NAIVASHA, Kenya — It was still dark when the call came. Grace Nyambura, known to her neighbors in Karagita as Mama Chuma, was asleep when she got a call from her daughter. It was around 5 a.m. She told Nyambura something had happened to Chuma, Nyambura’s fifth-born son. She asked her mother to get to Lake Naivasha as quickly as possible. Nyambura complied. Kamau, her eldest son, fetched her by motorbike and they rode fast through the sleeping town, headed for the lakeshore. What she found that morning four years ago would sear her memory: her son, Samuel Mwangi Kimani — Chuma to those who knew him — 25 years old and a father of two, lay dead on the lakeshore. “He appeared to be shot in the back, suggesting he was fleeing,” Nyambura tells Mongabay, seated on a worn-out sofa inside her dimly lit living room. “They were running away from the coast guard. They were not facing off.” The incident occurred in September 2021. Protests over the killing would soon erupt across Karagita settlement. But in recounting the murder of her son, Nyambura doesn’t seem agitated. She appears more haunted by it, not just his death, but also the years leading up to it, as she watched her child struggle to make a living. Kimani had spent two years fishing and picking up construction gigs in town. Fishing, she said, had always been dangerous. “They used to get beaten up,” Nyambura says. “They were harassed by coast guard…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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