For Money and Elders: Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya by Robert W. Blunt (review)

Political instability is a test of any country's commitment to its values. How a country chooses to respond speaks to its success in attaining stability while affirming its values. What happens when those vested with the authority to guarantee stability end up exposing the nation to vulnerabilities and uncertainty as a result of dishonest and corrupt self-dealing practices that betray the principles that they set out to espouse? This is the central question in Robert W. Blunt's book, For Money and Elders: Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya. Drawing upon the theme of elderhood as a template for authority, which is embraced in several African countries, he explains how elderhood, as a category often employed to account for the continuous perception of old age, can be counterproductive. Blunt employs Mario Aguilar's argument that elderhood describes the old as those who provide mediation of the past and the present because the past is perceived as an element in the cultural creation of the present.¹ The invocation of old age contains imaginary "aspirations" of sovereign capacity that tap into respect, wisdom, and authority, characteristics associated with old age, a common virtue in Africa. If left unchecked, Blunt argues, the capacities associated with elderhood can become engines for instability, as experienced in a nation such as Kenya.

The logic of invoking elderhood in Africa must be understood in the context of complex colonial rule in Kenya. It is a form of reaction to this system. As Blunt argues, the concept of elderhood dominated efforts to address crises dating back to the precolonial period in Kenya. It found a new meaning in the reinterpretation of oathing rituals and the life of the Mau Mau guerilla fighters of the 1950s. Elders were remade into traditional authorities tasked with the governing of native reserves. This system was later generalized and nationalized as the nation became a patrimonial state under the leadership of the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, who embraced his status as the elder par excellence.

At independence, Kenyatta was installed as an elder—Mzee²—to serve as the key actor in bridging the colonial past and postcolonial present. To be designated as a mzee in Kenya is an honor, a form of respect that acknowledges the wisdom and authority that come with elderhood. As an elder, Kenyatta had to replace the colonial understanding of the sovereign as a lawgiver in traditional terms to contain the violence that was associated with the Mau Mau resistance, while representing cultural values and traditions that were central to the movement. However, Blunt argues, money replaced the oath rituals that were administered in the colonial period as tokens of gerontocratic speech acts. Surrounded by elders of the state, leaders were expected to embody the notion of public good, bound to the demands and expectations of the public, and were not to be driven by tyranny or unbridled exploitation. According to Blunt, the colonial-era concerns of the Kikuyu are behind the nationalized politics of elderhood and the politics of instability in Kenya.

As Kenyans tried to make sense of existing political instability, they also faced the anxiety caused by fears of a cult of Satanism. As the desire to embrace democratic values, riddled with resistance to the transparencies that would come with such a system the mistrust that resulted contributed to violence, such as that experienced in the 2007–2008 post-election. When the authority that is granted by elderhood seems to be designed to exploit the public, violence becomes an expedient way to respond and, consequently, to enforce authority. Although efforts to cast authority as male are informed by the history of colonialism in Kenya, argues Blunt, gravitation toward elderhood exposed the nation to vulnerabilities that seem to perpetuate the political instability that the system was designed to contain. The...