If You can't Beat Them, Join Them: Government Cleansings of Witches and Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya

Abstract

During the mid-1950s British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya enlisted categories of Kamba occult “experts”—“witchdoctors” and “cleansers”—to cleanse local “witches” and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. A compendium of colonial documents concerning the “cleansing” campaigns illustrates how and why the socio-historical context of Mau Mau-era Machakos drove the colonial administration to break with its longstandingde factopolicy of not officially combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means. The overwhelming disorder wrought by Mau Mau motivated state officials to break with precedent and to identify and employ Kamba “experts” to cleanse Mau Mau adherents and witches.The widespread and politicized nature of the violence occurring during Mau Mau, and its perceived linkages to the supernatural, precipitated the state's shift to the employment of Kamba experts to combat “witchcraft” and Mau Mau oathing. An anthro-historical approach to understanding Mau Mau in Machakos shows that, while the cleansings constituted a group of “critical moments” at which British colonial officials could argue that they had dealt with supernatural challenges to state authority by rendering them “knowable,” the cleansings also demonstrated the degree to which state authority became situated in Kamba colonial officials and the extent to which the implementation and interpretation of British colonial cleansing policies depended on these local authorities.