Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change (review)

A tremendously exciting book, Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change offers many enticements to a Kenya scholar. Written in clear, lucid prose by a number of authors who have worked together intimately, the voices of the individual collaborators are molded into a smooth whole by the two editors, an anthropologist and a psychologist, who also are the co-authors of all but three of the nine chapters. This is precisely what the Kenya canon has needed: a jargon-free, ethnographically rich, well-focused monograph presenting a multifaceted research project that documents a process of community transformation from an agrarian to a wage economy and the concomitant social modifications and innovations of relevance around the globe.

The study analyzes the play of modernization and nationalization in contemporary Kenyan society, as well as much of the Third World, and is just as relevant today as when it was carried out, in a five-year period from 1968 to 1973. It demonstrates how Kikuyu families adapted to changing opportunities and conditions five years after Kenya colony became a nation-state. The authors explore not only the transition women underwent to become small-scale cash-crop farmers and entrepreneurs, but also how mothers became the agents of change, modifying the culture of their parents to meet the evolving national society. As social change transformed and increased women's workloads, their traditional family-based morals and obligations were challenged, moving them into the newly relevant realms of individualism within and between households. Against the backdrop of changing economic and political realities, the study also explores evolving educational practices and achievement expectations of children, as well as changing concepts of the "good child" and "good mothering."

The volume is the result of research carried out by more than twenty University of Nairobi students and U.S. graduate students working with senior investigators, and illustrates what an international, multicultural, and multidisciplinary team can accomplish when focusing on different aspects of community life, employing a range of research methods, and bringing in the talents of young apprentices who over the years have emerged as research scholars. One of the most fascinating chapters, on the teaching of old and new values, was written by one of these scholars, Ciarunji Chesaina, now a professor of literature at the University of Nairobi. Chesaina was a field observer for the project while a secondary student. Her use of folktales provides a scholar's and cultural insider's selection, analysis, and interpretation of a segment of the corpus of Gikuyu folktales, illuminating what they teach about cultural levels of achievement and motivation from the point of view of parental intent.

Another chapter offers a description of the daily life and experience of women and men growing old in Ngecha—a reality redefined in this generation by the effects of land pressure and the resulting decrease in the number of extended homesteads and polygynous marriages, two social institutions that previously provided care for the older generation. Unsentimental yet sensitive, this chapter, like the book as a whole, communicates people's wishes, aims, anxieties, and satisfactions. The connections between cultural constructions and social-economic institutions are always made clear, even when not central to the study, whose unswerving focus remains the family.

Published posthumously for Beatrice Whiting, who passed away in September 2003, Ngecha is a fitting monument to her accomplishment as a scholar and fieldworker. Further, the volume is a living testimonial to the value of longitudinal research and to the exciting opportunities cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research offer in a quest for understanding and enlightenment. This book is a must for any collection.