Roundtable on Grace A. Musila’s A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder

This roundtable is the first of a series to be published in the journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. In these roundtables, reviewers from different institutional, regional and disciplinary homes will be invited to respond, from these homes, to a particular text. The aim is to generate inter-disciplinary discussion, and to foster inter-generational and inter-regional conversations. The first text chosen for the roundtable is Grace A. Musila’s A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (published in hardback in the James Currey “African Articulations” book series, as well as in a paperback version for distribution on the African continent).

Roundtable headnote

In A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder Musila writes about the rumours and gossip surrounding the disappearance and death of British tourist Julie Ward in the Maasai Mara in 1988, and insists on the unknowability of her subject: Julie Ward, as well as the reasons for her death. Particularly generative of new approaches is her argument that the various discursive frameworks around Julie Ward’s death do not provide us with complementary evidence that leads to a more complete picture of the death. Such a belief in the power of adding archives together, in the hope of yielding a greater and clearer picture, assumes that the various local and transnational knowledge networks can be layered, stitched and patched to produce a bigger, “truer”, truth. Instead, Musila argues provocatively, layering and adding the different locations of knowledge production and circulation lead to a particular lack of focus and clarity – what she calls “opacity”.

In recent years scholarship on secrets, gossip and rumours has provided us with richly generative ways of thinking about how knowledge is constituted, and how and where such knowledge circulates. In the social sciences, the promise that an academic project has negotiated access to secrets and rumours can imbue the analysis of the data with extraordinary weight. Many have theorised the ways in which informants, interviewees and research subjects either facilitate or deny researchers’ access to secrets and locally held knowledge, most famously perhaps James Scott through his useful concept of the hidden transcript, but there are many other theorisations. In rooms where African literature is discussed, this question often surfaces in the form of the location of our reading, the degree and nature of our orientation and the inflection we give to our reading. Musila’s book nudges us to rethink many of these binaries, and to accept that the nature of archives is to lie and to encode. Her insights around knowledge production and circulation have an intellectual and conceptual reach that extends far beyond the case study of Julie Ward’s murder.

Striking in the response to the book has been the personal nature of many readers. So, for example, Stephanie Newell writes in an Afterword, included at the back of Musila’s book, of her personal connections to Julie Ward, and Ambreena Manji (below in the roundtable) remembers eating breakfast and reading about the case in the Nairobi dailies, when she should have been revising for her exams. Elsewhere, Luise White has written memorably that gossip is not only the medium through which people debate the change around them; it is the medium through which we debate the very terms in which those changes are to be described (White 2000, p. 209). Musila’s book elicits this response in readers: to animate us and to generate ever more, and always lively, discussion. In the response of her readers there is often an urge to whisper in the author’s ear another anecdote, to send her another newspaper clipping – adding to the already bulging files of case studies. The responses collected here, and overheard during many conversations with readers, confirms that the case will continue to generate more rumours and gossip, and that there will be many future conversations. This murder, whose many loose threads refuse to be tied together, keeps provoking and generating new conversations. Musila’s book gives us a conceptual grammar for what these conversations mean for the work we do as readers of news, or literary, legal and medical texts.

The responses included in this roundtable come from a number of disciplinary homes, and in each of them the readers respond to, engage with, and are drawn not only into the story of Julie Ward, but into the stories about the story of Julie Ward. The ways in which knowledge circulates, congeals and flows in stops and starts is integral to their responses to this challenging book, which cautions us to be aware of how much of what we do in university classrooms, and in academic publishing, is a form of rumour-mongering and gossip.

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