Ever since her son’s battered body was found on the roadside by Del Monte’s Kenyan pineapple farm last summer, Grace Mbinya has been trying to block out what happened to him.
She has deleted images of him from her phone, hidden his only framed photo and avoids tending to her garden where his grave lies.
Stephen Thuo Nyoike, then 22, had gone with friends to the plantation near Thika to steal ripe pineapples on the evening of 30 August. The next day, his body was discovered face down in the red dirt by a road next to the farm, his forehead caved in and his throat strangled with a wire.
Stephen was an apprentice welder and had promised his mother he would one day buy the family a better home. She remembers him as thoughtful and kind – her last memory was of him planting yams and cooking her a dinner of ugali, greens and tea two nights before he died.
“I just want justice for my son,” she said, sitting in the dark front room where they last sat together. “They should have just arrested and jailed him … where he is now, I can never see him and I will never see his children.”
Stephen is one of three men whom Del Monte security guards are alleged to have killed in the last four years. A joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has uncovered claims of violence by guards at the plantation over a number of years.
The global fruit company is taking the allegations “extremely seriously” and carrying out a “full and urgent investigation” into them.
Less than an hour after leaving Nairobi on the main road heading north, you enter Del Monte country. It is estimated that the company’s plantation near Thika covers more than 40 sq km, stretching across two counties with space for a factory, public roads, schools and a police station. Its size means people living in the villages and towns around it often travel through the farm on public roads.
Poverty and unemployment are rife in the area, despite the plantation being the single largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world. Organised pineapple theft by groups of young men is common.
Patrolling the fields behind the cheerfully painted red, yellow and green Del Monte signs are teams of khaki-clad security guards armed with long wooden clubs called rungus. While their use in security is legal in Kenya, the alleged behaviour suggests the use of violence has been excessive.
One of the last people who says he saw Stephen alive is a man who went with him to the farm on the night of 30 August to steal pineapples.
The man said it was their second raid of the evening and they were carrying bundles through the field when they heard a sack of pineapples fall to the floor.
“I looked back and saw the guards with torches. I heard a harsh voice shouting: ‘Catch! Catch! Kill!’,” he said. On hearing the guards, the men ran. Stephen’s friend claimed he found a bush to hide in and watched as about eight guards in green uniforms allegedly beat Stephen with rungus. He claimed that after about half an hour of beating, Stephen stopped shouting and his motionless body was carried into a Del Monte vehicle. He said he waited while the guards were inside before he saw the vehicle drive towards the main road.
He has never spoken publicly about what he saw and claims he was too afraid to go to the police because he had been stealing. “If you go and report to the police, you’d be arrested immediately,” he said.
Stephen’s body was found by the highway the next day. His father, Joel Thuo, reported his death to police after going to identify his lifeless son. A postmortem gave his cause of death as “pressure to the neck due to ligature strangulation” and “head injury due to blunt force trauma to the head”. He said police did little to pursue the case.
“Once I reported it to the police, they came to the scene, took pictures, did all the analysis and then took the body to the morgue.” He said he was not aware of “any other follow-up done by the police in terms of investigations”.
Joel said that when he tried to follow up, “all they [police] would tell me is to go and produce evidence. And for me, there is no evidence that I could give. Because my son was killed in the small hours of the morning and the ones whom he was with, they are not willing to cooperate to give that evidence.”
A senior police officer could not explain why, eight months on, there had been no investigation into Stephen’s death.
Joel wants Del Monte to act. Speaking about the guards he believed attacked his son, he said: “They don’t value life. What they value most is pineapples.”
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When pineapples are for sale on the roadside in Murang’a county, locals say it is safe to assume they were stolen from Del Monte. The farm has few obvious fences and entrenched poverty in the surrounding community makes the temptation to pick their fruit high.
A group of young men selling pineapples on the main road near a long stretch of unfenced Del Monte fields chuckled knowingly when asked where they got them. They did not take long to admit their provenance.
Some of the pineapple theft is organised: men travel into the farm in groups to fill sacks with pineapples and carry their plunder out by motorbikes.
Another group of men were frank about pineapple theft being their main source of income. Some were orphans who have been sneaking on to the farm to take the fruits from the age of eight, selling them individually for less than 30p so they could buy food.
A former gang leader in his 30s who called himself Master said that sometimes groups of more than 20 men would go to the farm and throw stones at guards if they tried to stop them.
Master said he no longer raided the farm but when asked why he had, he said: “I went there because of poverty and to get a means of survival.”
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Aside from clashes between security and young thieves, Del Monte’s guards have also been accused of indiscriminate violence.
When a minibus carrying 14 people home from a dowry party stopped on a road through the farm on the evening of 25 September 2021, its passengers were set upon by guards, according to three who spoke to the Guardian.
The passengers claimed their driver had stopped to mend a headlight and that the group had got out to use the toilet when guards emerged from the fields and started beating them with rungus.
The three passengers said they were all dressed in their best party clothes and described guards hitting those in the group so hard that one was left with a broken leg. They alleged all the adults onboard were beaten and that they only stopped when they continued to scream they were not thieves.
One of the passengers, a 50-year-old man who said his leg was broken in the incident, said: “I tried to plead with them. I told them we were not there to steal pineapples. We were coming from the dowry party and our vehicle became faulty, that is why we had stopped. And at that point, they left.”
He said he felt the guards “just walked casually” back into the fields after leaving them injured. “I think they realised they had mistaken us because we didn’t have any sacks with us and were dressed very smartly,” he said.
The man alleged he was so badly injured he had to be carried back into the bus and was unable to work for seven months. The incident was reported to police, but he claimed it was not investigated further.
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John Rui Karia, 52, was a former casual worker for Del Monte who scraped together a living selling long grass to passersby on the bank of a highway that backs on to one of the farm’s pineapple fields.
John died in December in circumstances that are under investigation by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
On the evening of 21 December, John was resting in his usual roadside spot alongside another man when Del Monte guards walked up and began beating them, people told the Guardian. They claimed the guards had been drinking and that the attack was unprovoked.
Boniface Nduva, 34, was working on the opposite side of the road digging sand and loading it on to trucks when he alleged he saw Del Monte guards beating the men before putting them in a car. “We ran to help but the guards were faster,” he said.
“They [the alleged victims] were sleeping opposite Del Monte. They were not stealing. They were at work all day and were just tired, sleeping.”
Fellow grass seller Dennis Mutiso, 40, said he was sitting at the roadside nearby when he saw Del Monte guards approach the two men. Speaking at the spot where he alleged John was attacked, Mutiso said they “started beating them and then the old man, Rui, started screaming. When I heard that I ran away and then I heard them being loaded into the Del Monte car. They were being stamped on when they were inside the car.”
He and the other man were then taken to Del Monte’s office, where they were allegedly beaten further, along with a third man. From there they were taken with pineapples to Ngoliba police station and charged with pineapple theft. The next day they were taken to court in a Del Monte vehicle and convicted of pineapple theft after pleading guilty.
Two men claimed John was so incapacitated by the previous night’s assault that he had to be carried out of Del Monte’s car to get into court. One alleged he saw him vomiting blood.
John was sent to Thika prison on remand and died a week after his arrest, on 28 December. According to a document from a doctor at Thika hospital, he was pronounced dead on arrival that day having “collapsed in the prison” with a “history of trauma about 1 week ago”.
A pathology report from the hospital seen by the Guardian gives the cause of death as “head injury due to multiple blunt force trauma to the head” with “abdominal and multiple soft tissue injuries”.
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When 26-year-old Bernard Murigi Wanginye was suspected of being beaten to death by Del Monte security guards in 2019, his father, Gilbert, was so determined to get justice that he took the case all the way to the inspector general in Nairobi, the country’s most senior police officer.
Five Del Monte guards, who were arrested on suspicion of murder that summer and immediately sacked by Del Monte, are still in custody. The former guards all pleaded not guilty.
Four years on, there has still been no trial.
Gilbert, 70, described his uphill battle for justice. Speaking outside the simple tin-roofed home in Kihiu Mwiri that Bernard built for the family, Gilbert clutched a pink A4 folder with the precious documents that helped secure the arrests. His son’s body was lying a few metres away, buried beneath a mango tree.
Bernard was the second youngest of Gilbert’s seven children, and worked cutting stones in a quarry within the Del Monte farm. “Whenever he used to work at the quarry he used to support us very much,” Gilbert said, adding that they never went without food while he worked there.
“He was a very obedient boy who used to assist us very much,” Gilbert said. “Whenever I remember my son I really get down.”
Work at the quarry was relentless and badly paid but a sack of pineapples picked from the farm was a quick way to make 1,500 shillings – about £8 – once a motorbike driver was paid his share. Bernard died after going with friends to the farm on the night of 20 April 2019 to steal fruit.
When Gilbert went to the morgue to identify his son, he was so appalled by his condition that he fainted. He said Bernard’s body was naked and encrusted in earth, with horrific injuries.
Bernard’s mother, Alice Wambui, took one look and left the room. “His head was badly damaged and I could not look for long. I just walked out,” she said.
Alice, 67, said: “There’s no justice at all for Bernard.”
“I’m urging the people out there to please assist us to get justice for our sons and not buy products from Del Monte until they resolve all the pending issues from the locals.”
It is understood that Del Monte says it has planned or implemented improvements including updated radio communications systems, training guards in new formal rules of engagement and enhancing formal processes around allegations of violence.
A spokesperson for Del Monte said: “We take these allegations extremely seriously and have instituted a full and urgent investigation into them. The conduct alleged in these cases is in clear violation of Fresh Del Monte’s longstanding commitment to human rights and the comprehensive policies and procedures we have in place to ensure our operations respect the dignity of all individuals.
“Our proactive investigations continue and will be supported by an independent review by a specialist human rights consultancy. We continue to fully support the Kenyan authorities’ investigations, including into the death of John Rui Karia. We are committed to constant improvements in the way we operate to adhere to the highest international human rights standards in all our businesses.”
The Kenya police service did not respond to requests for comment.
