Mumiani Season: Visual Aspects of a South Coast Kenyan Rumor

Abstract

This article analyzes visual aspects of an otherwise verbal communicative genre: rumor. The focus is an episode of public panic in southern coastal Kenya in 2013, about “mumiani”—politically connected gangs said to murder children for their eyes. I argue that widespread defacement of public images during the panic expressed dimensions of mumiani imaginaries that went unspoken in the verbal spread of rumors about them. These defaced images—the eyes of which were scratched out—also evoked regional cultural motifs relating to power, value and rain, expressing in a visual modality both the content of contemporary mumiani fears and the historical associations that make such rumors plausible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Athman Kibada, Tima Swalehe, and Mohammed Chiryauta for their invaluable assistance, and Robert Blunt, Hannah Chazin, Colin Halverson, Britta Ingebretson, and Anna Weichselbraun for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Notes

1 Lunga Lunga is Kenya’s southernmost administrative district, called a “constituency.” All references to “Lunga Lunga” are to this constituency, not the border town that shares its name.

2 The historical transformation of mumiani imaginaries is not as neat as this stratigraphic summary might suggest. Their reconfiguration is uneven, with fragments of older understandings reemerging in later contexts (hence my use of Benjamin’s concept of historical constellation). See Dingley (2022, 138–43) for a more detailed discussion of this complex history.

3 For an example of this sort of colonial administrative reportage, see Dingley (2018, 382).

4 For a perceptive analysis of the evidential functions of such metapragmatic labels in a different ethnographic context, see Paz (2009). Elsewhere (Dingley 2018, 386–387), I have shown how the circulation of mumiani stories can undermine the very distinctions upon which resulting “hierarchies of colonial credibility” (Stoler 1992) are built.

5 For another example of this sort of spatiotemporal-causal collapse in coastal Kenyan visual aesthetics, see Behrend (2013, 140).

6 This remains the only defaced banknote I have encountered in four years of research in Kenya.

7 On the density of associations around money, elders, and power in Kenya, see Blunt (2019).

8 Gideon Mwangangi Wambua & Another v. Independent Electoral & Boundaries Commission & Two Others’, Election Petitions Nos. 4 and 9 of 2013 (Consolidated).

9 On the intimacy of the Safaricom corporation and the Kenyan state, see Park and Donovan (2016). On Safaricom’s pioneering predatory lending by mobile app and its consequences for Kenya’s economy of credit and debt, see Donovan and Park (2019).

10 On the wider associations surrounding rain, heat, and money in the nearby Taita Hills, see Smith (2008).

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Zebulon Dingley

Zebulon Dingley is an Asst. Professor in the Department of History at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. His research explores the history of “occult” ritual and rumor in coastal Kenya from the 19th century to the present. E-mail: [email protected]