Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya by James Howard Smith (review)

Development may be the postcolony’s “master trope,” but it is not to be equated with the improvement of living standards, argues James Smith in this evocative anthropological study. Instead, development—whether taken as project, discourse, historical process, imagined future, or all of these—invites attention to how particular people grapple with a deep politics of time and morality. Beliefs about witchcraft are fundamental to those moral and political struggles in eastern Kenya’s Taita Hills, and in many other parts of Africa, and witchcraft can be synonymous with either modernity or tradition. As analyzed by Smith and as experienced by his Kenyan interlocutors, it refers to the secretive and “destructive power of selfish desire, which sometimes causes fantastic things to happen…[It] threaten[s] and resist[s] the (imagined) peaceful and productive sovereignty of the group in question” (16). Smith addresses witchcraft’s “metaphoric and imaginative” dimensions as well as “how people try to control and manage” it (16). He demonstrates that the occult warrants close attention because it is a powerful focus of creative intellectual energies that not only engage historically particular fears and tensions but also generate “positive, future-oriented actions” (244). These ways of imagining and working to bring about better futures are sometimes termed “development.”

The passion and hope with which Kenyans engage the idea of development (maendeleo in Swahili) and “work to construct moral and social order out of conflict” (244) anchor Smith’s superb ethnography, which builds on insights of scholars such as Peter Geschiére, John and Jean Comaroff, James Ferguson, and Mark Auslander. Centered on the era of neoliberal restructuring and the return of multipartyism, his analysis is based mainly on twenty months of field research between 1997 and 1999 in the Taita Hills, where he also spent a month in 1995 and four months as a teacher in 1991. He has returned for short visits during the 2000s. The telling of ethnographic vignettes and family and individual life histories enriches a compelling narrative. Smith’s close-ups of life in a Kenyan locality capture “grounded, everyday practices” (244) that are often less accessible in familiar models such as the “politics of the belly,” the criminalization of the state, or post-colonial “necropolitics” (all of which have profoundly enriched African studies).

Bewitching Development opens with a poignant account of tragedy that befell a Kenyan student political dissident whom Smith had befriended while he was an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Nairobi. Chapters 1–8 offer a well-structured narrative that moves from national historical context to Taita historicity; local conceptualizations of witchcraft and social boundaries; and Taita initiatives to “transform witchcraft into development” (91) in the spheres of family, valuations of the past, politics of the state and transnational patronage, and a community’s hiring of a transnational witch-hunter. The contradictory social consequences of the latter episode, Smith argues, point to the promise of ideas that finally were mobilized against the witch-hunter, including “notions of sustainable local development, moral modernity, and rational statehood” (239). At the same time, he deftly captures theatrical dimensions of the witch-hunter’s work, which included a carnivalesque display of the “absurdity of elite pretension” that prompted local rethinking of everyday assumptions.

Smith’s absorbing ethnography takes us into the worlds of the dot-com generation, whose members are “fascinated by cell phones and the Internet” (168), as well as elder guardians of other types of specialized knowledge such as ritual, ancient shrines, and healing. (Smith himself was treated successfully for a stomach ailment by a local healer, he reports [160].) Along the way we encounter engaging accounts of public meetings (baraza) that veered far off script, and Smith offers insightful comments on recent Kenyan phenomena such as spirit possession among girls in primary school, the neotraditionalist religious movement known as Mungiki, and public campaigns against devil worship.

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