This book began as a brief diversion from my prior focus on social and economic change in the Kenyan countryside. The global and African political upheavals of the early 1990s drew my attention to Kenya's vigorous new political contests, and to the heterodox political voices that now stormed the public domain – through popular music, theatre, sermons, court battles by human rights lawyers, and politicians' speeches. This recent tumult is not the central focus of this work, though it is the theme of chapter 2, and it inevitably affects readings of earlier processes of social change. The shifting political winds of the 1990s caught my attention as I was taking a new look at inventions of national political culture in earlier times, in an effort to connect rural livelihood struggles to the spectacle or staging of politics, especially as it occurred through public gatherings or baraza. I attended many of these political rituals while doing field research in rural Embu District, though at the time I did not imagine them to be particularly central to my work. They have turned out to be so, for reasons discussed in chapter 1. As I note there, though baraza are not the exclusive focus of this study, I take them as a revealing point of entry into the cross-currents of Kenyan life. From that entry point, I adopt a shifting angle of vision that captures interpenetrating domains of the local, the national, and the international.