Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955

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.

'This is one of the finest historical ethnographies of witchcraft and statecraft that I have read. Luongo simultaneously gives account of Kamba witchcraft and of the British colonial juridical system through which it was policed - two cosmologies that not only came into conflict but that also profoundly shaped one another over time. The rich detail of the work - a reading of the archives at once anthropological and historical - makes for captivating reading and, in light of the continuing, sometimes explosive, juxtaposition of witchcraft and formal legal systems in postcolonial East Africa and beyond, a work of significant contemporary relevance.' Harry G. West, SOAS, University of London

• 1. Introduction; 2. Clans and councils, caravans and conquest, cosmology and colonialism: Ukambani in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 3. Understanding uoi, uwe, and kithitu in Ukambani; 4. The 'cosmology' of the colonial state; 5. The Wakamba witch trials: a witch-murder in 1930s Kenya; 6. Witchcraft, murder, and death sentences after Rex v. Kumwaka; 7. The world of oathing and witchcraft in Mau Mau-era machakos; 8. Cleansing Ukambani witches; 9. Epilogue.