Suzette Heald, director. Law and War in Rural Kenya.2010. 64 minutes. English and Kuria, with English subtitles. United Kingdom. The Royal Anthropological Institute. $95.00.

Abstract

Suzette Heald, director. Law and War in Rural Kenya. 2010. 64 minutes. English and Kuria, with English subtitles. United Kingdom. The Royal Anthropological Institute. $95.00.Directed by anthropologist Suzette Heald, Law and War in Rural Kenya (2010) examines rise and fall of a vigilante group that emerged in southwest Kenya in 1998 with aim of curbing violent cattle raids. A research officer in Crisis States program at London School of Economics and author of two books on masculinity and violence in Ugandan society, Heald studies relationships among gender norms, land and livestock shortages, and civil violence as a response to political instabilities of contemporary East Africa. Part of her broader work on vigilantism, Law and War in Rural Kenya is a 64-minute documentary that combines a variety of formal devices, including interviews, an explanatory voice-over narration, and an unobtrusive, observational shooting style that affords numerous glimpses into community policing initiatives that, beginning in 1998, attempted to address both cattle raiding and perceived failures of Kenyan state.Distanced from, say, Jean Rouch's emotionally immersive, performative approach to ethnographic documentary filmmaking, while still appearing to reflect Rouch's influential commitment to shared anthropology, Heald deemphasizes her authorial presence in Law and War in Rural Kenya, embracing contributions of a range of African participants, especially young translator who at one point occupies Heald's frame, taking place of director. At no point do we see Heald's face or hear her speaking voice; film's narrator, Ugandan-born journalist Paul Bakibinga, is Heald's audible stand-in-a reversal, perhaps, of more familiar, Rouchian forms of ventriloquism. The film unfolds in long takes and features a minimum of graphic superimpositions, further underscoring Heald's observational approach to her subject.Law and War in Rural Kenya opens in a pastoral mode, with a series of bucolic images: cows graze, children wander, and women work sundrenched fields of Kenya's Bukira East. Eventually a middle-aged man emerges into light of late afternoon, a small child in his arms. Describing the old days in a steady, nostalgic voice that seems suited to sylvan images, man makes seemingly paradoxical claim that cattle raiding was once a deeply ethical practice, in keeping with traditions that militated against use of force in human interactions. In past, stealing was done quietly, he says, explaining that no cattle thief would have dared frighten a child or desecrate a homestead. These socially enforced conditions changed, however, when guns became widely available in late 1990s-the products of newly liberalized forms of transnational trade that brought scraps of global capitalism to Kenya. Emboldened as much by their suddenly plentiful weapons as by numerous shortcomings of Kenyan state, cattle raiders began to commit violent acts in name not only of their ungulate quarry, but also of a deep-seated cynicism regarding role of Kenyan government in promoting ethnic prejudice, particularly during early 1980s, which witnessed state-sanctioned Garissa and Wagalla massacres of ethnic Somalis.Several of Heald's documentary subjects describe atrocities carried out in name of modern (i.e., weapons-assisted) cattle raiding; most of them agree that in absence of effective state intervention-and, moreover, in absence of ethical models of state governance-vigilantism offered only means of redressing what had become an intolerable state of affairs in rural Kenya, particularly Kuria. …