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Reviewed by:
  • Contemporary Witch-Hunting in Gusii, Southwestern Kenya
  • Katherine Luongo
Justus Ogembo. Contemporary Witch-Hunting in Gusii, Southwestern Kenya. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Pp. 196.

Justus Ogembo presents compelling narratives of the waves of “witch-killings” among Gusii communities in Kisii District, Kenya, during the early 1990s. Aiming to engage with recent literature on “occult economies” and the “politics of the belly,” the book argues “this violence is a symbolic expression of the experience or threat of the experience of differential disadvantage and dislocation from access to significant resources occasioned by the process of globalization” (p. 2). This spate of “witch-killings” presents a worthy topic, one that could have benefited from a much more incisive analysis and significantly stronger historical contextualization than this book offers.

Twelve chapters are organized into three sections that alternate between heavily narrative and largely theoretical foci. Part I, “Socio-Cultural Background,” includes Chapter 1 “Introduction,” Chapter 2, “Gusii: Background,” and Chapter 3, “Forms of Mystical Disclosure.” Part II, “Material Cases,” forms the bulk of the book. It develops narratives of the violence through Chapter 4, “Strange Illnesses and the Witch-Hunts,” Chapter 5, “Strange Illnesses and the Witch-Hunts, (continued),” Chapter 6, “Abductions and the Witch-Hunts,” Chapter 7, “Notebooks and the Witch-Hunts,” and Chapter 8, “Essential Features of the Witch-Hunts.” Part III, “Witch-Burnings in Context,” consists of Chapter 9, “Economic Shifts,” Chapter 10, “The ‘Invisible Hand’ of God and Mammon,” and Chapter 11, “Political Realignments.” Chapter 12, “Making the ‘Invisible Hand’ Visible,” comprises the conclusion. Two appendices, court proceedings of a witchcraft case, and a reprint of Kenya’s Witchcraft Ordinance, are also included.

While the introduction by Harvard scholar Robert A. LeVine lauds the book as an “insider account,” this reviewer would argue that Ogembo’s overreliance on his status as a native of Kisii hobbles the book’s analysis and authority (p. i). First, the book fails to engage sufficiently with extant documentary sources. Though it addresses some of the major texts on witchcraft in Africa, for example, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s canonical 1931 monograph Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, as well as more recent works by Peter Geschiere and Jean and John Comaroff, the book offers a sketchy treatment of existing anthropological and historical literature on Gusiiland and on witchcraft in Kenya more generally. As a result, Ogembo is able to describe various theoretical frameworks pertaining to witchcraft and to depict the shape of Gusii witchcraft, but remains unable to integrate the two fields in order to complicate understandings of Gusii witchcraft and to intervene [End Page 126] into the scholarship on African witchcraft or the impact of “globalization” on African moral economies more broadly.

The book also neglects to reference archival information on Kisii, a significant missed opportunity because the files of the Kenya National Archives are replete with discussions of witchcraft. In all fairness, Ogembo makes no claims to be a historian. Nonetheless, the lack of sound grounding in the history of Gusii witchcraft, and indeed of the history of antiwitchcraft movements or moments in Kisii, render Ogembo’s claims about the singularity of the 1990s violence difficult for the reader to take at face value. The book leaves the reader with the question of where the 1990s killings fall in the sociohistorical spectrum of Gusii antiwitchcraft violence.

The omissions noted above also contribute to one of the book’s most regrettable aspects: the miring of Gusii witchcraft in a regrettable anthropological present. For Ogembo, the contours of Gusii witchcraft are presented as a constant, with limited intimations toward the possibility of change over time. On the occasions when the possibility of change is suggested, supported sources are not appropriately cited. For example, Ogembo writes, “accusations of witchcraft are usually made in Gusiiland as an explanation for deaths or other misfortunes but, before 1992, witch-killings in the land were very rare” (p. 35). This is an entirely plausible statement, but it is not supported by citations of documentary, or even ethnographic, sources.

This problem of appropriate citing plagues the book overall. Part II, “Material Cases,” is the most substantive part of the book, yet none of the...

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