The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya 9781845458027

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The Land is Dying

Series: Epistemologies of Healing General Editors: David Parkin and Elisabeth Hsu, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford This series in medical anthropology will publish monographs and collected essays on indigenous (so-called traditional) medical knowledge and practice, alternative and complementary medicine, and ethnobiological studies that relate to health and illness. The emphasis of the series is on the way indigenous epistemologies inform healing, against a background of comparison with other practices, and in recognition of the fluidity between them. Volume 1 Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in Contemporary Russia Galina Lindquist Volume 2 Precious Pills: Medicine and Social Change among Tibetan Refugees in India Audrey Prost Volume 3 Working with Spirit: Experiencing Izangoma Healing in Contemporary South Africa Jo Thobeka Wreford Volume 4 Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy Karen Lüdtke Volume 5 The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince

Volume 6 Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology Elisabeth Hsu and Stephen Harris Volume 8 Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland: Stethoscopes, Wands or Crystals? Ronnie Moore and Stuart McClean Volume 9 Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft Koen Stroeken Volume 10 Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds Vincanne Adams, Mona Schrempf, and Sienna R. Craig

The Land is Dying Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya

Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-481-4 hardback

In memory of Ida (29 August 2004–3 August 2006)

Contents

List of Figures

xv

Acknowledgements

xvii

1. Introduction: ‘Are we still together here?’ A community at the end of the world The death of today Growing relations Being together Growth Touch Searching for another social practice: contingency, creativity and difference Engaging boundaries Hygiene Knowing boundaries Changing perspectives? Coming together Visiting

1 1 6 8 9 9 11

2. Landscapes and histories Returns A road in time Kisumu Driving out Bondo district The lake Piny Luo – ‘Luoland’ A ‘tribe’

37 37 40 40 42 43 44 44 45 vii

14 19 19 22 23 25 29

The Land is Dying

Luo sociality The reserve Return to Uhero Yimbo Muthurwa Making Uhero village (Re)Settlement Belonging and ownership A modern Luo village ‘Down’ into the village ‘Up’ and ‘down’ KaOkoth Alternative ‘modernities’: the beach and ‘Jerusalem’ KaOgumba 3. Salvation and tradition: heaven and earth? Dichotomies in everyday life Salvation Strong Christians Saved life Saved and others Faith in purity Tradition The Luo rules ‘Born-again’ Traditionalism Traditionalism, Christianity and the West Customary everyday life Searching ways Tradition in everyday life Everyday ritual The absence of ritual The omnipresence of ritual

viii

46 48 51 51 53 54 54 57 60 61 61 62 66 68 77 78 80 80 82 84 86 87 88 90 94 97 98 101 103 103 104

Contents

PART I.

111

4. ‘Opening the way’: being at home in Uhero Introduction ‘Our culture says that one must make a home’ Embedding growth in the home Tom’s new home Moving forward – directions Openings and closures Order and sequence Coming together in the house Making a house Sharing the gendered house The living house Gender, generation and growth Struggling against implication The home in heaven ‘The rules of the home’ Powers of explication Practising rules Cementing relations Traditionalism and other kinds of ethnography

113 113 113 115 115 118 121 122 124 126 127 129 132 135 135 136 139 140 141 143

5. Growing children: shared persons and permeable bodies Introduction Sharing Sharing or exchange? Sharing food Food, blood and kinship ‘The child is of the mother’ Changed foods and relations Sharing and dividing nurture Shared bodies Illnesses of infancy and their treatment Evil eye and spirits Medical pluralism?

151 151 153 155 155 157 158 160 163 164 165 167 169

ix

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Herbal medicines Cleanness and dirt Sharing names Being named after Being called Sharing names and naming shares Conclusion

171 173 176 177 179 182 183

PART II.

193

6. Order and decomposition: touch around sickness and death Introduction Otoyo’s home The sickness of a daughter Return of a daughter Kwer and chira Continuity and contingency Avoiding the rules Treating chira Caring The death of a husband Expected death ‘She should remember her love!’ Death The funeral The dead body Loving people Conclusion

195 195 197 198 199 201 203 206 207 209 211 212 212 214 216 218 221 223

7. Life seen: touch, vision and speech in the making of sex in Uhero Introduction Earthly ethics and Christian morality Riwrouk Riwruok: outside intentionality Chira: growth and directionality

227 227 232 232 233 235

x

Contents

Chodo and luor: continuity and change Cleanness: sex and separation The proliferation of ‘sex’ AIDS and chira The fight against AIDS Pornography – ‘bad things’ Conclusion 8. ‘Our Luo culture is sick’: identity and infection in the debate about widow inheritance Introduction Testing positive Becoming a widow Contentious practices A tough head Tero Independence Alone Inheritance and infection Past and present tero Fighting tero Deprivation and property Inheriting HIV – fears about women’s sexuality and social reproduction Turning tero into a business Ambiguous heritage: tero as source of identity and infection ‘Our Luo culture is sick’ ‘The most elaborate and solemn ritual’: tero is our culture Sanitising Luo culture? Conclusion

237 240 244 244 245 250 256 261 261 263 264 264 265 266 268 269 270 270 271 273 275 275 279 279 282 283 285

PART III.

295

9. ‘How can we drink his tea without killing a bull?’ – Funerary ceremony and matters of remembrance Introduction

297 297

xi

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Funerary ceremonies Funerals in Uhero Funeral commensality Returning to the funeral Osure’s sawo An Earthly feast Rebekka Eating the sawo Traces of the past ‘Sides’ BabaWinstons memorial A Christian funerary celebration Debates The service Remembrance Conclusion

298 298 300 304 305 305 306 307 308 310 312 312 313 315 317 320

10. ‘The land is dying’ – traces and monuments in the village landscape Introduction Cutting the land Ownership Land, paper and power Living on the land Gardens and farms The bush Fences At home Traces and inscriptions Getting ones land – finding one’s place Conclusion

327 327 330 330 333 335 335 338 340 342 345 349 354

11. Contingency, creativity and difference in western Kenya Creative difference Old and new dealings with hybridity ‘Are we still together here?’

357 357 360 362

xii

Contents

Postscript KaOgumba and KaOkoth 2008

364 365

Bibliography Books and articles Newspaper articles and electronic media Websites Music

369 369 392 395 396

Index

397

xiii

List of Figures

1.1.

Age distribution of Uhero’s population, December 2002 (n = 956).

3

2.1a.

Location of Nairobi, Kisumu and Yimbo in Kenya.

39

2.1b.

Location of Yimbo in northern Luoland (from Evans-Pritchard: ‘Luo tribes (locations) and tribes assimilated or partly assimilated to the Luo’ (1949: 26)).

39

2.2a.

KaOkoth. Map of Okoth’s and the late Osure’s home (above that of Okoth) in 2002; showing Tom and MinWilly’s old house and her new house in their new home, as well as Peter’s proposed simba. 55

2.2b.

The people of KaOkoth in 2002.

63

2.3a.

KaOgumba. Map of the home.

64

2.3b.

The people of KaOgumba in 2002.

69

3.1.

Home page of www.Jaluo.com (1 August 2004) (note the ‘traditional’ round hut, abila, and the menu selections such as ‘Words of growth’ (Weche dongruok), ‘Luo custom’ (Luo kitgi gi timbegi), ‘Things of the village’ (Gi gweng’), as well as the webmaster’s address: [email protected] (the father of the traditional hut).

93

3.2.

‘The Other’. Photograph of the late Jaramogi Odinga with the founder of Legio Maria Church, Simeon Obimbo; from a Legio altar (also sold among Legio devotional objects on Bondo market; original probably from the negative “Drum”, 1960s). 96

4.1.

The downward/forward growth of the home.

118

4.2a.

KaOkoth, semicircle of houses.

120

4.2b.

KaOkoth, pathways and flow of rainwater.

120

4.3.

Interior and orientations of round and square houses.

125

4.4.

Living and dead houses: MinWilly’s new and old xv

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house; the decaying house of a deceased person.

131

7.1.

‘Let’s talk’. Condom advert on a roadside kiosk.

249

7.2.

Life Seen; magazine cover displayed at local news-stand; AIDS warning on rear cover of Life Seen.

251

‘After she gets hers…’ Technical illustrations from Sex Curiosities (Bendo 2000: 29–31).

251

Okoth’s drawing of Uhero’s history. Landscape, paths, genealogies, settlement.

329

The perfect home. One of several glossy, framed images of ready-made mansions that are sold in markets and adorn living rooms in western Kenya.

345

7.3. 10.1. 10.2.

xvi

Acknowledgements

The years since we began this fieldwork have been most beautiful and most challenging for us, and, rather than ending our acknowledgements with them, we want to begin with expressing our gratitude to our children Otto Ogutu, Ida Apiyo and Anton Odongo. We dedicate this book to the memory of our daughter Ida, Otto’s sister and Anton’s twin, who left us after giving us almost two years of great happiness.

We are grateful to JoUhero and people in Yimbo and elsewhere in western Kenya for their hospitality and patience, which we hope they will extend to the shortcomings of this account. Their struggles to ‘be together’ in very different forms have taught us much more than a book can contain. In particular, we are indebted to the many members of our two host families in Uhero, who welcomed us into their homes and shared much of their lives with us. We hope that our friendships will continue to grow. Since we finished our fieldwork, some of the young people in these families have died: Old Mary, Okoth’s mother, was preceded in death by her adult grandchildren, Tom’s wife and Fanuel, and Mercy Ogumba lost her sons Winston and Odhiambo. We shall remember the time that we shared with them and many other JoUhero who have since died. If, during our fieldwork, the shadow of the ‘death of today’ was outweighed by our encounters with the living, it has grown darker over the time in which we wrote this book. Philister Adhiambo Madiega, Reenish Achieng’ Mbuge, Emmah Odundo, Philip Gem and the late Collins Omondi, Collins Okoth and Willis Ochieng’ worked as research assistants and became teachers and friends. Achieng’ generously allowed us to draw on her life in a chapter of this book; Philister has been a source of continuous encouragement and inspiration through the past twelve years. Not only did MinRose (Jane Mayiega) care for our firstborn son, Otto, but our conversations and shared laughter shaped our work and life in Uhero. We remember with affection Omondi, Okoth and Ochieng’, as well as neighbours and friends from Uhero who have passed away: BabaFrancis and Francis, Alois, Alfred, xvii

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MinAnna, Rose, Flora, Grace, Damiano, Philgonia, George, Oruko, Solomon and old Mary. Friends and colleagues elsewhere in Kenya made our stay in western Kenya rewarding and sociable. The staff of the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases and the Kenyan-Danish Health Project in Kisumu supported us far beyond what we could have expected. We wish to thank especially Professor John H. Ouma and the late Dr Alfred Luoba and their families, Mrs Grace Obara and Mrs Anna Okutoi. Thanks also to our hosts at the University of Nairobi Institute of African Studies, especially Professor Colette Suda and Dr Isaak Nyamongo, and to Professor Paul Lane, then director of the British Institute in East Africa. In England and Denmark we thank especially Dr Kate Nokes from the Department of Zoology, Oxford University, and the staff of the Danish Bilharziasis Laboratory (DBL) and the Institute of Anthropology in Copenhagen, particularly Dr Jens Aagard-Hansen, Ms Grethe Gǿtsche and Mr Jørgen Pedersen. Special thanks for stylistic advice and the preparation of the manuscript go to Ms Linda Amarfio of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The studies that fed into this book were funded by grants from the Danish Council for Development Research, the Danish Bilharziasis Laboratory, the Partnership for Child Development, Oxford, the Rivers and Smuts Funds, Cambridge, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for which we are grateful. Preparation of the final manuscript was supported by the Norwegian Research Council. This book owes much to our PhD supervisors, Professor Susan Reynolds Whyte and the late Dr Susan Benson, who taught us social anthropology, and our advisers Drs Jens Aagaard-Hansen, Gilbert Lewis and Todd Sanders, who each made valuable contributions. Our examiners at various stages of this work, Professors Dame Marilyn Strathern and Sharon Hutchinson, Dr. Hanne Mogensen, and Professors Renaat Devisch, David Parkin, and Murray Last, gave much useful advice, often beyond what one would expect (or indeed wish for) from an examiner, some of which we heeded, and they have continuously stimulated our research beyond the present book. Other colleagues and friends who gave us advice at different times were Erdmute Alber, Felicitas Becker, Harri Englund, John Friedman, Benedicte Ingstad, Michael Jackson, Lotte Meinert, Eric Nyambedha, Onyango Ouma, Robert Pool and Sjaak van der Geest. John Iliffe, John Lonsdale, Kenneth Ombongi, Derek Peterson and Megan Vaughan nurtured our interest in the African past. Dr Michael Whyte, erudite anthropologist and wonderful cook, supplied us with ideas and readings, suppers, and a sense xviii

Acknowledgements

of home. Gisela Tuchtenhagen taught us filming and helped us, together with Margot Neubert-Maric, to make a small film about Uhero. This book has been under way too long and debts have accumulated to friends, whom we can only list here alphabetically (and, one fears, incompletely): Achieng’, Anna, Anne-Sophie, Atieno, Barbara, Bronwyn, Dixie, Dorcas, Emma, Erdmute, Fatima, Gaudensia, Hedda, Helena, Janet, Jerusha, Joyce, Judith, Juliane, Kate, Linn, Margaret, Maria, Mary, Mette, Paola, Penina, Philgona, Philister, Phoebe, Perle, Sian, Silke, Silvia, Thelma, Veronika and Viola; and Alfred, Andrew, Benson, Casey, Christian, Damiano, David, Don, Elmar, Enoch, Georg, Heiko, Jared, Jens, John, Kaku, Kenneth, Krachman, Marcus, Martin, Nnko, Ochieng’, Omar, Omondi, Pascal, Paul, Per, Rabango, Robert and Simon. Our parents, Gwen and David Prince and Ingeborg and Christian Geissler have been indispensable for this work, not just in the obvious sense of having nurtured us, but also through their continuous intellectual stimulation, their love and care for their grandchildren – and by sending us John Cowper Powys’s books to Uhero, which we read throughout our time there.

xix

Chapter 1

Introduction: ‘Are we still together here?’

This book is based on fieldwork in Uhero in the Dholuo-speaking Bondo District of western Kenya at the end of the twentieth century.1 It examines late modern East African village life, looking particularly at the central role of everyday practices of material contact or touch for the constitution and contestation of relations, and for the construction and reconstruction of time. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth, of persons, groups and the forward movement of life more generally. As we shall show, for many people in western Kenya growth is engendered by material engagements among persons and between persons and things. Yet both the capacity of touch and the nature of growth are contested in Uhero, which is why they have become the analytical themes of this book. In the first part of this introduction, we provide an outline of these themes; in the second part, we reflect on our way to Uhero village and on how we arrived at some of these concerns.2

A community at the end of the world To talk of Uhero is to talk of a group of people, JoUhero (914 persons in February 2001), attached to a particular place, a peninsula on Lake Victoria.3 Like all Luo, JoUhero have connections – practiced or fictitious – to distant places.4 Many of them travel widely, but home is never forgotten, although, for various reasons, people may rarely go there.5 Few of them are buried away from the home where they belong by birth or marriage, death being – at least in these days of uncertainty – the definite return home. The world beyond Uhero – cities, neighbouring nations, other continents – is present in Uhero in material objects that are used or longed for, in dreams of going abroad and in fears of exploitation. But, in spite of the considerable mobility of many JoUhero, at the centre of people’s life world is still – and probably increasingly – the idea of ‘home’ (dala): a particular, named place of belonging and of a community of people attached to this place. 1

The Land is Dying

Yet, as the question in this chapter’s title – asked in a conversation between young people – shows, the most salient trait of this community is its profound doubt in itself. Uhero is not usually evoked by either young or old as a coherent, stable and safe community, but in relation to the fractures and tensions between its members. Beneath these conflicts, what JoUhero share is a profound sense of crisis and loss. This undoubtedly encompasses what JoUhero call ‘the death of today’ (tho mar tinende) – the AIDS-related sickness and death of many villagers during the past decade or more – but this is seen as but the most recent outcome of longer processes of economic and social change that affect the very constitution of sociality itself. Nostalgia pervades everyday conversations, public oratory and popular music (Prince 2006), and generalising statements of loss are ubiquitous; either taken straight from Achebe/Yeats: ‘Things fall apart’ – words that generations of Kenyans have read in school – or in a local idiom: ‘The earth is dying. There is no love nowadays’ (‘Piny tho. Tinende hera onge’), which link the loss of life and belonging directly to that of social relations, continuity and sense of direction. Uhero calls forth, then, a sense of longing as much as of belonging. Laments about the ‘death of land’ and the decline of ‘love’ seem to be as widespread across contemporary Africa as the literary quotation. In Ghana, Geurts found frequent references to ‘worldly demise or something rotten and amiss in the universe’, expressing concerns with land degradation, AIDS, poverty and moral decline (2002: 112–14;183); de Boeck observed in postMobutu Congo ‘a deeply felt sense of personal and communal crisis which pervaded all levels of society’ and ‘a growing sense of loss of a viable basis of social relations’ (1998: 25; see also Gable 1995; Hutchinson 1996; Mamdani 1996; Yamba 1997; Ferguson 1999; Sanders 2001; Dilger 2003).6 JoUhero (as well as Luo people elsewhere) say this crisis started in the 1980s. This was a time of accelerating economic decline that disappointed the expectations of ‘development’ of the period after the Second World War, which had been encouraged by independence and the achievements of the new nation’s first, progressive years. The 1980s were a time of authoritarian political rule, corruption, externally imposed austerity policies and economic decline that betrayed the promises of independence; and it coincided with a sharp rise in mortality due to deprivation and, increasingly, to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since over 60 per cent of JoUhero are under thirty years of age (Figure 1.1), few of them have personal memories of better days. The Luo contemporary sense of loss, then, does not simply reflect an experience of change, but is also a distinct way of talking about people’s sufferings and the challenges to survival in the present. 2

Introduction

Figure 1.1. Age distribution of Uhero’s population, December 2002 (n = 956).

What exactly has been lost people disagree upon. For some it is an idealised pre-colonial world of morally upright pastoralists, for some it is civil servants’ and wage-earners’ expectations of development, modernity and progress that seemed achievable in the 1960s and 1970s – and often Arcadian and Utopian longings merge. Accordingly, ethical arguments take on a temporal dimension: ‘These people don’t do as they should do any more’; ‘Those people still do as it was good to do in the past’; and ‘Because people still behave like this, we have not yet achieved that future.’ Contact and continuity with the past, especially material contact in ritual and everyday practices, are widespread and contested concerns. Some people fear it, such as born-again Christians, who regard the African past as the ancestors’ (in their terms: devils’) realm. In contrast, others struggle to reconnect to the past by calling for the restoration of ‘Luo Tradition’7 or by trying to reconcile what they distinguish as ‘Christian’ and ‘Luo’ practices. Through these contested practices, different understandings of temporality are materialised in everyday life and engaged with each other. For the purpose of this study, the most significant fact is that, irrespective of people’s particular orientation in time, tropes of loss have become a leitmotiv of conversations about sociality and change in Uhero and give shape to people’s practices in the present. 3

The Land is Dying

They also shape imaginations of the future. How one creates families, marries and raises children, ensures their future, builds houses, uses one’s property and arranges for its devolution, works the land to produce food or surplus, cares for one’s body, provides for old age, cares for the sick and elderly, copes with illness, and buries and remembers the dead depends on how one understands the past and wishes the future to be. Orientations forward as well as back in time thus give shape and meaning to people’s present practices and are equally contested. Conflicts and disagreements about personhood and social relations, property and durability, crystallise around people’s attempts to bring about the futures they desire. Some dream of moving ahead, leaving past and origins behind, while others dwell on imaginations of return; but these are different orientations rather than characteristics of different persons and groups; people adapt positions contextually and move between these orientations, including contradictions and dilemmas, which guide their social practice in the present. For JoUhero, these temporal trajectories from past to future are entangled with spatial trajectories spanning what in colonial times was designated as ‘reserve’, the rural repository of backward lifestyles; the Kenyan cities and farms, places of transformation and possibility; and the realm of remoter futures, Europe or the USA. In the second half of the twentieth century, after political independence, colonial separations between spaces of the past and those of the future were somewhat eroded, initially spurring people’s mobility and their hopes of eventually arriving somewhere. However, from the 1980s onwards the present crises – in politics, health and the economy – have considerably challenged these movements and expectations. Suspended between past and future, the present continues to be imagined in terms of movement, journeys along the battered tarmac roads and railway lines, longed-for jet travel and virtual movements through letters, penfriends and, of late, for some, the Internet. But alongside this is a sense of immobilisation – no past to return to, no future to gain – which is well captured by young people’s responses to the question of what they are doing: ‘I’m just sitting’ (‘Abetabeta’) – implying not working or moving – or ‘I’m just walking around’ (‘Abayabaya’) – without productive purpose or destination. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this community on the shore of Lake Victoria finds itself at ‘the end of the world’, in both a locational and a temporal sense. This sense of being stuck in place and time does not, however, imply isolation. People see their predicament as part of a larger pattern; they recognise how wider currents with distant sources flow 4

Introduction

through and shape life in Uhero. Structural Adjustment and donor policies, (antiretroviral) drug prices and globalised medical research are issues of debate, as are Kenyan politics, government policies and corruption scandals, and the expansion of South African influence during the past decade – manifested in fish export, satellite TV, gold prospectors and rumours about child abduction – augments the spatial imagination. Yet the experience of being part of a larger whole, which affects people’s lives but remains outside their control, being part of a process but unable to affect its course, exacerbates their sense of immobility and loss. Although it is not our main theme, this book does necessarily have something to say about how people engage with wider, so-called global, processes of change, or modernity, a theme that has gained prominence in the anthropology of Africa over recent decades (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Hutchinson 1996; Weiss 1996; Crehan 1997; Ferguson 1999). Some of these works emphasise the destruction resulting from the confrontation between local societies and global modernity (e.g. Fernandez 1982; Vansina 1990). Others celebrate the creativity of global modernity in peripheral African locations (and ignore its destructive sides) as if the engagement with wider connections were a specifically new phenomenon (e.g. Hannerz 1992; see also Appadurai 1986). Others again acknowledge that African and other modernities have co-evolved, and seek to replace the dichotomy between pre-modern African and modern Western societies and culture in favour of an analysis of ‘African modernities’ (e.g. Fabian 1990; Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff J. 1991; Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L.1997; Geschiere and Konings 1993). This book takes its orientation from accounts of African modernities that explore changing ideas and practices of personhood and social relations through observations of localised social practice, such as Piot’s study of Kabre sociality (1999), Hutchinson’s work on Nuer relatedness (1996) and Taylor’s work on changing and contrasting imaginations of the body and practices of healing in Rwanda (1992). What these ethnographies share, despite their different approaches, is that they transcend the older ethnographic fiction of cultural or social otherness (e.g. between Africa and the West), not by collapsing them into the convenient sameness of a global ecumene, but by retracing within African societies the patterns of radical alterity that mark the predicament of modernity. In a similar manner, this book will focus on concrete everyday practices between JoUhero, and JoUhero’s reflections about these practices and how they change, emphasising the diversity of experiences within this 5

The Land is Dying

community (see Chapter 3). Despite the apparent clarity of distinctions drawn by JoUhero between ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, we argue that there are, in fact, no such clear-cut, easy distinctions to be had – especially in these times of confusion and death.

The death of today Before we move on to lay out the main concepts explored in this book – growth and movement, touch and relations – we must address the place of the ‘death of today’ and of AIDS in the lives of JoUhero, as well as in this book. Death is omnipresent in Uhero, in fresh graves, deserted houses, and homes inhabited by very young and very old people. Saturday has become the day of funerals, which are the only social occasion of note. During our last longer fieldwork period (2000–2), seventy-seven JoUhero (forty-one women and thirty-six men) died, and thirty-seven of these were young adults (fifteen to forty-five years of age).8 Estimates for western Kenya suggest that, during the time of our fieldwork, 30–40 per cent of young adults were HIV-positive (KNACP 1998; UNAIDS 2000). This means that every third adult in Uhero will die within ten years unless a radical change of health care provision occurs. Young adults die before they are married or even before they have had children, and children are orphaned and left with relatives, old people, or to care for themselves. ‘Growth’ in the sense of ordered generational sequence can no longer be taken for granted.9 Yet, although death, presumably related to AIDS, is central to JoUhero’s current sense of crisis, we choose not to place AIDS at the centre of this account. Until recently, ‘AIDS’ or ayaki (from yako, ‘to plunder’, ‘to raid’) were scarcely used terms in Uhero and, even in 2000, when one could hear them in private conversations and funeral speeches, this was rarely related to a particular person but to health problems in general. Even though JoUhero are keenly aware of the epidemic and its immediate causes, it is still not common for somebody’s illness or death to be openly attributed to HIV. Instead, people say ‘she has been sick for a long time’ (or claim, more commonly, that this has not been the case). If AIDS is mentioned, it is after someone’s death, since speaking the name of the ‘death’ while the sufferer lives would almost amount to a curse. Moreover, for many people, the omnipresence of death is understood in a broader context, extending well beyond the biomedical facts of HIV/AIDS and originating in the ‘confusion’ (nyuandruok, from nyuando, ‘to confuse, jumble up, disarrange’) of social relations that the past century has brought about.10 This death is not merely a long-term side effect of 6

Introduction

modernity; it also reveals the impotence of modernity itself, as biomedicine offers no remedy for it.11 The defeat of modern science leaves JoUhero suspended between a lost past and a fading future. Well aware of the fact that treatment for AIDS exists for those who can afford it, JoUhero are left behind as, some of them say, ‘us poor Africans’.12 The understanding that ‘AIDS is our illness’, as one young JaUhero put it, ‘and not yours’, is reiterated and debated around the notion of chira, a deadly affliction arising from disordered social relations and affecting the growth of families. Thus, the death of today is understood within wider historical struggles about power and resources. Were we explicitly to centre this account on AIDS, we would suppress the critical potential of the villagers’ interpretations of their present condition and its genesis. However, if we choose not to place AIDS at the centre of analysis, this does not mean that it is not present throughout this book. The bodily suffering and death of young people are experienced as opposed to any form of growth, creating a sense of being stuck, and opening up the question of what exactly growth is and how it should be produced. Moreover, AIDS makes certain kinds of material contact problematic and potentially dangerous – notably bodily intercourse, care for the sick and burial of the dead. But how exactly AIDS affects social relations and concerns with touch and growth is far from obvious, and this question occupies JoUhero as well as the pages of this book. AIDS brings many tensions and conflicts in social relations to a head, but the situation of this sociality cannot be reduced to it or explained by it. JoUhero’s primary concern is not with death, but with growth and how to engender it against considerable obstacles. As we shall argue, all kinds of substance – body and bodily fluids, food or earth – and all substantial ties established through touch and material contact have the potential to bring about growth; and they are all related to one another through metonymic associations. Every form of touch potentially evokes another one. Touch and sharing of substance in the sexual union have an important place in this metonymic cluster, but not the dominant one. Every substantial relation has the potential to create life and growth as well as to kill. Thus we contend that, only if we understand how a loaf of kuon (stiff porridge) is shared or not shared in modern Uhero, can we begin to examine bodily intercourse and its effects, including the problems arising from HIV. The specific problems that sex, reproductive fluids and AIDS pose in these times is implicitly present in our account, but to place it at the centre would be to distort the representation and would 7

The Land is Dying

prevent us from understanding AIDS in this place, at this time: it is omnipresent, it enters all existing tensions and conflicts, but it is not the dominant theme. Uhero is not an ‘AIDS village’.

Growing relations JoUhero agree that ‘there is no love these days’, sharing a sense of loss and – to a greater or lesser extent – of being lost, and locating this loss in the workings of their sociality. ‘Love’ (hera) should here be understood less as an emotion or attitude than as a practice, or, rather, the multiplicity of everyday practices through which people create and enact positive social relations. However, people do not agree about what human relations in their community should be like and blame different causes for their malfunctioning.13 People deal differently with the present predicament, and the same people may respond differently to different situations. Rather than framing our study in terms of ‘the consequences of social change’, or the effect of time on social relations (in Tönnies’ idiom of the dissolution of Gemeinschaft), we look at how images and debates about rupture and loss are used in relations, concretised in people’s use of ‘time figures’ (premodern/modern, nostalgia/expectations, decay/development) in social practices and ethical reflections about practice. Undoubtedly, many things have changed in living conditions and people’s ways of acting towards one another in the course of the ‘-ations’ of the twentieth century: colonisation, monetisation, commodification, Christianisation, modernisation, globalisation, individualisation (and, of late, Africanisation and Traditionalisation), and their concomitant phenomena: biomedicine and schooling, wage labour and private property, literacy and mass media, demographic change and epidemics. However, JoUhero rarely talk about the past in such linear terms; rather their memories emerge through everyday practices and evaluations of other’s practice. People’s position in the present and towards other people shapes their access to and use of the past and vice versa. Imaginings of rupture and continuity are realised through relational practices towards others and the environment; temporality is translated into social space. This practised and relational sense of time is what we shall try to grasp. Practices of relatedness and ethical reflections about relations provide a historiography written in the present, in which global ‘-isations’ engage with local patterns of relatedness. Rather than framing JoUhero’s experiences within the narrative of ‘modernisation’, we shall see how tropes of modernity, of rupture and difference, are played out among them. 8

Introduction

Being together Positioning their concerns with relatedness and belonging within spatiotemporal dichotomies, JoUhero often state: ‘We are still together here’ (‘Wan pod wariwore kae’ or ‘Wan pod wabed kanyakla achiel’); some question whether this is really still the case; others have reservations about being together, preferring different connections and groupings, or to stand alone. These debates will occupy us throughout this book. Like JoUhero, we shall not be able to provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether JoUhero are still together; instead, the question will help us to prise open some of the understandings of relations, personhood and temporality with which JoUhero are struggling. The importance of substantial relations for the conception of time was identified by the early structural-functionalist ethnographies of East African societies (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940; Lienhardt 1961). While this is probably the case in all societies, it is particularly evident in those ‘acephalous’ African societies that did not have political institutions that produced alternative ways of time-reckoning. These ethnographers’ notions of society (as bounded and unified), of time (as equilibrium) and of relations (as natural bonds of biological kinship) have been subjected to much critical scrutiny, but this does not detract from the empirical foundation of their analyses. More recent Africanist ethnographies confirm that to understand these societies and their recent transformations, time and social relations, enacted in locally specific material practices, must be studied together because changes are conceptualised within concrete practices between people, and in turn, imaginations of time and change orient these relational practices (see, for example, Fernandez 1982; James 1988; Werbner 1991; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Hutchinson 1996). Thus we follow older social anthropological concerns when we explore questions of time and relatedness in a place where time seems to have come to an end and where relations are experienced as breaking apart.

Growth Our and JoUhero’s interest in time and relations, movements and change, converges in another familiar theme of African ethnography: ‘growth’ (see, for example, Richards 1939, 1995; Lienhardt 1961; Fortes and Dieterlen 1965; Turner 1967; Karp and Bird 1980; Beidelman 1986, 1997; Jackson and Karp 1990; Taylor 1992; Devisch 1993; Moore et al. 1999). Far from supporting reductionist renderings of East African societies as concerned with biological reproduction, ethnographic evidence reveals a notion of 9

The Land is Dying

growth, in which the well-being of cosmic and social worlds, the fertility of the land and its inhabitants, people and animals, living and dead, form an interconnected whole, and in which seemingly disparate dimensions of growth are dependent upon one another. Two interrelated dimensions of growth appear in these ethnographic accounts: (gendered) complementarity and (generational) sequence. Growth relies here on bringing together male and female, not only in the obvious instances of sexual intercourse (e.g. Heald 1999; Moore 1999) or in marriage as ‘the principle of order in human existence’ (Whyte 1990:111), but also in the enactment of gendered complementation among nonhuman ‘things’ that engenders creativity and transformation (e.g. Sanders 2002). Creation myths tell of how life originated from a fusion of otherwise separate categories, qualified variously as male and female, up and down or dry and wet (Jacobson-Widding and van Beek 1990; Broch-Due 1999); and rituals recapitulate this original fusion, which releases creative potential by transcending boundaries (Kratz 1994; Kaare 1999; Devisch 2007). The complementarity of one and other is powerful and needs ordering within an overall ‘social communion’ (Jacobsen-Widding and van Beek 1990: 41), based on peace and respect between the generations, including between the living and the dead (e.g. Whyte and Whyte 1981; Beidelman 1986). Growth is synonymous with gendered complementation and ordered generational sequence; challenges to this order pose a threat to growth. Another observation of the older ethnographers should be mentioned here: the important role played by material substance and physical ‘participation’ between living and dead persons and with things and with place, in the conception of growth. Transformative material contact – variously referred to as ‘interfusion’ (Lienhardt 1985: 154), ‘participation’ (Moore 1986: 112), ‘embeddedness’ (Boddy 1998: 256) or ‘interbeing’ (Devisch 2007: 118) – is often made here through creative substances like rain, blood, semen, milk, beer or porridge; these bring different entities together to create new life, and they are in turn produced through good relations. Material flows, social relations and processes of growth are intertwined. In this book we examine JoUhero’s increasingly diverse struggles to grow in a time of death, when growth seems to have all but ceased. Our approach to growth differs from that of previous ethnographies in two ways. While many focus on ritual, myth and symbolism, our main concern is everyday practice: mundane material engagements and their effects. Moreover, older ethnographies tend to present somewhat static and coherent ‘cultural systems’, ignoring their interplay with colonial and post-colonial political, economic 10

Introduction

and religious change. While it does indeed appear as if the ‘matrices’ of growth (de Boeck 1999: 205) persist, especially in religious practices (Fernandez 1978, 1982; Jules-Rosette 1979), rites of rainmaking (Sanders 2002) and initiation (Kratz 1994; Kaare 1999), and some forms of healing (Devisch 1993), it is within such seemingly stable practices and discourses that changes – often radical ones – occur. ‘Traditional’ practices of healing and associated notions of personhood, relatedness and growth have been transformed in the context of post-colonial capitalism (e.g. Taylor 1992); and it is precisely the apparent stability of ‘traditional’ forms that lends itself to culturalist elaboration and deployment in modern politics (Parkin 1978; see also Kratz 1994; Sanders 2003). In this book we shall follow negotiations and conflicts about growth in late modern East African social life, under the shadow of widespread suffering and death. To do this, we will focus on concrete moments of contact among people and between people and things and places – potentially creative events, which engender growth but can also disturb it. It is these transformative moments of contact that, based on what appears to us a pervasive concern among JoUhero, we choose to address as ‘touch’.

Touch Our joint work in Uhero began with questions regarding health, sickness and practices of care. Thus, from the onset, our attention was directed towards moments of material contact between people, concrete acts of touch between persons’ bodies. During our fieldwork, we came to realise that touch (v. mulo; n. mulruok, ‘touching’ and ‘being touched’) – defined broadly as the making of material contact between persons – was an overarching concern for JoUhero across social divides and different domains of social practice. We looked at caring, benevolent and evil touches, and learned about the particular importance of moments marked by absence or avoidance of touch. Straying away from ‘medical anthropology’, we expanded the scope of our studies to include other concrete, material practices in which persons and their relations are brought together and thereby made and remade: the production of houses and homes, care for children and for dying persons, bodily (sexual) intercourse in the context of pleasure and of death, cooking and eating in everyday and ceremonial occasions, funeral ceremonies, architecture and land use. We shall argue that, in Uhero, touch is usually understood as a form of merging, in which the substances of one and other are shared. As we shall show, this merging has a potent creative capacity, which by some people, or in certain circumstances, is appreciated as ‘growth’ (dongruok), but which 11

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also contains destructive, threatening potential. This principle behind imaginations and practices of sociality, this ambivalent first cause, is captured in the Dholuo term riwo (‘to unite’, ‘to share’, ‘to merge through sharing’, ‘to be together’), which will provide an underlying theme of this book. Riwo and mulo are linked in that touching the other person’s body and bodily products, or persons and things that extend her person, implies shared substance and merging, and in turn someone who does not wish to, or must not, merge with a particular other would say: ‘I cannot touch her/it’ (‘Ok anyal mule’). Sometimes merging through sharing is desired for its profound and lasting effects (as we shall discuss in regard to ritual commensality and bodily intercourse); sometimes it is ephemeral and unmarked, even unintentionally contained in mundane gestures; and sometimes the capacity and effects of merging are feared, in a particular situation or generally, and therefore avoided. Yet, irrespective of whether material contact is purposely established or not, and whether it is wished for as creative moment or feared as destructive threat, we shall argue that when getting in touch or avoiding it, JoUhero conceptualise boundaries – of their bodies, other humans and non-human things, and the spaces between them – as permeable interfaces, not as closed frontiers. Important aspects of this notion of touch or merging through sharing evoke LévyBruhl’s concept of ‘participation’ (e.g. 1926: 69–104,1975), to which we shall return. We prefer to use the term ‘touch’, which conveys the sensual and material character of this elementary dimension of social practice. Anthropological studies of touch are relatively scarce (see Hsu 2000). The only monograph dedicated to this topic treats the universal importance of touch as ‘basic need’ and foundation of personhood (Montagu 1971: 289), and contrasts European ‘tactile deprivation’ (ibid.: 250) with the positive appreciation of touch, especially in relationships with children, in other cultures (see also Mead and Macgregor 1951; Ainsworth 1967). Similarly, Geurts proposes that touch, hearing and movement are relatively more important for the Ghanaian Ewe than for ‘Western’ culture (2002). While we concur with some of these authors’ observations, our own interest in touch is not a concern with senses, but with the work that touching (or not touching) the other can do in everyday sociality. Although it is about bodies and substance, our study is thus not about embodiment. Geurts’s study on the cultural ‘sensorium’ of the Ewe shows the problem of the latter approach: it tends to take as universals the individual body, an understanding of sensual knowledge as information and of the mind as the destination of this knowledge (2002: 227, 234). Geurts therefore underemphasises what we 12

Introduction

found the most striking aspect of her ethnography: not that the Ewe rank ‘the senses’ differently, but that what she presses into her model of ‘sense’ is not at all located inside individual person-bodies, but in between them: less ‘senses’ than modalities of relating or ‘being together’ – hence the primacy of touch, walking, balance, speech and hearing over vision (2002: Chapter 3). Below, we study touch as a ‘practice of relatedness’, as the primary modality of making relations, which reaches, momentarily, across the physical separation in between one and the other. In contrast to the quoted studies of touch, our interest is not in exploring a contrast between (idealised) European and African social practices, but in examining the differences and conflicts that arise from touch within one particular sociality. Here again we must emphasise the lack of consensus in Uhero. The practices of relatedness that we examine as forms of touch in Uhero are not one set of habits and ideas that are culturally agreed upon: they are debated and contested. Two (or more) people who touch each other can experience their contact in the same or in different ways. Moments of contact are observed by other people and evaluated by them, possibly differently from the actors. Surfaces have an ambivalent potential to connect or separate, relate or exclude, protect or expose, open or contain. Therefore people’s movements between, along and across surfaces, and the practices by which substantial relations are articulated and produced, always involve tensions and conflicts, possibly more so in certain conditions than in others. In contemporary Uhero, radically different modes of imagining and making subjects and relations have become available to people, and diminishing resources for life, together with the omnipresence of death, have raised the stakes in potential social conflicts. Discussions and struggles about the interfaces between people and – since many things are aspects of persons here – between people and things and among things will run through this ethnography. It is in concrete moments of touch that relations are produced, contested and dissolved. Based on the growing literature on what has recently been called ‘cultures of relatedness’ (e.g., Meigs 1984; Strathern 1988; Gow 1991; Carsten 2000; Schweitzer 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001), we take it for granted that social relations are made in substantial practice rather than simply given by formal affiliations. While different societies emphasise one or other of these practices, a concern with immediate, substantial contact (be it through blood, semen, food, sweat or bodily nearness) appears to be widely shared.14 However, our book is not a study of ‘how the Luo make relations’, which would imply the critical application of Melanesian and 13

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Amazonian models in the East African highlands. Rather than exploring another cultural model of relatedness, we shall focus upon how social relations are practised, and how these practices – which are fraught with tensions and often hard to live with – in turn make and remake persons. Thereby, we hope to better understand not only the predicament and the creativity of JoUhero, but also the problems of social relations that they share with us at this historical juncture. How we get near to others or keep distances and how we touch, engage and defend the surfaces of the other are universal practical and ethical problems that take on specific shapes in particular societies and times. Even in those societies or particular domains of social practice where firm boundaries around and between individual persons are ideologically stressed, there is always a struggle, a movement, a moment of life when a human meets the other. This struggle, and the mundane practices in which it takes place, will occupy us here.

Searching for another social practice: contingency, creativity and difference The work of Michel de Certeau and Emmanuel Lévinas influenced our thinking about social life in Uhero, about touch and relatedness and about the role that imaginations of time play in them. De Certeau’s reflections about the centrality of encounters with the other (rather than of, say, individual agency) in the constitution of ‘everyday life’ turned our attention to the role of contingency in human sociality (De Certeau 1984). Lévinas’s attempts to speak about that which is ‘between us’, before the advent of subjectivity, and his reflections about touch equally resonated with our experiences in Uhero (e.g. Lévinas 1967). One point of convergence between Lévinas and De Certeau is their perception of the use of time and place in relation to the other. De Certeau differentiates between ‘strategies’ and the ‘tactics’ of everyday life (see Desjarlais 1997: 183–89). Like Foucault, he uses strategy to designate the privileged modern dispositives of power: the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships … [by] a subject with will and power. [Strategy] postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority … can be managed … A Cartesian attitude … , an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the powers of the other. (De Certeau 1984: 35–36)

Strategy thus relies on a particular order of space, on the production of lasting boundaries that define what they contain and on alterity. In contrast, 14

Introduction

‘tactics’ – a term inspired by Bourdieu’s observations on practice, but without the deterministic implications of the ‘habitus’ (De Certeau 1984: 45–60) – are contingent and relational: where strategies are grounded in firm subjectivity, tactics are marked by ‘absence of a proper locus’ and have only ‘the space of the other’ (ibid.: 39), relying upon opportunities arising between one person and the other in moments of encounter. Tactics’ lack of an own place and permanence differs from the condition of strategies, yet tactics do not necessarily oppose strategy. On the contrary, as De Certeau argues, they often ‘make use’ of strategies without being inevitably subjected to them in the way Foucault’s earlier writings suggested they might. Everyday life is neither the malleable material of modern strategic dispositives nor their resistant antagonist; it is a substrate of life that predates and will outlast the modern subject’s purposeful strategies. De Certeau’s emphasis on the contingent moment that affords tactical opportunity between one and the other, on relations emerging in everyday practice and on the difference between such practice and the stability and ownership of strategic power may persuasively be linked to Lévinas’s critique of the firm ground of being and immanence, upon which, he suggests, ‘occidental’ approaches to the other in philosophy, science and social practice rest. These approaches, Lévinas argues, understand the subject as consciousness that turns exterior being into knowledge through experience. The other is internalised as identical, appropriated into the self, annihilating difference and missing the possibility of transcendence that (only) the encounter with the other in his radical otherness offers (Lévinas 1981). This internalisation implies objectification (making the other into a thing), the condition of technical rationality and of its specific potential to exercise domination.15 Instead, Lévinas searches for a foundation of thought ‘inbetween’ humans, in the relation that has no fixed ground, but emerges from an instant in time: the moment of addressing or touching the other. Lévinas and De Certeau share a concern with touch. Emerging from momentary contact with the other, De Certeau’s ‘tactics’ imply tactility and tact, sensibility and sense. Everyday practice occurs as physical ‘contacts touches’, resulting from movement and the continuous construction and transgression of boundaries, ‘the operation of distinctions resulting from encounters’ between the person and her exterior, other persons and things (De Certeau 1984: 126–27): [The] paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction 15

The Land is Dying are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? (ibid.: 127).

According to this perspective, it is not the case that touch arises from the intentionality of pre-existing subjects towards one another, but rather that persons and their ways in life are constituted by getting in touch. Instead of being an inner essence, personhood is at skin level, made and remade through touch. Hence the ambiguity and contestedness, but also the surprising and creative potential of touch, which, we shall argue, is echoed in JoUhero’s everyday practices and their understanding of riwo. Lévinas’s philosophy focuses on touch in contrast to the visually framed, objectifying epistemology of most modern thought (see Fabian 1983; Jay 1993). For him, touch is more than a sense, ‘it is a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity … to touch is to comport oneself not in opposition to the given but in proximity with it’ (Wyschogrod 1980: 199). Touch is the original sense, before subjective cognition, before intention and knowing. Certainly, touch can be employed to know, to explore the surface of the other; but in this role as cognition, the senses are superficial: ‘before transforming itself into the knowledge of the exterior of things – and even during this process – touch is pure approximation and nearness that cannot be reduced to the perception of nearness’ (Lévinas 1967: 227, our transl.). Touch is not a primordial sense in contrast to vision, but the potential of nearness that visual and aural senses possess as well.16 Even seeing, the ‘noblest sense’ of modern cognition, can establish touch, meeting the other’s eye; and, if touch is applied as a grasp, even tactility follows the appropriative and recognisant logic of Cartesian vision. For Lévinas, touch is the event in-between that occurs before dialogue or understanding and it is the origin of ethics (rather than the result of ethical reflection). The other’s response to one’s address or touch, his act of ‘non-indifference’ towards me, ‘can also turn into hate, but it has the potential for that which one – cautiously – could term “love” or something similar to love’ (Lévinas 1981: 78, our transl.). In this relation, which is different from ‘intersubjective’ experience or ‘dialogue’ (ibid.: 75), the other remains an absolute other and engagement transcends but does not erase difference. Hence, a human ‘relation’ is a transcendent act, to be distinguished from a ‘connection’ (ibid.: 76) between objects (or subjects), which remains immanent. Lévinas’s respect for the encounter and the touch as transcendental (and contingent) events resonates with JoUhero’s concerns with touch and 16

Introduction

material nearness to the other human, concerns that are expressed in the notion of riwo (‘to merge through sharing’, ‘to be together’) and its creative potential and with their understanding of growth as transformative process. Jay observed that, for Lévinas, touch is the core of religious ritual (Jay 1993: 558). Indeed, touch is for him the religious act. We argue that JoUhero’s emphasis on what we shall describe as ‘everyday ritual’ – an emphasis derived from their recognition that mundane practices have the potential to relate persons (including ancestors and personhood embodied in things) and thereby to facilitate flows of substance or block them, enable growth or prevent it, give life or kill – reflects an awareness of this transcendental aspect of human relations, a sensitivity to the potential of touch as origin of the ethical relation. Lévinas draws attention to the link between his thinking and the ethnographic search for other modes of rationality and ethics in an essay on Lévy-Bruhl (Lévinas 1991). Here, he embraces the ethnographic tenet that ‘Western thought relied upon a combination of circumstances, which could also have produced another thinking’ (ibid.: 65, our transl.), and acknowledges that Lévy-Bruhl’s reflections on being as ‘participation’ (e.g. Lévy-Bruhl 1975)17 pre-empts the phenomenologists’ concerns with ‘being in the world’ and Lévinas’s explorations of the ‘in-between’ beyond phenomenological intentionality. Lévinas’s insistence upon the relation as prior to the subject is paraphrased in Lévy-Bruhl’s warning not to assume: that beings were already given and would only then enter into participation. For them to be given, for them to exist, participations are already required. Participation is not just a mysterious, inexplicable merging of beings, who lose and at the same time maintain their identity … Without participation they would not be given in their own experience: they would not exist at all. (Lévy-Bruhl 1975 (1949), quoted by Lévinas 1991: 59, our transl.)

Lévinas underlines that ‘of course it is not the issue to return to the primitive articles of faith, but it is about rediscovering intellectual structures that make them possible and ultimately ways of being – an ontology – that make such structures possible’ (Lévinas 1991: 55, our transl.). He thus proposes a search, not for other socialities in evolutional time and/or geographical space, but for other potentialities within social life, for an ‘extension of the category of reason itself ’ (ibid.: 67, our translation) as a source of ethical practice. Lévinas and De Certeau share an ethical project, a search for another kind of social practice that can counter the dangers of instrumental, economic 17

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rationality. Lévinas proposes this other social practice in terms of an ‘ethics of the other’ (a position elaborated upon in Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics (1993)).18 De Certeau locates it in ‘everyday life’, people’s ‘tactical practices’ underneath the modern dispositives of power.19 This book takes some orientation from their ethical project as it discerns, within social life in Uhero, different practices, discourses and ethics of everyday life and explores their contrasts and connections. JoUhero’s conflicts about different modes of being towards other humans, and thereby of being persons, do not guide us ‘back’ to an ‘African’ or ‘non-modern’ sociality. Instead, their debates can help us to understand the contradictions and conflicts that mark our common modern situation, not in order to find a way out of reason, individuality or agency, but to realise that these fictions do not exhaust modern human existence, that there is something else – there, as well as here. In our ethnography, tropes of modernity and tradition will be prominent, as they are critical categories in JoUhero’s debates, but our aim is not to discern survivals of a pre-modern past or to contrast ‘their’ sociality with ‘ours’. Instead, we want to recognise in modern JoUhero’s everyday life dimensions of the ethical challenges we share with them at this time. In social anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl’s search for other ways of being with others remained somewhat constrained by the spatio-temporal frame of his era, the evolutionary ‘othering’ that Fabian called the ‘allochronism of anthropology’ (Fabian 1983: 32).20 Standard-functionalism continued within this framework, despite the interest of some of its proponents in the practices and ethics of relatedness (e.g. Fortes 1949; Lienhardt 1961). Structuralism had little scope for the small movements of human practice, and what was called ‘wild’ here had little resemblance to the wilderness of everyday life.21 Victor Turner moved closer to the issue in his analysis of communitas (1995) among American students as well as Ndembu youths. He drew our attention to the role of physical nearness and merging with the other for religious ceremony and the constitution of sociality and he engaged his understandings of African and American sociality with each other, searching for traits of a sociality other than that which he found dominant around him. However, his communitas remained enshrined in ritual, in special moments outside the ‘structure’ of ordinary life, and it was understood as a coherent group experience, rather than as a more general everyday event between two or more humans. His study of other forms of social practice, particularly in Africa, sometimes led Turner to identify nonmodern, religious forms of social practice as solutions to the predicaments of modern sociality, which appears to us as a valid consequence of this kind 18

Introduction

of enquiry (for a similar argument see Fernandez 1982). For other ethnographers, examining modes of relating and of being a person that were found to be radically different from Western models – such as Strathern’s work on personhood and exchange in Melanesia (e.g. 1988) – served as a means of prising open familiar and taken-for-granted constructs of person and relation. The different sociality serves here not as something to return to or long for, but to denaturalise assumptions that place ‘our’ understandings at the centre of analysis. Both kinds of ethnography challenge the occidental epistemology against which Lévinas and De Certeau argue and cast doubt upon one of its cornerstones: the taken-forgranted individual subject. Our ethnography takes some inspiration from these different anthropological takes on otherness/difference. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall begin to explore these themes by examining our way into the field, our position within it and relations between field and home.

Engaging boundaries Our first encounters with JoUhero (between 1994 and 1998) concerned, respectively, worms and intelligence: as a zoologist, Wenzel studied the epidemiology of worm infections; trained as a human scientist, Ruth devised psychological tests to measure the cognitive effects of worm infections. We met in Uhero in 1996 and have since then lived there periodically, first separately, then together, and eventually joined by our first child. From 2000 to 2002, we both returned for our social anthropological fieldwork. Our attention to touch and growth and our approach to studying them arose partly from, as well as in reaction to, our initial medical concerns and the attendant mode of ‘data collection’, which we gloss below as ‘hygiene’.

Hygiene We began our journey into social anthropology with scientific explorations, investigating connections between worms, nutrition and cognition in children. Thus, we contributed to a ‘randomised, double-blind, placebocontrolled trial’ to demonstrate that deworming improves physical and mental development (e.g. Geissler et al. 1998a, b; Olsen et al. 2003); catalogued villagers’ knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical drugs (Prince et al. 2001); and measured medicinal knowledge and local concepts of knowing (Grigorenko et al. 2001; Sternberg et al. 2001). As we argue in a 19

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critical reassessment of this work elsewhere, these very varied academic endeavours share a preoccupation with bounded entities on different levels of scale: with the defence of boundaries against outside enemies, and with the accumulation of capacity within them (Geissler and Prince 2009). In this sense, ‘hygiene’ was a crucial aspect of our first engagement with Uhero. The OED defines ‘hygiene’ as a ‘department of knowledge or practice which relates to the maintenance and promotion of health’ or a ‘sanitary science’ and defines ‘sanitary’ as ‘cleanliness and precautions against infection and other deleterious influences’: a science of boundaries and their defence. Hygiene is a central aspect of modern biomedicine, and especially of tropical medicine’s expansive, appropriative and accumulative imaginary of health and space – pushing out and defending the boundaries of the known and the own (e.g., MacLeod and Lewis 1988; Farley 1991). The historical links between tropical medicine and colonialism in Africa have been extensively studied (Packard 1989; Vaughan 1991; Ranger 1992; Comaroff 1993; Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff 1997). In this section, we shall examine only some epistemological aspects of hygiene as a field science that are relevant for the ethnographic study presented below. These reflections are inspired by Fabian’s insight that hygiene merges medical, religious and political concerns, pursuing ‘a quasi-spiritual, ascetic ideal of purity and selfcontrol … which conquers the dangers of a hostile physical and social environment through the mastery of mind over body’ (1991: 159). Hygiene in this broad sense was critical to the construction of the (post-)colonial encounter and its sciences and representations, including ethnography. On different levels of scale, our first studies in Uhero were concerned with ‘precautions against infection and deleterious influences’. This was most obviously the case for the ‘data collection’ in the worm control trial: its ‘study population’ consisted of the (supposedly) immobile inhabitants of a remote administrative Division with high prevalence of worms and malnutrition – a stable, bounded entity in need of intervention; a field, constituted as distinct from the scientist’s observational position into which the researcher enters and exits to gather his ‘data’. The members of the ‘study cohort’ were selected from this population at random, statistically excluding the influence of their relations. These ‘study subjects’ were the individual loci of health and illness, of development and knowledge – and eventually the targets of intervention. The children’s bodies were accessed through their stools and blood; using psychological tests, we examined their intelligence, i.e. their minds’ capacity to acquire, store and apply knowledge; and finally we correlated these different individual properties (Sternberg et al. 2001). Laboratory and intelligence tests share the ideal of the individual 20

Introduction

person as owner of its attributes and of development as individual accumulation. Physical or intellectual capacities add up in the progressive completion of the person, from which lack of nourishment or the consuming activity of parasites subtract, calling for hygienic intervention. The studied children were thus constructed in much the same spatial mode as the study area, on a different scale: bounded entities, parasiteinfested, whose integrity was to be restored by eradicating the disease agent. The resulting purified bodies can accumulate nutrients; the minds attached to these bodies can absorb information; by strengthening the body/mind container the person is enabled to add substance and capacity. Hygiene in this original wide sense aims to ensure the integrity and completeness of individual entities by defending boundaries (primarily those of the body, but also those of families, territories and populations). Hence, the imaginary of hygiene can serve individual disease prevention and national disease control, and bodily discipline and political domination. Hygiene construes surfaces as frontiers engaged in struggles about ‘eradication’, battles until victory or destruction (see Parkin 1995 for the contrast between ‘eradication’ and ‘dispersal’). In these struggles, the control of bounded spaces is the necessary condition of health. Time, the process of illness, is imagined as stages in a territorial battle: intrusion, infestation, intervention, eradication. This is a battle for purity, ultimately a moral battle, in which the infested or dirty body (or place) is associated with a morally deficient person (or population) in need of unequivocal intervention. As intervention and epistemological stance, hygiene aims for control over place, an archetypical modern imaginary, pure enactment of ‘strategy’ in De Certeau’s sense. In De Certeau’s terminology, epidemiological studies and disease control – and the attendant notions of ‘areas’, ‘cohorts’ and ‘subjects’’ bodies and minds that shaped our early work – emphasise a logic of ‘place’ (lieu), implying separations and order, boundedness and stability (1984: 117). This contrasts with ‘space’ (espace), which is place transformed by interactive and surprising movements between humans. In most human practice, persons are shaped through acts of drawing as well as of transgressing separations – ‘boundaries’ and ‘bridges’ constitute each other (De Certeau 1984: 126–9) – and the resulting permeability and ambiguity allow life to take form and to grow. Hygiene, in contrast, imagines impenetrable front lines, without bridges of ambiguity. It is, paradoxically, a life science that rejects the ambiguity that is life.

21

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Knowing boundaries The peculiarity of these ways of knowing humans revealed itself in the villagers’ occasional suspicions. The most striking among these were accusations of blood-stealing issued during epidemiological data collection (Geissler 2005; see also Odhiambo 1974; Pels 1992; White 2000), but the problems of information and mistrust, of knowledge and value (and validity) went beyond blood-sampling and also posed themselves in connection with such seemingly ‘non-intrusive’ practices as mapping, collecting genealogies or census data. Concerns with these peculiar quests for knowledge were expressed in the Catholic children’s nativity play we watched on Christmas Eve 2000. The children had expanded the imperial census episode into a long slapstick scene that took up much of the evening: a veiled and faceless ‘emperor’ commanded his people to be counted, in what JoUhero call a ‘British’ or ‘majestic’ rhetoric and gesture. Two hilarious (but armed) soldiers in improvised colonial attire made up of fathers’ old railway uniforms searched every corner of the crowded church, to find the population that had hidden from them and the emperor’s gaze. Wherever the soldiers found somebody, people invented new ways of evasion and cheating; each time the congregation responded with laughter of recognition (and, we sensed, sideways glances at us). The imperial census served as reconnaissance for the massacre of the innocents. Similarly, we were occasionally suspected of gathering genealogical and demographic information to prepare killings. When we asked villagers to compare different village children’s intelligence during our earlier research, many rejected the task, not only because they found it impolite to talk about and judge other people’s children, but also because some suspected nefarious intentions – possibly child abduction. When we later collected data on religious affiliations, some feared that we produced lists for a Satanist mission drive or a religious purge. Such fears were related to historical experiences of labour and war recruitment, to Ugandan and Rwandan war stories and to wider perceptions of exploitation and threat, as well as previous experiences with medical and other research (see Chapter 2). As the nativity play also showed, people’s ideas about research (and medicine or education) were formed by exposure to colonial lifestyles and regulations, which is probably typical of the historical experience of Kenya as a settler colony with a strong European presence, a colour-bar system and periods of violent oppression. 22

Introduction

In other words, ‘our’ modes of collecting knowledge are suspect. This is not a problem of misinterpretation, but a historically grounded epistemological commentary.22 Knowledge is an ambiguous power; it is dangerous if it is not shared between those whom the knowledge concerns and settled within their relations. Unrelated knowledge is suspect. And it is exactly such unrelated and alienable, objective knowledge that much scientific research aims for: knowledge that creates a difference that serves mastery (see Fabian 1991: 163–66). This epistemology recalls De Certeau’s categorisation of synoptic forms of knowledge as ‘maps’, in contrast to the ‘pathways’ or ‘tours’ along which knowledge is produced and used – as narrative of encounters – in a local context (1984: 119; see also Jay 1993: 63). Censuses, summarised in lists and tables, epitomise the production of map-like, controlled knowledge; ideally freezing every individual in her place for a moment outside time. This is the kind of knowledge of which Foucault wrote that it had originated in pathology: the ordering of dead matter in order to control life (1973: 197). It raises epistemological qualms and vital fears in Uhero. Conflicts about the production and the value of knowledge accompanied our work, and facilitated occasional moments of reflection about our endeavour.

Changing perspectives? When we started working in Kenya, hygiene was more than an epistemological stance: it was a way of life. In bodily and domestic practices, and in our engagement with post-colonial landscapes (especially in Kisumu City, where some of the earlier work was based) marked by traces of colonial segregation and post-colonial class, we reiterated boundaries, no matter whether we accommodated them or purposely transgressed them. These demarcations made our own place and defined our position towards the field around us. At first, this emphasis on boundaries seemed to contrast with the life of people with whom we worked and lived – it appeared as an aspect of ‘cultural difference’ – which led us to attempts to transgress them. Yet we came to realise that we shared concerns regarding personal hygiene and other spatial separations with many others in western Kenya who, for example, protected themselves with insecticides and soaps with unequivocal slogans: ‘kills “dudu” [Kiswahili. ‘insects’, ‘germs’] dead’, ‘killing 99 per cent of all germs’. Gradually, we learned that they also shared the social dilemmas and conflicts that these concerns with boundaries could lead to in everyday sociality. Thus, eventually, these issues became important in our ethnography. 23

The Land is Dying

Triggered by encounters, we changed our position during our years in the field, crossed boundaries, got entangled in new relations and began to explore other modes of knowing. The life and work at the beginning of this trajectory seem quite distant now; stool examinations and intelligence tests now seem like odd points from which to begin engaging with other people. Our shift from human science and zoology to social anthropology (and the attendant decision to live in a village) could be represented as progression towards new locations and insights, taking a new perspective, getting a better view. One recognises the ethnographic fiction of distance transcended. Indeed, we did move in geographical space, changed our daily lives, and were, after the initial years of scientific fieldwork, trained in different, anthropological ways of knowing. But representations of change in terms of temporal dichotomies are at best partial. Did we in fact move closer? Had we not already been rather too close when we tested children’s bodies and minds? We moved from the former administrative quarters of Kisumu to a mud and thatch hut, but then this large round building is now almost the only one of its kind in the village, more similar to the ‘traditional’ Luo houses in Kisumu’s museum than to our neighbours’ square-shaped, tin-roofed houses. Did this translocation imply getting ‘nearer’ in anything but a geographical sense? Returning to Uhero as ethnographers we questioned the epistemological frames of our earlier studies, but our routines were still initially shaped by the differentiations that had marked these. What Gupta and Ferguson described in their discussion of anthropological fieldwork as the ‘hierarchy of purity’ or otherness gave direction to our being in the field (1997: 12–15): We continued to go ‘out to the field’ (i.e. to specific homes, institutions or events). Returning, we brought notes and tapes ‘home’ – the locus of reflection and analysis. Thus studying ‘others’ – such as elderly healers or the Legio Maria Church, with its ‘exotic’ healing practices and iconography, members of which wear biblical-style robes and often dreadlocks (Prince 1999) – we excluded from view what was more familiar – the people of our ‘home’ and their friends, professionals, business people, civil servants. And, even when we began our more inclusive doctoral research on the area, we still excluded from our ethnography the Danish-funded medical research project that was going on around us, conducted by Kenyan and Danish doctors, nurses, nutritionists and epidemiologists as well as local youths as research assistants; it was based in a health centre twenty kilometres from Uhero, but recruited pregnant women from Uhero as well as other villages for research as well as providing antenatal services. Our attachment to a particular understanding of difference and of our own fieldwork underlines 24

Introduction

that ethnographic proximity, or participant observation, cannot alone remedy the objectifying relation to the other, which hygiene research brings to the point, but which it shares with other scientific ways of knowledge production. Only when, with time, we entered into closer relations with and shifting positions towards others in and around Uhero did home become field and field home. Just as ‘home is a place of difference’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 33) so was our ‘field’ a site of differences, of which our home, and ourselves, were a part. Indeed, at times JoUhero operate differentiations between own and other that are not unlike those that structured our fieldwork. As Gupta and Ferguson put it: ‘in an interconnected world, we are never really “out of the field”’ (1997: 35); and, indeed, we are never really out of home. Rather than studying practices that differed from our own and from those of the people and groups that we identified with, we began to explore differences as they played out around us. Entering the everyday politics of Uhero implied taking a stance with regard to power and conflicts, which resembled the differentiations and conflicts of familiar home contexts, albeit in characteristic local forms. Diversifying our understanding of JoUhero’s predicament meant also understanding our own.

Coming together A few weeks after we arrived, John Ogumba, the father of the home where we lived, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. The following weeks passed in organising the funeral, notifying distant relatives in inaccessible areas, and procuring supplies. This activity culminated in the funeral in the homestead. For four days and nights our house, a round space twenty feet in diameter, ceased to be our home and became the sleeping and eating place of twenty to forty people – friends, youths who felt free in the house of their age-mates, in-laws who, due to customary habits, could not eat in the main house and other visitors curious to meet us. There was no discussion about this invasion: ‘This is what a funeral is like’. It rained, so nobody could remain outside, and soon bodies, clothes, floors and things became muddy. Our hosts and friends became concerned with the fate of our property and began rearranging furniture and things. All food was shared, and our stocks shrank more quickly than we could replenish them. More than these material concerns, we were overwhelmed by the sense of physical nearness, pushing our way through bodies, lying down to doze among others, waking up without a chance to wash, change or write notes. Some of these experiences are regular parts of Luo funeral ritual, for example the explicit prohibitions on sleeping in one’s bed or washing, the 25

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prescribed sharing of food or the idea that nobody should mourn alone, lest she encloses the grief in herself and prevents her future growth. However, our reactions to this were not mainly a result of cultural difference. Everybody was concerned with similar mundane issues. Those with more property to lose and those with particular notions of hygiene and propriety struggled perhaps more than others did, but everybody was disturbed by mud, hunger, sleeplessness and lack of privacy. Almost everybody, though, accepted this loss of control over self and place as an unavoidable consequence of a funeral, a reflection of the confusion and rupture brought by death and a contribution to its aimed-for outcome: togetherness (riwruok). During these days and nights of liminal disorder, the boundaries between home and field, us and them, self and other were challenged together with those of our bodies, our space and our belongings. None of these boundaries disappeared, of course, but for moments they became permeable, allowing for touch in the sense of acknowledged mutual nearness partly beyond our control, rather than in the sense of mere physical proximity. This included, of course, the inherent ambiguity of touching and being touched, and of losing control over the encounter with the other. Conflicts between people (and within them) about touching and about the right and wrong ways of getting in touch (in mundane practices such as greeting, eating, cooking, sitting or sleeping) dominated conversations and people’s actions during the long days and nights of the funeral. Not everybody was equally pleased to get near to others, finding it unhygienic, unchristian or simply a nuisance. Some of these arguments over everyday practices were concerned with customary rules, some referred explicitly to categories like ‘modern’ or ‘Luo’ and their derivatives (see Chapter 3). In the tensions that ensued, we were, like everyone else, forced to take sides in a multiply fractured field. Which side we took could depend on choice or instinct, on others’ decisions and actions or on economic and educational differences. Through taking sides, and by getting in touch or being touched, we began to realise the tensions and conflicts that shape life in Uhero. Taking sides does not imply that one constructs one’s identity consistently on ‘one side’. On the contrary, one positions oneself anew in each encounter, in each moment of a relation. Most people do indeed strive for some sort of coherent identity, but this remains an unfinished process; nobody is able to fashion a single, unequivocal identity. As we shall discuss below, JoUhero frequently use social categories such as ‘strong Christians’ or ‘Anglican’, ‘of class’ or ‘educated’ to demarcate differences, but funerals like this show that none of them can establish and maintain definite belonging to one ‘side’ or distinct social group. 26

Introduction

Sitting under the roof of our house in the early morning amidst a group of youths, muddy, sweaty and tired, but snug among the others in the damp coolness, we felt, somewhat surprisingly, that we enjoyed this situation. Others agreed and somebody affirmed: ‘We are still together here!’ Then someone else asked: ‘Are we?’, and a conversation about the village and life in the city and in Europe, and the pleasures and problems of togetherness ensued. We understood only much later the full meaning and importance of ‘being together’ ‘merging into one’ (riwore or bedo kanyakla achiel), which we shall explore throughout this ethnography; but, as we sleepily leaned against our age-mates’ bodies during that early morning, what the first speaker had said made sense. At dawn, Wenzel bumped into Winston, the eldest son of the deceased, a jazz-loving urban flâneur, who against the customary rules had slept alone in his bed, and who hoped for a lift to go and have a peaceful breakfast in a hotel in town. Pointing at the homestead’s gate, he asked: ‘Off to the field?’ Not sure what to answer, Wenzel sat down and waited for a cup of hot tea that the women were preparing on the fires smouldering around the wet compound. Thus, between moments of indignation and pleasure, our interest in touch and contested surfaces and in the transformations and indeed growth that can spring from material engagements and boundary crossings emerged. Another experience in which unease with infringed boundaries and the impulse to rush to their defence ran counter to a growing sense of relatedness and belonging was the pregnancy and the birth of our first child, Otto. Through the years of shared life in Uhero we had begun creating relations within the village, which was enhanced by getting older, through family visits revealing our own relations and by getting married. Ruth’s pregnancy and our son’s birth intensified these relations, and we were expected to occupy a different place in social activities, for example, in-law visits or funeral ceremonies. People’s care and advice regarding the child and his mother included us in the community in a new way. However much our practices and values may differ, people implied, the life and survival of an infant in this village are our shared concern. As neighbours and friends pointed out, they knew better than we did the dangers of the place, whether malaria, unclean water or the evil eye. These growing relations and the many visitors who kept us company throughout the day were a source of well-being for all three of us. At the same time, pregnancy, the birth and life with the small child in our hut raised issues of hygiene and order that contradicted our growing into relations with others and with the place. In the context of endemic malaria and a local cholera outbreak, mosquitoes, 27

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touching and food preparation once more became concerns. However, this was, again, not mainly an issue of cultural difference but a struggle that many other parents experienced, between the desire to protect ‘one’s own’ – from snakes, insects, infections, evil eye – and others’ understandable wish to share in the new life, a wish formalised in habits like holding a child before giving him something (e.g. a chick) or by spitting (a blessing) on him.23 In fact, the most radical advice about cleanliness, such as disinfecting clothes or even our mud and cow dung floors, or feeding the infant formula milk, came from our host, who was an avid hygienist and concerned for our son. Many of the recommendations were (socially and technically) unlivable in Uhero, but like other new parents there, it took us a while to find our way between different ideologies and practices. These experiences of burial and birth brought the field into our home or us into the field. Boundaries of bodies and privacy, space and property, and distinctions of cultural contrast were infringed and momentarily transcended. Both events were contingent – in the word’s double sense of ‘fortuitous and accidental’ and ‘touching and relating’ – and our control of boundaries and relations was reduced. For moments, the free play with locations and distinctions – the ethnographer’s cosmopolitan privilege – was challenged. We had to engage in messier contests about and around our and other surfaces, exploring their contiguity, without, however, erasing difference itself. Both situations changed our everyday life, and challenged our epistemology – not because they reduced distance or improved perspective, but because they challenged the particular rendering of difference upon which our ways of knowing were premised. Objective knowledge was momentarily replaced by situated encounters, by ‘being together’. The conflicts between one’s indignation over infringed boundaries and the experience of and need for nearness and relatedness show the ambivalence of touch. The ethnographic trajectory is not one from home to a foreign country – appropriating the different and bringing it back home to oneself – but into making and knowing about relations and experiencing their transformative potential. Simplifying a less determinate process, our fieldwork could be summarised as a movement from implementing hygiene to exploring issues of hygiene, along with other ways of dealing with the surfaces of what is ours and our boundaries with the other. A third contingent and indeed fortuitous event that shaped this transition was our encounter with people we worked with, of whom we want to mention two. Achieng’ Mbuge was a Dholuo teacher in Nairobi who became a colleague and friend. Her curiosity about social life in Luoland and 28

Introduction

elsewhere, her sharp observations of relations including those between anthropologists and their field, and her critical reflections about the distinctions that our lives and work entailed taught us about the boundaries around us and in our research. Helen (Nell) Mienachido had just finished secondary school and lived with her uncle in Uhero when we came to settle there. Some weeks later, she began accompanying us on our walks through ‘the field’ and continued to work with us for years. Without her curiosity and kindness, neither JoUhero nor we would have continued this long-term fieldwork. As much as her interest, her reflexive commentary and her skilful manoeuvring between the different inhabitants of Uhero, it was the small gestures of amity that she exchanged with others, her profound sense of tact and tactility, that enabled us to live among JoUhero. When her daughter Jully was born in Kisumu in 1997, Wenzel brought mother and daughter back home from the hospital. When Ruth went into labour in February 2001, Nell accompanied her to the hospital in Kisumu and saw us through the long night during which our son was born. We mention these experiences of contingency not (only) to recall sentimental memories, but to hint at the importance of shared experience in the evolution of relatedness, from which understanding can grow. The contributions of these two individuals, and of others who shared and explained social life with us, are too complex and profound to be acknowledged in this space. It should be read, however, between the lines of this ethnography.

Visiting If touch is, in a sense, before the order of being, and if we aim to recognise and share (if only momentarily) the presence of the other in instances of touch rather than comprehending her into our knowledge, then ‘observation’ is a problematic tool. Apart from its objectifying quality, observation is primarily visual and can be unidirectional, thereby avoiding the unsettling quality of touch: that which you touch always touches you. Instead of ‘participant observation’, which subsumes participation under the real task of observation (Fabian 1983: 106), ‘visiting’ – with its ambiguous mutual expectations and disappointments, its potential for boredom and surprise, composed of shared time, words, food, presence – seems a more suitable approach. In Uhero, visiting (limo) is, for various reasons, at the core of sociality. It maintains ties between homesteads and lineages, and constitutes larger, encompassing groups such as village, clan and ‘Luo nation’ (and also groupings such as denominational fellowships). Moreover, it is regarded as a vital source of well-being. People say, ‘visiting 29

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is love hera’ or ‘life ngima’, referring both to the all-important formal visits to in-laws’ homes and to funerals, and to the short, improvised visits that one engages in every day, walking through the bush and passing through homes (for all pathways lead through homes and visiting is a consequence of movement and vice versa). Visits can last minutes or days and although official visits, such as those that occur between in-laws, require a sequence of formalised practices, even their timing is not fixed, and casual everyday visits are open-ended. This expected unpredictability deprives both guest and host of the opportunity to define the encounter. These moments of shared presence born out of movements are, in Uhero, the most explicit form of social encounter, of getting in touch. To practise fieldwork as visits means to acknowledge the indeterminacy of the encounter as an origin of knowledge, rather than relying on the scientific observer’s subjectivity and control over his object.24 A ‘visitor’ lacks his own place; he moves and rests, if so permitted, with the other. His first question is not ‘What is your name?’, the order to identify, but one for shared time, presence or food. The host may reject the visitor’s request or accommodate it, and his response and the ensuing conversations are the nucleus of a relation – of difference and yet, potentially, of recognition – and of knowledge. The material presented below arises mainly from having visited and having been visited by people in Uhero. It is in particular shaped by our extended visits to two homesteads (and, together with their members, elsewhere), which in their explicit differences – in everyday life practices, ideas about themselves and each other, and their relations with us – demarcated a field of social practice and enquiry, and became our irreconcilable ‘two homes’ in Uhero. In both homes we were ascribed kinship positions and the resulting role conflicts contributed much to our knowledge, while our relations with particular persons run through this book. It follows a small group of people with whom we lived, and who live with each other in Uhero, and presents their social practices and relations as an extended situation analysis. These relations will move through a series of themes that, on different levels of scale, have to do with touch, with contested boundaries or interfaces, with the struggle to make relations and with the transformative effects of coming together, the creation and negotiation of growth. We begin in Chapter 2 with the landscape in which Uhero is situated and introduce the issues of belonging and change, movement and return, and continue in Chapter 3 with an exposition of some of the concepts that frame JoUhero’s debates about time and relations, such as ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. We shall 30

Introduction

then begin our ethnography with three chapters that focus on the concerns that could be said to dominate contemporary JoUhero’s lives: belonging, origin and return. Chapter 4 begins with an exposition of the home, the principal site of substantial relations and growth, the beginning and end of life, the embodiment of shared values and of radical conflicts. Chapter 5 then explores the nurture of children, and Chapter 6 care for dying people – practices towards emerging and departing persons that occur in the home. We then continue with three chapters about critical substantial relations: Chapters 7 and 8 both deal with sexual intercourse in, respectively, discourses about pleasure, and in death and bereavement; Chapter 9 attends to concerns with time, substance and social relations in and around funeral ceremonies. In the end we shall return, in Chapter 10, to the concerns with space and belonging with which we began, and look more closely at people’s different forms of living on their land. Looking at the same set of people in different situations and relations, we shall show how images and practices at different levels of daily life are related to and work upon each other, without, however, any one of them determining the others, or providing a root metaphor for all. We shall argue that the underlying concerns that are contested and negotiated on different levels of everyday life are those of ‘being together’ in terms of substantial, material nearness or ‘sharing and merging’ (riwo), and its capacity to effect growth. Although widely shared and embodied in practice, this concern does not provide an overarching or consensual cultural or social logic, first because it is a diffuse concern, a field of negotiation about the order of life, rather than a prescriptive rule, and, secondly, because in modern Uhero, ‘being together’ is just one component within a fundamentally antagonistic, dichotomised social imagination, a source of conflict rather than consensus. JoUhero’s actions towards one another, and their evaluations of their own and other’s actions, differ and are frequently in disagreement. Here, we shall explore their struggles about being together and about growth by looking at what particular people do, what they say they do and what they see others doing. In the next chapter, we shall enter Uhero, presenting an itinerary into the field, drawing attention to some places and pathways, some traces and images, some memories and stories, and locating and connecting some people. We choose to present people and places and their history together, in order to draw out some of the relations that constitute the landscape. We (re)construct this entrance to Uhero along the trajectory of our own travel, returning to visit like many JoUhero do, thus connecting both people and places by our movement. 31

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Interspersed with digressions into the history of western Kenya and of the village of Uhero, this account of our own journey aims to convey how situations and encounters occur along one’s way, creating momentary, incomplete associations and insights, of which only a few are ever analysed. Some of the paths we cross on our way we shall return to in the subsequent chapters, others will remain unexamined, just as most of what we encounter along our way is understood only partially, while it nonetheless directs our course.

Notes 1. Names of places and persons (except larger areas and clans) have been changed. 2. This book is the outcome of our joint work. We therefore use ‘we’, except for the moments where only one of us experienced a particular event, in which case we revert to the use of each other’s first names. 3. Dholuo terms are italicised, while Kiswahili terms used in Uhero are set in single quotation marks. 4. We use ‘the Luo’ rather than terms such as ‘Luo-speaking people’ that try to avoid essentialising ‘tribal’ connotations, for the sake of convenience and because the category of JoLuo (‘Luo people’) is central to contemporary Luo identity. 5. We use the present tense for common practices and general conditions of life in Uhero during the time of our fieldwork (2000–2), as well as in some longer descriptions. As this book is about change, it should be clear that the choice of tense does not imply a timeless ‘ethnographic present’. 6. Colleagues conducting fieldwork elsewhere in Africa at the same time as we did heard similar statements about the loss of love or the death of land (Lotte Meinert, Uganda; Soori Nnko, Tanzania; Fiona Scorgie, South Africa; John Friedman, Namibia; Tilo Grätz, Ghana, personal communication), suggesting a continent-wide sense of crisis and a shared idiom in which it is conceptualised. Such complaints are not new. BaTswana parents complained in the 1930s about the youth’s selfishness and lack of ‘respect’, linking this to the dissolution of their social group (Shapera 1939: 265–66); at the same time, Luo songs were bemoaning the loss of morality and proper relations among townsmen and schoolgirls (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989: 95–99) while the notion that ‘the earth is tired’ (though not yet ‘dead’) has been current in Luoland for decades (ibid.: 67). This does not mean that people’s perceptions have not changed, but it confirms Luo understandings of the long-term and incremental nature of change. The omnipresence of these laments today, among all generations and social groups, indicates that the Luo present is marked by a dark outlook indeed. 7. We capitalise ‘Tradition’, in contrast to ‘custom’ or ‘habits’, to mark the fact that it is increasingly turned into a codified body of belief and practice. Like Christian Salvation, with which it shares an emphasis on dualism, rules and boundaries, it is a modern phenomenon. 32

Introduction 8. Amounting to a staggering 8.4 per cent of the 914 inhabitants in 2001. The actual number of deaths was probably higher, as we only registered people who had been resident in Uhero for more than six months prior to each census round (conducted biannually), and thus missed those who returned from the city and died within half a year, as well as those who left Uhero and died elsewhere. 9. By 2000, 8 per cent of the children in a neighbouring Division had lost one or both parents (Lindblade et al. 2003); caring for ‘orphans’ has, in spite of extended kinship practices, become a problem (Nyambedha et al. 2003). 10. Already in the 1970s, before AIDS, people compared their bodies with the fat bodies of the past, registering the impact of social change on agriculture, food supply and physical well-being (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989: 64). 11. In 2005, after the end of our fieldwork, the Kenyan government introduced free Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) and antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and care for HIV patients through the government health system, with funding and logistical support from the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), distributed through the Global AIDS Programme (GAP). When Wenzel visited Uhero in 2006, some younger JoUhero told him they had taken HIV tests, but few of them had gained access to ARV treatment, partly because the drugs and important diagnostic facilities were still unavailable at the local government health centre (although they were available at the district hospital in Bondo, 30 kilometres from Uhero), and also because of lack of information. Thus one acquaintance from Uhero who told us she was HIV-positive, was being given multivitamins and the antibiotic septrin (both recommended for HIV positive people whose immunity is still strong) from the local health centre. Despite feeling weak and sick, she had not been advised to go the Bondo and enroll on ARVs. When she subsequently did so, she found that her immunity was very low and she needed ARVs. ARVs only became available in the local health clinic serving Uhero and surrounding villages in 2007. By April 2008, Ruth was told by the nurse-incharge that uptake of VCT and ARVs was still low, although increasing every month, stigma was still high and the few JoUhero who took the medicine preferred to get their drugs from the district hospital where people would not know them. Few JoUhero would admit to their spouses, families and neighbours that they were taking ARVs, although as this book goes to press, this situation seems to be slowly changing. ARVs are hopefully now changing the situation of ‘death’ described in this book, but in 2008, people are still dying from AIDS. Such deaths are due to delayed or poor treatment, which partly stems from the stigma that continues to surround HIV/AIDS, and partly from inadequate investments by the present HIV treatment and care programmes into the government health system. 12. Since the HIV epidemic’s early days, JoUhero suspected that a cure for AIDS was withheld from them by the Europeans. The common idea that a vital medicine is kept away from Kenyans is part of a larger cluster of stories about resources, interest and knowledge, which converge in local interpretations of the biblical 33

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

narratives of Ham and Esau, according to which black people have been deprived by white people of their father’s blessing. ‘Things fall apart’ refers to the neglect of and disagreement about concrete practices that should continuously make relations, and not to a ‘breakdown’ of, for example, kinship (see Richards 1939; Moore and Vaughan 1994). The ‘new kinship’ literature critiques structural-functionalist accounts of descent and lineage as overly focused on constructs of ‘biological kinship’ and blood relations. While the caveat not to universally apply culturally and historically specific biogenetic notions of relatedness is justified, the importance attributed to genealogical ties and lineage obviously varies between different people. For example, within Kenya, Luo would seem to be particularly concerned with relations based on blood, semen and parenthood, and it would be mistaken to simply replace older, maybe overly rigid analyses of descent with fashionable notions of overly flexible and negotiable relatedness. Lévinas criticises phenomenological concepts of intentionality and intersubjectivity which remain understood as ‘connections’ between subjects, who mutually internalise each other and ‘exchange ideas’ that are conceptualised as objects, things each of them has produced (1981, our transl.). To us, this critique evokes Strathern’s analysis of representations of Melanesian (gift-based) sociality shaped by (commodity-based) assumptions of ‘internal proprietorship’ and ‘oneto-one relations’ between producing and, hence, owning subject and the owned object (thing/action/intention) (1988: 143). In contrast, (Strathern’s) Melanesian understanding of relations as being prior to and constitutive of persons, and of ‘exchange’ as being the origin of (rather than the secondary connection between) persons and objects, presents us with a particular, localised expression of the alternative logic Lévinas proposes. In Strathern’s terms, the other or objects are here not objectified as things but as persons (that objectify relations). In criticising modern ‘ocular-centrism’ and the (technical) rationality, knowledge (science, classification) and social practice (domination, oppression) it produces, Lévinas and De Certeau do not juxtapose vision and tactility, but critique a specific Cartesian understanding of vision. Rather than recommending ‘blindness’ (pace Jay 1993: 543) they suggest that touch within vision and other modalities of contact forms the basis of ethical responsibility. Lévinas further argues that language is central to the constitution of persons, because ‘speech is touch’ (that is ‘tenderness and responsibility’) rather than because language facilitates cognition or communication (1967: 224, our transl.). In other words, touch is not another ‘primary sense’ but the aspect of any human sense that calls forth an ethical relation. ‘Living means for a given person to be engaged in a complex web of mystical participations with members of his social group, whether they are dead or alive, with groups of animals and plants born of the same soil, with the earth itself, etc … Their reality is not homogeneous or unequivocal’ (Lévy-Bruhl 1975 (1949) quoted by Lévinas 1991: 64, our transl.). 34

Introduction 18. Lévinas defines ‘ethical’ as ‘a relation between terms, in which the one and the other are not united by synthetic reasoning or by the relationship between subject and object, and in which nevertheless the one has weight for the other, is important and meaningful for him, in which they are tied by an intrigue that knowledge can neither exhaust nor disentangle’ (1967: 225, n.1, our transl.). 19. Both refer occasionally to an ‘older’ logic in non-European sociality, metropolitan underclasses or Jewish thinking (De Certeau 1984: 32, 50, 2000; Lévinas 1991). Lévinas has even been labelled a ‘conservative thinker’ (Jay 1993: 558). Yet their quest is not one for return but for a particular ethical practice within existing sociality. 20. As his later writings (such as the Carnets) suggest, Lévi-Bruhl’s concern was much less with evolution and difference, than with the universality of participation as a dimension of human existence (1975 (1949)). 21. However, Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques does point to similar concerns (1972 (1955)). 22. And, of course, it is an economic critique of transformations of value and the conditions of exchange in a global market in which knowledge is traded like labour and produce, like blood, organs or children (see Fairhead et al. 2006; Geissler and Pool 2006). 23. The vulnerability of newborn children provokes dilemmas between the desire to protect and the obligations of relatedness irrespective of culture. What, however, bewildered and amused our neighbours in a specifically ‘cultural’ sense were our attempts to make our son, when he reached eight months, sleep in his own bed and to impose some sleeping rhythm on him. Every so often, someone’s raised eyebrows and comments like ‘he is not tired’ or ‘he feels lonely’ terminated these attempts. JoUhero regarded the idea that an infant was to be confined to his own space or time in order to nurture his personhood (and protect that of his parents) as utterly strange and European (for Baganda objections to isolation and timing of infants, see Ainsworth 1967: 451). 24. In our fieldwork, on one, rather extreme, end of this continuum were contacts through IQ tests, rubber gloves and needles. These were scientists’ movements of intervention and extraction from objects (or research ‘subjects’) – intrusive, and yet detached ‘data collection’. On the other end of the continuum, however, is not the undirected walking of the flâneur, who seems to inspire some anthropologists. The flâneur is the scientist’s privileged younger brother, an aesthetic observer moving within his own play, for whom his other is merely a surface for solipsistic reflection.

35

Chapter 2

Landscapes and histories

[Male voice] There is no more work, daughter of Gem, lets go back home, so that we see how we can grow. The happiness we have seen is over and the money I was earning is running out. And you also know, daughter of Gem from Oremo’s place, the house we had at home has fallen down. People are laughing at us daughter of Gem, we are lost in town and we don’t even go home. It is now time to go back so that we can make our home as our people have done. Work is finished, daughter of Gem, let us go back home When the money has run out, daughter of Gem, let us go back, so we can make our home. [Female voice] We met in town so we should resolve our problems here. I won’t go back home, my children are going to die there. I won’t go back to Luoland – I don’t even know how to dig – eh eh! I won’t go back home, my in-laws are going to laugh at me. I won’t go back home, my co-wives are going to despise me. I won’t go back home – I don’t even know how to dig, mama – eh eh! We met in town so we have to resolve our problems here. You’d better, father of my children, give me money to trade. Asino Osundwa: ‘NyarGem’ (‘Daughter of Gem’) (2001)

Returns On Fridays, the buses, matatu (minibuses) and ‘Peugeots’ (each with a different price, speed and level of risk) from Nairobi to Kisumu are crowded. Music and conversations entertain the passengers and distract the fearful from the dangers of the road. Every weekend cars collide and people die, occasioning further travel, to the burial of people in their rural homes. Returning to the village is important in the life of people in western Kenya, and every turn of the road brings familiar signs. After the steep descent from the tea plantations of the western highlands – formerly ‘white 37

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farms’, now mainly owned by multinational corporations – towards Kano plain, the low, eastern parts of Luoland, the air becomes warmer and the smells familiar. Thorny bush with scattered homesteads surrounded by maize and millet gardens replaces the uniform green of tea fields and the order of the tea workers’ townships, and zebu cattle take the place of the Friesians and grade cows of the commercial farms. People return home for funerals, to see parents and grandparents, to bring supplies, build houses or look after their gardens, pay school fees, help a sick relation, or just to visit.1 Many carry foodstuffs from the highlands and on their way back they will take fish from the lake and maize from their family’s place. The scent of these foods, taken partly for economic reasons, partly as tokens of relations and belonging, marks the direction of the matatu. Home may be another couple of hours drive from Kisumu and often visitors can only stay there for a few hours before they return with the night bus, but everybody agrees: ‘it is good to visit’. Others go home for the school vacations or for annual leave, return after finishing school or for their retirement, or, more commonly nowadays, after retrenchment or attempts to find work in town (known as ‘tarmacking’). Young girls return home after stays in town, either with family members or working as maids. Some young people come back sick, to be nursed by their family; almost all will eventually return to be buried at home. Where one’s home is may be disputed, but in the end everyone ought to rest there. Since the world wars and the growth of the colonial economy began to move people away from home in the first half of the twentieth century (Hay 1972: 226; Hodges 1972: 92–93; Stichter 1982), return has been central to the experience of Luo people, and a recurring event in their lives. The meanings of home and return have not been static: in the late 1950s and 1960s, when, as John Lonsdale observed, ‘Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala were outposts of Piny Luo [Luoland]’, some urban Luo chose to make a home and even be buried in town (in Cohen and Odhiambo 1991: 109; see also Parkin 1978). Then, return was not necessarily aimed for, although it did remain the lot of most migrant labourers. In contrast, in recent years, although people probably travel as much as they did a generation ago, they do not (indeed, they cannot) stay away from home. Today, the best one can hope for is to take home some elements of urban life, some connection to distant currents – literally in the case of piped water, electricity or radio, or symbolically in the form of airline cutlery or magazine covers adorning living rooms. Sinking terms of trade, austerity policies and corruption since the late 1970s have caused retrenchment and 38

Landscapes and histories

unemployment, confounding the expectations that independence had raised (Stichter 1982). During the same time, the epidemic of death associated with HIV/AIDS has brought about a growing burden of sickness, which in individual lives often implies an involuntary return home (KNACP 1998). It is this return in space and time, and the disagreements it raises between men and women, husbands and wives, that the popular song above addresses; it is played on matatu, in the bars of small towns and

Figure 2.1a. Location of Nairobi, Kisumu and Yimbo in Kenya.

Figure 2.1b. Location of Yimbo in northern Luoland (from Evans-Pritchard: ‘Luo tribes (locations) and tribes assimilated or partly assimilated to the Luo’ (1949: 26)). 39

The Land is Dying

at funerals. Its lyrics are accompanied by the gentle rhythm of West African music of the 1960s, and mature men and women recognise the beat of another time, when people danced rumba in urban dance halls. Memories of a lost future merge in their sentiments with nostalgia for an imagined past (see Prince 2006). To return to places and people to whom one has grown close, to past experiences and growing memories, bringing along new relations and taking others back, is one of the pleasures of our long-term ethnographic fieldwork. In this chapter, we shall retrace our way back to our fieldwork site, Uhero, following the trajectory of return, driving from Kisumu to Yimbo, where Uhero is located, and then through Uhero, away from the tarmac road and to ‘our’ home. We shall describe our study area less as a territory and more as movement towards the people and places that will figure in the following chapters (Figures 2.1a, b). We shall alternate descriptions of travel (intertwining our experiences and observations with local perspectives on the landscape) with digressions into the histories of land and people (based on published historiography and ethnography) that are prompted by the places we pass. This will provide a background to the ethnography and introduce the themes of land, belonging and time that underlie this ethnography.

A road in time Kisumu Coming from other parts of Kenya one passes through Kisumu on the way home. Founded in 1902 as a railway terminus at the tip of what the British called the Kavirondo Gulf, it lies twelve hours by train, five by road, from Nairobi. Since 2001, Kisumu has been one of Kenya’s three official ‘cities’; the traces of its colonial origins and ‘colourbar’ remain visible in its landscape, but, in contrast to Nairobi and Mombasa, it has developed little since independence.2 From the tree-lined streets and spacious colonial bungalows of the residential areas near the lake, one passes through zones with smaller but solid and homogeneous buildings that were once intended for ‘Asians’, and ends up, furthest from the lake breeze, among what used to be the one-room dwellings of ‘African’ railway workers. Around them, the first communal housing estates were built after independence, which in turn were gradually surrounded by less formal settlements (see Macoloo 1988). Kisumu continues to be shaped by these imposed categories and 40

Landscapes and histories

boundaries, and in turn, its landscape contributes to Luo understandings of past and present, here and there, inside and outside, own and other. According to the 1999 census, Kisumu had a permanent population of 322,734 (ROK 2003); many of its residents speak Dholuo. In contrast to other cities, if one asks people where they are at home they refer to a village. Many people live in town only for the time they have work or are looking for it. Others visit to buy things, go to banks or to the hospital, or simply pass through on the way to or from home. Stopping over in Kisumu affords an opportunity to visit friends and relatives and to buy gifts for people in the village. We are therefore not the only strangers who leave the new supermarket on this Friday afternoon with bulky food packets – flour, sugar, tea, rice and cooking fat. Outside, Wenzel bumps into Phillip, a retired bank manager who built his home on a piece of land he bought near our hosts’ home in Uhero. Wearing T-shirt, shorts and a baseball cap for his journey ‘upcountry’, he, too, loads parcels of food into the boot of his car, which in his case is a little surprising, because Uhero is not his family’s place. He explains that he is organising the funeral of his neighbour, the old widow from whom he bought his land, who had died a few days previously. At the end of this book we shall come back to why he, an outsider, buried this old lady. Having gathered the latest news from him, we pass by the high street clothes shop, where Magdalene – a middle-aged friend of ours, and the sister of Mercy Ogumba, our host in Uhero – works. There are few customers – most people buy cheaper second-hand clothes and the shop’s closure seems imminent – and we have time to chat before we drive to her house in Kaunda, one of the postindependence council estates. The rows of solid brick houses with two bedrooms, kitchen, toilet, electricity, piped water and a veranda, between which vegetable gardens and fruit trees have been grown, recall a long-past time of planned urban development. Magdalene has never married and lives here with her daughter, who has just finished school, a ‘granddaughter’3 (ZHBDD) and a ‘son’ (ZBS), both attending school in Kisumu, a young girl from Magdalene’s village, who came to help in the house, but then had a child, and another young girl who works in place of the former. The house in Kaunda – the official tenant of which is Magdalene’s sister’s late husband, John Ogumba – also serves the family members in Uhero as a base in town, and Magdalene lives with and cares for several of her brother-in-law’s children and grandchildren who attend school or training in Kisumu.4 Jully (b. 1997) is one of Magdalene’s ‘grandchildren’, the daughter of Nell (b. 1975). Nell’s parents both died when she was still a teenager and she was 41

The Land is Dying

cared for by her uncle (FB), John Ogumba, and lived with Magdalene through secondary school age. After finishing school, she helped with the housework in her uncle’s rural home in Uhero, and worked for some years as a research assistant with us, before she began training to become a teacher. Shortly after we began working together, Nell had Jully, who lived with Nell in Uhero until she was three years old, when her mother decided to send her to live with her ‘grandmother’ (MFBWZ) Magdalene in Kisumu so that she could go to nursery school in the city. Nell was well aware that only attendance at a good nursery ensures a place in a good primary school. And schooling remains a necessary, though by no means sufficient, condition for determining the course of one’s life.

Driving out This Friday, Jully is supposed to go home to her mother in Uhero and she leaves with us after tea. Like most young children here, Jully is a quiet passenger, so we sit in silence, watching as the landscape passes by. It is Friday afternoon and Kisumu is busy with travellers arriving at the bus stop behind (King George’s) Jubilee market. The names of the brightly painted matatu evoke self-assertive urbanity and global perspectives: ‘Niggaz with attitudes’, ‘Sarajevo Boyz’, ‘Yasser Arafat 3’, ‘Pol Pot’, ‘Beckham Redeemer’, ‘Microsoft Executive’ and ‘Salmonella’. Around the bus stop food is sold, along with audio cassettes of Luo music and local medicines. Two large billboards over the roundabout convey seemingly opposite messages about getting in touch: A pink YES! announces the arrival of mobile phones (facilitated by South African capital) in Kisumu, a red SAY NO! refers to sex and HIV/AIDS, which at that time affected between a quarter and a third of Kisumu’s adult population (KNACP 1998; Eijk et al. 2001, 2002; Glynn et al. 2001). We pass the hospital and the mortuary, surrounded by wailing that grows in intensity on Fridays, the customary days for the last journey home. Beside it lie the small offices of the government’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, our base during our earlier health research. Passing the dusty golf club, the flame tree alley to the airfield and the war cemetery, and the end of the pipeline that carries oil from Mombasa for further transport to central Africa, we leave Kisumu. After a few kilometres on the crowded transcontinental road leading on to Maseno, the first secondary school in western Kenya and the centre of Anglican mission activity (est. 1906; see Richards 1956), we turn on to a less well-maintained tarmac road, where traffic is scarce and slower. From here it is 80 km to Bondo and another 30 km to Uhero in Yimbo, where the road ends; we are moving away from the centre, out towards what is still often called the ‘reserve’, although some have adopted the more genteel term ‘upcountry’. 42

Landscapes and histories

Bondo district Crossing a ridge of boulders, we pass Seme, famed for its fertility and for being the site of bloody Luo resistance to colonial conquest in 1899 (Collard 1900a, b; Lonsdale 1977a). Relics of steel archways over the road, once painted in the national colours, demarcate administrative boundaries created during colonial occupation along supposed clan boundaries. Police checkpoints at regular intervals collect penalty fees from overloaded matatu and passing cars, but Land-Rovers, long associated with the powers of government, seem exempt from this. After an hour we pass Bondo town, site of the government administration, the last hospital, mortuary, bank and – up to 1999 – the last functioning telephone. Hand-painted signboards at the town’s first hotel offer ‘workshop facilities’ and ‘cultural tours’. ‘Dr Ouma’s photographic consultancy’, the ‘Gender sensitisation’ offered at a small grocery store and the Serena Hotel, a makeshift bar named after an expatriate hub in Nairobi, mark the last outpost of the cultural productivity of development work. Bondo is a poor district, neglected by the government and by its own elites, but favoured by international donors, who have implemented hundreds of independent projects over the past decades, improving the lives of some and shaping people’s imaginations of the wider world. Past Bondo, the road gets worse. The aggressive, urban matatu names give way to Christian – ‘God first’ – and parochial ones like ‘NyarAlego’ (Daughter of Alego). People used to explain the road’s bad state by the fact that it led to the homestead of the opposition politician Oginga Odinga.5 The state of the road is emblematic of a more general indifference and neglect: the Luo experience of being disconnected by the ethnic politics of the government (see Haugerud 1993: 38–45). Yet, since it was built in the 1980s, this tarmac road has been vital to the transport of people and of the export product of the area – fish – to the markets and the fillet factories of Kisumu and Nairobi. We move more slowly between the potholes, overtaking a cyclist transporting a coffin, fish lorries and a pickup adorned with leaves carrying a women’s group to a funeral. Unofficial reports from hospital staff and medical researchers in the area suggest that one-third of the young adults in this area could be HIV-positive (see also KNACP 1998; UNAIDS 2000). Despite substantial international aid for AIDS campaigning, only one rusty signboard at a turn towards a fishing settlement warns that ‘AIDS can kill everybody’, which is generally understood as a warning to avoid the women on the ‘beach’.6

43

The Land is Dying

The lake Our road from Kisumu to Yimbo follows the shore of Winam (‘lake’s head’), traversing northern Luoland from the Kano plains and the border with the hill tribes7 of Kisii and Nandi to the shore of the open lake, where the Luo border Luhya or, rather, Manyala (a mixed group, the members of which move and marry to either side).8 Manyala are skilled at negotiating the practices and idioms of both groups, much as they are skilled at manoeuvring through the treacherous terrain of the swamps that divide Luoland from Luhyaland. Across Winam lies the southern part of Luoland, South Nyanza. Both sides share one language (with minor differences) and intermarry, but most JoUhero marry women from the northern side. Passing over the top of a hill, we see the bays of the Yimbo shore and behind the last peninsula the expanse of the open lake. The dry landscape, sloping down towards the lake, makes one appreciate the importance of water and its flow towards the lake for the identity and imagination of these ‘People of the lake’ (Jonam), as the Luo call themselves. On the lakeshore lies Got Ramogi, the highest hill in the area. According to public wisdom, this is where ‘the Luo’, led by Ramogi, settled upon their arrival in what is present-day Luoland. Yimbo is the cradle of the Luo nation, which in 1999 numbered some 3 million people (GOK 2001). The densely forested hill and its smaller companion Got Otonglo, which rises steeply from the lake shore, evoke images of a long-gone, heroic Luo past, migrations and returns, origin and belonging, of home. The hills have power – their snakes are said to be enormous, their medicinal herbs strong (Odera et al. 1995), and until recently it was here that the ancestors were called upon to return the rain.9 The vista prompts reflections on Luo self-understanding and history.

Piny Luo – ‘Luoland’ Luo identify with a joint place, as people of the lake (JoNam) and with a shared past, as descendants of Ramogi (JoRamogi); and Luo men meeting in town or at work are known to address each other as ‘brother’ (omera). Yet the term piny Luo connotes not so much a stable historical territory (such as a nation or its population) as a movement: the migrations of people and the sequence of generations over the land, much like the flow of water across the land and into the lake. This sense of being on the move inherent to the self-understanding of the group is central to the imaginary of growth that we explore in this book. This understanding of piny Luo is quite 44

Landscapes and histories

different from the colonial rendering of ‘the Luo’ as a defined group, a tribe, inhabiting a defined territory, measured in Districts, which dominates classic scholarship (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1949) as well as current political debates about the ‘Luo nation’.

A ‘tribe’ Earlier Luo historiography (e.g. Crazzolara 1950; Ogot 1967; P’Bitek 1971) tells the story of a tribe, a single, bounded sociocultural entity, composed of patrilineal clans and lineages, which from the fourteenth century onwards migrated from Sudan to the area of Yimbo, where the first Luo settled before they expanded across present Luoland. While there is sound historical, linguistic and archaeological evidence for the north-west to south-east migration of Nilotic groups, the imaginary of a bounded social unit on the move, a ‘tribe’ with a unified social structure, which occasionally gives birth to subgroups, is a problematic imposition of colonial imaginaries to a more fluid past. Indeed, it is more plausible to see Luo ‘tribal’ identity as the historical product of colonial processes (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989: 19). Nevertheless, this narrative has steadily gained salience over the past century. Its origins lie in the British occupants’ attempts to organise the area administratively along ‘tribal’ lines (Cohen and Odhiambo 1987: 277). Their desire to draw boundaries served not only political and administrative purposes, but also an epistemological need: things exist as bounded entities, and their boundaries must be made known. Things are either bounded or continuous, different or one, other or same. Instead, one might argue that the production of difference – not ontological difference but one born from a particular moment in a relation – is a mode of contingency (in the term’s double sense of nearness and potential of surprising events). This replaces the stark alternative between identity or alterity with a view in which making difference and making relations are aspects of one and the same practice, just as the work of bounding and bridging in one moment differentiates, and in another relates neighbouring populations (like that of the Manyala, mentioned above). It is towards such an understanding that Cohen and Odhiambo point when they suggest a Luo identity ‘articulated … by accepting the terms, manners, routines of the other’ (1987: 270), a ‘composition of oneself by others in a constellation’ (ibid.: 272; see also Lonsdale 1977b). Viewed from this perspective, the question of group identity recapitulates on a broader scale the problems with which this book is concerned in the context of everyday life: boundaries and contact, identity and relatedness. The difference 45

The Land is Dying

between stable, autonomous groups and the continuous relational (and momentous) production of groupings provides the broader frame within which the account we offer in the following chapters must be set. Two practices of bounding appear here in contrast to one another, one strategically appropriating and dividing tribes, the other working tactically on and across fluid boundaries of groups that call each other into existence. The success of ‘the Luo’ shows the power of the strategic discourse of fixed boundaries, identical units and inherent properties in political struggles within the nation state. Today, the Luo are indeed a tribe (Kenya’s third largest, after the Kikuyu and the Luhya) and political tensions and uncertainties continuously increase the sense of tribal cohesion, territory and self-defence. The creation of a located identity allows for the exercise of a particular form of power. This is one fundamental advantage of strategies of ownership and distinction over the tactics of everyday life (De Certeau 1984: 34–42). The violent success of the concept of the tribe does not always support De Certeau’s optimism regarding the tactical reappropriation of strategic space. Adherence to a fixed tribal identity is widely identified in Kenya with ‘Tradition’. However, the fact that the name ‘Luo’ was probably only adopted by Dholuo-speaking elites in the 1920s, in an environment shaped by missionary rejection of pre-Christian practices and by proto-nationalist ideas (Cohen and Odhiambo 1987; see Peel 2000 for a similar West African case), suggests that Luo identity was shaped more by the strategies of expanding modernity. Like other nationalisms, Luo identity is itself a strategy, which was put to resistant uses as well as to oppressive ends, bearing out Cohen’s dictum that ‘ethnicity is … a political, not a cultural phenomenon’ (1969: 190; see also Chapman et al.1989: 1). We need to bear this modernity of Luoness in mind when we examine village life: tactical movements of customary everyday life and commitment to reified tribal Tradition must not be conflated. We shall return to this in the next chapter.

Luo sociality Classic ethnography described Luoland as ordered by acephalous, segmentary lineages (Southall 1952). Evans-Pritchard disputed the existence of any ‘political office’ here (1949: 212). In contrast, Luo scholars of the following generation described a ‘Luo state’ (Ogot 1963; OchollaAyayo 1976: 207; Mboya 1983 (1938): Chapter 1). Each of these descriptions is a product of historically situated interests. As Cohen and Odhiambo pithily put it, ‘while the British were busily creating “tribes”, the 46

Landscapes and histories

leading proto-elites were creating the Luo nation’ (1989: 34). Functionalist lineage-systems and their supposed equilibrium must be understood in relation to their colonial political context (Asad 1973); political ethnographies that (re)constructed a tribal state date from the time when the Luo formed their opposition first to the colonial and then to the Kenyatta-led Kenyan state (see Cohen and Odhiambo 1987). There is little evidence for any pre-colonial overarching political structure other than the patrilineage. The continuity of Luo ideas and practices over time and throughout the area seems instead to have rested more on the exogamous movements of women, both in the sense of forging alliances between patrilineages (Ocholla-Ayayo, 1985) and through relations between the women themselves (Geissler, 1999a). Political organisation and institutional structures probably varied from area to area (Southall, 1952; Whisson, 1964; Dupre, 1968) and cultural rules (Wilson 1968) and genealogies (Blount 1975) continue to be constantly renegotiated. It is this pattern of difference and negotiation, rather than social or cultural homogeneity, that creates ‘the Luo’ as a field of social action with shared language and shared ways of negotiating, not only in the relation between Luo and others, but also in relations within the tribe. When we say that essentialist descriptions of Luo society or custom are time-bound, shaped by a certain epistemology or politics, we do not dismiss them. The canonical Luo histories, whether by colonial anthropologists or by post-colonial African historians, provide texts that shape the present by recreating the past. They have fulfilled specific interests in the historical process and continue to underpin present Luo assumptions about identity and relations to other groups. They provide ‘maps’ of knowledge in De Certeau’s sense, maps that lay out lineages, territories and customs beside each other, and that therefore have the power to rearrange things in space – land boundaries and inheritance, ritual acts or bridewealth payments (De Certeau 1984: 118–22) – offering a framework for the evaluation of changes and thoughts about the future. They structure conceptual dichotomies – past–present, self–other, here–there, black–white, rural–urban – under the umbrella of ‘then–now’ within which social practices are given meaning. These dichotomies, to which positive and negative values can be attached, take the Luo origin as a fixed point and contrast it with the other, the new, that has come to play an ever increasing role during the past century. We shall return to these tropes of rupture and temporal difference below.

47

The Land is Dying

The reserve The colonial experience of western Luoland was peripheral but intense (Ogot 1963; Ochieng’ 1976; Lonsdale 1977a). Before coming under British rule in 1888, the northern lakeshore had little direct contact with Europeans or with coastal traders, except for a brief visit to Uhero by Stanley in 1875 (1890: 107). The British imposed administrative units and appointed chiefs, who collected tax and recruited men, first as troops and carriers for the First World War (Ogot 1963: 258; Hodges 1986), and later for road and railway building. With occupation came epidemics – plague, smallpox, rinderpest, influenza, measles, sleeping sickness – which killed many and created a situation of fear and discontent (Haran 1905; Carpenter 1920; Wijers 1969; Beck 1970; Ochieng’ 1974; Hodges 1986; Dawson 1992; Hoppe 1997; Olumwullah 2002:108). Partly in response to these crises, the missions, led by the Anglican Church Mission Society (CMS), which had arrived in 1904, gained followers from the 1920s onwards (Ogot 1963: 255; Anderson 1977), and the first independent Churches developed their distinct ideas and practices (Ogot 1963: 257; Wipper 1977; Hoehler-Fatton 1996; Rasmussen 1996). In the 1920s, when Kenya had become a settler colony (Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 101–25), Luoland was classified as a ‘reserve’ or ‘laboursupplying districts’ and movement to and from these areas was restricted (Lonsdale 1970: 592), with the corollary that economic development was not encouraged and that ‘tribal’ social structures and ‘customary’ law were to be maintained (Ogot 1963: 260; Lonsdale 1970: 592; Okoth-Ogendo 1976: 156; Pala 1980: 188; Stichter 1982). This administrative designation, combined with fiscal pressures and the desire for new consumer goods, encouraged labour migration to farms and cities, railways and ports across East Africa, and, by the 1930s, most Nyanza men had entered the labour market at some point in their lives (Stichter 1982: 105; see also Fearn 1961; Southall 1961: 173; Ominde 1965; Parkin 1966; Wilde 1967; Hodges 1972; Cohen and Odhiambo 1989).10 After the Second World War (which some Luo men participated in as soldiers and carriers), standards of life in Kenya rose, creating an urban, white- and blue-collar, Luo ‘working class’ and increasing social stratification (Stichter 1982: 10, 140). By the 1960s, most workers spent their entire working lives in employment, returning to the rural home only for holidays and retirement.11 The workers’ wives either settled in the husband’s rural home, or spent planting and harvesting seasons there, to sustain their families and maintain claims to land (Hay 48

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1976: 99; Parkin 1978; Stichter 1982: 144). While urban incomes rose, the rural economy declined, and rural households became increasingly sustained by urban wages (Pala 1978, 1980; Stichter 1982: 145–6; Cohen & Odhiambo 1989). This orientation towards urban life meant that for many older Luo the 1960s and 1970s stand out as a time of hope, of ordered trajectories, expanding horizons and rising expectations. With deepening conflicts between the Kenyatta and (later) Moi-led government and (partly) Luo opposition, fuelled by cold war politics, Luoland was increasingly disconnected from the flows of people and wealth within and beyond the new nation. From the late 1970s, partly prescribed by external economic policies, public sector employment and government agricultural subsidies diminished. With falling real wages and rising unemployment, cash remittances dried up and migrants began to return to the rural areas (Francis 1995). Luo see the 1980s and 1990s, then, as a period of decline; and whereas unemployment, inflation and corruption, decay of government services, devaluation of education and growing class differences, accompanied by a crisis of political and social imagination, are found in many parts of post-1980s Africa (e.g. Comaroff, J. and J.L. Comaroff 1999; Ferguson 2006), in Luoland the death of more and more people during the 1990s transforms the ailments of our times into a cataclysmic experience. During the past half-century, this trajectory from development into ‘abjection’ (Ferguson 1999) was tied up with changing and often tense relations between women and men (Francis 1995). While male and female agricultural labour and rights seem to have been complementary if not equal in the past (Hay 1996: 244–45), with male labour migration the burden of agriculture fell upon women’s shoulders, while men procured and largely controlled cash income (Hay 1982). By 1945, many rural areas had become societies ‘of women, children and old men’ (Hay 1976: 102). Due to labour shortage, pressure on land and declining soil fertility, agricultural production decreased, and, by the early 1990s, few households could feed themselves from their produce (Pala 1977; Francis 1995: 199).12 Men’s absence may have increased women’s autonomy and responsibility in the rural home (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989), but it also provoked a backlash of patriarchal ‘traditionalism’ (Parkin 1978; White 1990; see Chapter 3), which, conjoined with Christian family values instilled by mission education and with men’s control of cash resources, tends to weaken women’s standing. This conservative backlash influenced the codification of Luo customary law (which restricts a woman’s rights to her children, land, livestock and other 49

The Land is Dying

forms of property if she leaves her marriage) undertaken in the 1950s and applied through male-controlled African courts (Pala 1980; Hay 1982; for a similar situation in colonial Zambia, see Chanock 1985). According to Hay, the concern to maintain control over women and protect the rights of absentee migrant men to land also encouraged male elders’ opposition to the colonial government’s attempts to consolidate and register land, as possibilities for women to purchase plots is a critical aspect of their economic independence (1982: 117). The present return of men, defeated by economic vicissitudes, to homesteads headed de facto by women, intensified power struggles (see Silberschmidt 1999 for neighbouring Kisii). Disappearing cash incomes13 have placed the burden of sustaining families on the women and have led some women to take up new economic activities, such as trade in local markets and in town, whilst men’s opposition to women’s economic activities remains strong (Francis 1995: 212). After an era in which the Luo family spanned village and city and progressed by combining subsistence agriculture, cash cropping, industry and the civil service, its members are now all thrown back to a rural home. Resulting tensions between women’s economic needs and men’s economic frustration are short-circuited in the production and sale (by women) and the consumption (by men) of chang’aa, strong, home-distilled, often dangerously impure liquor.14 Throughout recent Luo history, colonial and post-colonial constructions of space fused the dichotomy then–now (in Dholuo: chon-tinende) with spatial dichotomies. The colonial categorisation of Luo space as a ‘reserve’ – a remote and undeveloped space of the past – created a geographical framework in which time figures – development, progress, modernity, Tradition and nostalgia – were rendered spatial: rural, agricultural, Luo, black spaces versus urban, industrial, white spaces. Hence, people say: ‘back in the rural areas’ or ‘in the interior’, which can refer to the inaccessible areas off the tarmac road, or to rural Luoland as such, as opposed to Nairobi. Up to today, Luo identify, if sometimes only ironically, with their historically shaped remoteness, celebrated in the popular Luo anthem ‘Malo, malo’ (‘Out/Up there’) (Aluoch Jamaranda 1999). Since the past was in one distant corner of the country and the future in the metropolis, the Luo present was inevitably located on the roads between the reserve and the centre. In the late colonial period and in the early days of independence, this was the road forward, towards progress. Much Luo labour migration was indeed related to road and railway building, and the railway service epitomised this culture of geographical and social movement (see Grillo 50

Landscapes and histories

1973). Today, the decaying rail services are for many Kenyans a symbol of the (lost) stability and comfort – material as well as epistemological – of Kenya’s modern, developmental era. Then there were opportunities to move forward, one could occasionally return from one’s urban life to one’s rural homestead, and, importantly, the latter would eventually itself develop, progressing, as it were, in the direction of town. This expansive timeline has now crumbled, and the connections, tangible or hoped-for, that the past had offered to the Luo traveller have been truncated. A road forward is hard to discern, and the predominant direction is back towards what used to be the reserve; to a ‘home’ that now, upon further scrutiny and under the shadow of HIV, no longer looks quite familiar. Even the railways to Kisumu have become unreliable, and expensive, speeding, unscheduled matatu with violent names and astounding death rates (Odero 1995) embody the dangers and confusions of the present. And the brass buttons of the worn railway uniforms displayed during Sunday church services have become souvenirs of a future that was never quite reached.

Return to Uhero Yimbo Yimbo is bounded to the south by the lake, to the north by the River Yala and along the tarmac road – the main axis of movement – by Osogo Market to the east and by the fishing town of Otonglo to the west. This area is roughly identical with the colonial Yimbo Division, which supposedly represents a ‘tribal’ territory, but which in fact cuts across and merges different clans.15 Although Yimbo is today (partly because of clan rivalries) split up in three Divisions, people continue to identify themselves as JoYimbo vis-à-vis neighbouring JoSakwa etc. (see Cohen and Odhiambo 1987: 276). Since colonial times – and possibly even before – the Kadimo clan has been the dominant group within the area. The Kadimo had probably come from the northern hills to Yimbo in the eighteenth century (Ochieng’ 1975) and regard themselves as ‘pure’ Luo (as opposed to Dholuo-speaking Manyala). In 1902, they were designated as the chiefly clan: indeed the Division was called Kadimo until 1954, when the name was changed following requests by Yimbo residents (Evans-Pritchard 1949; Ochieng’ 1975). Many of the first Christians who were educated in the CMS school at Maseno came from this clan. The tension between the Kadimo and other clans has shaped political life in Yimbo since, and conflicts 51

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among JoUhero continue to be charged with this historical legacy (Geissler 2005; see also Holmes 1997). The main town in Yimbo is Otonglo (5771 residents (GOK 2001: 3)), the bus and matatu terminus at the end of the tarmac road. A square market is surrounded by shops adorned with advertisements for soaps, medicines and soft drinks; behind them are rows of rental rooms, and behind these several churches lies dispersed among homesteads that slope down to the lake shore. At least twelve different denominations have churches here. There are public telephones (since 1999) and electricity (since 1995), a post office and police post, bottled beer, video cinemas (one with a satellite antenna), live music and discos.16 Fishing boats depart for Uganda, Tanzania and the islands, and fish is traded for sale in Kisumu, Nairobi and beyond. In Otonglo, JoYimbo enjoy town life, stroll about, telephone and send telegrams, buy newspapers and watch satellite TV. Young people gather around the bus stop, from where several daily buses and matatu go to Kenyan towns and cities and the Ugandan border, and where one always gets news from elsewhere. At Osogo, some kilometres before Otonglo, people begin greeting us; we drive slowly, stopping here and there to talk. Osogo is the oldest market of the area, which was established before the 1930s by Asian shopkeepers at the (then) landing place of the post boat (Ochieng’ 1975: 67). It was here, elderly JoYimbo remember, that missionaries first preached and distributed clothes and medicines, and that tea was promoted by a tea company in the 1930s. Today, small shops sell industrial foodstuffs and textiles, and an unlicensed clinic attached to a shop provides health services. Osogo is also home to a Catholic mission and Catholics girls’ secondary school, and is the centre of a lively Christian community under the guidance of a Dutch priest who came to Kenya in 1961. A little further down the road lies Oyundi, the Division’s administrative centre, consisting of prefabricated round tin huts, each representing a government ministry at the local level. Beside this ‘chief ’s camp’ lies the small government dispensary; established in the 1930s as part of sleeping sickness control, it is today run by a trained nurse offering outpatient treatment, mainly for malaria and other infections, when medicines are available.17 On the other side of the road, a few shops and ‘hotelis’ (eating places) – several owned by dispensary staff – have grown into another small ‘shopping centre’, as these roadside clusters of shops, ‘hotels’ and rented accommodation are called.

52

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Muthurwa Halfway between Osogo and Oyundi, we reach Muthurwa, the ‘shopping centre’ of Uhero, liminally positioned on the edge of the village territory at the side of the road (sixty-one inhabitants in 2001, 54 per cent female, mean age eighteen years (range one to fifty-eight).18 Muthurwa consists of several rows of one-room ‘flats’, cemented mud with tin roofs. Three shops sell the few commodities of daily use and hospitality: ‘soda’ (soft drinks), bread, school supplies, cooking fat, flour, sugar, tea, medicines and fishing gear. At the diesel-driven mill women wait to grind their maize. From open market stands and on sacks spread on the ground women sell small amounts of fruit and vegetables. Opposite, a young man has opened a bicycle garage under a tarpaulin, and in its shade his age-mates sit and chat, waiting for punctures to be fixed. Flanked by the mill and the garage, the square is known among the young people as the ‘BBC’ of Uhero, where village issues and world affairs are discussed publicly and fertilised by other news arriving by matatu. Via BBC, news of a death in town reaches the village, and rumours, such as those of child abductions in Nairobi, which were featured in reports on the BBC World Service African News, are transformed into accounts of heinous crimes committed as nearby as Otonglo. People call Muthurwa ‘town’ (taun) as opposed to ‘village’ (gweng’). It is named after a railway workers’ estate in Nairobi where many Luo migrants live, and JoUhero sometimes joke ‘I’m going to Nairobi’ when they go up to Muthurwa. The market has grown since the 1980s, when people returning from town built shops along the road as an investment. The tenants are young people, couples and small families, most of them related to JoUhero, who live here instead of at home because they enjoy the freedom of town life, or because of family problems, customary rules and the effects of death. Around and between the houses, the women plant maize, vegetables and beans, but despite such rural elements the settlement has an urban atmosphere, especially if one comes up from the village, not least because of the absence of the intergenerational hierarchy that pervades rural homesteads. Jully’s mother, Nell, lives with Bert (b. 1998), her sister’s son and Jully’s age-mate, in one of these houses. Unlike other young women in Muthurwa, she lives on her own. Before she moved here, she had lived with her uncle (FB), John Ogumba, and his family, first in Kisumu, where she finished secondary school, and then in Uhero. Her own parents passed away in the early 1990s, and her late father’s home would now be ‘almost a gunda’,19 she says, were it not for her efforts to build a house for her younger brother there so that she and her siblings would ‘have a place to stay and be buried’. As a 53

The Land is Dying

young woman, one does not have a home until one is married somewhere – and this Nell would rather leave for the time being. While she welcomes her daughter and makes tea, we greet Odhiambo, her ‘brother’ (FBWZS), who lives next door with his wife and daughter and his late sister’s daughter. Inside the tidy one-room flat, two beds are placed behind a partition made of a sheet suspended on a string; to the right is a sofa and ‘easy chairs’ – the trousseau of a young family – and behind the door a kerosene cooker. Belongings are stored in boxes under the beds and under the rafters of the tin roof. The walls are decorated with calendars, coloured ‘lifestyle’ pages of the Daily Nation and a poster of a recent AIDS education campaign. Odhiambo’s parents live nearby, but since he was born before his mother married, he does not quite belong to their home and his rights to land there are contested. After growing up with his grandmother, he too lived with John Ogumba (his MZH) and his family. Both Odhiambo and Nell have lost adult siblings and have taken in their siblings’ children, both grew up between different places in town and their grandmothers’ or relatives’ homes in the village, and both stay for the time being in this ‘shopping centre’, in between home and city, neither inside nor outside. Although they are unusual in that they are currently working with us on our research, their lives and their reasons for living in Muthurwa resemble those of the other young people there.

Making Uhero village (Re)Settlement Uhero ‘village’ is not a settlement but an administrative unit. In 2001 it consisted of ninety-nine scattered family homesteads with 914 inhabitants (54 per cent female, mean age twenty-three years, range one to ninety-five) spread out over a peninsula of about 4 km2.20 Uhero would not exist in its present form but for the epidemic of sleeping sickness that hit Yimbo – a fertile area, rich in fish and benefiting from lake-shore trade (Ochieng’ 1975: 20; Cohen and Odhiambo 1989: 68) – during the first years of the twentieth century (Wijers 1969; Wellde et al. 1989), spreading from Uganda and exacerbated by colonial transformations (Koerner et al. 1995). Many people died and the survivors fled the lake-shore for less disease-ridden places (Ochieng’ 1975: 49).21 Sleeping sickness control in Yimbo began before the First World War and continued with varying intensity up to the 1980s. Today, thanks to dwindling government funding and donor interest, it is moribund. Control campaigns involved population control and 54

Landscapes and histories

Figure 2.2a. KaOkoth. Map of Okoth’s and the late Osure’s home (above that of Okoth) in 2002; showing Tom and MinWilly’s old house and her new house in their new home, as well as Peter’s proposed simba.

resettlement, bush clearing and spraying, medical research and treatment (see Lyons 1992; White 1995). Elderly JoUhero remember the camp that the Johealth had in the 1960s in Oyundi, where blood specimens were examined and rats inoculated and from where infected people were taken for treatment to distant hospitals. Apart from examining and treating people, control sought to impose a new order of space. Control relied on boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and control over movement of people and flies (Hoppe 1997). Bodies and territories were constructed and dealt with in much the same way, through procedures of isolation, intrusion, intervention, cleaning and rearranging. Bodies had to be treated and isolated from the infested environment and other people; the landscape had to be evacuated, cleared, sprayed, and ordered by resettling there the cured (and educated) people. Much of this remained a colonial vision rather than reality, because means were limited and people and flies continued to move. But sleeping sickness campaigns (and subsequent malaria and Bilharziasis campaigns) introduced JoUhero to modern ideas of medicine and government – a healthy body, clean and free of infection, contingent upon an orderly and productive landscape – and left some lasting suspicions about these ideas.22 55

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But sleeping sickness also had more immediate effects. Before the first epidemic, the peninsula had been populated by members of different clans from other lake-shore areas (Ochieng’ 1975: 11). Among these, the Wahaya clan’s people (claiming origins from the northern Tanzanian Haya), who lived around the main hill, exercised particular influence until they fled sleeping sickness in the 1910s.23 By 1948, most of the peninsula was uninhabited (aerial photograph RAF5370V CPE/KEN/0160 21 March 1948, m/a29752) and colonial sources described it as ‘Uhaya forest’ (Wijers 1969). To the north, further inland and less affected by the disease, lived the dominant Yimbo clan of the Kadimo-Kajongo. To the west, two families from a related sub-clan, Kadimo-Kanyibok, had settled. Despite the threat of sleeping sickness, one of these families, headed by a man called Osure (d. 1994), who is referred to today by some villagers as the wuon lowo (‘father/parent of the land’) of Uhero, expanded in the 1940s in the direction of the peninsula and called his kinsmen to settle around him. A second epidemic of sleeping sickness in 1959–66 killed cattle and people (Wijers 1969: 332), but in 1970, after a successful disease control campaign, the government decided to resettle the reclaimed area with the former inhabitants, and a group of Wahaya returned.24 Thus, there were two groups with conflicting ancestral claims – Kadimo-Kanyibok on the western and Wahaya on the eastern side of the peninsula. In 1970 matters came to a head and were taken to court. The Kisumu court acknowledged the Wahaya claims to some land, but gave the defendants, Osure’s brothers, rights over most of the peninsula.25 Two zones of influence were thus established, that of Kadimo-Kanyibok and that of Wahaya, in one administrative ‘village’, Uhero, dominated by Osure’s kinsmen.26 This outcome was perhaps unsurprising, given that Osure’s people are Kadimo and had been chiefs and among the first to send their children to school; by 1970 some of them had accumulated influence and wealth, which they deployed in the case. Another factor may have been more important. Since the early 1960s, and especially after the end of the epidemic, Osure had given outsiders without ancestral claims – many of them affines from lower (by then flooded) parts of western Yimbo – land in the south of the peninsula, claiming the right to do so on the basis of his belonging to the Kadimo clan, and because he was the appointed Headman of Uhero. People of one clan, who settle in an area in which another clan is the wuon lowo, are referred to as jodak (sing. jadak; ‘people who stay’) (Evans-Pritchard 1949; OchollaAyayo 1976: 127–28; Mboya 1983 (1938): 69–71). The jadak-wuon lowo relationship involves a process of incorporation: jodak share the everyday 56

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life of the wuon lowo including food and labour, laying the base for a joint group identity (Odenyo 1973: 773). As generations pass – intermarriage being likely due to rules of exogamy – the two groups merge, expanding the influence of the original clan (ibid.: 776; Pala 1980: 194). Rather than being a matter of land rights or ownership, jadak designates a relation to the ‘parent of the land’, addressed as ‘father/mother’. An important aspect of such a relation is the obligation to side with the ‘parent’ in conflicts. Osure could thus draw upon a combination of older and newer rights and obligations to obtain a dominant position in Uhero: as a Kadimo headman, he had assembled settlers around him, who supported him in court and eventually ensured that his (and their) statutory property rights were secured by government registration. On the surface the case was about ancestral land rights, and indeed the examination of ancestral homes lay at the core of the proceedings; but beneath this, the case was part of a more complex struggle. When we discussed it in 2001, some elderly people insisted that only knowledge of ancestral homes could decide such issues, but some younger people argued against the idea that belonging, founded upon traces of the past, should establish ownership.27 They acknowledged that different clans had settled in the area over time, but argued that ‘now, this is history’, which would ‘only cause quarrels’ if brought to bear on matters of ownership. For them, ownership relied upon land titles, not on kin relations or narratives.

Belonging and ownership The court case that brought Uhero into being in 1970 marked the transition between a time in which land was given and one in which it was sold. It made people realise the difference between giving and selling – and thus between belonging to and owning – land (see Chapter 10). Looking back in 2000, JoUhero sometimes described this realisation that land had (exchange) value as a move from ‘stupidity’ to ‘knowledge’. It occurred comparatively late in Uhero, and the transition was marked by the resettlement and the implementation of Kenyan land tenure reform (locally: ‘land consolidation’), which reached Yimbo in 1975, and aimed to identify (or, as anthropologists might argue, create) individual ownership through land titles (Coldham 1978: 100–1).28 Before the reform, people of different ages and genders had engaged in different practices on the land on which they resided (planting and grazing livestock, hunting, collecting firewood, honey, vegetables and medicines, building and attending to ancestors) because of their relations to each other, and thereby their shared relations to the land, rather than on 57

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the basis of ownership (Okoth-Ogendo 1976: 153; Pala 1980: 188; Shipton 1994). Since land was inalienable and not yet scarce, these land uses did not necessarily contradict each other. JoUhero describe this time as marked by the absence of fences: ‘only old people knew where one’s land ended’; and by inclusive settlement: ‘you just came and stayed’. People’s relations to things always embody relations between people, but whereas this is obscured in concepts of private ownership, where a one-toone tie is imagined between owning subject and owned object, in the practices of land-sharing, land is not imagined as an object in this sense. Rather, relations between humans extend into the land through graves and old homes, through placentas that were buried near the house, through blood shed for the ancestors in sacrifice and through the intervention of the dead in people’s lives.29 This conflation of physical land and social ties is captured in the term piny, which refers to a group, a place or the substance of place, earth. We distinguish these relations of people on and through land as ‘belonging to land’ as distinct from ‘ownership of land’ in terms of individual, exclusive and alienable rights, which underlay the tenure reform process. Concerns with ‘belonging’ continue to be important to people’s lives on the land and the difference and interactions between ‘belonging’ and ‘ownership’ shape JoUhero’s land conflicts (and, as we shall explore, other everyday practices). This difference is not the same as the (colonial) dichotomy between ‘customary’ and ‘statutory rights’ in the dual legal system of colonial and post-colonial government (Shipton 1988). ‘Customary land tenure’ does not embody the practices of the past, but it is one modern discourse on land–human relations, responding to the colonial administrators’ question of how Africans ‘owned’ their land (see Chanock 1985: 238). Assuming the universality of ownership, it imagines bounded groups such as patrilineages to be collective owners, overlooking many practices of belonging between people and land and squeezing fluid everyday practice into a normative frame of ownership. This is the double play of modernity, in which the other is appropriated into one’s own terms (as if it were another kind of the same) and then cast as a radically different other. As we shall see in Chapter 10, however, JoUhero’s land practice is constituted not just by this strategic copresent dualism, but by another, tactical formation of everyday life, in which relational belonging to land and to other people continues to operate. Legal critics of tenure reform warned that the continuity of practices beneath the new order would lead to conflicts, that private ownership would destabilise gender and generational relations, and that alienability would create landlessness (Odenyo 1973: 777; Okoth-Ogendo 1976: 58

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174–78, 182; Coldham 1978: 98, 111; Pala 1980: 189, 203–5). Studies in different parts of Kenya confirmed these predictions and showed that the reform exacerbated inequality without increasing productivity (Heyer 1975; Haugerud 1983: 84; Shipton 1988). Today, all land in Uhero has been allocated parcel numbers (usually in the name of the home’s senior man). However, other kinds of attachment to land continue to exist. Conflicts over land are seen as part of the present crisis, and many JoUhero say that ‘cutting the land’ (ng’ado lowo) by apportioning and selling plots has contributed to the ‘drying up’ or ‘death’ of the land, the fragmentation of sociality. ‘Cutting’ designates here both the delineation of boundaries and ruptures between persons and groups living on the land, between persons and the land and between past and present. Many older JoUhero agree that, before land consolidation, people respected each other, and in particular the relationship between jodak and wuon lowo had been like that of ‘parents and children’, framed by nurture and respect. In contrast, they say, ‘today it is a matter of money’, alluding to the separating effect that buying and selling, and the calculability of monetary value, has on immediate social ties. Their sons confirm this judgement, although some regard it as a more positive development, when they say: ‘We are now free; there can be no quarrel; either you have a parcel number or not’. Land consolidation and selling of land have led to growing social differentiation in Uhero, between families who have more land than they can cultivate and others who have too little to grow food and no land for their children and grandchildren.30 When resettlement began, there had been thirty-five homes in the area; when buying and selling began, there were sixty-two, most of which had been given land. After 1975, only two new JoUhero were given land free of charge,31 and a third group emerged: people who had bought their land. Today this group makes up over one third of Uhero’s homes. The three groups are distinguished in JoUhero’s self-understanding and often linked to differences in wealth. In the 1990s, a subgroup of land-buyers emerged: absentee landowners, buying bush, fencing it and leaving it untouched as an investment, completing the transition from ‘belonging’ to pure ‘ownership’. A group of land-sellers simultaneously emerged, whose land was continuously reduced, opening up for the prospect of a landless youth.32 The quality of housing can give us a very crude idea of social differentiation among JoUhero: at the upper end are the several-bedroom concrete block houses of the ‘working (i.e. salaried) classes’, with concrete floors, ceiling boards, glass windows, battery-powered television and in some 59

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cases even solar panels and rainwater tanks; at the lower end is the grassthatched round hut that old Judith, the healer, shares with her granddaughters. Apart from land to grow food and settle on, the crucial differentiating factor is access to cash for schooling and health care, food and clothes, house-building and funeral expenses. Only a handful of those living in Uhero now receive a regular salary. Many used to rely on remittances from urban-based husbands or children, but these have become rare. Some men catch a rare fish or burn and sell charcoal from one of the last remaining trees, and many leave Uhero for periods to look for casual work. Women occasionally sell some of the produce from their gardens, smoke and sell fish by the road, trade in small amounts of cigarettes, brew and sell chang’aa, or work in the fields or houses of wealthier people (see Francis 1995). Economic deprivation is evident in the changing reasons for selling land: in the 1980s most land was sold for bridewealth and building costs; in the 1990s funeral expenses, medical treatment and school fees motivated the growing number of sales, reflecting the effects of both HIV/AIDS and poverty.33 When an emergency arises, which is common these days, land is often the only resource to draw upon. And, although older, more egalitarian land practices do persist, having or not having land makes the difference between the possibility of a poor but stable rural life, and uncertainty and misery.

A modern Luo village As a result of its settlement history, Uhero’s households are affiliated with different clans and the relationship between people and land does not resemble the ideal of lineage land, in which group and territory were homonymous and identical. Some JoUhero trace their ancestry to (different, competing) local clans; others came through settlement policies, looking for affordable land, or following affinal ties and bonds of friendship. The latter make no claims to autochtonous status, yet Uhero is their home. Moreover, many young people living in Uhero are daughters or daughters’ children without patrilineal claims to land, who, like many single women or fatherless children and orphans, live in Uhero with maternal kin because they have nowhere else to go; in one case, a son-in-law made his home on land that his wife’s father had given him; in other cases, daughters’ sons have been allocated land by their grandmothers despite their lack of patrilineal rights (although such allocations tend not to be reflected in registered landownership). Such infringements of patrilineal expectations are supported by women’s growing economic role in the homestead; often, young daughters, married or not, supply cash income for their parental 60

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homes by working as maids in the city. When these women return home pregnant, their children tend to stay with their maternal grandparents. Lacking a sound economic basis – whether in land, cattle or migrant labour – marriage is a less stable arrangement than it seems to have been in the past (Potash 1978). Many young women move through numerous ‘marriages’, usually confirmed not by bridewealth but by children, and, if the husband or new husband does not accept them, the resulting offspring often become attached to the maternal grandparents’ home. Household composition and relations among kin and with the land are further transformed by the effects of death. Between 2001 and 2002 (twenty-four months), seventy-seven JoUhero died (i.e. 8.4 per cent of the total population in 2001). Of these, thirty-seven (nineteen women and eighteen men) were between fifteen and forty-five years of age. Half of Uhero’s children and young people have lost one or both parents.34 In some homes, grandmothers are left alone with their grandchildren (see Nyambedha et al. 2003 for neighbouring Sakwa). Some homes are inhabited by children and youths, and others are, against virilocal ideals, inhabited by three or more generations of mothers and daughters. Advocates of ‘Luo Tradition’, who measure Luoness by the standards of a stable patrilineal virilocal system (see Evans-Pritchard 1949; Southall 1952; Ocholla-Ayayo 1976; Mboya 1983 (1938)), might call Uhero atypical. We would argue that, in fact, the peninsula seems to have been a patchwork of lineages even before resettlement, and that this was common along the lake shores. Moreover, and more importantly, Uhero’s present patterning makes it typical of the modern condition of Luo sociality, which is based upon movements within the larger national and global political economy and draws variously upon myths of ancestral belonging and narratives of ownership by rightful acquisition, which in turn are intertwined with different understandings of the person and her relations to people and places (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989: 92; see also Blount 1975).

‘Down’ into the village ‘Up’ and ‘down’ Leaving Muthurwa, one first follows the tarmac road, along which lie two different types of homes: homesteads made up of ageing, spacious concrete houses with tin roofs surrounded by tall exotic trees, some with signboards drawing attention to their prominent owners like ‘The late chief O.’; and 61

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recognisably younger homesteads, also on square plots, which are newly fenced with barbed wire, but which consist of mud-and-grass huts. Often the buildings in the latter homesteads are carefully decorated with red mud, and resemble each other because they were all built at the same time (after the return of an owner from town with his wives), unlike ordinary homesteads, which are added to successively in the course of a family’s expansion. The former are the older ‘modern’ homes of local people who succeeded in colonial and post-colonial society; the latter are the new ‘Traditional’ homes of those who, like the man in the song quoted above, recently returned to the rural areas, bought land and built according to imagined Luo Tradition (possibly planning to build ‘modern’ permanent houses later). In the bush behind these homes, off the tarmac road, orientations in time are less stark, but the paradoxical impression of the two generations’ roadside homes is emblematic of the time warp within which JoUhero live at the turn of this century. The modern departures of those who are now old have ended in the younger men’s return to Tradition, a return which cannot, however, restore the past. The tarmac road is a manifest social boundary: to our right, ‘up’ north, away from the lake, are villages dominated by members of the KadimoKajongo sub-clan, many of them old Anglican Christians, some well educated and descended from the former chiefs of the area. ‘Down’ south, between road and lake shore, is Uhero, where large permanent houses are rare. Uhero is poorer and its neighbours and some of its inhabitants consider it to be less ‘developed’, more ‘backward’ in its beliefs and practices, than the northern villages. Leaving the tarmac, we turn down the earth road into Uhero and to the lake. Built during the last tsetse control campaign to take the Land-Rovers of the insecticide-spraying teams directly to the lake shore, the road passes few homes. Seen from here, Uhero appears as ‘bushy’ as people from the upper side of the road describe it, or as townspeople say the reserve is. However, the bush along the road is not an original wilderness: it is dominated by recently introduced shrubs, particularly nyabend winy (Lantana camara), which came from overseas via city gardens and modern village homes.

KaOkoth Halfway to the lake, we reach KaOkoth (Ka-, ‘place of ’), the first homestead we visited and our other ‘home’ in Uhero (Figure 2.2). It may be that the road into Uhero passes Okoth’s home because its head, Okoth (b. 1932), the son of the village ‘founder’, Osure, was the village assistant for the last 62

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sleeping sickness control programme in the late 1960s. Since he retired from working with the Ministry of Health in 1994, he has tried to obtain his pension, even petitioning the local MP, but without success. Like other men in Uhero who, after a life of migrant labour or in the civil service, receive no or little pension, this has changed his position vis-à-vis wives, kin and neighbours. The proud breadwinning homestead father depicted on the family’s photographs from the 1970s that adorn the wives’ houses now spends his days in the bush, tending the home’s small herd of cattle and accompanied by his youngest son, six-year-old Nelson Mandela. His reclusive behaviour contributes to his reputation as a medicine man (janawi), which probably also feeds on his earlier work in medical research. In spite of our long acquaintance, Okoth is reluctant to speak about his practice as an unlicensed doctor, providing injections to JoUhero and preserving dead bodies with formalin injections. Okoth’s home conforms to JoUhero’s ideal of a homestead (dala or pacho, pl. mien).35 It consists of a horseshoe of houses (udi, sing. ot), each of which is built for and identified with a wife. The home faces downhill towards an

Figure 2.2b. The people of KaOkoth in 2002. 63

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Figure 2.3a. KaOgumba. Map of the home.

opening referred to as a gate (dharangach).36 As we discuss in Chapter 4, homes ‘go forward’ (dhi nyime) across the land with the family’s developmental cycle. This movement of the home is, as we shall see, central to JoUhero’s understandings of life, relations and time – of ‘growth’ (dongruok). Going forward, the home leaves the ancestral ‘old homes’ (gundni, sing. gunda) behind it. Thus, behind Okoth’s home lies the home of his deceased father. His mother Mary (b. ca.1912) lives here with several of her grandchildren. She still digs her own fields and, although occasionally teased by grandchildren and even daughters-in-law, she remains the wuon lowo, the ‘parent’, of the family land, who allocates gardens to daughters- and granddaughters-in-law, and whose consent is required and obtained for changes in land use and sales. Since it was her late husband, Osure, who gave land to most JoUhero, she enjoys a reputation – ambiguous as all reputations are – as the mother of the land, as a skilled healer and as the oldest living woman in Uhero. Okoth married his four wives in roughly ten-yearly intervals. Each lived for a while in town with him before settling in their own house in the rural homestead. All four cultivate the gardens allocated to them by Mary. In addition, Rebekka (b. 1945), the oldest, lives from her adult children’s remittances. The three younger wives still have to support children in 64

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school; the second, MinSusan (b. 1946), works as a household help for a teacher’s family (she does this unhappily, since this is inappropriate work for a married woman); the third, NyarAlego (b. 1954), buys, smokes and sells fish; the youngest, NyaSakwa (b. 1962), sells small commodities from her house. MinWilly, Rebekka’s daughter-in-law, married to Tom, her oldest son, describes herself as a business woman, selling fish and vegetables in Muthurwa. Around twenty children live in the home, among them grandchildren and great-grandchildren from daughters and sons, and the foster daughter (BD) of the childless NyarAlego. Okoth’s large home represents a ‘typical’ Luo home as JoUhero describe it, but it is not representative of Uhero today.37 Few homes have as many wives and children, and during the last decade, this home has lost only two of its (many) adult children due to illnesses that may have been AIDS-related, while in some adjacent homes most adults died during this time.38 Okoth went from primary school into the government health service. None of his wives finished school, but all their children have gone to the local primary school, at least for some years, and two of the boys went on to secondary school. This is fairly representative of educational chances and gendered priorities in the area (GOK 2001: 1–48). The changing value of education and the changing nature of labour and mobility in Kenya is exemplified by Okoth and his sons: when Okoth finished primary school in 1956, he chose which ministry he wanted to work with, received training and spent his life in government service in different parts of the country. His oldest son Tom finished secondary school in 1985 and, after several years of looking for work in Kisumu and Nairobi, found a position as a clerk in the local fishermen’s cooperative. Fanuel, for whose secondary school fees the family sold part of their dwindling lands, was fortunate that the owner of a local shop employed him temporarily as a bicycling salesman when he finished secondary school in 2001. Like Fanuel, many other young men and women in Uhero have secondary school certificates but little chance to move on. By 2001, eleven of Okoth’s daughters had reached marriageable age (wagogni, sing. migogo). Of these, eight had given birth before marrying. One daughter (b. 1978) gave birth to three children in her grandmother Mary’s house before she moved in with a man (who was not the father to any of the children) and thus got ‘married’. One (b. 1975) got pregnant while working in town in the household of a distantly related family. Another one (b. 1966) is living with her third husband, while yet another one (b. 1967) left her third husband in 2002 and was (according to her mother) pregnant with another man’s child. Bridewealth had not been brought in 65

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any of these cases, and contact with the families-in-law was limited, not only because custom prevents visits between affines prior to bridewealth, but also because the couples lived on the nearby fishing ‘beaches’ (temporary settlements of fishermen and their girlfriends or wives) or in Kisumu or Mombasa, and there was little or no involvement of either partner’s kin. Moreover, in several cases, the woman’s husband had no pater. Since this state of affairs was perceived as anomalous and somewhat shameful by many adult JoUhero, it was impossible to collect systematic data on marriage and bridewealth.39 However, the few instances during our fieldwork in which substantial bridewealth was taken in the conventional form of cattle were remarked upon in the village as exceptions, and on two occasions they only occurred because of our involvement. It would thus seem that marriage has undergone a dramatic change since the times of the obligatory and substantial bridewealth transfers and famously stable marital bonds of which older Luo ethnography (Parkin 1978; Potash 1978) and older JoUhero speak. Okoth’s home represents a cross-section of Uhero’s Christian denominations.40 While Mary, like her late husband, is nominally Anglican – the younger women joke that ‘she only prays with her hands’ – her daughters-in-law attend, respectively, the Anglican, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic and Apostolic Churches. Together with his youngest wife whom he is closest to, Okoth recently joined the latter Church. The family demonstrates that religious affiliation is not determined by kinship but provides an alternative network. The fact that over half of the household members were baptised in a Church other than the one they currently attend underscores the shifting nature of Church affiliation (often linked to the experience of illness and pursuit of healing). Although all Okoth’s adult family members go to church, most of its members also uphold some customary practices; the older women know and use herbal medicines, and the home has a reputation among JoUhero (not confirmed by its inhabitants) for consulting diviners.

Alternative ‘modernities’: the beach and ‘Jerusalem’ A short way past Okoth’s home, the road branches. The spot is rumoured to be dangerous because of young men from the fishing beach, to the southwest, who have occasionally threatened a neighbour in passing. Recently these stories have condensed into talk about ‘Ninja’, violent youths who are said to live on the beach, smoke bhang (marijuana), drink and beat people up at random. Although we never met any of their victims, anxieties about 66

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such violence within the village (inspired by video films) is an index of how people experience the state of relations within their community. Boda beach (seventy-eight inhabitants in 2001, 55 per cent male, mean age seventeen years (range one to fifty-eight)) resembles Muthurwa in terms of housing and shops, but, positioned by the lake rather than by the tarmac road, the place is muddy and less orderly, and so are, according to JoUhero, its inhabitants’ morals.41 While the boys in Muthurwa founded a youth club that organises annual ‘sports extravaganzas’ and got funding from an overseas aid agency for ‘community sensitisation’ of various kinds, the youths in Boda live life more in the fast lane: fish brings occasional cash to buy drink and marijuana, which are readily available and deemed necessary for the hard and dangerous work on the lake. Young men in Muthurwa wear shirts and dark trousers, whereas Boda youth sport headscarves, shorts and net shirts. Boda is as peripheral to Uhero as Muthurwa is, but it is perceived as more male and aggressive, less respectable and forwardlooking. Its marginality, on the edge of the lake, is chosen and definite, unlike the transitory liminality of a bus stop on the way to a better life, which is what Muthurwa imagines itself to be. These stereotypes are confounded by fishermen who live in Muthurwa and schoolboys in Boda, but they capture the alternative futures that are available to young JoUhero (depending upon education and family resources): that of turning one’s back on the modern nation and living wildly, or that of looking out for the vehicle that will one day take one forward to a better place in the world. We turn left and come to Bar Ogunde, a large clearing where hunters find guineafowl and the boys take their families’ cattle to graze. Despite rinderpest, tsetse and taxation, all of which reduced Luo cattle stocks over the course of the twentieth century, cattle remain important to people’s lives. Apart from providing milk, cows are the unit of bridewealth – although nowadays some of the bridewealth is replaced with money and often, due to poverty and marital separations, brideweath is not paid at all. Cows are also indispensable for funeral ceremonies, where their blood must be spilled and their meat shared. The cattle population of Uhero is shrinking, and as funerals are frequent, there are few cows left on Bar Ogunde. In the middle of the clearing is the village school, founded in 1989 by the people from the ‘lower’ side of the road (officially because crossing the tarmac road to the existing school at Muthurwa was dangerous for the children, and also because of tensions with the wealthier people from the ‘upper’ side). When we first came to Uhero, the school had one wattle-and-daub classroom, while the other classes learned under trees, and none of the pupils had benches or a blackboard. Under the 67

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tree at the school’s centre stands the old grindstone (pong’) of the defunct homestead nearby, which now consists only of cemented graves and a decrepit house rented to young lodgers. Its founder died before he could facilitate the building of his son’s houses and homes or ‘set them free’ (gonyo, lit. ‘untie’), leaving his children with practical and ritual problems in making a home or building houses (see Chapter 4). These, increasingly common, new kind of gundni are not venerated places of emergence and belonging, but places of premature endings and loss. On the other side of the school lies the newly built Anglican church. Seen from the middle of the field, school and church frame the painted tin roofs, bougainvillea and palm trees of the house belonging to Phillip, the retired bank manager we met in Kisumu, who donated land for the building of church and school. After this vision of modern Uhero (which once prompted a friend to comment: ‘Our new Jerusalem!’) we enter thick bush on our way down to the lake. This area was uninhabited before the late 1970s, when land began to be sold and wealthier townspeople without (kin) relation to the area and with little intention to get entangled in any such relations began to buy ‘lakeside plots’. While BabaWinston moved with his family and Phillip retired here with his wife, others bought the land only as an investment or died before retirement, and their lands, marked by barbed wire, remain undeveloped. On the other side of the thickly forested Uhaya hill, deep inside the bush, live the two remaining Wahaya. One of them, Sylvanus, is a formally Catholic pantheistic hermit, who recently lost his only son; his participation in British warfare throughout the empire has made him an avid radio listener and political commentator. The other one, Sylvanus’s ‘brother’ Abel, is Catholic in his own way, lives together with his old wife and ‘inherits’ village widows (see Chapter 8). He enjoys controversy and fuels his wit with chang’aa (liquor). The two elderly men herd their few animals in the thicket of ‘their’ hill. They claim that the gunda of their ancestors is hidden here and that they look after it by occasionally making sacrifices to the ancestors or Were, the pre-Christian Luo divinity.42

KaOgumba At the road’s end we come to a new wooden gate in a wiremesh fence, the homestead of the late John Ogumba (b. 1947) and his wife Mercy (b. 1954) – KaOgumba or, more commonly, KaMercy – our home in Uhero (Figures 2.3a, b). Mr Ogumba – or BabaWinston, ‘father of Winston’, as he is more commonly called – was born in his original lineage area about twenty kilometres away and would have been entitled to family land there. Yet, 68

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having spent most of their lives in Kisumu, he and his wife preferred to buy land and settle in Uhero, where neither had kinship relations. Since Ogumba’s death in 2000, Mercy has invested heavily in fencing. Rather than preventing anybody from entering, the wire mesh expresses her autonomy vis-à-vis the villagers and her kinsfolk, an autonomy that is difficult for a widow to maintain, especially since many JoUhero think that widows should be ‘inherited’ by a clansman of their late husband (see Chapter 8). The fence demarcates her property and symbolises her control of her own space, a necessary precaution given the economic challenges ahead of her and her plans for her children’s education. This purposive separation notwithstanding, the Ogumbas have taken in many of the children and young people of their less well-off brothers and sisters, several of whom have died, and educated these children, some of whom finished good secondary schools. While cutting some taken-for-granted ties to people or land, the family thus remains profoundly engaged in their obligations towards both his and her kinsfolk. Aesthetically, the Ogumba’s home aims to be the opposite of homes like Okoth’s. From the gate, a short drive leads to the main house, in front of which lie the solidly cemented latrines, both convenient and symbols of cleanliness. The house was built in the late 1980s, while John Ogumba was studying overseas. It consists of cement blocks and natural stone facings (indicating the architectonical orientation towards highland mansions),

Figure 2.3b. The people of KaOgumba in 2002. 69

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has glass windows and iron window frames and doors, and, contrary to Luo custom, is divided into bedrooms for the parents and for their adult children, uniting different generations under one roof. This home is a ‘Christian home’, meaning that its inhabitants are ‘saved’ (or ‘born-again’) Anglican Christians, who strive to follow God’s word and reject Luo customary practices (see Chapter 3). In its self-understanding it is indeed the most Christian home in Uhero. The home is the end point of various other continua of social distribution in Uhero. Its denizens are the most educated. The late household head, himself an orphan, was a ‘self-made man’, as his funeral eulogy stressed, who ‘educated himself ’, held several academic degrees and was a parish priest. His widow is medically trained, and their sons and daughters went to school in Kisumu and hold higher educational diplomas. An often emphasised aspect of the educated home is its ‘developmentmindedness’, which sets it apart from the alleged inertia of village life. It is expressed for example in the intensely cultivated and irrigated vegetable ‘farm’ that the younger son, George, has created on the lake shore below the home after his return from college. Development-mindedness constitutes also a specific relationship between oneself and what from this perspective is called ‘the community’. A development-minded individual, as was stressed in Ogumba’s eulogy, ‘thinks not only of himself, but also gives to his community.’ In Mercy’s case, ‘development’ has another dimension, too: hers is one of the few families in Uhero that has modestly prospered in the decades of economic decline. An active, disciplined person, Mercy became involved in various health and development projects. The sense of distinction between the home and the local community or the villagers is referred to by family members themselves, and by some other JoUhero, as one of ‘class’. Below the Ogumbas’ solid mansion is our house, one of the two round houses in Uhero and (with a diameter of about 20 ft) the only large round house. The old man who organised its construction (who died shortly afterwards) and the villagers who came to help with the work took pleasure in the task; the house remains an object of admiration, especially for old people, whose memories are revived under the cool, conical grass roof. It was in Mercy’s homestead, KaOgumba, and in Okoth’s home, KaOkoth, mentioned above, that our closest ties were forged and into which we were incorporated in kinship terms. We had stayed with the latter because of our affection for the old lady, Mary, who categorised Wenzel as a ‘grandson’ and Ruth as ‘co-wife’, liked sharing tobacco and embarrassed us with sexually 70

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explicit jokes (see Chapter 5). We came to the other home, because we had asked Mercy – the one person we knew whose life and ways resembled ours – if she knew a place where we could stay. Our similar education and lifestyles (as well as our shared assumptions about ownership) ensured that we were given a place to build in her family’s compound. What relates us to each of these families has changed over the years, as attachments have grown on both sides. It was often through the tensions that this dual filiation created that we came to learn about life in Uhero, and our relations with these households will run through our account. Nothing, it seems, can be taken for granted in Uhero. For JoUhero, the habitual practices of everyday life and its kinship-based order have become not only uncertain but deeply divisive. By the turn of the twenty-first century, neither older trajectories of growth nor twentieth-century development provide a clear pathway and an unquestioned direction in life. Loss rather than progress dominates the landscape, and life itself has become more precarious as death permeates JoUhero’s lives. For the ethnographer, the foundations of classic ethnographic enquiry are in doubt. This community is characterised by its internal differentiation and fragmentation; instead of being bounded, it is part of wide webs of sociality; and even the seemingly given determinants of social order – kinship and gender – are in flux. Few social ties are unquestioned, and gone are the days of classic Africanist village ethnography, where everyone had his or her place (see also Crehan 1997). Moreover, despite our long journey to Uhero, this distant place is anything but remote. While JoUhero are in very important ways increasingly disconnected from the centre, their marginalisation is not given by geography or because they missed social change, but it is a product of history and political economy and is experienced as new and socially made. Rather than studying a remote place where things (and people) have remained as they were, this marginal place is marked by departures and returns (see also Tsing 1993). Finally, Uhero does not fit a linear pattern of change; future hopes for progress have become past, and distant Luo pasts are turned into hopes for the future; different imaginaries of personhood and relatedness, associated with different notions of time, coexist. Before moving on to the ethnographic chapters that will explore JoUhero’s lives and our themes of touch and relatedness, movement and growth, we must consider one particularly important division, which plays a critical role in ordering JoUhero’s understanding of themselves: that between ‘Saved’ and what are called ‘Earthly’ (or, in particular contexts, ‘Traditional’) ways of life, and the relationship between these two imaginaries and JoUhero’s everyday work to make and sustain growth. 71

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Notes 1. Apart from responsibilities for ‘people at home’ (jodala), Luo residing in town usually retain rights to land at home: men to some of their father’s land, and married women to gardens in the husband’s home. These gardens are often taken care of by wives who live some of their time ‘at home’; wealthier urban dwellers have relatives or workers take care of the gardens, and return occasionally to check on them. 2. Since the end of our fieldwork, the influx of mostly HIV-related, external funding for NGOs and research has led to a growth of service-related business in Kisumu, including several shopping malls, fast-food and other restaurants and cafes, catering for younger, well-educated employees in the aid and research sector. Since employment in productive sectors has continuously declined, overall economic inequalities seem to have grown. 3. Classificatory relations are distinguished by inverted commas, not to reduce their reality, but to flag the expansion of kin terms and relations beyond biological kinship reckoning. 4. Luo adhere to patrilineality and, in principle, virilocality, but recent patterns of mobility between ancestral land, town, settlement schemes and bought land create situations in which men have a town house and a rural home, and their wife or wives alternate between town and village (see also Parkin 1978). 5. In 2002, after the end of our doctoral fieldwork, President Kibaki replaced President Moi and the late Jaramogi Odinga’s son, Raila Odinga, joined government. Eventually the road to Bondo was restored as a very wide but rather thinly paved highway. Far from satisfying Luo longings for recognition, this only fueled new political debates among matatu passengers enduring dusty and bumpy travel past kilometre-long building sites. On a return visit we found a general mistrust of all politicians, while some lamented that their leaders’ efforts were thwarted by a ‘corrupt Kikuyu government’ and ‘Asian contractors’ greed’, reflecting the prevailing cynical and tribalist mood. 6. The visibility of HIV interventions and the openness of discussions about AIDS have changed since the end of our doctoral fieldwork, and donor-driven treatment campaigns will potentially change the situation, although this process seems to be taking rather longer than some expected. 7. We use ‘tribe’ rather than ‘ethnic group’, because it is what JoUhero say and it captures the historical conditions under which tribes came into being as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991; see also Chapman et al. 1989: 11–17). 8. Like other groups ‘between’ Luo and Luhya (e.g. Marachi, Maragoli), Manyala are not so much in-between two bounded tribes as a living boundary or a bridge between them. Members of these groups intermarry, change language and residential area, exchange produce and knowledge, largely without essentialist qualms regarding whether they ‘are’ Luo or Luhya. What they are depends upon 72

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

those they are with. As a result, similar cultural ideas and practices exist in both language groups (see, for example, Wagner 1949). Archdeacon Owen reported having seen the sacrificial pots on the top of the hill in the 1920s (1933: 235); in 2000, we found in their place the sacrificial altars of the independent Legio Maria Church. From the 1920s, labour migrants and CMS men established welfare and trade unions, which expanded with Luo migration across East Africa and became a strong force in colonial and post-colonial politics (Ogot 1963). From 1964 to 1972 average earnings among Kenyan workers rose by 55 per cent (7 per cent p.a.) (Stichter 1982: 142). In the late 1960s, middle-income Luo residing in Nairobi had lived there for an average of 17.6 years (Parkin 1978). Among JoUhero, in 2001, among half of the men over thirty years of age had, at some point in their lives, resided in Nairobi and three-quarters in an East African city, and one third had lived in Nairobi for over five years; among women of the same age, one-third had lived in Nairobi and two-thirds in cities for periods ranging from six months to several years (interviews with 184 men and 247 women). Some women used the economic opportunities town afforded – trade, brewing and prostitution – raising concerns about female mobility among migrant workers’ associations in the 1940s (Southall and Gutkind 1956; White 1990). Nairobi’s Institute of Economic Affairs (2002) quotes Nyanza Province as having an absolute poverty rate (defined as living on less than US $1 a day) of 63 per cent in 2002. It seems to us that the impact of chang’aa has grown over the last decade. While in the late 1990s, drunkenness during daytime was rare, except during funerals or at the fishing beaches, since 2002, this has become common. It has become acceptable for senior men and women to drink chang’aa, while the less intoxicating home-brewed millet beer has all but disappeared. The link between this and a sense of growing social distance is implied in the polite request to buy liquor: ‘We are cold, we need something warm to be together.’ Luo lineage organisation has been depicted as a hierarchy of maximal (gweng’), intermediate (libamba) and minimal (anyuola) lineages (Blount 1975; see also Evans-Pritchard 1949; Southall 1952; Whisson 1964). JoUhero, maybe because of the origins of the village described below, referred only to intermediate levels (five to eight generations) and ‘clans’ were, irrespective of their generational depth, called dhoudi (sing. dhoot, ‘door’, ‘coming from one house’). The largest clan, Kadimo, distinguished between different exogamous ‘sub-clans’ (still called dhoudi), while for the others such differentiations seemed to play no role in their dealings in Uhero (maybe because most of their clans people lived elsewhere). By 2007, mobile phones had become a necessary consumer item for those with employment, also in the ’reserve’, and adverts for air credit from competing mobile phone companies dominated the market centre. Since 2005, Oyundi dispensary also has a free ‘Voluntary Counselling and Testing’ (VCT) site attached to it, where a trained nurse provides testing and some care for 73

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18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

HIV positive people (distributing free multivitamins and the antibiotic Septrin for HIV-positive people). Antiretroviral drugs, funded by PEPFAR, became available in the dispensary in 2007. Muthurwa’s population is mobile: of those living there in 2000, only eighteen were there in 2003. An abandoned homestead or gunda (pl. gundni) concentrates the power of the earth and the ancestors and is the original locus of human vitality and sociality. These places can be recognised by the trees that once gave the homestead shade, which should not be cut (the cutting down of old trees for firewood and charcoal, which has taken place in Uhero over the past decade, indicates a loss of memory and respect for the past, as well as growing poverty). Despite high mortality, Uhero’s population grew, supported by in-migration, from 896 in 2000 to 956 in 2002. Mortality due to sleeping sickness (1901–31 and 1948–66) was high (Wijers 1969). Bishop Tucker’s account of a ‘sad and solemn’ journey through the area around the turn of the century – overgrown gardens, ruined houses and omnipresent wailing – reminds one of the present epidemic. The experiences of the two epidemics – locally called the death ‘of today’ (mar tinende) and ‘of long ago’ (mar chon) respectively – may be more alike than current imaginations of the singularity of the AIDS pandemic suggests (Tucker 1908: I, 306; II, 218). JoUhero experienced sleeping sickness as a new scourge and rumours located its origin in the disagreements that characterised local responses to colonisation (see Wijers 1969): during the early colonial years, when the Kadimo were at war with other Yimbo clans, one of the factions sent for powerful medicine from a medicine man in Uganda. The messengers returned with an earthen pot that contained the eggs of tsetse flies. The pot was hidden in the bush, where an ignorant farmer smashed it and released the plague, which depopulated the very land that people had fought over. This narrative of the foreign origin of ‘death’ and its political implications parallel current rumours about HIV being invented by the USA and spread among African peoples. Interviews with elders of Wahaya and Kadimo and the village elder, Uhero, January 2001 and 2002. Interviews with the late ex-Chief Herbert Magoye (d. 2002), Wambasa, January 2002. The following account was reconstructed mainly from interviews. The court files, confirming oral testimony, were located by Mary Davis and Michelle Osborne, graduate students with the British Institute in East Africa, in the Nakuru Archives, AKV/3/307. Osure’s widow Mary and other old Kadimo-Kanyibok wives acknowledged, to us, that they were indeed living on former Wahaya land, thus confirming the Wahaya version of the history. Interviews with household heads about the origins of the land they owned or lived on, Uhero, January 2002. 74

Landscapes and histories 28. The colonial government had long resisted demands for private land ownership in the reserves, preferring what they imagined to be customary common ownership (Ogot 1963: 262; Lonsdale 1970: 632). Tenure reform was only conceived before independence to encourage agricultural innovation, social stratification and economic development (Swynnerton 1955: 13; Okoth-Ogendo 1976: 163–66; Pala 1980: 189); the project inserted itself into a modernist narrative of abandoning the disorderly past and extending the future (spatial) order into the reserves. While some resisted these recommendations, others used them to their advantage (Haugerud 1983; Shipton 1988, 1994; Donovan 1996, 2001). The Swynnerton plan was promoted in schools and public meetings in the 1950s and this propaganda in favour of private property and ‘better farmers’ affected local imaginations and practices of farming (see Pala 1977) and introduced JoUhero to important new words: acre, parcel number, title deed, court case, and mpaka (Kiswahili ‘boundary’). 29. Parker Shipton has explored these relations in several articles (e.g. Shipton 1992, 1994) and books (1989, 2007). 30. Land has become scarce due to high population density (167/km2 in Yimbo and above 200/km2 in Uhero (GOK 2001: 1–138)). In 2001, thirty homes owned less than five acres, twenty-three owned five to nine acres, eighteen owned ten to forteen acres and nineteen owned more than fifteen acres with a maximum of thirty to forty acres (ninety household heads’ reports of approximate landholdings). 31. Both were widows who were given land on which to build by fellow Legio Maria Church members. 32. Between 1978 and 2000, fifty-eight plots between one and twelve acres (total approx. 200 acres) were reported as sold, out of which approx. sixty acres were bought by people who did not by 2001 reside in the village, and approx. 140 acres were bought by present villagers. Thirty-nine of these sales involved smallholders (fewer than ten acres) as sellers, increasing the difference between largest and smallest landowners. 33. Reasons for selling land (fifty-eight plots, one to twelve acres, total approx. 200 acres; four respondents gave no reasons): Bridewealth Build

Food Buy land Treatment Fees Funeral Total

1978–89

5

6

4

1

1

1

2

20

1990+

0

2

4

1

7

7

13

34

34. Of the children (less than fifteen years of age) 41 per cent have lost one and 10 per cent both parents; among youths (unmarried and fifteen to thirty-five years of age) 44 per cent have lost one parent and 14 per cent both. The effects of parental mortality are exacerbated by marital instability and the existence of many ‘fatherless’ children, creating a large group of children without any attachment to, or rights in, a paternal home. 35. In spite of the shared idea of the Luo homestead embodying continuity, settlements possibly changed over the past centuries from larger units to one-family homesteads (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989). 75

The Land is Dying 36. Despite variations in wealth and lifestyles in Uhero all homes conformed to this ‘Luo’ layout of the home. 37. The average home in 2001 had eleven inhabitants (range two to forty-two), and Okoth was then the only man who was living with four wives. We have no historical census to compare these data with, but an examination of aerial photographs shows that homesteads did consist of many more houses, and thus, in all probability, more wives and children, in 1948 and 1961 than today (RAF5370V CPE/KEN/0160 21 March 1948, m/a29752; 006V 13A RAF1076 17 January 1961, Kenya m/a29752/03). 38. However, like most Uhero families, the people of Okoth’s home have lost many relatives from their extended families in recent years. And, like most mothers in Uhero, Okoth’s wives’ have lost children in infancy or childhood: five of Rebekka’s seven children, seven of MinSusan’s thirteen children, and seven of Nyasakwa’s nine children were alive in 2001. 39. However, people generally agreed that bridewealth for women married in the 1950s and 60s had been in the order of five to ten head of cattle, while at the turn of the 21st century, people accept one cow (with a cash value of about 5,000KSh in 2001) although they of course hope for more. Socio-economic differentiation means that there are large differentials in bridewealth between families. 40. In 2002, out of 914 JoUhero (children below ten years: parent’s information), 167 (18 per cent) belonged to the originally dominant CPK (Anglican), 175 (19 per cent) to the new Apostolic Church (most of them ex-Anglicans), 170 (18 per cent) to the Catholic Church, 107 (12 per cent) to the independent Legio Maria Church, 150 (16 per cent) to four different Roho (Holy Spirit) Churches, ninety-three (10 per cent) to twelve different Pentecostal Churches, thirty-two (4 per cent) to Seventh Day Adventists and subgroups; nine (1 per cent) were Mennonites (one family) and three (