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      Trouble with Witchcraft

      The initiation season began in November 1998 in an unremarkable way. As the school year drew to a close, rumors cropped up in the marketplaces and in homesteads sprinkled across the rolling hills that this was the year for holding initiation ceremonies. Elders discussed the implications at every chance—over cups of tea, sharing pots of home-style beer, or simply while perched on a log at a kiosk watching a bicycle being repaired. Women vendors chatted about this in their market stalls between customers or with shoppers stopping by to assess their vegetables. Youths coming of age ran around the neighborhoods in high spirits and invited relatives and friends to come participate in their festivities. Mothers prepared for feasting by drying cereals in the sun, grinding flour at the posho mills, and sprouting finger millet for obosara, the much-loved beverage of celebrations. Fathers appraised their livestock with slaughter on their minds. Three years had elapsed since the last initiations were held and potential candidates were many. Free on school vacation and in high spirits, adolescent boys with bells tied around their calves stirred up commotion wherever they went, decked out in the assorted regalia of initiation. And though kept by custom out of public spaces, adolescent girls would be a part of the celebration, too, and enjoy increased attention in their homesteads.

      Having received an invitation to attend the initiations and permission from my dean to miss two weeks of classes, I set off to join the festivities. The trip from Bennington, Vermont, to Nyankare,¹ Kuria District, took me from Wednesday to Saturday morning. Reaching Nairobi on Friday, I made contact with many of my urban Kuria acquaintances, hoping for a ride to Bukuria, a distance of some 400 kilometers as the road goes. I was unlucky. Everyone had either left already to participate in the initiations or had their vehicles full. Spurred to action, and fearful of missing too much, I boarded an overnight bus. I squeezed into the last row amidst packages, bags, and too many people on too few seats. I sat, jetlagged but awake, as fellow passengers dozed around me. The moon outside was full, and the night so bright that the zebras grazing along the road on the dusty plains of the Rift Valley were clearly visible. As the bus crawled up the western escarpment in the wee hours of Saturday, we were attacked by bandits. They had piled logs on the tarmac, barricading the road.

      December is a dangerous time to travel from the city into the countryside. Returning to their natal homes for the month of school vacations and holidays, many people carry gifts and goods in preparation for Christmas. Most highway robberies take place during this time of the year, and overnight buses are obvious targets. A million thoughts went through my mind in the next minute, as passengers woke up shouting, and the driver lurched the bus off the road. “What will happen to my children? I left them for this experience, and I will die on a stupid bus in the middle of nowhere, for nothing” was prominent among them, as well as “What are the chances of my being passed over, the one mzungu at the very back of a bus filled with Kenyans?”

      We were lucky. Thanks to the driver’s vigilance and presence of mind, the worst we sustained were a few bruises and jolted bones. The driver aimed the bus directly at the bandits, who scrambled to escape getting run over. Then he gunned the engine and somehow managed to haul the bus over the piled obstacles. For the next hour or so the bus was animated with relieved chatter. Passengers replayed the scene, taking special delight at the retreating bandits’ faces when their plan backfired. As people drifted off to sleep again, I stayed bolt upright, busily planning how I would alight and save myself if such a thing happened again. We reached Migori, our terminus, after daybreak. I was starting to feel sick with fatigue, not having laid down to sleep since Tuesday night in Bennington. I incoherently but effusively thanked the driver and stumbled from the bus.

      I got a ride on the first morning run of a matatu² going to Nyankare. I didn’t recognize any of the drivers, conductors, or passengers—not surprising after an absence of four years, but certainly not an auspicious beginning. The women squeezed in next to me were Luo traders, heading to Nyankare for market day. In the past, people from Nyankare had always traveled to Migori for its market day, not vice versa. I focused inward, savoring my return to a place that had been very meaningful to my life for the past fifteen years. It looked much the same—the rolling hills, the alternating clusters of thick, short trees and bushes, and grasslands—and as we got farther from the paved road, cultivated fields took up ever more of the land. I noted extensive new construction as we drove through areas that had, in the past, consisted of isolated shops. Strips of buildings lined the road and held all types of commercial interests, including restaurants (known as hoteli), hardware shops, retail stores, grain purchase stores, clinics, and posho mills.

      The matatu stopped at Kehancha, the district capital. Four years earlier, this rural center had encompassed mainly maize fields and low, one-story wattle-and-daub structures. The capital now sported several multistory buildings (most still under construction), a bank, a gas station, and a busy matatu stage. Hawkers plied their assorted wares up to our vehicle’s windows. My fellow passengers examined the cheap Chinese plastic goods with interest, though they didn’t buy anything other than cornets of groundnuts, artfully wrapped in pages from children’s school exercise books. As we were pulling out of town, we encountered a group coming home from the circumcision ground. It made for an impressive and awe-inspiring sight. An initiate was being escorted by thirty or so adults, many of them draped in branches, shouting, whistling, waving weapons, and surrounding the vehicle, menacing in gesture and word. The Luo traders shrank in their seats.³ I was not frightened, having experienced this numerous times before. I was actually, despite my fatigue, exhilarated to see the force of initiation celebrations unleashed. The pulsing music of the ekegoogo, the resounding gourd rattles, and the shrillness of human voices and whistles all formed an exuberant backdrop to the powder-streaked faces of the initiates, their liminal status indicated by the sheets tied around their necks, draped like wide aprons and stained with blood from their genitals. Members of the entourage flexed their muscles and, in keeping with their duty to protect their charges from both physical and supernatural threats, brandished machetes, rungu, cooking spoons, and other potential as well as real weapons. Some, disguised by foliage to resemble walking bushes, charged in unison, chasing invisible malevolent forces, the spirits of aggression. Protection and jubilation intermingled in a cacophony of sounds. This was what I had come for.

      We came across five or six similar groups walking on