well as cultural. Though Kuria people were not recognized as a unitary ethnic group, or “tribe” in the colonial parlance, until the late 1950s, a shared history is referred to and cherished by many residents in the area. The importance of the overarching Kuria identity is growing, as is a sense of national identity, of being Kenyan. But since more than half of Kuria live in Tanzania, national identity has been slow to take full hold. Instead, underlying these emerging identities is an important, localized designation reflecting clan and lineage membership—that of the ikiaro, recognized as the maximal unit of affiliation prior to the late colonial era. Its enduring importance warrants examination and delineation.
Major demographic, social, economic, and political transformations on the national level in the past thirty years have not bypassed Kuria District.8 Many people living in this rural area aspire to be progressive and rue what they see as backwardness (Prazak 1999). Electricity in the district was limited to sporadic service in the capital until 2012, when even Bwirege became linked to the power grid. A growing number of people have solar panels at their homes, used in the past decade to recharge batteries for mobile phones and, in a few cases, to power television sets. Since 2005, the isolation of the area has been broken by mobile phone technology, and Nyankare market now hosts a phone booster tower, connecting the area with the rest of the globe. Another, just on the other side of the international border, allows people to communicate easily with kin south of the border in Tanzania.
The only paved road in Bukuria, a mere 20 kilometers, runs south of Migori to the Tanzanian border. The murram roads, on which the bulk of humans and cargo are transported, are pitted, potholed, poorly maintained, eroded, and overused. During the rainy seasons, their clay base makes them dangerous or impassable. Large lorries come into the district to remove maize surpluses accumulated and stored in the capacious warehouses of the Cereals Board, which buys up the harvests of Kuria and the adjacent Transmara districts. Lorries also export the tobacco harvest of smallholder farmers supplying British American Tobacco, Mastermind, Stancom, and Alliance companies, which compete for the best leaf to sell on the international and national markets for cigarette making. The only running water is in rivers and streams, and these have become increasingly polluted by runoff from tobacco nurseries, in which seeds are germinated and nurtured prior to transplanting. Girls and women fetch water from these sources, sometimes multiple times a day, to meet the needs of their homesteads.
Kuria widely regard educational attainment as the principal way to get ahead economically, as well as to gain access to horizons broader than the rural countryside. Nonetheless, educational attainment for Kuria men and women is lower than the national average and, perhaps consequently, employment levels are lower as well. Since very few people are able to survive by subsistence farming alone, most resort to multiple strategies to make a living (Bryceson 2002). Though employment options have been more accessible to men than to women, women are also intricately tied into the global economic system through cash-crop production (coffee, tobacco, maize), agricultural labor offered for sale, and petty trade.
In the last few decades, a number of important changes occurred in Bukuria. In the late 1980s, a large-scale in-migration of families placed a new burden on the resource base of these rural communities. The families had been squatting for the previous fifty years in the adjoining Rift Valley areas and were dislocated in the name of majimboism (Klopp 2001).9 This influx of peoples, whose livelihood was based on large herds of cattle, reinforced the most conservative elements within Bwirege society (Prazak 2000, 25). This is true, too, of neighboring Abanyabasi, who also squatted in adjoining Maasai areas.
That the initiation season was canceled because of witchcraft seemed impossible. It did not square with the image Abairege and Kuria generally have of themselves as the intrepid challengers of obstacles that stand in their way, an image reinforced nationally by the significant role they took historically and play currently in the police, army, and security industry, including private forces.
But that was the state of affairs when I arrived in the community on December 2. I had received my invitation back in October, and excitedly stayed up nights, preparing for the opportunity to fill this hole in my experience and knowledge. There and then, in the dusty marketplace, my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. After such a long journey, my purpose had suddenly vanished. This was too unexpected to contemplate. Despite the warm welcome of Samwel’s mother, Mogore Maria, and the excited whispering and nudging of her younger children, I felt dizzy and nauseated, hardly believing my bad fortune. It took me into the next day to get over the shock. I went from tears of disappointment, fatigue, and frustration, through a lot of rationalizing, to the beginnings of formulating a new plan and reason for being there. I decided that since I was already there and couldn’t go back home, I was ideally located for the study of witchcraft.
The Challenge of Studying Witchcraft
Studying witchcraft is an intractable endeavor. Raised in a secular humanist tradition, I have little background to help me come to grips with the ideas and reported realities of witchcraft.10 Like Ashforth, I am not predisposed to find higher or hidden meaning or purpose in the workings of the world (Ashforth 2000, 249). Yet witchcraft is nonetheless a meaningful category of thought and action to Kuria and many other peoples of the world.
Scholarship on this topic has a very long history in anthropology. E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed that if one assumes unseen forces exist in the world and nothing happens to people by accident, then beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft (as well as magic and oracles) are rational (1937). Beliefs and practices resembling Azande witchcraft in southern Sudan, where Evans-Pritchard studied, are found in many societies, and a great deal of work has been done to identify patterns and underlying meanings of witchcraft accusations (see, e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2004; Fisiy and Geschiere 1996; Green 1997, 2003).
How do we understand witchcraft in the context of a circumcision celebration in Nyankare village in Kenya? Currently, a commonplace position of academics is that witchcraft is an idiom through which other realities, such as misfortunes, social stress, strain, unemployment, and capitalist globalization, to mention a few, are expressed (Ashforth 2000, 245). A study in postcolonial Africa in recent decades has recognized that local discourses on witchcraft and sorcery have always centered on power and inequality, on the tension between individual ambition and communitarian control. Fisiy and Geschiere (1996, 194) argue that these conceptions are invoked more often and more openly to interpret new inequalities. In the case of Cameroon, they argue that witchcraft discourses offer the idiom of choice for trying to understand and control modern changes. In some cases, witchcraft discourses pose obstacles to change, while in other contexts, they intertwine easily with new developments, with the form “modernity” takes. Sanders (1999) makes a similar point for rural north-central Tanzania. He shows that older notions of Ihanzu witchcraft—which are and always have been linked to material wealth and its accumulation and destruction—have been redefined and redeployed in more contemporary settings, and that “African witchcraft can be properly understood only as an historically conditioned phenomenon that is itself eminently modern” (127–28). Further, he proposes that though African witches represent an attempt to demystify modernity and its perverse inequities, currencies, and pieties, and its threat to the viability of known social worlds, witchcraft also critiques local forms of “tradition” by pointing up the moral and economic difficulties associated with a conceptually closed, finite-good economy. As Adam Ashforth discusses in his work in South Africa, people living in a paradigm of witchcraft seek meaning for misfortune in the actions of ill-disposed people nearby (2000, 253). And if nothing else, as one of a variety of interpretive schemes available through numerous agents, including doctors, traditional healers, missionaries, and ministers, witchcraft offers one way of deciphering signs of invisible power that shape the texture of everyday life.
Witchcraft ideas in contemporary Africa have become a prominent way of conceptualizing, coping with, and criticizing the very “modernity” that was supposed to have done away with them (Stewart and Strathern 2004, 5). James Smith (2008) elaborates the case for witchcraft as a tool to interpret new inequalities arising in Taita social life in Kenya. Smith’s detailed exegesis
