A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder by Grace Musila (review)

Stories about who killed a white woman tourist in Kenya in 1988 led Grace Musila to interrogate what she calls the “colonial archive”—the set of attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices that recur long after the social structures that propped them up have fallen. Exquisitely examined through memoirs, reports, official documents, journals, newspaper articles, blogs, social media, scholarly works, and novels, A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour visits the contact zone between Africans and Europeans and traces unequal relationships from colonialism to the present. It is a study of the effects of the tenacity of colonial binaries of modern–traditional, white–black, nature–culture, male–female, and virgin–whore, as well as an unblinking look at the space of terror in what she calls “the criminal state.” Musila happened upon the story of the murder of Julie Ward while doing research on political assassinations in Kenya. Julie Ward was a young British woman on an overland trip across Africa, whose charred remains were found in Kenya at the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988. To this day the motive for the murder and the identity of the murderers are unknown. But theories about the death abound. Not admitting that it was murder, Kenyan officials first postulated that she committed suicide, burning herself after hacking her body proved ineffective. Later they forwarded the idea that she was struck by lightning and devoured by animals. Through pressure from the murdered woman’s father—his book about his daughter’s death is a major source for this study—junior and then senior game wardens were put on trial and in each case the defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Outside the courts, Kenyan public opinion, or the “pavement radio,” as Musila puts it, circulated rumors that a “Big Politician” or someone related to a “Big Politician” did it. Giving up on his theory of lustful black men and defenseless white women that pointed to the game wardens, Ward’s father, after years of investigation, came to believe that a “Big Politician” was responsible for his daughter’s death. Other binaries from the colonial archives that had fueled his indignation—the inefficiencies, duplicities, and corruption of Africans versus the truth, justice, and integrity of the British—also collapsed as he noted the complicity of the British High Commission in Kenya in covering up the truth of his daughter’s death. Tracking how Ward’s father came to see unities and continuities across what he once believed were absolute divides, Musila shows that “binary lenses—often articulated through notions of Europe’s commitment to justice and human rights as contrasted to postcolonial African states’ abuse of these—work to mask the intersections between the two, marked by complicities largely mediated by the interests of capital, which fracture the myth of Europe’s moral authority sanctioned by a value-neutral progress through modernity” (168).

The eight chapters of this book are rich in detail and resplendent in research, each developing a different facet of multiple and overlapping stories. Here I will briefly reprise two arguments, one on truth, rumor, and modernity, and the other on postcolonial whiteness. In the chapter titled “Julie Ward’s Death and the Kenyan Grapevine,” Musila argues that rumors that a powerful man was responsible for Ward’s death grew from networks of subalterns, reflected a history of political assassinations, evidenced a distrust of modern state institutions, critiqued the legacy of colonial modernity with its selective distribution of privileges, and should be taken seriously as a species of social truth. This is a marvelous use of folklore and social history as well as an exposition of Kenyan modernity. In two chapters, “Wildebeest, ‘Noble Savages’ and Moi’s Kenya: Cultural Illiteracies in the Search of Julie Ward’s Killers” and “Farms in Africa: Wildlife Tourism, Conservation and Whiteness in Postcolonial Africa,” Musila analyzes the performance of...