says.
The report accuses the security agencies of being reluctant to give information, leading to a significant reduction of the actual numbers.
“The police refuse to give actual figures and sometimes treat the killing as normal murders thus making it impossible to categorise them as witchcraft killings,” Wanyama says.
The report cites land, youth unemployment, weak legislation, illiteracy and administration inaction as among the key contributors to the killings.
Wanyama says security apparatus need more training on how to handle such matters.
He says the report suggests the review of the Witchcraft Act, which was done in 1925.
“We want this to be a national conversation. Our next conversations will be between us and the security actors, the Judiciary and the Legislature,” Wanyama says.
He says through their advocacy, the Labour ministry through the State Department for Social Protection and Senior Citizen Affairs has come up with a Bill that seeks to better protect senior citizens.