Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 19001955 [Paperback]

This book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft and its contentious relationship with the state in colonial Kenya.This book chronicles witchcraft practices in colonial Kenya and the attempts of British bureaucrats and judges to control them. Colonial authorities produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence, making witchcraft a capital offense punishable by death. This book offers an analytical narrative of these efforts in the first half of the twentieth century: the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the contentious Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s.This book chronicles witchcraft practices in colonial Kenya and the attempts of British bureaucrats and judges to control them. Colonial authorities produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence, making witchcraft a capital offense punishable by death. This book offers an analytical narrative of these efforts in the first half of the twentieth century: the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the contentious Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s.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 lsj