Kenda Mutongi, Worries of the Heart: widows, family, and community in Kenya. Chicago IL and London: University of Chicago Press (pb $20.00 – 978 0 22655 420 4; hb $50.00 – 978 0 22655 419 8). 2007, 256 pp.
Kenda Mutongi's social history of twentieth-century Maragoli widows raises provocative questions about how scholars and their interlocutors might differ in evaluating the political morality of colonialism. Told through the stories of the now ageing children of Maragoli widows who lived under colonial rule, this book offers up current debates about the revision of the African past. The central and organizing tension in Mutongi's historical ethnography is sprung loose by her acknowledgment that elderly informants did not take her critical stance on the ‘callous immorality of colonial rule’ (p. 195). In her selection of lucid narratives, Mutongi offers the profoundly contentious, but nonetheless often heard argument that colonial rule was better than the unhappy time of the present. The paradox she explores in this book will resonate with readers already familiar with discussions of public morality in post-colonial Kenya. How is it that a pervasive nostalgia for the colonial past sits alongside growing disillusionment and cynicism towards post-colonial leadership?
Having grown up in Maragoli, Mutongi aptly reveals that while a community's leadership may want to foster a rhetoric of homogeneity and unity, it is usually riven by debate issuing from competing perspectives. In this case, gender takes centre stage in her analysis. Mutongi's own struggle to understand imperial nostalgia perhaps overlaps with other members of the so-called ‘Uhuru generation’. These are Kenyans who grew up sandwiched between fresh memories of the ‘contradictory muddle of opportunity and oppression’ that colonial authority thrust upon Africans (p. 10) and the initial optimism of independence that latterly crumbled into despair, after the leadership of post-colonial Kenya failed to deliver on their promises.
This historical ethnography of the Maragoli, ‘a fairly typical rural community of Africa today’ (p. 1), contributes significantly to an arising body of studies that focus on the gendered course of Kenya's social history (for examples, Claire Robertson, Lynn Thomas and Luise White). Through Mutongi's position as a ‘daughter’ of Maragoli, however, she establishes new sensitivities in the telling of that history. Part of Mutongi's efforts in this direction is to discuss the Luragoli idiom of kehenda mwoyo, translated as ‘worries of the heart’, a performative act evoked by widows to call attention to their compromised social position and to lobby men – brothers-in-law, sons, elders and government-appointed chiefs – to act on their behalf in securing resources and sponsorship in a patriarchal community. The author effectively traces the reconfigurations of this idiom throughout the early and later colonial periods, before demonstrating how widows increasingly came to exploit, often unsuccessfully, a new language of citizenship, legal recognition and entitlement in the immediate post-colonial period.
The organization of the book corresponds less to theoretical schemes than to a chronology that lasts approximately a century, inclusive of Mutongi's fieldwork in the mid-1990s. The reader might question why thirteen chapters relate to the colonial period, while only two chapters are reserved for speaking to a relatively under-explored post-colonial history. The strength in Mutongi's last two chapters, dealing with the broken promises of political independence, calls out for more work in this direction.
Three highlights of this book point to how community, one of the author's main theoretical constructs, is powerfully antagonistic to the people whose social relations make it up. Mutongi's work traces complaints about ‘black rule’ in a manner that ought to make readers reconsider the facile residual distinction between colonialism and the post-colony. With her focus on the family disputes and the socio-cultural ambivalences of Christianization in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century, readers are encouraged to appreciate the costs exacted by rapid social change on ideas of certainty. Mutongi's tact in analysing the roots of conflicts over land within Maragoli and the rise of nepotism among the political and economic elite in the 1940s is a welcome historical antidote to the readily digestable laments about corruption so frequently read about in the East African press. Finally, in careful treatment of the legal reconfiguration of marriage and marital rights following Kenya's independence in 1964, the book reveals its thesis to be the intimate realities of intra-African conflicts.
Worries of the Heart is an empirically informed contribution to the historical ethnography of post-colonial Kenya, but raises at least one potentially unfinished line of enquiry and thought. In the light of the paralysis of debate among foreign scholars inflicted by recent political violence, it seems that the gendered dimension of the post-general election crisis could be more acutely informed by Mutongi's perspective. This is how I read this book, as an experimental, maybe tentative treatise on the gendered tensions of ethnicity and nationality. Perhaps in another work of similar import, Mutongi could synthesize a long-overdue ethnographic investigation into the ways in which gender is canalized into disputes about the very meanings of ethnicity and nationality. For her part, however, I think Worries of the Heart is a ground-breaking foray into understanding this complex heart of conflict.
