Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955

In colonial Kenya, procedure in murder cases dictated that each prisoner remanded on a capital charge undergo a standardized medical examination by the medical officer in charge of the Nairobi jail. This examination was directed toward ascertaining the prisoner’s physical and psychological health prior to appeals proceedings in the Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa. Information concerning physical and psychological states provided additional layers of evidence upon which the advocates and justices could draw in formulating arguments and decisions about the culpability of the prisoner. The beginning quotation represents a typical answer to a standard question on the medical officer’s examination form, “Does the question of witchcraft arise?” The inclusion of such a question points not only to the prevalence of witch-killings in colonial Kenya but also to broader imperial concerns with witchcraft and murder.

By the late 1930s, a nexus of juridical and administrative circumstances underscored the importance of considering witchcraft as a mitigating circumstance in capital cases. First, Rex v. Kumwaka remained a benchmark in adjudicating capital cases in which the witchcraft of the deceased was posed as mitigation. Case law suggests that justices in the East African colonies were increasingly considering witch-murder cases referentially rather than on a case-by-case basis. Further, jurisprudence from the post-Kumwaka period shows how witchcraft cases emerged as central to the development ideas of what a made a “reasonable” African and to elaboration of the key legal principle of “grave and sudden provocation.”