Among MijikendaFootnote ¹ of the Kenya coast, the male Kaya elders (azhere a Kaya) – custodians of sacred spaces and customary knowledge – traditionally undergo years of secretive ritual training and tribulation in order to accrue both expertise and seniority. Over the past few years, however, a series of scandals have fragmented this group, casting them into the national spotlight while fomenting debates about the nature of elders’ expertise. In the so-called ‘tribalist’ context of Kenyan politics, politicians of Mijikenda and of other ethnic backgrounds have sought out and paid Kaya elders for ritual anointing or blessing in order to win Mijikenda allegiance in their political campaigns. As public cynicism toward these events has mounted, various elders have accused one another of amateurism, fraudulence, greed and disloyalty to their fellow Mijikenda, throwing into relief the question of what counts as ‘real’ expertise within the community. Some members of the Mijikenda community bemoan what they see as the end of an era where elders’ expertise was tightly bound to customary moral authority. ‘These elders,’ laments one community member, ‘are turning from traditionalists to vendors of tradition.’

Although I discuss certain elements of the expertise that Mijikenda elders are expected to possess, my primary focus in this article is on the ideologies of expertise that have been both exposed and created during this era of perceived crisis. For what emerges in the narratives of Mijikenda elders and laypeople – narratives that circulate both ‘on the ground’ and in the many published newspaper reports surrounding these controversies – is an idealized and revealing model of the expertise considered to be under threat. This model is shot through with what Herzfeld has termed ‘structural nostalgia’; namely, a kind of longing for ‘an Edenic order … in which the balanced perfection of social relations [had] not yet suffered the decay that affects everything human’ (Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld1997: 109). Among Mijikenda, structural nostalgia involves the perception of an unblemished era in which elders’ expertise was inextricably bound up with a communitarian morality, devoid of selfish or political motives, and totally inalienable from the Mijikenda people. As Herzfeld notes, furthermore, structural nostalgia often has the paradoxical effect of uniting social antagonists upon shared terms. Indeed, both the critics of Mijikenda elders and the elders themselves, despite their differences of opinion on some matters, seem to invoke the same model of idealized elder expertise. These notions of expertise are not merely reflections of ‘tradition’ but also emergent from presentist struggles for personal power on the part of elders and for the collective identity of Mijikenda, many of whom fear that their community is losing cohesion and integrity in the face of capitalist forces, global religions, and the increasingly fierce multi-ethnic politics of the Kenya coast.

A word about the term ‘expertise’ is in order here, for a standard Western definition of this word, with all its connotations of individualism, interiority and mentation, may not be sufficient to capture what is at stake in discussions of Kaya elders’ expertise. To be sure, Kaya elders are considered repositories of traditional knowledge and of special skills such as the ability to attract rains and adjudicate disputes. Yet the expertise of community leaders in socio-centric societies is not usually limited to the possession of information or technical abilities; rather, it extends as well to specialized social comportment and heightened moral obligations. Among Mijikenda, all of these components of Kaya elders’ expertise – knowledge, comportment, morality – are inextricably bound up with an autochthonous Mijikenda ethnic identity. Parkin raises a similar issue in his discussion of the ideological wedding of traditional knowledge, ethnicity and (a theme that will also become important to my discussion) the sacred spaces of the Kaya themselves:

While these tenets obviously pre-dated the elders’ political scandals of the early 2000s, they are also foregrounded – perhaps even reinforced – during precisely the moment when certain elders are seen as threatening them. Although the events I discuss below are seen by many Mijikenda to have threatened the integrity of the elders and the very core of Mijikenda identity, the responses to the scandals have also reified the importance of elders’ morality, the secrecy of their knowledge, and their capacity to represent the Mijikenda as a whole. Folk idealizations of elders’ expertise, in other words, have been burnished in the light of these scandals and linked ever more tightly to an authentic ethnic identity in the Mijikenda imagination.

THE EXPERTISE OF THE KAYA ELDERS

The Kaya, which according to Parkin are ‘the unquestioned and absolute centre’ of knowledge and tradition among Giriama (Parkin Reference Parkin1991: 23) and among other Mijikenda as well, are sacred rings of lowland forest with a circular central clearing. According to legend, each of the nine culturally related Mijikenda peoples had their own Kaya (Spear Reference Spear1979: 6–7), and many of these gave rise to offshoot Kayas over time. Each Kaya was highly structured and territorially divided among four to six clans, or unilineal descent groups. There is some scholarly disagreement about the historical relationship between the Mijikenda population and Kaya spaces. According to Spear (1979) and Brantley (1981), before the nineteenth century the majority of Mijikenda lived in or near the Kaya under a centralized and relatively cohesive political structure overseen by elders, but with a population growth spurt in the mid-nineteenth century the Kayas largely emptied out (most are now occupied only by a small handful of elders, if any) and the elders’ authority became diffused as homestead heads became primary decision makers (Brantley Reference Brantley1981: 39). According to Willis, however, we should look sceptically on such tidy narratives of the Mijikenda past: ‘[t]he nineteenth century … saw not the steady breakdown of an established order but the continuation of a dispute over what that order should be’ (1993: 46). The mythical centrality of the Kaya may, he suggests, be an instance of the invention of tradition (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993), a ‘tradition’ that is often invoked as a means of historically legitimating the powers – actual, and hoped–for – of contemporary elders.

Despite the questions surrounding the particularities of Kaya history, all Mijikenda today consider the Kaya historically significant spaces that serve as burial grounds for some of the most venerated ancestors and the locus of vital traditional powers and rituals that are overseen by a small number of elders. The forests surrounding the central Kaya spaces are thought to be inhabited by spirits of deceased elders, and to house sacred medicines. Interactions with the central living area and the forest surrounding it are scrupulously policed by rules and supernatural strictures. While many Mijikenda rituals now take place in more mundane village settings outside the Kaya, there is no doubt that Kaya are considered the spatial seat of a Mijikenda essence (Parkin Reference Parkin1991), an essence that is also lodged in the sacred Mijikenda knowledge to which the elders, through the intercession of the spirits, have privileged access.

The idea of this essential knowledge and identity is particularly prized given that most Mijikenda today live in conditions of serious impoverishment and marginalization, finding themselves on the lowest rung of the ladder of capitalism and feeling like outsiders in most national political proceedings. Furthermore, customary Mijikenda ritual and knowledge have been profoundly marginalized by the presence of Christianity and Islam on the coast – a presence centuries-old, but increasingly influential in Mijikenda lives. Colonial authorities, missionaries and the Muslim elite have tended to denigrate local ritual practices as backward, superstitious and unworthy of being deemed ‘religion’ at all. As a result of such pressures, many urban and rural Giriama have internalized a degree of shame toward their customs and profess allegiance to either Christianity or Islam, though many also continue to practise variations on the theme of Mijikenda traditionalism (cf. McIntosh, forthcoming).

Historically, male knowledge of Mijikenda custom was conferred in a series of ritual stages that provided all male Mijikenda youth with a degree of age-graded expertise, culminating in ritually consecrated seniority.Footnote ² Male age-sets are known as rikas, with each rika being divided by seniority into thirteen sub-rikas (see Brantley 1978 for a detailed description of the intricacies of this system). Customarily, each of the sub-rikas has its own initiation ceremonies. According to some of my own informants, the first of these, called kwanza, involves assembling young (adolescent or pre-adolescent) initiates at night, blindfolding them, and warning them about the secretive nature of what they are to experience. These youth are instructed about certain rules and rites of the community, and told that they will die if they reveal community secrets. The rites are given special force through the drumming, singing and dancing of elder men, whose ritual songs praise the various clans associated with the Kaya. As a Mijikenda boy comes of age through a trajectory of further rituals, joining a new sub-rika approximately every three years, he learns of a vast range of customs, including the structure of Kaya life; Mijikenda governance and law; the many intricate rules of clan, family and marital organization; the potencies of the supernatural entities that populate Mijikenda life (including the godhead Mulungu, the spirits that intercede in human affairs, and the ancestral dead); the complex supernatural prohibitions upon certain kinds of sexual contact; the social role of the young warrior; and a great deal more, including many secrets that are off-limits to outside scholars.

Traditionally, the men in the most senior sub-rika (the youngest of whom were in their late thirties, though some were considerably older for reasons having to do with the contingencies of initiation timing and rika structure) were ritually confirmed in so-called kambi status, a stage of responsible adulthood with a supreme councillor function that formed the crux of Mijikenda gerontocratic government (Brantley Reference Brantley1978). Kambi status is conferred through two major steps: a protracted (sometimes years-long) training phase focused upon traditions of governance called sayo ra mudhangha, followed by a highly important instructional and oathing ritual known as kiraho,Footnote ³ which in the pre-colonial past was conducted about every three years (Brantley Reference Brantley1978, 1981).Footnote ⁴Kambi elders have been associated with a great range of expertise. At the level of occult abilities, the elders are guardians of the Kaya spaces, with privileged access to certain areas of the Kaya and to certain ritual instruments, including the protective charm known as fingo and the sacred mwanza friction drum used during rituals.Footnote ⁵ They are also responsible for ritually cleansing the Kaya, an act that ‘aims to clear out all the accumulated evil and contamination incurred by neglect of the Kaya and its rules’ (Parkin Reference Parkin1991: 29). Elder men are thought to control the rain, and have often been credited with relief from droughts (see, for instance, Parkin 1991: 28–9). They may intercede with the ancestors to prevent bad luck and sickness during ceremonies in which goods such as palm wine, food and cloth are extracted from the community and consumed (Willis Reference Willis1993: 42). Their expertise in understanding the medicinal and sacred value of certain trees and plants (mitishamba) qualifies them to serve as guardians of the forest surrounding the Kaya. And elders have historically held crucial political and economic positions as well, overseeing the Mijikenda role as middlemen in the trade between coastal towns and the interior, adjudicating the distribution of land and bridewealth, and serving on public councils to arbitrate disputes and impose fines (Brantley Reference Brantley1981: 8, 11). Through such functions, a flow of fees, fines, cattle and agricultural surplus was channelled to the elders, who continually redistributed such wealth. While their redistributions were not always equitable, individual elders rarely accumulated a great deal of wealth – or, if they did, generally ‘found themselves subject to exactions from other elders’ (Willis Reference Willis1993: 43). Indeed, as I have already indicated, the expertise of Mijikenda elders ideally (if not always in reality) involves a communitarian style of comportment, as well as other forms of moral wisdom. Giriama today, for instance, say that respected elders should renounce material luxuries, be highly disciplined in their habits, and be great listeners who hold their tongues while hearing out complaints in the community.

In addition to holding the kambi status that comes with the passage through the sub-rika rituals, adult Mijikenda males can also become members of various special societies (chama) of elders with varying roles and statuses, each of them involving its own induction rite or rites. The most known of these societies today are Kinyenzi, Habasi, Gohu and Vaya. Each society, furthermore, cultivates its own form of expertise. Those initiated into the Gohu society, for instance, have special roles and privileges associated with conspicuous consumption, redistribution and fertility. They tend to have the means to hold feasts and to marry more wives than others, and they are known for a special form of magic that ensures these wives’ fidelity and fertility (Parkin Reference Parkin1991: 209, citing Champion 1967). The society considered the ultimate ruling group is the exclusive Vaya, who have a judicial and policing function in the community, and are seen as custodians of especially potent herbal medicine and incantation, including the fearsome fisi hyena oath which is often used in trials of witchcraft. Today the Vaya society remains feared for its secret knowledge. While most chama societies are open to those willing to pay for entry and to undertake the requisite rituals of induction, the exclusive Vaya society is eligible only to men who are recruited by existing Vaya members.

The rituals surrounding the installation of elders – whether into general kambi status or the more specialized chama societies – avail themselves of quintessential Mijikenda symbolism. Drumming and dancing are not merely celebratory acts, but performative means of elevating age-sets to the next level or invoking the various spirits who can instruct and protect initiates. The mitishamba herbs, whether mixed with water, reduced to ash, or otherwise manipulated, often play a crucial role in consecrating initiates or conferring sacral powers upon the proceedings. Incantation in archaic and sometimes inscrutable versions of the Mijikenda language may be used to appeal to Koma tsi, Mulungu dzulu (ancestors in the earth, God on high) and to cast away negative powers while appealing to positive ones. And symbolic garb – ranging from feathered headdresses and fly whisks to coloured or embroidered clothing – is used to mark the special status of the new initiate. These rituals also frequently involve various forms of privation such as the renunciation of luxuries (alcohol, sex, and so forth), prolonged separation from family members, and more stringent physical and psychological trials.

Many details of these trials are shrouded in secrecy, reinforcing their aura of magic while strengthening belief in their potency (cf. Dilley, Gemmeke, Marchand and Thornton, this issue). Such secrecy, combined with the arduous ritual process itself, may also construct a kind of solidarity and pride among elders, underscoring the significance of their expertise in their own minds, as well as in the minds of outsiders. As Luhrmann observes:

As I explain below, an emphasis on secrecy appears frequently in the critiques surrounding the commodification of elders’ expertise – and secrecy in these discourses sometimes reifies not only the ideal of insularity among elders, but also an ideal of ethnic insularity. Secret knowledge, in the highly politicized contexts I describe, is also very much about preserving a freshly important ideal of ethnic authenticity and segregation.

According to Mijikenda oral history, kambi eldership was once a status ritually conferred on all males in the community, and was of course firmly located in the Kaya, where most Mijikenda lived. Today, however, Mijikenda men and women are scattered up and down the coast, many of them working as migrant labourers in urban centres, while most Kaya stand largely empty, occupied only by a few geriatric elders, some of whom are members of the Vaya or other specialized societies. Many Mijikenda, too, now profess allegiance to Christianity or Islam, as noted above, and both religions tend to see Mijikenda custom as a kind of barbarism (anathema to the civilizing qualities that world religions supposedly confer upon the heathen). As a result of such shifts, there has been a drastic decline in all of the rites of passage that train and transition Mijikenda males, including the crucial kiraho ritual that inducts men into kambi elder status. Sometimes the funeral of a Kaya elder prompts the community to pull together a kwanza ritual for a new generation of youth, in a push to preserve local custom, but many youth go on to secondary school and never experience another rite of passage. One senior Giriama elder claims that whereas a few decades ago he was approached by twenty or more youths each year seeking initiation into elderhood, today he sees fewer than five annually – and some of these abandon the sequence of rites after they've begun them, leaving them ‘more confused’ than not about Mijikenda custom (Kithi Reference Kithi2004). Today, the routes to elder status may take rather improvisational form, and at least some accredited with it have skipped some of the rituals they once would have undertaken. Brantley has argued that as the Mijikenda population dispersed from the Kaya and kiraho rituals to induct the kambi grew harder to coordinate, council membership grew increasingly ambiguous (1981: 41). To add to the potential confusion, as Parkin notes (1991: 39) there is some semantic slipperiness to the term ‘Kaya elders’, since the title is now often attributed to people who are not notably senior but who nevertheless participate in some fashion in the political and mystical activities associated with the Kaya, sometimes by apprenticing themselves to other elders and gaining access to rights to live in the Kaya in the process. But such apprenticeships are few and far between these days. Elders express fears that, when they die, no one will remain as a ‘living archive’ (in the words of one) for traditional knowledge. Ordinary Mijikenda, too, express concern about this potential loss. One Giriama man blames it on the demands of urban life:

Says another young man: ‘Well, the Kaya community has no future. Right now no new recruits are incorporated into the Kayas, and this is to the detriment of all of us. When the old men die, what we shall have is bush without expertise.’⁶

Although many Mijikenda value the idea of the elders as repositories of their cultural traditions, to many Mijikenda youth elders have come to seem a dying breed whose faintly antiquated expertise on matters such as rainmaking, land, adjudication, and traditional medicine has been largely supplanted by weather reports, title deeds, government courts, Westernized education and hospitals. It stands to reason that if Mijikenda elders cannot easily reach vertically to younger generations, they sometimes attempt to enhance their relevance and standing by reaching laterally to politicians, who – in exchange for a fee – may be blessed (kuhaswa) by the elders and sometimes awarded titular eldership in the process. I turn now to these relationships and the upheavals they have recently created.

ELDERS AND POLITICIANS

The politicization of Kaya elders and the commodification of their ritual expertise are not particularly new developments. Since the advent of European colonialism (if not before) Kaya elders attempted to carve out politically strategic relationships with non-Mijikenda in powerful places (cf. Parkin 1991). In decades past, senior Kaya elders have sold customary knowledge to tourists and foreign researchers (Parkin Reference Parkin1991: 34), reflecting a lack of perfectly insular ethnic secrecy (and perhaps a certain impurity of motive). And since at least the mid-twentieth century many Mijikenda politicians – including the late Kenyan nationalist Ronald Ngala (founder of the Mijikenda Union in 1945), his son Katana Ngala, and the late minister of Tourism Karisa Maitha – have visited Kayas for blessings, traditional rites and ceremonial installation as elders (see Parkin 1991: 42, 46). Politicians of other ethnic backgrounds, too, such as Raila Odinga (currently Prime Minister, but Lang'ata MP at the time of his blessing) and the past and current presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Mwai Kibaki have been ceremonially blessed or conferred with eldership. Such installations, of course, provide a symbolic ratification of the politicians’ standing, as the Mijikenda politicians come to seem more respectful of and integrated within Mijikenda traditions, while the non-Mijikenda ones typically hope they will garner Mijikenda votes. Such allegiance is particularly important in the contemporary political context, where Kenyan political parties are often divided along ‘tribal’ lines – a pattern tragically evident in the violent aftermath of the December 2007 election. The Kaya elders benefit from their ritual blessing of politicians, too, for despite their history of resentment toward governmental interference in Mijikenda affairs (Parkin Reference Parkin1991: 27), their endorsement of political candidates helps them to accrue a modicum of the politicians’ reflected glory while receiving remuneration such as animals for slaughter and consumption, palm wine and cash. The ceremonies, furthermore, are often reported in the national newspapers, and if they are colourful and public enough they may be televised. The Kaya elders’ status as Mijikenda experts and emblems of the Mijikenda community may be semiotically reinforced through such events.

But the last few years have brought a storm of criticism toward this symbiotic relationship between politicians and elders. Initially, the controversy focused upon Mzee Simba Wanje Kagujo, who died in his eighties in April 2007. For many years the chair of the primary Giriama Kaya (Kaya Fungo), Simba Wanje was known as both a prominent Mijikenda elder (indeed, he was sometimes referred to as the ‘chairman’ of Mijikenda elders) and a champion of certain politicians. On 20 April 2003, he presided over a series of ceremonies in Kaya Fungo for the (now deceased) Giriama politician Karisa Maitha, the high-profile MP for Kisauni and Minister of Tourism. Although Maitha was rumoured to have incited Mijikenda (sometimes violently) against upcountry tribes and coastal Swahili and Arab Muslims, he was rhetorically framed by his advocates as a champion of Mijikenda causes and one of the great hopes of the Mijikenda people. During Maitha's rituals in Kaya Fungo, he was photographed by several media outlets shirtless and in bare feet – a sign that he was setting aside the cosmopolitan garb of the politician to adopt the customary appearance of a Kaya elder. In one ritual Maitha was given a fly whisk symbolizing his leadership status, and he emerged from the Kaya as the symbolic ‘King of the Mijikenda’. Rumours and newspaper reports (see, for instance, Mdoe 2004) claimed that Maitha had been not only crowned ‘King’ but also ‘installed as a Kaya elder’ – implying that not only symbolic leadership but also the elder's full expertise had been conferred upon him. Critics of Maitha's politics were aghast at his new titular status, claiming that Maitha had muscled his way into tribal leadership and purchased fraudulent rituals, promoting himself as an expert without possessing any substantive expertise.

Simba Wanje, of course, was seen as complicit in this corruption of expertise and authority, and matters grew worse for him the following year. After Karisa Maitha's untimely death of heart failure in August 2004, more than twenty contenders emerged to compete for his seat in Parliament. A procession of these politicians decided to follow in his footsteps and approached Simba Wanje for his blessing, bringing the usual gifts of animals, wine and cash, rumoured to be as much as Ksh40,000. These events came to an abrupt end when Simba Wanje and several other elders at Kaya Fungo hosted a former KANU councillor for Kisauni (1997–2002), Mwajaribu Mwandugu. Mwandugu had sponsored a feast, and the elders were in the process of blessing his contestation of the Kisauni by-election. But the ritual was disrupted by a rival camp of elders led by one Tayari Mwaringa Chuma, who accused Wanje of failing to share the proceedings equitably among elders. The police were called in, and while Wanje himself was never arrested, the rival group claimed that he was no longer qualified to serve as a senior Mijikenda elder. As if to substantiate this claim, rumours abounded (and were of course hotly contested) that Simba Wanje had ‘stolen’ a ritual instrument from the Kaya and ‘sold’ it to a researcher of some sort.Footnote ⁷ Wanje was effectively excommunicated from the Kaya by the force of such critiques – though his detractors, particularly Tayari Chumba, were themselves accused of greed and fraudulence by Wanje's own supporters. Later, Chumba would complain to an informant of mine that elders were being systematically used and corrupted by politicians: ‘The politicians are using us … they come [to the Kaya] when they want power and fame, but it's like they buy our expertise. It's a seller and buyer relationship. They don't need our expertise … they only want us during the political season.’

Wanje's shame was endorsed by several Mijikenda elders from other Kayas, including the elder Pekeshe Ndeje. Yet Ndeje was a controversial figure in his own right. Although he hails from a different Mijikenda sub-group (Rabai, rather than Giriama), he had worked in conjunction with Simba Wanje for several decades, helping to bless numerous prominent politicians. Ndeje then began to branch out on his own, and provoked a firestorm of controversy in early 2006 when he blessed Najib Balala, a coastal Arab politician who had recently announced he would be making a bid for Kenya's presidency. Balala is well known as a supporter of federalist ethno-territorial (majimbo) sentiments, sometimes styling himself as someone who might save coastal peoples – Arabs, Swahili, and Mijikenda – from the incursions of upcountry wealth. During Balala's Kaya ritual, which took place near the Giriama-centred Kaya Fungo, he was dressed in photogenic Mijikenda regalia, with journalists in hot pursuit. Once again, the event was framed by the national media and by rumours on the ground reacting to the anointing of a politician – this one an Arab – as a Mijikenda ‘tribal elder’.

Balala may have hoped to portray himself as a supporter of pan-ethnic coastal rights through this ritual, but in fact the event tapped into longstanding antagonism between Mijikenda and the Muslim Swahili and Arabs of the coast (cf. McIntosh, forthcoming). It also triggered a series of further accusations about who should count as the ‘real’ spiritual leader of the Mijikenda, and about the relationship between ethnicity and expertise. Uproar ensued as members of the Mijikenda community deplored the idea that a non-Mijikenda – particularly an Arab, hailing from a group that many Mijikenda currently regard as their oppressors – had been given access to secret knowledge of the Kaya and to titular jurisdiction over a body of expertise and a tradition of comportment thought to house the very essence of their people. Indeed, the notion that an outsider could so precipitously become ‘an elder’ heaps cynicism upon the title, while implying that highly secretive Mijikenda knowledge has been opened and dispersed to unworthy individuals. Pekeshe Ndeje was branded a fraud by many in the community, who decried the selling of traditional ritual and ethnically marked forms of expertise to politicians willing to pay in food and cash. A top Mijikenda administrative body, the ‘Kaya Advisory Council’, was so incensed it refused to recognize any titles bestowed on leaders installed by Ndeje, and ‘asked Mr. Balala to apologize for his installation as an elder’ (Nation correspondent 2006). Another administrative body called the ‘Coast Kaya Elders Advisory Council’ described the mere blessing of non-Mijikendas in the Kaya as ‘an insult’, and appealed to have the Balala anointment ritualistically ‘reversed’ (Kwena Reference Kwena2006). The Rabai Kaya elders, too, met in a traditional court and, rejecting Balala's anointment, also resolved not to recognize Pekeshe Ndeje, suggesting he had claimed authority without undergoing the proper rituals. And Simba Wanje himself held a press conference to denounce Balala's anointment and decry Ndeje's authority – thus indicating his clear awareness that the struggle for authority among self-ascribed Mijikenda elders was playing out on a very public, even a national stage.⁸

Amazingly, in the midst of these claims and counter-claims a third and then a fourth Mijikenda elder threw their hats into the ring. About a week after the Balala fiasco, a Giriama named Fundi Muramba issued a statement through a spokesman, claiming that he was the proper leader of all Kaya elders, and that any other person claiming to be leader was an ‘impostor’ (Nation correspondent 2006).Footnote ⁹ The fourth man, Mwambo wa Manyoka, who had enjoyed the honour of dressing Najib Balala for Ndeje's controversial function, also laid claim to Mijikenda leadership. Neither claim was taken particularly seriously, but both were symptomatic of an apparent leadership vacuum into which others hoped to step.

We have seen, then, how the anointing of politicians fomented acute anxiety about the authority of the elders who conducted these ceremonies, and a more general sense of crisis concerning the safeguarding of Mijikenda expertise. How did elders themselves respond to the charges against this? How did their responses, along with discourse among ordinary Mijikenda, both reflect and shape Mijikenda models of elders’ expertise?

PERFORMING AUTHENTICITY

The power of Kaya elders has long been subject to various external challenges and internal rivalries, and they have long been a politically savvy and strategically minded group (Parkin Reference Parkin1991; Willis 1993). Yet the rhetorical responses to the perceived ‘Mijikenda identity crisis’ (Kithi Reference Kithi2004) of the mid-2000s recurrently returned to an essentialist model of the ideal Kaya elder against whom the transgressing elders were judged. Such judgements were underpinned – whether explicitly or implicitly – by a kind of ‘structural nostalgia’ for a more pure ‘traditional’ era in which elders’ status was unshakeable, their morality untouched by political or economic motivations, and their secrets closely guarded. Herzfeld's predictions about structural nostalgia, furthermore, are amply fulfilled in this case, for both the critics of the elders and the elders themselves appeared to share and to reify a definition of the ideal traditional elder in contradistinction to the corrupt innovator, while reinforcing the notion that a strong connection to the purer past and to the Kaya itself – the (nominally) autochthonous source of Mijikenda people – is a central means of establishing an elder's authenticity. Such rhetoric about tradition draws of course on past discourses, but it is also a product of contemporary anxieties and strategies, for the elders under fire were at pains to reify their authority and the importance of their expertise, while Mijikenda laypeople anxiously hoped to preserve in their ‘true’ elders an ideal Mijikendaness in the face of contemporary capitalist and political corruption.

Most of the elders embroiled in these disputes spoke to journalists at some length, thereby gaining a platform on which to perform their authenticity and expertise in the face of their critics. Many, furthermore, used the opportunity to defuse the charge that their relationship with politicians was avaricious or subservient. Simba Wanje, for instance, argued that Karisa Maitha could not possibly have bribed or coerced his way into his Kingship because the Kaya elders learn who is to be anointed as King through occult prophecies:

Wanje was in the habit of reminding those around him of the higher spiritual forces that guided him and controlled the fate of others, too; such reminders surely functioned (at least in part) to shore up his own credibility as a repository of specialized and even sacred knowledge. During his dramatic ouster from the Kaya, Wanje warned the police officers who had raided the sacred space that they had desecrated its purity and put themselves at risk of harm (Thoya Reference Thoya2004). Several months after that, journalists visiting Wanje at home reported that he continually ‘cautions them to heed his advice lest they anger the spirits’ (Kithi Reference Kithi2005). After Maitha's death, at a time when Wanje was no longer welcome in the Kaya, Wanje further emphasized his spiritual connections by speaking again to members of the press and invoking a ‘strange’ dream he had on the day the politician died, in which he saw the ancestors calling Maitha to join them (Mwakio Reference Mwakio2004). Emboldened by this mystical message, Wanje was among those gathered at Malindi airport to meet Maitha's body when it arrived at the coast; he told journalists he hoped to perform certain traditional Mijikenda rituals such as offering animal sacrifices at the minister's house and at the graveside, wrapping the body in a raffia mat and possibly the skin of a bull, and sprinkling a mixture of water and herbs called vuo onto the grave – rites that would have marked Maitha as essentially a Mijikenda traditionalist despite his Christian leanings.Footnote ¹⁰ All of these rhetorical manoeuvres may have been entirely sincere, and at the same time all performatively reassert traditional hierarchies in which politicians, representatives of the state, and professionals answer to the authority of spirits and elders, rather than the other way around.

Several elders took pains to protect the very category of eldership by rhetorically purifying the motives behind and the terms of their political installations and blessings. Not only did Simba Wanje insist that Maitha's installation had a spiritual rather than a political inception; he also emphasized to journalists that at the time of his death Maitha still had two crucial stages to carry out before being considered ‘fully’ as Kaya elder (Mwakio Reference Mwakio2004). With this assertion, Wanje responded to public anxiety that the elders’ expertise and authority was cheapened by such political installations – and, in so doing, indirectly preserved his own. Wanje and another elder also insisted that Maitha had a genuine thirst for knowledge of Mijikenda ways – indeed, they said, around the time of his installation, he had begun visiting schools to educate Mijikenda youth about the cultural significance of the Kaya and about the path to becoming an elder (Kithi Reference Kithi2004). Pekeshe Ndeje, too, attempted to clarify the political rituals he had performed, telling journalists later that, contrary to reports, he had not installed Balala as an ‘elder’ but had only ‘blessed him’ to seek the presidency, and agreeing that non-Mijikenda could not be installed as Kaya elders (Kithi Reference Kithi2006b). ‘When we are blessing people we ask them to dress in traditional attire but this does not amount to making one an elder,’ he explained.Footnote ¹¹ With this apparent back-pedalling, Ndeje attempted to reassure the Mijikenda community of the ethnic exclusiveness of the elders’ secrets and status.

Wanje and several other elders further defended their expertise by claiming the moral high ground against other putative elders, in dramatic discourse that sometimes verged on the sanctimonious. Simba Wanje echoed his very critics when he decried a culture of money worship for the mushrooming of what he considered ‘fake elders’ who are attempting to ‘cheat aspiring politicians’ without themselves commanding any authoritative understanding of Kaya custom (Kithi Reference Kithi2005). He charged these frauds with being under-qualified to make rain, and took credit himself for the heavy coastal rains of June 2005. In response to one journalist's invocation of allegations that he is a ‘witch’, Wanje offered a tantalizing glimpse into the moral dimension of his initiation into elderhood: ‘I have never bewitched anybody in my life. To be a Kaya elder, one must vow never to harm any living creature’ (ibid.). In his own bid for moral authority, when Pekeshe Ndeje got word that some Kaya elders had threatened to prosecute him for fraudulence through the governmental courts, he responded with an outrage that signalled his traditional expertise: ‘I'm shocked that some people are talking about taking others to court when a true Kaya elder knows exactly what is to be done in the event of conflict’ (Kithi Reference Kithi2006b). Similarly, when the spokesman for Fundi Muramba (the third contender for Kaya leadership) was asked why Muramba had not come out to defend his position, he replied: ‘a Kaya elder is a respected and disciplined person who does not indulge in public bickering’ (Nation correspondent 2006).¹²

Clearly these discourses register the perceived importance of the elders’ moral integrity as a crucial component of their expertise. Other narratives – shared by elders and laypeople alike – focus on elders’ epistemological privileges, underscoring the importance of secrecy to their knowledge. As Mzee Wanje explained to a journalist who was inquiring about Mijikenda initiation rites in the wake of his scandal: ‘They are community secrets. Explaining them to you will invite a curse on the community. If you want to learn more about the Kaya, come to the forest and I will explain everything to you as I initiate you’ (Kithi Reference Kithi2005).

Wanje's rival, Tayari Chuma, performed his expertise in a similar way. In speaking to a Giriama informant of mine, who accused Chuma of ‘ganging up’ on Simba Wanje and fragmenting Mijikenda solidarity in the process, Chuma drew himself up in the protective and authoritative cloak of secrecy:

Yet in the Mijikenda community at large, it seemed that the elders’ anointing of politicians of various backgrounds had created a deep current of anxiety about the disbursement of precious secrets to ethnic outsiders. Said one cynical townsman in Kaloleni:

Evidently, the perception of financial corruption among elders is bound up with a more general concern that an immoral elder might betray secret Mijikenda knowledge to the world, thereby threatening the very core of Mijikenda identity, as Parkin suggests (1991). This anxiety seems especially contemporary. Traditionally, of course, men going through Kaya initiations are urged to keep the secrets privy to the community of elders, but in narratives like the above, the in-group and out-group expand to the point that the secrecy of the elders is the secrecy – and, perhaps, a rare source of pride – of the Mijikenda people themselves. Such concerns are presumably highlighted in an era in which Mijikenda feel both disrespected and oppressed in their economic, political and religious competitions with other ethnic groups.

The scandals over elders’ expertise and authority also foregrounded the importance of the Kayas themselves, as elders and their supporters validated their authenticity on grounds of their autochthonous relationship with these sacred spaces. Importantly, these relationships bring an ideological dimension not only of space but of time, for the Kaya are associated with an ancient and inherited Mijikenda pedigree, and – as discussed earlier – a bygone era in which the ancestral elders held sway. Although the current Kaya elders have a broad range of historical and family relationships to the Kaya, discussions in the wake of the political scandals tended to crystallize around an idealized model of such relationships and around the notion of the heritability of expertise. Asked to explain the roots of his expertise, for instance, one member of the Mijikenda Council of Elders who had criticized the relationship between elders and politicians replied: ‘My parents and grandparents were Kaya elders who followed the tradition very closely … . I inherited this from my elders and was blessed with the same gift.’ Said another: ‘My own expertise comes from my grandfather who was an elder … . I learned from him and I also went through the customary rituals. After his death I was in line to inherit [the eldership].’ In many of these discourses, inhabitance of the Kaya – ideally, inhabitance that stretches into one's childhood and one's descent lineage – is a crucial means of asserting authenticity. One layman, Saumu Karisa, used Simba Wanje's longstanding inhabitance of the Kaya as evidence for his authenticity, saying: ‘Simba Wanje is the true elder; he has been in Kaya Fungo his entire life.’ In response to attacks on his own authenticity, Pekeshe Ndeje told informants of mine he was a Kaya elder ‘by birth’ because his parents and grandparents were, and went on to insist that a true elder must be born in the Kaya of Kaya parents. Tayari Chuma reiterated this ideal in a separate conversation with an informant:

In a later discussion Chuma conceded that in fact his initial assertions had been too rigid; many elders were not ‘brought up in’ the Kaya – nor, in point of fact, had he been, although he maintained that his parents had.Footnote ¹³ But Chuma's original and, it seems, exaggerated portrayal of the origins of elders’ expertise highlights the extent to which contests over authenticity generate idealistic and essentialist rhetoric. And like all of the above discourses, it implicitly consolidates the treatment of the Kaya as a synecdoche for Mijikendaness itself. As each elder reaffirms his yoke to the Kaya, so, too, is he implicitly affirming his ethnic loyalty and the depth of his ethnically specific knowledge.

I have shown that the responses to the political scandals of the Kaya elders drew upon and reified certain models of elders’ expertise and morality, while highlighting the elders’ capacity to represent the Mijikenda as a whole. In some of these discourses, a lofty portrait of elders’ expertise is painted, in which the spirits guide every important decision, the moral integrity of their training is unshakeable, and the Kaya provided the crucible for their very upbringing and the formation of their knowledge. But, strikingly, not everyone in the community engages in this essentialist nostalgia for a pure ‘traditional’ elder. Some have no particular qualms about elders blessing politicians, seeing the publicity as potentially good for Mijikenda standing on the national stage. And some engage in a more individualistic kind of reasoning about the elders’ commodification of their skills. One layperson, for instance, argues that Simba Wanje should have been allowed to keep the proceeds from the politicians he blessed rather than redistributing them. His reasoning draws on a capitalist metaphor: ‘People here don't share expertise. For example, I'm a mechanic. Does this mean for every car I repair here in Kaloleni I should share the payment with other mechanics? It's not logical.’ Evidently, a nostalgic model of the elders’ ‘traditional’ role is not the only one in circulation, leading one to wonder what kinds of roles future elders might inhabit and how they will be regarded by others in Mijikenda communities.