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Roundtable details
This review forms part of the roundtable on Grace A. Musila's A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder.
Grace A. Musila. A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder. James Currey/Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge UK.
£45.00/$80.00, Hardback, November 2015, 978 1 84701 127 5
Library e-book 978 1 78204 590 8
Africa-only paperback edition 978 1 84701 137 4, £14.99
Notes
1. See Johnson (1993, 218).
2. For a superb discussion of Piny Owacho as juridical utterance and critical implication, see Masolo, (2010, 195).
3. For Spivak, rumour ‘evokes comradeship because it belongs to every “reader” or “transmitter.” No one is its origin or source’ (1988, 213).
4. Macbeth's soliloquy, ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,’ is spoken in Act V, Scene V upon the death of his wife and during the approach of Birnam Wood.
5. Musila uses this term following an anonymous peer reviewer (2015, 11). I find her term ‘afterlives’ useful, specifically, for thinking through popular narrative as the ghosting of the historical event, or popular narrative as the ghosting of political decree.
6. Musila's focus is on Ngũgĩ's novel, Devil on the Cross.
7. See Kariuki (1963).
8. I offer this uncomfortable phraseology in the attributive spirit of Piny Owacho-like pastiche.
9. See Ward (1991, 381) and Gavron (1991, 183).
10. For true crime accounts of Benson's murder, see Humphry and Tindall (Citation1977) and Sharp, (1981). For a memoir of Benson and her lover, Hakim Jamal, see Athill (Citation1993).
11. Young (Citation1995) provides the most comprehensive account of the psychosexual desires at work in scientific racism.
12. Allegations naming the supposedly responsible politically-powerful figure were advanced in an article by John Ward, published in the Nairobi Law Monthly 62, March 1996.
13. For a brilliant environmentalist and psychoanalytic reading of genocide and national parks, see Hemsley (Citation2016).
14. ‘In the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, for instance, the majority of accommodation facilities were at the time [of Julie's murder] owned by multinational companies.’ (Musila Citation2015, 181).
15. Binyavanga Wainaina offers this imaginative framework of understanding: ‘In Pokot, an essential word, korok, allows me to glimpse, in a small way, how this landscape is seen through Pokot eyes. The word korok is three things: the tibia, a unit of physical space, and a unit of social space’ (2011, 198).