Between the Wildebeest, Noble Savages and Moi's Kenya: Deceit and Cultural Illiteracies in the Search for Julie Ward's Killer(s)

Abstract

This paper examines the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve. It explores the search for Julie Ward's killers and how it is narrated in the three books on the case: John Ward's The Animals Are Innocent: The Search for Julie's Killers (1991), Michael Hiltzik's A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julie Ward (1991) and Jeremy Gavron's Darkness in Eden: The Murder of Julie Ward (1994). Both the search for Julie Ward's killers and the narration of the case in the three books are framed within a distinctly British colonial archive, which reads Kenya(ns) through the twin tropes of exoticism and the political jungle of the postcolonial state. The paper argues that their embedding in this colonial archive resulted in an epistemological disarticulation between the British and Kenyan players in the search for Julie Ward's killers, as certain Kenyan textualities remained illegible to the British.