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If You can't Beat Them, Join Them: Government Cleansings of Witches and Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Katherine Luongo
Katherine Luongo*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

During the mid-1950s British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya enlisted categories of Kamba occult “experts”—“witchdoctors” and “cleansers”—to cleanse local “witches” and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. A compendium of colonial documents concerning the “cleansing” campaigns illustrates how and why the socio-historical context of Mau Mau-era Machakos drove the colonial administration to break with its longstanding de facto policy of not officially combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means. The overwhelming disorder wrought by Mau Mau motivated state officials to break with precedent and to identify and employ Kamba “experts” to cleanse Mau Mau adherents and witches.

The widespread and politicized nature of the violence occurring during Mau Mau, and its perceived linkages to the supernatural, precipitated the state's shift to the employment of Kamba experts to combat “witchcraft” and Mau Mau oathing. An anthro-historical approach to understanding Mau Mau in Machakos shows that, while the cleansings constituted a group of “critical moments” at which British colonial officials could argue that they had dealt with supernatural challenges to state authority by rendering them “knowable,” the cleansings also demonstrated the degree to which state authority became situated in Kamba colonial officials and the extent to which the implementation and interpretation of British colonial cleansing policies depended on these local authorities.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 33 , 2006 , pp. 451 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2006

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References

1 Generally speaking, from the colonial era to the present day, people in Kenya have broadly explained “witchcraft” as an embodied power or a bought substance, each of which is used to do malevolent “magic” in order to harm the person, psyche, property, or kin of another. In Kikamba, “black” magic or magic-for-harm is referred to as “uoi.”

2 Thomas, Lynn M., Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003), 6Google Scholar.

3 See Kanogo, Tabitha, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963 (Nairobi, 1987)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, “Mau Mau and the Discourse of Decolonization,” JAH 29(1988), 313–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, David, Histories of the Hanged: the Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

4 Lonsdale, John, “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,” JAH 31(1990), 393–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bruce Berman explains the state's response to the insurgency: “[w]ith metropolitan political and military backing, the colonial state moved to crush the radical challenge through massive force and the imposition of an extraordinary degree of direct administrative control. At the same time, the Provincial Administration became once more the dominant and most important element of the state apparatus.” Berman, , Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: the Dialectic of Domination (Nairobi, 1992), 347Google Scholar.

5 For analyses of this discourse see Rosberg, Carl G. and Nottingham, John, The Myth of Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Furley, O. W., “Historiography of Mau Mau,” Hadith 4(1971), 105–31Google Scholar.

6 KNA DC/MKS.1/1/32.

7 See “Akamba in Nairobi,” KNA MAA 7/112.

8 Ibid. The Nairobi Extra-Provincial District was an area specially demarcated during Mau Mau and encompassed market centers on Nairobi's far reaches and the edges of Kambaland.

9 KNADC/MKS/1/1/31.

10 See, KNA DC/MKS/1/1/31 and KNA DC/MKS/1/1/32.

11 The term “Mau Mau” is itself obscure, although John Lonsdale has cogently suggested that it derived from the Kikuyu phrase, “kiama kia mau mau,” or “council of greedy eaters,” used by Kikuyu squatters in the late 1940s to describe the Kikuyu political leadership and later adopted into broad use during the 1950s conflict. See Lonsdale, , “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: the Problem” in Unhappy Valley, Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (Oxford, 1992), 265-303, 426Google Scholar.

12 KNA DC/MKS/1/1/31.

13 “Kamba Oral Evidence,” a collection of 30 taped interviews of Kamba men and women between the ages of 65 and 100 from seven locations in Ukambani, which I recorded in 2004. Hereafter KOE.

14 KNA VP/2/2/21, “Report on the Sociological Causes Underlying Mau Mau with Some Proposals on the Means of Ending It.” See also Leakey, L.S.B., Defeating Mau Mau (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Carothers, J. C., The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi, 1954)Google Scholar; and McCollough, Jack, Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For genera] information on kithitu see Hitoshi Udea, “Kithitu among the Kamba of Kenya: the Case Study of Kilonzo's Kithitu.” (n.d.) Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, Research Seminar. KNA Mss. 83-821 390 EUD; Kimilu, David N., Mukamba wa Wo (Nairobi, 1962)Google Scholar; and Ndeti, Kivuto, Elements of Akamba Life (Nairobi, 1972)Google Scholar. For information on the continued salience of kithitu in Kamba politics see François Grignon, “The Kithitu Oath in Ukambani Politics: a Moral Contract in Kenyan Politics.” Paper presented at the ASA-UK Bi-annual Meeting, London, School for Oriental and African Studies. 14-16 September, 1998; and Luongo, Katherine, “A Self-Evident Death? Reading Water and Witchcraft in the News of a Kenya MP's Death” Journal of the University of Michigan International Institute (March 2005)Google Scholar.

16 Grignon, , “Kithitu Oath,” 5Google Scholar. See also Middleton, John and Kershaw, Greet, Central Tribes of the North-Eastern Bantu (London, 1965), 76Google Scholar.

17 KOE.

18 Udea, , “Kithitu,” 3Google Scholar.

19 KOE. See also Dundas, Charles, “Native Laws of Some Bantu Tribes of East Africa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 51(1921), 229–31Google Scholar; Murphy, J. H. Blackwood, “The Kitui Akamba: Further Investigations on Certain Matters” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 56(1926), 195–206Google Scholar; and Ndeti, , Elements, 124–26Google Scholar.

20 Mutungi, Onesmus, The Legal Aspects of Witchcraft in East Africa (Nairobi, 1977), 78Google Scholar. Mutungi highlights the supernatural power with which kithitu is believed to be imbued.

21 KOE.

22 For a discussion of community divisions in the Kikuyu context see Branch, Daniel, “Loyalism during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952-60” (D.Phil., Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

23 KNA VP/2/2/21. See also, Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, and Carothers, Psychology. For discussions of witches as members of a “category of dangerous persons” requiring social (re)integration see Heald, Suzette, “Witches and Thieves: Deviant Motivations in Gisu Society,” Man 24(1986), 124–44Google Scholar, and idem., Controlling Anger: the Anthropology ofGisu Violence (Oxford, 1998).

24 For a nuanced fictional treatment of discourse of colonial magico-religious discourse surrounding Mau Mau and oathing, see, Vassanji, M.G., The In-between World of Vikram Lall (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

25 Nottingham, J.C., “Sorcery among the Akamba of Kenya,” Journal of African Administration 11(1959), 2–14Google Scholar.

26 KOE.

27 KNA BB.PC/EST/12/15, Witchcraft, General, 30 October 1954-11 July 1961.

28 Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, 1987)Google Scholar. See also the special volume of History of the Human Sciences on archives, especially, Thomas Osborne, “The Ordinariness of the Archive,” 51-64; and Joyce, Patrick, “The Politics of the Liberal Archive,” History of the Human Sciences 12(1999), 35–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Stoler, Ann Laura, “‘In Cold Blood:’ Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations 37(1992), 151–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar. See also De Hart, Jane Sherron, “Oral Sources and Contemporary History: Dispelling Old Assumptions,” Journal of American History 80(1993), 582–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dressman, Mark, “Theory into Practice?: Reading against the Grain of Good Practice Narratives” Language Arts 78(2002), 50–58Google Scholar.

31 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.

32 KNA DC/MKS/1/1/32.

33 Ibid.

34 J.C. Nottingham, interview with author, Nairobi, January 2004.

35 KNA BB/PC/EST/12/15. More specifically, the appendix attributed the impetus for the witch-cleansings to the chiefs, and the D.O. stipulated: “I want to emphasise here that I was pushed into this by the Chiefs, who were in turn pushed into it by public opinion; and that, through-out I have gone as slowly as they would let me.”

36 Nottingham interview, January 2004.

37 Waller, Richard, “Witchcraft and Colonial Law in Kenya” Past and Present 180(2003), 241–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katherine Luongo, “Dead Bodies in the Archives: an Anthro-Historical Approach to a Witch-Murder in 1930s Kenya,” paper presented at the British Institute in Eastern Africa/ Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique Seminar Series, Nairobi, Kenya, 2004; and Katherine Luongo, “Colonial and Contemporary Continuities in Conceptions of ‘Witchcraft’ in Kenya,” paper presented at the Workshop on Colonial and Postcolonial Continuities in Kenya. Oxford University, Oxford, 2005.

38 KNA PC/SP/1/3/2.

39 KOE.

40 PRO CO 822/21/2. Courses like the “Summer Schools” at Oxford and the Tropical African Services Course were implemented to train colonial administrators.

41 KNA MAA 7/602. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1946) supported the position of the Government Sociologist in part through the provision of research grants. In Kenya the position of Government Sociologist was contoured largely by the noted anthropologist Isaac Schapera and the Chief Native Commissioner. See KNA MAA 2/5/17 for Schapera's report, Some Problems of Anthropological Research in Kenya Colony, published for the International African Institute in 1949. Schapera's program was described in a 1947 memo from the Chief Native Commissioner to all Provincial Commissioners with sufficient enclosures for all District Officers. It was duly circulated from the Provincial Commissioner of Central Province to the District Commissioners of Thika, Kitui, Machakos, Nairobi and Kiambu. See, KNA VQ/16/25.

42 Brown, G. Gordon and Hutt, Bruce, Anthropology in Action: An Experiment in the Iringa Province of Tanganyika Territory (London, 1935)Google Scholar; Schapera, Isaac, Some Problems of Anthropological Research in Kenya Colony (London, 1949)Google Scholar; Lewis, Joanna, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925-1952 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Schumaker, Lynn, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 KNA PC/SP/1/3/2.

44 Willis, Justin, “Two Lives of Mpamizo: Dissonance in Oral History,” HA 23(1996), 321–22Google Scholar.

45 Pavenello, Mariano, “L'événement et la parole, la conception de l'histoire et du temps historique dans les traditions orales Africaines: le cas des Nzema,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 43(2003), 461–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 For example, Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; Stoller, Paul, Embodying Colonial Memories: Sprit Possession, Power, and the Hausa in West Africa (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and, Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar.

47 KOE.

48 KOE. “Atumia” refers to the Kamba council-of-elders who held a politico-judicial function in precolonial Kamba society. The atumia's powers were largely stripped or redirected during the colonial period, although atumia remained in existence and were regarded by Kamba people as arbiters and authorities in a broad range of community conflicts.

49 KOE. Kabwere was a renowned witchdoctor from the Mombasa area. For earlier colonial discussions on “importing” witchdoctors from the Coast see KNA CC/13/39 “Native Medicine and Witchcraft, Kwale.”

50 KOE.

51 KOE.

52 Ibid.

53 In colonial parlance, recent anthropology and the testimony of present-day informants, king'ole emerges as a broadly-defined term. It can refer to a body of law, to the group charged with carrying out the law, or to an act. In the first instance king'ole signifies the law that demands that serial or particularly serious social transgressions-thievery, murder, and witchcraft-be punished through various forms of lynching. King'ole also refers to the atumia, charged with carrying out this law and maintaining social order in precolonial and early colonial-era Kamba communities. And king'ole denotes the actual killing of murders, witches, and thieves by beating, stoning, hanging, or shooting with poisoned arrows. Administrative literature dating from the colonial era defines king'ole as the beating of a “witch” dispensed by a group of adult men using small sticks. See also Hobley, C. W. in Akamba and Other East African Tribes (Cambridge, 1910)Google Scholar; Munro, J. Forbes, Colonial Rule and the Kamba: Social Changes in the Kenya Highlands, 1889-1939 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; and Somba, John Ndeti, Akamba Mirror: Some Notable Events in the Machakos District of Kenya, 1889-1929 (Nairobi, 1979)Google Scholar.

54 See KNA MAA 7/835.