parties, guest/host relationships, and feasting, the norms of respect operate between the different classes to establish generational groupings. Thus, for example, only members of the same class will share food from the same bowl. The more informal the situation, the less rigidly these codes are adhered to and behavior becomes more relaxed. Generation classes tend to be associated with certain age-groups of the community. In the past, the rough equivalence of the classes with the age-structure of the community was determined by a sequence of ceremonies performed by the classes in succession. Most of these ceremonies were no longer practiced in the 1950s and none took place in the ikiaro in the 1980s (Ruel 1959, 131–33). Still, Kuria use the names of the classes in referring to people of a particular generation or time. Thus, people refer to the movement of the Abahirichacha (a descent group) north into Kenya as having taken place in the time of Abasaai, who were accompanied by their children, Abanyamburiti.
The association between generation classes and age-groups of the community is seldom clear-cut and simple, and results from membership in a generation class being assigned on a genealogical basis. Thus two brothers, sons of the same man but by different wives, belong to the same class, even though the age difference between them may be thirty years. They will thus move through the life stages and age-statuses at different points in time, even though they are of the same generation class.
As I was listening to rumors of witchcraft and supernatural happenings, the troubles of the circumciser and debts owed to ancestors, the recurrence of blame and accusation being directed at the people of Nyabasi, the neighboring ikiaro, it became clear that the sociopolitical units of Kuria society figured largely in the unease expressed through rumors of witchcraft, pointing to arenas where local boundaries need to be revitalized.
More Rumors
The most frightening stories were the ones that focused explicitly on okogenderana—witchcraft carried out between clans (ibiaro). Three of the four Kuria clans in Kenya had decided to hold initiations that year. Abakira had already begun. But Abanyabasi and Abairege had both called off their initiation ceremonies. These two neighboring clans have a long history of hostility toward each other. For the past several decades they had been raiding each other’s cattle, and it had become unusual for both groups to circumcise in the same year. The okogenderana power of the witchcraft on each side was a matter of substantial concern. Numerous accounts circulated of trespassers coming from Nyabasi, stealing hair, fingernails, and other small body parts through which to exact witchcraft on their unsuspecting rivals.12 People told frightening tales of children being kidnapped, killed, and dismembered; adults being waylaid, beaten, and robbed; individuals unwittingly recruited to do evil.13 As I later found out, many of these incidents were registered with the police and the civil administration, so the rumors were often based on some level of fact.
I heard the first account from Mogore Maria, my host. An independent businesswoman, a widow, and an elected local official, she firmly blamed witchcraft for creating a climate where it was necessary to cancel initiation ceremonies. The day after my arrival, she assured me that two or even three witches from Nyabasi had already been apprehended in Bwirege, after a buried bag of magic had been discovered. One of the witches, a woman, was caught in a market community in the southeast part of the location as she carried a basket in which she was hiding a sheep’s leg. In Nyankare, the main market of the location, two men were caught, having been observed behaving in a suspicious manner. They claimed they had come to buy cattle, but instead left behind bundles containing fingernails and other body parts. All three of these people/witches were severely beaten, and it was said the woman lost an eye.
In another case, people believed to be from Nyabasi went to a farm in Bwirege where they found a young girl, not yet old enough for initiation. She was looking after her parents’ maize, which had been attacked by monkeys in the preceding days. The people from Nyabasi shaved her head, scraped some skin from the front and back of her head, and cut off her fingernails. They left her in the fields and walked off. The girl immediately ran home and told her parents what had happened. This, like some of the other stories, was repeated to me by diverse people in various areas of the location. Because the parents of the girl were named, it was easy to see that this particular story was widely believed.
Stories of this sort of witchcraft (okogenderana) between Abairege and Abanyabasi abounded. Two sisters, Nyagonchera Mwita and Janet Gaati, wanted to circumcise their youngest sons, who were insisting on accompanying each other through the process. But the sisters had heard and repeated to me a story of a young boy (a potential initiate) who had been bewitched into running into Nyabasi, to the secret conclave of that clan, where the elders killed him and cut off his private parts. When the elected official for whom the boy had been working followed the runaway to find out what happened to him, the councilor was stabbed. Both sisters are schoolteachers, traveled and well-educated, and their fear of witchcraft was palpable. The other story they recounted I had previously heard. It was of the two Nyabasi men, both married to Abairege women. The men had traveled to Bwirege to buy cattle but were set upon by the mob at the cattle auction and beaten badly. Some of their hair was shaved and their fingernails cut to create anti-Nyabasi magic. Since the men were sons-in-law to Bwirege, and were in fact quite well known, the sisters found this story shocking, as it illustrated the escalated emotional pitch and fear building in the community.
One day, as I sat on a narrow wooden bench in front of a dry goods shop in the market, I listened to a conversation between two old men perched on small stools watching the goings-on in the market center. A sixty-year-old employed watchman, the younger of the two, recounted the story of a married woman from Bwirege who had gone to Nyabasi to visit her boyfriend. The boyfriend gave her a black sheep. Members of the secret conclave in Nyabasi decided that they would strike at Bwirege through this adulterous couple. When the woman got back to Bwirege, she went to her sister’s place and asked her sister’s uncircumcised son to assist her in slaughtering the sheep. He agreed, and when the meat was cooked, he ate it and went back to his home. Two days later, the boy was helping his parents transport maize home from the fields using a donkey. The parents were carrying sacks of maize on their heads, and were left behind. On the third trip, almost halfway home, the boy suddenly unbuttoned his shirt and dropped it on the road. He then began unloading the maize from the donkey and when done, took off, leaving the donkey and everything on the road.
He allegedly went to a place in Nyabasi, where he met some boys his age looking after a herd of cattle. The boys asked him where he was from and he promptly told them he was from Bwirege and just out for a stroll. He helped them drive their cattle to the river to drink, and in the evening they invited him to their home. Their father made some inquiries about the boy, and satisfied that the boy was indeed from Bwirege, he left the boys at his home and went to inform and consult with the council of elders. He told the elders that everything had turned out as planned and expected. After supper, the other boys went to bed and the visiting boy asked to be shown where he was to sleep. He was led to where the council of elders was meeting and was killed. His genitals, nose, and right ear were chopped off, and his eyes and intestines gouged out. His badly mutilated body was found some days later in a river in a border area with Bwirege.
The storyteller went on to describe how the secret conclave of Bwirege dispatched members to the scene where the body was found to ascertain that the body was actually that of the missing boy. This done, the elders decided that the body of the missing boy should not be brought back to Bwirege. The woman who brought the black sheep had since separated from her husband and been taken to the council of elders in Bwirege, Tanzania, to be punished. She was asked to pay two cows as a fine or be killed.
The day after I heard this detailed story in the market, I stopped by the home of John Muruga, who was relaxing in the shade cast by the conical thatched roof of one of the three circular wattle and daub traditional houses that made up his homestead. We talked about the stories going around. He had heard them all, but was confident that initiation would nonetheless be carried out in Bwirege this year. He claimed not only that it would happen but also that it would begin on December 14. He was planning to circumcise his two oldest children, son Mwita John and daughter Grace Gaati. While
