Nicholas Chirande was on the way home from training on the evening of 30 July last. He was one of the better footballers in the Nairobi slum of Mathare, where 200,000 people are crammed into mud huts.

Football is the sole repository of dreams for young men in Mathare. In recent years, the slum has sent players to the professional leagues of France and Norway. Football offers hope, and even for those who don't make it, playing the game is an escape from drudgery, a distraction from vices like drugs, which permeate a teeming slum.

Chirande, or King Tubbs, as he was known, was something of a hero in this milieu. He had played abroad a number of times. He was the star of the local street league team, which has links through sponsorship with the Football Association of Ireland. He was 22, and relative to many of his friends and contemporaries, he had the world at his feet.

On his way home that evening, King Tubbs encountered a local policeman, a notorious individual in the slum, to whom a number of murders have been attributed.

The nature of the encounter is disputed. The official police file says that Chirande was "shot dead by police officers during a robbery and was allegedly armed with a toy pistol".

Eyewitnesses and local human rights defenders, are adamant that Chirande was neither robbing nor in possession of any replica firearm. Toy pistols have a habit of showing up on the bodies of police victims in the slums of Nairobi.

According to the eyewitnesses, Chirande was singled out by the policeman, and shot dead with no effort made to conceal the crime. A post mortem conducted on Chirande found that he died from four gunshot wounds. "All of these are close-range gunshots from a low-calibre weapon," said the report. "This is a close range-execution," it concluded.

Two days of protest

The killing of King Tubbs prompted two days of protest in the Mathare slum. There was some violence, and plenty of pictures that would have made it onto the floor of parliament or the six o'clock news in a functioning democracy. Not in Kenya. The protests passed and life moved on.

Despite the evidence, the policeman in question has not been arrested. Local activists maintain that one of the witnesses was detained in a police station for five days. There is little hope that the perpetrator will ever be brought to justice.

Calvin Mbugua is the director of a local community centre which attempts to staunch the human rights abuses that flow through the slums like the open sewers which residents must endure.

It was outside Mbugua's centre, a four-room breeze-block building, that Chirande was executed. "Since Nicholas's death, five other youths have been killed," he says. He attributes most of these shootings to the same individual, but he dryly notes that state killings do not follow the same psychopathic trend. "Most of the police don't shoot people in the same way." It would appear that these officers are more judicious in selecting their targets.

Impunity is the most pressing element of corruption in Kenya. The police, politicians and their cronies are seen to be above the law. In the small wealthier areas of Nairobi, the police perform their duties as they would in developed countries. In the ghettos, their writ is different.

"They take money from young people in particular, threatening them with jail if they don't give it up," Mbugua says. "You see in November and December around here, the young men aren't to be seen. They know if they go out they will be taken for money by the police who are saving up for Christmas."

Mbugua's task in attempting to defend the human rights is a lonely one, confined to his area. Frequently, he finds the need to call in better equipped colleagues in the field. In the case of King Tubbs he made a call to an organisation called Bunge La Mwanachi, a grassroots group which works to educate people about their rights.

One of their representatives is Keli Musyoka, who, in this case, was able to organise for the independent post mortem of the body, and attempt to gather all the available evidence.

Bunge La Mwanachi has a network of volunteers and can also call on lawyers who offer their services. They work under extraordinary conditions. Community groups call on their services if there is an eviction, or alleged abuse by the cops. Musyoka points out that all calls require an organised response.

"We have to organise every time who goes and who doesn't so that if one gets arrested, as often happens, there are others outside who can organise for their release."

The attack on human rights in a nominally democratic state is not confined to abusing the poor. Any element in society that is fingered as being dissident feels the wrath of the state apparatus.

Violent side of the state

Ann Njogu is director of the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness, a campaigning group that attempts to educate and inform the wider public, and particularly women, about their rights.

Njogu is known and respected beyond the borders of Kenya for her work. She details her belief that she is frequently under surveillance, particularly when she travels abroad.

On recent trips to Uganda and Germany, on human rights business, she encountered individuals who made themselves known to her, under, she believes, the guise of being colleagues. Travelling for a conference in Heidelburg, a man introduced himself in this manner. She later saw him at the conference centre, and, the following day, in the ladies underwear section of a department store where she was shopping.

"They don't just follow, or keep you under surveillance, they want to let you know there might be something up, that there might be something to fear," she says. Her organisation is restricted in phone use as the staff all believe their phones are bugged.

Last July, Njogu collided with the violent side of the state. She was among hundreds who attended a protest in downtown Nairobi about alleged corruption in the government which involved selling a state-owned hotel to interests in Libya.

Police moved in to break up the peaceful protest, and she was manhandled in a manner which she alleges constituted sexual abuse. The Sunday Tribune has seen photographs from the assault which back up her claims.

After a period in detention she was set free. Now she intends to sue the individual police officers who were involved in the assault. Such a move in a country like Ireland, for instance, might require a degree of courage. In Kenya, where a culture of impunity reigns, only the reckless or somebody like Njogu who is seriously principled would stick through the long, dangerous haul of a prosecution against a policeman.

"We have brought the process to the stage where now we will have to name the officer concerned in court," Njogu says. "I must now name him as the man who violated me. I am going to pursue it but as soon as I name him there is nothing he won't do to protect himself.

"But I must do it. If I don't, they will continue with impunity."

Abuses suffered by women

Njogu's other pressing project at the moment is documenting the abuses suffered by women in the aftermath of the election violence. Among the thousands displaced from their homes at the time, were many women who were left in a vulnerable position and subjected to rape.

"There were other women who had married into different tribes and they found themselves vulnerable when the violence between the tribes broke out," she says.

The centre is also campaigning for legal reform in the area of bride prices, something that is still a feature of life in rural Kenya.

"The bride price was traditionally something that involved tokenism (in terms of payment), but now in some places it has become commercial," she says.

Njogu is one of the hundreds of human rights defenders who operate in a country which has the veneer of democracy as we know it, until you scratch the surface and see the gaping abuses that are endemic.