When Susan Wangari last saw her son, Emmanuel Mukuria, he was heading to work in the heart of Nairobi. That was June 25, 2024—just hours before crowds of angry youth overran Parliament to protest tax hikes and corruption. She hasn’t seen him since.
“I wish he was dead,” she says quietly, her voice steady but broken. “At least then, I’d know where to lay flowers. I could visit his grave.”
For the past year, Wangari, 50, has wandered through police stations, hospitals, and morgues across Nairobi, searching. Always hoping. Never finding. She clings to memories of her son, a 24-year-old matatu tout with a warm smile and a habit of tapping on her window after late shifts.
“I sleep lightly every night,” she says. “I still hope he’ll knock.”
Mukuria is one of dozens of young men who vanished during or after the anti-government protests that shook Kenya last June and July. Human rights groups say at least 60 people were killed and more than 80 abducted—some never seen again.
Mukuria’s friends say he was arrested by police while shouting slogans in the city centre. Two former detainees later told Wangari they shared a cramped cell with her son. One of them, released just four months ago, still won’t speak publicly—fear clings tightly.
“They told me they were beaten, questioned about the protests,” Wangari recalls. “They kept asking them who paid them to demonstrate.”
“We sympathised. We moved on.”
President William Ruto made a rare acknowledgement in May, admitting that security forces were behind some of the abductions. He claimed everyone taken had been “returned to their families.”
But rights groups paint a different picture.
“Dozens are still missing,” says Hussein Khalid, head of Vocal Africa, a civil rights group. “The government’s so-called accountability mechanism is a dead end.”
Khalid says the police have made little effort to find or explain what happened to the missing. Instead, families are met with silence or passing responsibility.
AFP sought comment from the president’s office and police. The president’s team said the matter was with the police. Police referred questions back to the president’s office. No one had any official information on Mukuria’s case.
“The case is under investigation,” an officer from the station where Wangari filed a missing person report said. A year later, she’s heard nothing more.
“We are not near the truth.”
Wangari’s pain echoes across other homes like hers. In the estate of South B, Gillian Munyao keeps a framed photo of her son, Rex Masai, on the wall. He was the first to die during the protests—shot in broad daylight on June 20, 2024.
“I found him lying in blood at a clinic,” she says, staring ahead. “I still don’t understand why.”
An inquest into Rex’s killing has stalled, the state prosecutor citing a lack of willing witnesses. One potential eyewitness backed out, saying he feared being “disappeared.”
Khalid, the rights advocate, has attended dozens of funerals since the protests. He estimates between 20 and 30 young people buried—many without full investigations.
“Was all this force necessary?” he asks. “These were young, innocent Kenyans.”
Inside Parliament, a recent debate on the unrest showed just how quickly the country’s leaders moved on.
“People were killed, we sympathised, we moved on,” said Bashir Abdullahi, a ruling party MP.
But for families like Wangari’s and Munyao’s, grief doesn’t move on. It lingers.
“The wound will never heal,” says Chrispin Odawa, Rex’s father. “Justice, even if delayed, means a lot.”
The Cost of Silence
Back in Kasarani, Wangari stands outside her single-room home. The narrow alley is quiet. Chickens cluck in the distance.
“Every time a body is found,” she says, “my heart stops.”
She holds onto a slim hope that her son is alive somewhere—in a secret cell, perhaps—waiting to come home.
“I’ll keep searching,” she says. “But the silence… it is louder than any answer.”
