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Witchcraft and colonial rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 / Katherine Luongo

Author
Luongo, Katherine, 1975-
Published
New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Physical Description
1 online resource (xiv, 243 pages) : illustrations, maps
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Contents
Clans and councils, caravans and conquest, cosmology and colonialism : Ukambani in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- Understanding Uoi, Uwe, and Kithitu in Ukambani -- The "cosmology" of the colonial state -- The Wakamba witch trials : a witch-murder in 1930s Kenya -- Witchcraft, murder, and death sentences after Rex v. Kumwaka -- The world of oathing and witchcraft in Mau Mau-era Machakos -- Cleansing Ukambani witches -- Epilogue.
Summary
Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.
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ISBN
9781139161633 (electronic bk.)
1139161636 (electronic bk.)
9780511997914 (electronic bk.)
0511997914 (electronic bk.)
9781107012189
110701218X
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 43357392