Reviewed by: The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya Derek R. Peterson Cohen, David William, and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo . 2004. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 344 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). The Honourable John Robert Ouko's death in 1990 has been the subject of two official commissions of inquiry. It has inspired thick books, lengthy police investigations, and reams of newspaper reportage. This body of discourse has sought to answer a straightforward forensic question: "Who killed Bob?" In language that appears several times in the book, David William Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo explain that "ours is not a whodunit but rather a close study of the social history of knowledge production" (p. 18). They study the documentation produced by inquiries into Ouko's death, looking beyond forensic questions to explore "how people come to know; how they used what they knew or claimed to know in interested and strategic ways; and how these uses of knowledge and claims to knowledge marked investigations, inquiries, proceedings, and the nation" (p. 18). By eschewing the search for easy answers, Cohen and Odhiambo map out a program and a method, not just for students of Ouko's death, but for Africa's scholars more generally. Historians, they argue, should be wary of harnessing their scholarship to the aims of the state and semiofficial bodies: instead, they should work "within a broader range of discovery and narration of truth, with the goal of understanding the powers and poetics of uncertainty and indeterminacy in the productions of knowledge" (p. 20). Cohen and Odhiambo's most profound insights are into the fabrication of historical knowledge. Facts, they show, are constituted as authorities invested in certain strands of discourse, and people argue about certain things and not others. They demonstrate, for example, how housekeeper Selina Ndalo Were's testimony regarding a white car came to be pivotal to the public's theorization of Ouko's death as a murder. Ouko's smoldering body was found several miles from his rural farm. Selina on several occasions testified that she had seen a white car pulling away from the minister's compound on the night he disappeared. Drawing from newspaper reportage, Cohen and Odhiambo inventory some thirty-three instances where Selina talked about the white car, or where others reported that Selina had talked about the white car (pp. 53–66). Like an earlier generation of African historians, Cohen and Odhiambo argue, the Scotland Yard detective sent to investigate the death treated Selina's voice as authentic, concrete, and real. He used her testimony to show Ouko's death to be a murder, not a suicide. But the body of discourse surrounding this testimony opened onto bigger issues. Kenya's publics were sifting it, using the white car as evidence with which to speculate on the identity and motives of Ouko's killers, and to criticize their government. In the search for authentic voices, argue Cohen and Odhiambo, historians (like police investigators) make it hard to hear how voices play in the past and present. [End Page 118] There are material insights to be gleaned from this book about Kenya's recent history. Cohen and Odhiambo use Ouko's life story as an occasion to reflect on the political and private lives of Kenya's Luo elite—a project adumbrated in their 1989 book Siaya and developed in Burying SM. In a chapter on Ouko's experience as a minister for the ill-fated East African Community, for example, the authors contrast the portfolio of an urbane international diplomat with the parochial politics of patronage expected of Ouko once he had been elected Member of Parliament for Kisumu. A chapter on the molasses plant that he lobbied for during the 1980s highlights the often hidden world of international wheeling and dealing; a discussion of Jonah Anguka's book (1998) on the Ouko "murder mystery" offers illuminating insights into the practice of local government in Moi's Kenya. But these historical and sociological reflections arise in medias res. This is...