This book explores how ideas of development and witchcraft intersect in Kenya's Taita District, where state efforts at ‘development’ have borne little fruit. Smith conducted fieldwork in the mid 1990s, while Daniel arap Moi was clinging to power, and structural adjustment programmes – and the decline in employment opportunities that resulted – were biting hard. Thus, there is a turbulent background to this ethnography, and it vividly and movingly portrays how people attempted, often in vain, to get themselves a ‘little development’.
Smith demonstrates how development discourse has spread everywhere in Taita (albeit in its Kiswahili gloss of maendeleo), even though ‘development’ itself seems more out of reach than ever before. Witchcraft also permeates Taita: as well as being an idiom through which people explain an absence of development, it is also actively fought against in the name of development. The book's earlier chapters focus on these interrelated themes of development and witchcraft, providing a general background, and examining their local meanings in a context where male authority is threatened by an increasing household reliance on women's earnings, and where girls are increasingly reluctant to allow themselves to become commoditised in the quest for bridewealth.
Gender and age are thus given much attention, as is what Smith terms ‘tempopolitics’, referring to the management of ‘the flow and sequencing of time’ (p. 29). Smith weaves many strands of his work around this concept, including colonial ideas that modernity should be introduced gradually to Africans to avoid ‘atavistic’ reactions like Mau Mau, and Taita ambivalence to ‘traditional’ values and beliefs exemplified in the fighi protector shrines, which once protected Taita, but are now viewed as either obsolete or dangerous and in need of appeasement to help secure progress. Consequently, debates about the best course for the future are shot through with debates about the value of the past.
The book is at its most compelling in its ethnographic chapters. These immerse the reader in the ‘development’ projects of members of a particular family; aborted efforts to heal the present through traditional rituals; and the impact of the NGO Plan International. Chapter 7 is the most engaging, describing the antics of a Tanzanian witchfinder, Maji Marefu, who was invited to the area to weed out witchcraft and so help remove barriers to maendeleo. The description of his group, organised along the lines of an NGO, and their sweeps of the villages in search of occult paraphernalia is stunning ethnographic writing. In contrast, the more theoretical sections are densely written and infused with abstract musing about temporality. This gives the book its own different temporalities: while the ethnographic sections fly by, the theory applies the brakes. However, perseverance pays dividends: this insightful book provides a wonderful window onto the intricate relationship people have with development discourse in East Africa.
