embodied in foreign donors were accompanied by the spread of language that became ubiquitous by the end of the twentieth century and redefined the terms in which people thought about their realities. One of these notions was that culture had potential utility and was “good” when it could be deployed and rationalized to benefit the public (Smith 2008, 89). In addition, dispositions and states of mind were held to be the main factors that could influence whether things were moving forward, moving backward, or going nowhere.
The Power of Witchcraft
In December 1998, interterritorial witchcraft (okogenderana, literally “to act against”) was on everyone’s lips. Even though the initiation season had been called off some weeks earlier, a pronounced tension reigned in the community. Virtually all conversations, however casual, included the latest bit of news about the unusual, unsettling things going on. For me, the next week was devoted to conversations, interviews, meetings, and discussions on the topic of witchcraft, particularly as related to initiation. In two weeks, an assistant and I collected dozens of versions of accounts about why the initiation season had been called off. The stories and rumors whirled. Some versions seemed to be dismissed, only to reappear at another time and with further embellishment or evidence. The tellers drew gasps of astonishment, fear, or doubt, but the listeners dutifully passed on the stories, adding fuel to the fears of supernatural attacks being carried out by covert agents.
Early the next morning, a great ruckus emanating from the marketplace reached Mogore Maria’s house. An intensifying buzz, sounding like a crowd at a sports event, was punctuated by periodic crescendos. We were simultaneously curious and concerned. Samwel went running off to see what the excitement was about. As we drank porridge, passersby supplied commentary on the action in the market. A mysterious animal that people couldn’t identify had been spotted on top of one of the trees. It was not a cat, nor a monkey, but had a long tail and five fingers, just like a monkey. Eerily, it cried like a baby.
The tension was palpable as people speculated about what it could possibly be doing on top of a tree in the busy marketplace. They reasoned that it had been sent by Abanyabasi to bite someone. Or it had been sent by Abanyabasi to find out whether circumcisions were taking place in Bwirege. Either way, general sentiment marked it as a portent of evil. A crowd a hundred strong gathered around the tree where it was hiding, and people were laying out strategies for how to thwart the danger the animal presented. The discussion took several hours. Around noon, a young man came forward, suggesting that if he were given KShs. 200, he would climb an adjacent tree and bring the suspicious animal down.11 People pooled money and soon the amount was collected. The young man pocketed the money and, true to his word, climbed the tree. After a few attempts to capture it, he brought the animal down to the unmerciful multitude, who stoned it to death. The carcass of the bushbaby was unceremoniously thrown into a ditch and the crowd broke up.
For the next week, I continued to listen to and engage people in conversations about witchcraft and other initiation seasons. I began to discern that the stories circulating through Bwirege as explanations for the cancellation of the initiation season addressed different points of tension.
Rumors
The first type of rumor was of the general “bad omen” nature, as epitomized by the following story I first heard from a young market woman. She described an incident that was alleged to have taken place where the Bwirege secret conclave held its clandestine meetings. As the members of the inchaama arrived at their usual meeting place, they discovered a passing hyena. All recognized the sighting of a hyena as a bad omen. This was further compounded by their finding that the egeteembe tree, used by the conclave members to read portents regarding the initiation season, had dried up on the right side. The right side symbolizes the males, and that occurrence was seen as indicating that many boys would die, beginning with the eight youths who open a period of circumcision. If that were to happen, initiation ceremonies could not proceed. This was probably the most often repeated tale I encountered.
Another widely repeated story was of a young girl who, dismayed that the initiation season had been called off, decided to circumcise herself. Youths told this story with awe for her audacity and determination. But she failed to complete the job and someone had to be called to finish it. All recognized she had seriously transgressed social rules, and thus the representatives of the inchaama were said to be visiting that home and gathering evidence. As no one would name her, I could not verify or follow the tale. I thought the story unlikely and categorized it as a contemporary legend. In a time fraught with incredible rumors, parsing stories for embedded facts can be astonishingly difficult. This story appeared not to be of witchcraft, but was clearly of transgression of normative behavior, and seemed to pertain to a genre of tales that stress the initiates’ expectation of participating in the ritual. However, many years later, a similar story came to light once more, this time in a BBC News radio program (2006), which reported that a girl who had started to circumcise herself had died in the attempt. In scholarly literature, the threat of self-circumcision appeared in a paper describing the defiance with which Meru women and girls met colonial prohibition of genital cutting in the 1950s (Thomas, 1996).
Other rumors revolved around Muniko Zachary, a renowned circumciser from Bwirege in Tanzania. He had been operating on boys for the past forty-plus years, but lately had been ailing for some time, and his eyesight was failing. Rumor had it that he had been bewitched. While a circumciser with bad eyesight is reason enough for an initiate to be concerned, community members worried that even greater misfortune could pass on to the boys he would circumcise. Still, this explanation left room for the inchaama to reverse their decision to cancel initiations. For instance, a cleansing ceremony (ogosonsoora) could be carried out and the initiation season could proceed.
In a different version of the story, his recent sickness had made him partially blind. He wanted to seek medical help in Dar es Salaam, and thus requested the council of elders to release him from his initiation duty. Because of his long and dedicated service, he was told he could retire the following year. But in preparation, he was to identify his successor, and for this last year, be in charge of all the operations. The other man who had also been circumcising was unhappy with this decision, as it robbed him of a source of income. He is said to have bewitched Muniko Zachary, causing his illnesses and blindness. But because this younger man had himself been circumcised by Muniko Zachary, Muniko Zachary cursed the man for causing the loss of his vision, saying, “I am the one who circumcised you and you have seen it fit to do this to me. May everybody you circumcise die in your hands!” With these words, he compelled the younger man not to participate in the circumcision ceremonies. This version of the story came to me via a middle-aged man from Tanzania. A very similar version was circulating in Kuria-inhabited locations in the Rift Valley.
A more elaborate version was recorded from Victoria Gaati, the chief’s wife in Nyankare. In her account, the circumciser was cursed by the father of one of the boys he had operated on, following a fight between the two men over where the circumcision of the latter’s son had taken place. The father had been circumcised in the very first set Muniko Zachary operated on, and in his anger said something to the effect that since he belonged to the first set of boys who had been circumcised by Muniko Zachary, he was thus advising him to let the operation he did to his son be the last or else something dire would happen. Come this year’s ceremonies, Muniko Zachary refused to participate unless the boy’s father renounced his statement, after which a cleansing ceremony would need to occur.
Seeing that things were getting out of hand, the inchaama met and requested that the age-mates of the boy’s father confront their colleague and ask him to retract his earlier threat, so that the circumcision ceremonies could go on as planned. That Muniko Zachary had been ill was a consequence of what the boy’s father had said. According to Victoria Gaati, who was recounting the story, the cleansing ceremony could then take place and thus the initiation season could proceed as expected.
Yet another type of rumors circulating involved the internal dynamic of Bwirege’s generation classes (amakora). About a century earlier, when the cycle was at a similar configuration, a serious famine devastated the area. The young men of that time had to leave their communities to find food. They were gone too long, and by the time they came back, the elders had starved to death. So in order to ensure that youths about to be circumcised would survive the operation,