I used to tick the ‘single’ box on forms interested in my marital status. This was the truth. It was also true that I had two husbands. I acquired both of them at birth, though I met one of them posthumously. I loved and continue to love different things about my two husbands. I loved my living husband's particular brand of craziness. His chronic political incorrectness is in a class of its own, even by the standards of older Black people, who often dispense with common politeness as they age, and say and do as they please. In his 90s, my husband's offside thoughts and utterances were second only to his belief in hard work as a moral principle. Yet that sharp tongue, caustic wit and immodest swearing is a deceptive shell of toughness, beneath which lies the gentlest, most generous old man who has ever loved me.

But if my cantankerous husband taught me to look forward to that age when I could flout all social expectations of politeness, my posthumous husband taught me something even more precious: he showed me a different face of death. Before meeting him, death meant a confusing mix of grief, adults’ tears and their insistence that good children went to heaven and enjoyed all those impossibly fresh fruits – some of whose names I didn't know – and played with cute lion cubs and lambs on green gardens beside fresh blue streams, as The Watchtower magazines promised. True, I longed for those perfect fruits. Somehow, the juicy passion fruits and creamy avocados from our garden looked apologetic beside these Jehovah's Witness fruit baskets. And yes, I wanted nothing more than to play with those lion cubs as I dipped my feet into those infinitely blue streams. Still, I remained unswayed by this version of the hereafter. Even at that tender age, I had soaked up the spiritual arrogance that marked the Catholic children of my parish. We knew we were the chosen ones. And instinctively, we considered these Watchtower heavens a little too syrupy.

But my late husband introduced me to a different face of death. He had been laid to rest under a smooth gravestone, right in front of his house, that bore his name and date of death. With that gravestone, he taught me a lot about death.

My fear of South African taxi drivers goes back to an encounter in my early days in Johannesburg in the early 2000s. I was in a taxi van on Jan Smuts Avenue, going to Braamfontein, in Johannesburg. I needed to be at WITS University by 12.30 for a meeting. It was 11.15, and there was a stop near Braamfontein Centre on Jan Smuts, right across from one of the University entrances. I was confident I would be on time for my meeting, having made this trip countless times before. By the time we got to my stop, I was the only passenger left in the taxi. I asked the driver to please drop me at Braamfontein Centre, to which he responded, ‘yhini hawukhulumi?’

I suddenly remembered a Facebook status update by a well-known radio presenter on an English medium radio station, who had posted one morning: ‘Today, I don't feel like speaking English, I am #unableToCan speak today. Akhant.’

As we drove deeper into the Johannesburg CBD towards the notorious Hillbrow precinct, well known to many foreign students as a no-go area, a cold panic started settling in my stomach at not only missing my meeting, but also being stranded in Hillbrow with all its reputed horrors. I begged him to drop me, but he just calmly kept asking why I was speaking English. Was I not Black? He stopped somewhere in Hillbrow, and dropped me off, with a firm word of advice: ‘learn your language!’

When I told my friends about the encounter, they asked me why I hadn't responded in Kiswahili. This bit of wisdom has saved me many taxi crises since. In situations that hover towards an accusation of being a ‘coconut’—black on the outside, white inside—I simply respond in Kiswahili ‘sielewi unachosema’ (‘I don't understand what you are saying’). My response works wonders. The tone of these conversations changes from aggressive to curious.

On 17 September 1988, the Daily Nation featured a short article titled ‘British tourist eaten by beasts’. The Kenyan newspaper quoted Kenyan police as saying they did not know how the woman had died or which animals had eaten her, but that lions, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards were among the animals in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve where the remains had been found five days earlier. The woman in question was Julie Ann Ward, a 28-year-old British tourist. She had been reported missing on 6 September, before her remains were found on 13 September. This book is about Julie Ward's death.

I did not set out to write about Julie Ward. My journey to the story of her life and brutal death was far less deliberate. In fact, Julie Ward found me. Initially, I wanted to write about rumours of political and politicized assassinations in Kenya. Growing up in Kenya, rumours about politicians’ misadventures and highprofile court cases rubbed shoulders with tales of Abunuwasi's escapades in our story-telling worlds. Some of these tales found their way into what T. Michael Mboya terms ‘soundtracks of our youth’. So, while the state broadcaster Kenya Broadcasting Corporation religiously flooded the airwaves with ‘patriotic’ songs in praise of the then ruling party, Kenya African National Union (KANU), and the Daniel Toroitich arap Moi presidency, the rumour networks collaborated with rugby fans and students, to produce cover versions of such songs. In place of patriotic songs like ‘Kenya Nchi, yangu / Kenya Nchi yangu na ninaipenda!’ we sang ‘Kenya Nchi, yangu / Kenya Nchi, yangu na ‘toto Jonathan!’ We never realized it at the time, but on hindsight, these songs were accurate commentaries on the political elite's sense of its ownership of the country: Kenya belonged to the political elite and those in their networks, as a culture of personal rule and patronage took root, first in the Jomo Kenyatta regime of 1963–1978 immediately after flag independence, then in the Moi regime of 1978–2002, later to be perfected by the Mwai Kibaki regime of 2002–2012 and then the current Uhuru Kenyatta regime that took over in 2012. This prompted Kenyan rumour mills to update the terminology for this plutocracy by coining new terminology: wananchi (ordinary citizens) and wenyenchi (owners of the country).

Atieno Odhiambo's ‘Hegemonic Enterprises and Instrumentalities of Survival’ sums up Kenya's political history in the twentieth century as

Odhiambo identifies four historical themes in this political biography of Kenya: ‘state power and who should control that power’, ‘the tyranny of property pitting the haves and the have-nots’, ‘the politics of clan and tribe, pitting insiders against outsiders [translated] into the idiom and practice of ethnic cleansing’ and ‘the theatre of world citizenship, which links the individual and the state to an international discourse on democracy … human rights and international laws against all forms of discrimination’ (2002: 225). Each of these themes was to feature in Julie Ward's murder in some form, from state security institutions frustrating the family's search for answers, possibly in the interests of economically (and politically) well-placed individual(s), to the spectre of ‘ethnic’ militias training in the Mara Game Reserve and the framing of the case within an international discourse of human rights, as I discuss later in the book.

Interlaced in Atieno Odhiambo's compact history of Kenya and his four strands of the country's political biography is a recurrent motif of violence, whose bloody footprints – to use that patriotic trademark of the Kenyatta and Moi regimes – reaches back to the British colonial enterprise in Kenya, and forward to 2015, when Kenya's Vice President, William Samoei arap Ruto is facing charges relating to the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, which unfolded along largely ethnic lines that coincided with party loyalties; and saw over 2000 Kenyans lose their lives and thousands others displaced as alleged witnesses disappear or turn up dead under mysterious circumstances.

In her study, Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography, Gillian Whitlock finds Raymond Williams’ notion of residual elements of cultural processes (Williams 1977: 122) instructive in understanding the continued valence of white settler imaginaries in readings of contemporary Kenya. As she writes,

Whitlock's observation speaks to this chapter's interest in the influence of social memories in shaping speculations on Julie Ward's murder. Indeed, as she rightly points out, ‘values and meanings, tropes and allegories which were part of the hegemony of settler culture re-emerge … in interpreting [incidents like] the Ward affair’ (ibid.).

This chapter reflects on how circulating discourses in Kenyan and British social imaginaries shaped the speculations on the circumstances surrounding Julie Ward's death. Drawing on John Ward's speculations as laid out in his book The Animals are Innocent: The Search for Julie's Killers, Jeremy Gavron's speculations in Darkness in Eden: The Murder of Julie Ward, and the claims of alleged eye-witnesses in Kenya, the chapter suggests that Julie Ward's death was interpreted through the lens of ideas constructed across Kenya's post/colonial history, which have over time crystallized into popular wisdom regarding the multiple intersections between sex/uality, race, gender and state power in Kenyan and British social imaginaries. By excavating the subterranean discourses that underpinned the various speculations, the chapter suggests that Julie Ward's death took place in a discursive landscape marked by deeply layered and intermeshed contours of British and Kenyan social memories which tinted speculations on the circumstances surrounding the death.

Julie Ward's murder and the subsequent quest for her killers was a much publicized affair, which convened a range of publics, to borrow from Michael Warner's (2002) useful concept, both through formal institutions such as the media and the courtrooms, and the more informal discursive spaces created by rumours and books about the death.

As early as 1991, Ward describes the rumours and allegations about a powerful man behind his daughter's murder:

This early in the case, Ward concedes that the involvement of such a figure would explain why the Kenyan authorities went to such trouble and expense to orchestrate the cover-up. As he ponders ‘would they really do all that just to save a couple of murdering park rangers who they would obviously be better rid of? This kind of protection is only afforded to someone with great influence’ (ibid.). Despite this line of thought, Ward seems to have stuck to his resolve to ‘dismiss such accusations until provided with some proof ‘. It would be another twenty years, before he publicly acknowledged these rumours and took them seriously, in a 2012 publication.

Although on the surface the rumours and allegations on Julie Ward's death appeared to be primarily interested in incriminating what was perceived to be criminal political elite, as discussed in Chapter 3, at another level, these rumours were also a commentary on the limits of privileging legal truths produced in modern state institutions, especially in a context such as Kenya in the 1980s, where these institutions were largely compromised.

Within the colonial context, the myth of white supremacy legitimized imperial conquest, control and the accompanying privileges. This myth was materially and ideologically sustained by colonial state apparatuses – both repressive and ideological – including the law, the church, schools and colonial administration, all of which policed the boundaries of Mamdani's (1996) citizen–subject axis. Through these apparatuses, the dividends of whiteness were assured, culminating in the accumulation of social, cultural and economic capital, and the entrenchment of white privilege. With the demise of colonial rule, these institutional and ideological infrastructures were largely dismantled. Yet, despite this, as Alfred López (2005: 20) notes, whiteness still presents itself as an aspirational ideal in the postcolonial world, while retaining much of the privilege and prestige it held at the height of colonialism, begging the question: how is whiteness constructed and performed in postcolonial Africa?

In her study White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg makes an important observation about the workings of whiteness: ‘the material and discursive dimensions of whiteness are always, in practice, interconnected. Discursive repertoires may reinforce, contradict, conceal, explain or ‘explain away’ the materiality or the history of a given situation’ (1993: 2). It is this interaction between the discursive and the material dimensions of whiteness that this chapter seeks to explore, with particular focus on wildlife tourism and conservation. Using the case of two Kenyans who were shot dead by pioneer settler Lord Delamere's great-grandson, Thomas (Tom) Cholmondeley, a 1989 feature film on poaching set in Kenya, Ivory Hunters, and the narration of the Julie Ward case in the three books on the case, the chapter examines wildlife, tourism and wildlife conservation as important registers in the performance of certain strands of whiteness in postcolonial Kenya. Our key interest here lies in tracing these discursive tropes of postcolonial whiteness. In what ways do they mirror the tropes of colonial whiteness? To what extent was Julie Ward's presence in Kenya, her death and quest for her killers mapped onto these grids of contemporary constructions of postcolonial whiteness? What tensions and contradictions emerge from the continued deployment of wildlife tourism and conservation in the construction and performance of whiteness in postcolonial Africa?