The Ostrich Wakes: Struggles for Change in Highland Kenya (review)

Jean Davison's experience of Africa goes back more than thirty years and is recorded in several volumes that focus on gender issues, with particular emphasis on the economic forces that underlie and shape women's lives. Her edited volume, Agriculture, Women and Land: the African Experience (Westview Press, 1988) includes her own chapter on land ownership in Mutira and Chwele locations of central and western Kenya, respectively: "Who Owns What? Land Registration and Tensions in Gender Relations of Production in Kenya." In it, she explores the imbalance between women's major role in the production of both food and cash crops, and their weak position as holders of title to land. A broader picture of women's lives emerges from Voices from Mutira (Lynn Rienner, 1996), in which Davison presents the personal narratives of seven women born between 1910 and 1950 in Mutira division of Kirinyaga District on the southern slopes of Mount Kenya. Davison first visited Kenya in 1977, and the bulk of her fieldwork with her seven informants was conducted in the early 1980s; the first edition was published in 1989, but after several subsequent trips an updated edition appeared in 1996. The Ostrich Wakes was written following her return to Kenya and to Mutira at the very end of 2002, after a nearly nine-year absence.

Davison's long contact with the people of Mutira allows her to present a detailed longitudinal study, in which events in individual women's lives throw light on the history of this part of Kenya from precolonial times to the present day. The narratives of the oldest women, born between 1910 and the 1930s, are used to present an image of "traditional" Kikuyu society, highlighting childhood, adolescence, and marriage. Voices from Mutira also provides information about the Emergency, the transition to independence in 1963, and more recent political events. The seven personal narratives are set in context with useful introductory and concluding chapters, adding up to an effective introductory ethnography of the Kikuyu.

Apart from the historical and anthropological scholarship which informs Davison's chapters, these books are infused with a sense of friendship and companionship stemming from her respect for her informants and their points of view. Davison is realistic about the problems of transmitting culture from oral narratives to the written, translated text, which, as she says in Voices, "can never capture the complete texture, nuance of meaning and physical expression that are implicit in the initial telling of the narrative in Kikuyu" (53). As a woman of European descent married to a Kikuyu from a district neighboring Kirinyaga, I can testify to the realism and sensitivity with which she has reflects on her own reception in the area and the gradually increasing trust and confidence built up between her and her informants.

In undergraduate courses in anthropology and African studies, I have found Voices extremely valuable and accessible. Consequently, I eagerly anticipated Davison's The Ostrich Wakes, and in 2006 I used it as a class text for the first time. The book is a personal, anecdotal narrative of the weeks she spent in Mutira at the end of 2002 and early 2003, revisiting her research area and the families of her seven informants. She refers frequently to the earlier narratives and sometimes quotes sections of them to show the background to and contrasts with the situation in the twenty-first century. The Ostrich Wakes is a lively book, filled with people, places, and events. It is possibly a little too full, even for someone like myself who is familiar with the place and the people, and my students certainly found it confusing. Davison's original seven informants have produced, as she says in the preface, "twenty-something daughters, sons, and granddaughters," and she seems to meet and tell us about all of these people—and more. Keeping track of them is not made any easier by the Kikuyu naming system, by which Wanjiru...