Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955

Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law, and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.

Author: Katherine Luongo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 05/21/2015
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781107529847

About the Author
Luongo, Katherine: - Katherine Luongo received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2003-4, she held a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to conduct archival and ethnographic research in Kenya and was a research associate at the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique in Nairobi. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University in Boston. Luongo's articles have appeared in History in Africa, African Affairs, The Journal of Eastern African Studies and the Cahiers d'Études africaines. Her research and teaching interests include the occult, legal systems and anthropological history.