Dolan-gender In Ag Transition-02

Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition: The Case of Kenyan Horticulture Catherine S. Dolan ABSTRACT This article examines the social effects of contract farming of export horticulture among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. During the 1980s and 1990s, contracting was popularized by donors and governments alike as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunities for self-employment in rural areas. Considerable research has documented the tensions in social relations that emerge in such cases, giving rise to gendered struggles over land, labour, and income in the face of new commodity systems. This article highlights similar tendencies. It suggests that men’s failure to compensate their wives for horticulture production has given rise to a string of witchcraft allegations and acts, as the wealth engendered by horticultural commodities comes up against cultural norms of marital obligation. While witchcraft accusations can expose women to risks of social alienation and financial deprivation, witchcraft nevertheless remains a powerful weapon through which women can level intra-household disparities and, more broadly, challenge the legitimacy of social practice. In Meru, witchcraft discourses are a vehicle through which gendered struggles over contract income are articulated and contested, and through which the social costs of agrarian transition become apparent.

INTRODUCTION

On a breezy February day, throngs of women descended the fertile slopes of Mt. Kenya to convene at the Chief ’s camp. The meeting had been summoned by local politicians in the wake of the poisoning of a village man, whose wife claimed that he refused to share French bean income with her. As women sat in the shade of the trees, nursing their babies and grading French beans for export to Europe, the speaker asked the women if it was right to put poison in their husbands’ food? The women quietly responded ‘no’. The speaker continued, ‘Why are you killing your husbands? . . .Your husband protects and guards you so don’t try to kill him’.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Fulbright, the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation (grant #240-2873A), which made this research possible. I also thank Cecile Jackson of the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Development and Change 33(4): 659–681 (2002). # Institute of Social Studies 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148. USA

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Indeed, why are women allegedly poisoning their husbands? How are such accusations connected to the infusion of external capital for French bean production? And what can this case tell us about the way that social relations are expressed and/or destabilized in situations of agrarian change? This article explores these questions, focusing on how the contract farming of export horticulture in Meru District, Kenya has been mediated by local conceptions of gender and culture. Prior to the introduction of French beans in Meru, women’s usufruct property was allocated to local vegetables grown for household consumption and sale at local markets. When export horticultural crops were introduced, they engendered new property and labour arrangements, with the horticultural success story founded to a large extent on women’s labour. Moreover, as French beans became increasingly lucrative, horticulture — the historical domain of women — became appropriated by men, who laid claim to the land allocated for, or the income derived from French bean production. With men hedging into conventionally female spheres, women’s1 control has eroded, and conflict has ensued over male and female property, and women’s rights to a rewarding income stream. Most women have responded to the intensification of the labour process with apparent compliance, although the form of that compliance differs. Some have remained silent in the face of mounting work burdens; others have diverted their labour to church groups and become saved into a life of Christ (Dolan, 2001).2 However, several women have employed more aggressive strategies when their remuneration is at stake. Income is one terrain on which familial politics are played out, as the wealth engendered by horticultural commodities comes up against cultural norms of communal obligation. In particular, women have directly challenged men’s refusal to compensate them for their land and labour, threatening and/or deploying witchcraft to reclaim their economic autonomy and purchase freedom from male constraint. In Meru, witchcraft discourses are a vehicle through which gendered struggles over contract income are articulated and contested, and through which the social costs of agrarian transition become apparent.

HORTICULTURAL CONTRACTING IN MERU DISTRICT, KENYA

This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Meru District from 1994 to 19963 and three supplementary visits from 1998 to 2000. The research took

1. While there are important intra-gender differences and social divisions that condition women’s access to resources, this article focuses exclusively on married women and resource constraints between husband and wife. 2. Joining church groups and becoming saved into a life of Christ have become ways that women confront the confines of their marriage. 3. Fieldwork consisted of quantitative and qualitative interviews conducted with 113 male contract farmers and 94 spouses cultivating French beans.

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place in Abothuguchi West, Central Imenti Division, one of the most densely populated and agriculturally productive areas in Kenya.4 While Meru boasts a long history of smallholder involvement in coffee and tea, it was not until the late 1980s that several Nairobi-based companies, responding to the growing demand for exotic vegetables in Europe, introduced export horticulture to the area.5 By the mid-1990s there were more than twenty-five horticultural export firms operating in Meru, providing seeds, inputs and a guaranteed market outlet to smallholder farmers under contract. In Central Imenti specifically more than 600 farmers were integrated into contractual arrangements to grow French beans and mangetout on plots of less than half an acre. Horticultural crops are particularly well suited to contract farming due to stringent quality and cosmetic imperatives that necessitate close scrutiny of cultivation and post-harvest activities. Such imperatives engender particularly high labour intensity at certain points in the production process such as planting, weeding and harvesting. For example, Kenya’s most widely grown horticultural export crops — snow peas and French beans — require 600 and 500 labour days per hectare respectively (Little, 1994). By outsourcing production, export firms ensure that this intensification of the labour process is internalized within the farm household. While there is a now a sizeable literature6 documenting the economic benefits as well as social costs of contract farming, there are two features of the institution that are relevant to this article. Firstly, one of the main advantages of contracting for export firms is that it allows them to exercise control over the production process without the liability of owning or operating farms (Key and Rungsten, 1999). However, companies will generally only issue contracts (and payment) to landowners. This effectively excludes women from receiving a contract in their name since in Meru, as in most parts of Kenya, the vast majority of landowners are men. Secondly, companies remunerate growers on the basis of the unit of produce harvested regardless of labour input, thereby banking on the process of family self-exploitation to meet production objectives. Export firms thus harness an entire family to global agricultural production, trusting that the labour process will be managed through cultural norms of rights and responsibilities (Collins, 1991). However, it is not only family labour but specifically female labour that is essential for effective horticultural production. As the chairman of Kenya

4. In 1995 there were an average of 420 people per km2, with approximately 95 per cent of the labour force engaged in smallholder agriculture (Rural Planning Department, 1996). 5. While Kenya has a long history of participation in export horticulture (vegetables, fruits and cut flowers), it became widely promoted during the 1980s as part of the agricultural diversification initiatives of international lending agencies. 6. See Ayako et al. (1989), Glover and Kusterer (1990), Kennedy (1989), and Williams and Karen (1985) for a discussion on the benefits of contract farming. See Little and Watts (1994) and Mbilinyi (1988) for a critique of its social consequences.

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Horticultural Exporters claimed, ‘Women are better bean pickers. Their hands are smaller and they have more patience for the work than the men’ (pers. comm.). These gendered associations are not simply derived from capitalist ideologies that consider women better suited for horticultural work but are also embedded in local cultural norms that differentiate labour allocation and crop cultivation by gender.

Gender and Contract Farming Studies of how gender identities, roles and responsibilities inform and are informed by changing commodity relations are, by now, familiar ones. Nearly three decades ago, for example, Chambers and Moris (1973) charted the ‘unintended consequences’ of development that arose when gendered property rights were overlooked in a Kenyan rice scheme. More recently, scholars have documented the tensions in social relations to emerge in cases of agricultural commercialization, tracing the link between the penetration of transnational capital and the transformation of women’s private lives in the household (see von Bu¨low and Sørensen, 1988; Carney, 1992; Dey, 1981; Heald, 1991; Mackintosh, 1989; Mbilinyi, 1988). Several of these studies have focused specifically on the institution of contract farming, documenting how agrarian potential is circumscribed by the nature and form of domestic organization, including conjugal, kin and filial responsibilities. For example, Heald’s research (1991) among contract tobacco growers in Western Kenya clearly illustrated how social structure mediated the effects of contract farming, leading to markedly different outcomes for the Teso and Kuria. In contrast to the Kuria, the small household size and rigid division of labour among the Teso impeded the moblization of labour, generating tensions among husbands and wives over labour allocation, subsistence, and control over tobacco income. This theme — the incapacity of households to accommodate increased labour burdens and the social strain that ensues — features in several studies of contract farming. Both von Bu¨low and Sørensen (1988), and Mbilinyi (1988), for example, depicted how pressures on women’s labour time following the introduction of tea contracting destabilized conjugal relations and undermined the broader potential for capital accumulation. Similarly, research by Carney and Watts (1990) on irrigated rice contracting captured with great clarity the significance that social norms play in defining property rights and labour responsibilities, and more importantly how those definitions confer opportunities for income and well-being in contract farming. What all these studies share is a conjugal contract rife with struggles over land, labour, and income in the face of changing material relations. More specifically, they all point to the importance of understanding how gender and cultural norms figure in the constitution and transformation of agrarian processes. This article follows these lines of inquiry, exploring how the process of French

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bean contracting is shaped by, as well as embedded in, the practices and discourses of witchcraft in Meru.

WITCHCRAFT AND MODERNITY

Within the last two decades, one of the most striking aspects of postcolonial Africa has been the re-emergence of witchcraft in public discourse. While witchcraft has long been at the heart of African anthropological study, it has recently resurfaced as central to critiques of culture and modernity. Part of the reason for this renewed interest has been the shift away from viewing African witchcraft as a phenomenon restricted to bounded ‘traditional’ societies to the identification of witchcraft with wider processes of global change.7 In fact, the majority of recent work views witchcraft as distinctly modern, as a signifier for the contradictions and tensions emanating from contemporary processes of missionization, urbanization, state domination and globalization.8 These studies show that far from disappearing in the face of modernization, witchcraft is ubiquitous in Africa, implicated in conflicts between rural and urban, state and community, and men and women. While anthropological interpretations of witchcraft may have changed, the idea that witchcraft reflects the friction between communal values (moral economy) and individual accumulation (capitalism) persists. Expressions of the occult are well documented in situations of economic change, where the introduction of new resources exacerbates social differentiation and accentuates struggles for power and control. For example, Seur (1992: 206) shows how farmers in a climate of rapid economic differentiation in Zimbabwe used sorcery accusations as a check on communal imbalance, effectively ensuring conformity to ‘an ideology of equality’. Similarly, Kohnert (1996) discusses the spate of witchcraft accusations against the nouveaux riches who flout customary rules of redistribution and kinship norms of solidarity. In the same vein, Niehaus (1993) traces the historical shift from witches attacking communities to witches targeting individuals and households, reflecting the deterioration of communal ties and heightened friction within and between households. 7. Anthropologists have interpreted African witchcraft variously. Arguably the most significant work has been Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) interpretation of Azande witchcraft as an explanatory framework for seemingly inexplicable phenomena (such as misfortune and illness). Functionalist approaches such as Goody (1970), Douglas (1963), Marwick (1965), Middleton (1964) and Middleton and Winter (1963) viewed witchcraft and witchcraft accusations as mechanisms of social control, ensuring long-term equilibrium through the release of structural tension among kin and community. For a review of literature on African witchcraft see the essays in African Studies Review 41:3 (1998). 8. See Auslander (1993), Austen (1993), Bastian (1993), Comaroff and Comaroff (1993), Englund (1996), Geschiere (1997), Kohnert (1996), Masquelier (1993), Niehaus (1993, 2001), Parish (1999, 2000), Rutherford (1999) and Shaw (1997).

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What all these studies demonstrate is how clearly witchcraft and kinship are connected to social norms and expectations of reciprocity and exchange, and how both are inculcated in putative notions of intimacy and trust. As Geschiere and Fisiy (1994: 325) contend: ‘witchcraft is indeed the dark side of kinship: it reflects the frightening notion that there is hidden aggression and violence where there should be only trust and solidarity’. In no area is this ‘dark side’ more evident than in the use (or purported use) of witchcraft between men and women. Several feminist scholars (Ciekawy, 1999; Drucker-Brown, 1993; Karlsen, 1987; Larner, 1981) have shown how witchcraft practice and accusations are grounded in gendered power struggles, where culturally constructed notions of male and female and the boundaries of material prosperity are played out.9 For example, Nadel (1952) interpreted witchcraft among the Nupe of Nigeria as a manifestation of male–female competition. He argued that the prevalence of female witches attacking, dominating and threatening male authority was linked to women’s economic power in the marketplace. In this situation the success of female traders precipitated accusations by their husbands (who were frequently indebted to them) that women were organized in clandestine witch’s covens. Similarly, Goody’s study of male and female witchcraft among the Gonja of Ghana showed how idealized constructions of gender roles denied women a sanctioned vehicle for the expression of aggressive emotion. As Goody noted, women’s perceived use of witchcraft not only threatened the viability of male control but cast ‘into doubt the benevolence of the affective relationships on which the domestic group centres’ (1970: 242). This theme was echoed by Drucker-Brown (1993), who argued that witchcraft among the Mamprusi of Ghana not only reflected the emergent autonomy of women in the sexual division of labour but also diminishing male control in the economic sphere. What all these cases have in common is that witchcraft is associated with women transcending the boundaries of appropriate social behaviour and hence, challenging their ascribed position within the social hierarchy.

WITCHCRAFT IN MERU

Despite the widespread adoption of Christianity in Kenya, anxiety about witchcraft and fear of its repercussions remain a salient feature of daily life. Witchcraft is blamed for missing persons, deviant social behaviour, illness, death and natural catastrophe, and people are lynched, mobbed and 9. Several theories suggest that women are predominantly associated with the occult due to their social marginalization, which is expressed in symbolic forms such as spirit possession, sorcery and witchcraft (Ardener, 1970; Giles, 1987; Lewis, 1989; Ong, 1987). However, others (Drucker-Brown, 1993; Nadel, 1952) attribute the phenomenon to the increasing power of women in economic spheres.

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slaughtered because of their alleged predilection for the occult.10 It is an integral and dynamic aspect of social order, an ever-present threat that is deeply inscribed in ‘public culture and private life’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993: xviii). As one interviewee noted, ‘Most of us fear it so much. We are so afraid of losing our lives, property or children. You see if one is bewitched it’s not easy to reverse its effects. It’s traumatizing’. Yet witchcraft is not a new phenomenon in Meru.11 As early as the 1900s colonial officials in Meru District perceived local institutions such as kiamas 12 and the njuri ncheke13 as bulwarks of witchcraft and paganism. Local Native Council minutes are permeated with claims that the progress of the District had been impeded by the persistence of ‘superstition’, and warnings to Christians against joining secret societies or adopting lurid oathing practices.14 By the 1920s colonial officials were intent on banishing witchcraft, contending that the inability of the ‘backward’ Meru people to attain the economic advancement of the neighbouring Kikuyu was rooted in witchcraft practices, which had penetrated the Meru African Colonial Service and endangered the colonial structure itself. District Commissioner Lamb (who instituted the anti-witchdoctor campaign), claimed that no tribe in Kenya was more deeply steeped in witchcraft than the Meru, and that witchcraft was robbing ‘the chiefs, and through them the entire machinery of the British administration of all governing initiative’ (cited by Fadiman, 1993: 305). Close to a century later, vilifying witchcraft as an obstacle to development is central to the vision of the post-colonial state. From national politicians to village leaders, witchcraft is demonized in public discourse as a relic of a backward past that threatens to undermine national objectives of progress and accumulation. In fact, in 1994 President Moi was forced to appoint a Presidential Commission to investigate the perceived resurgence of witchcraft, ritual murders, and other ostensibly occult practices brewing throughout Kenya. The outcome of this investigation — the widely publicized Report on Devil Worship — included numerous reports of magic, ritual murder, and cannibalism, which threatened to derail the country’s national objectives (Njau, 1999). The government frequently calls baraza (public assemblies)15 to preach against the apparent rise of occult practices such as witchcraft 10. There were sixteen deaths caused by mob violence against persons suspected of practising witchcraft in 1998 (US State Department, 1998). 11. In contrast to Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) seminal distinction between witchcraft (ascribed) and sorcery (achieved), the Meru use the terms interchangeably in conversation. While the practices described in this paper (i.e. poisoning) fall within the Evans-Pritchards’ definition of sorcery, I use the term witchcraft to denote both types of action. 12. Kiamas (councils) formed part of the governing body of the Meru (Fadiman, 1993). 13. The njuri ncheke, or Council of Elders, is a disciplinary body that was responsible for executing laws and arbitrating disputes. 14. Minutes of the Meru Local Native Council County Court, LNC/15/15/6, 1952, and May 12, 1955 (no file number). 15. Baraza are outdoor assemblies licensed by the state, typically called by national and/or local politicians (Haugerud, 1995).

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and to promote ideologies of Christianity and national unity to subvert its appeal. However, despite the rhetoric deployed by government and clergy, it is specifically within the context of the ‘modern’ post-colonial state that witchcraft is flourishing (Parish, 1999). So who are these witches that are the ‘terror of development’ (Apter, 1993: 125)? Can witchcraft discourses tell us anything about the way gendered conflicts over resources are registered and contested in a context of agrarian transition? As in many African societies, witchcraft in Meru (urogi ) is seen as a way to diagnose and understand misfortune and adversity.16 It is not uncommon to hear witchcraft invoked as an explanation for crop failure, livestock loss, and other ‘natural’ catastrophes. As one interviewee said, ‘A phenomenon that cannot be explained like drought, floods, these things that destroy our property and not the neighbours, this is truly witchcraft’. Yet witchcraft is more frequently viewed as a means to redress interpersonal hostilities and jealousies stemming from economic differentiation. In an area of high population growth riven by competition for resources, witchcraft acts as a powerful weapon to settle the score against potential rivals for economic gain. As one interviewee expressed it, ‘it is this gap between the ‘‘haves’’ and the ‘‘have nots’’ that causes all this bewitching issue’. This echoes Green’s (1994: 24) study of the Pogoro of Tanzania, which showed that witches, motivated by jealousy and greed, attacked people whose main mistake was in surpassing their fellow villagers on the path to accumulation. This explanation was supported by a well-to-do Meru man who said, ‘When I go into Meru town . . . you hear many educated people and those who are very rich confessing they don’t want to go to the villages because they will be bewitched. I understand that. You even fear the people around you. When you have something they don’t have, it’s not easy to live with it. When you know that the people you eat and drink with want your things, what can you do?’ For the Meru witchcraft is a premeditated act, based on the manipulation of spiritual entities and/or substances by malicious individuals with the intent to cause harm. It generally assumes the form of either bewitching or poisoning.17 The former involves casting a spell on a piece of the victim’s property or planting a substance in a strategic point where the victim is likely to pass. The latter involves creating a medicinal concoction from plants, to inflict illness, death, or more widely, to render the victim lazy, unreliable, and mentally incapacitated. The Meru also believe that a witchdoctor or ‘herbalist’ can counter the effects of bewitching, but only if the victim possesses sufficient resources to offer proper compensation. 16. Prior to the advent of Christianity, the notion of a centralized evil force personified as Satan or the devil was non-existent in Meru. Instead, misfortune was attributed to displeased ancestral spirits or to various forms of witchcraft. 17. Historical acounts record three main types of witchcraft in Meru: curses and incantations; rituals; and potions/medicines (Fadiman, 1993; M’Imanyara, 1992).

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In contrast to the colonial and pre-colonial period, however, where individuals associated with witchcraft were widely considered to be male, today the sex of the witch is contingent upon the type of offence for which retribution is sought. In general, men are associated with witchcraft that is employed to mitigate inter-household conflicts, primarily land disputes with neighbours. Women, on the other hand, are most commonly regarded as perpetrators of intra-household witchcraft, seeking to revenge husbands, cowives, and children for their greater share of resources. The latter association is borne out in divorce records, where husbands frequently accuse wives of threatening to poison or bewitch them to gain access to household land.18 However, while women are the targets of most allegations, many women also consider witchcraft to be a legitimate way to assert claims for equity and power within their households. Rumours of women giving their husbands kagweria19 — a substance that induces psychosis and transforms men into dolts, thus leaving control of the household to the wife — or poisoning their husbands to death, have been recorded in Meru since the 1930s. Women’s use of the practice is said to have heightened during the 1970s when men started abusing coffee and tea income, which while under male control, was also intended to sustain the economic well-being of the household. Currently the practice is claimed to include conflicts over French bean income, which women consider their crop. Other rationales for ‘demasculinizing’ men through kagweria include adultery, one co-wife becoming jealous of another if the husband is favouring the latter’s children in land allocation, and women’s subordination in the household (Dolan, 1999). In these cases, the use of kagweria is fuelled by a woman’s sense of injustice, primarily their exclusion from the protections afforded by land and independent income streams, such as French beans. In reality, whether or not women use kagweria against their husbands is unclear. While there are indications of a well-established local market for the herbs, it is also the case that witchcraft is generally manifest in rumours, allusions and insinuations, which may or may not be grounded in actual practice. However, the essential question is not whether women are poisoning their husbands per se, but rather under what circumstances such threats and allegations arise. And it appears that one such circumstance is the contract farming of French beans. French Bean Production How women’s work is defined, commodified, and negotiated within the household directly mediates the production process of horticulture 18. Meru County Court Records, Land Register, Central Imenti Civil Cases #63/88, #69/91, #20/91, #5/92, #733/64. 19. Kagweria, a liquid acquired from certain trees, is mixed with sedative drugs. It can be purchased from knowledgeable women in the Chuka and Embu areas.

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contracting. In Meru over 90 per cent of contracts are issued to male household members who control labour allocation and secure payment.23 However, the fulfilment of those contracts rests primarily on women’s unpaid labour; women are nearly wholly responsible for planting, weeding and picking French beans. While over 27 per cent of men do participate in French bean labour, for the most part their activities (ploughing and fertilizer application) require less overall labour and have less significance for product quality. Nevertheless, despite the labour requirements of French beans, there has been no adjustment of labour obligations between husband and wife. In fact, men have contributed less labour to their wives’ plots and women have been compelled to hire labour to perform tasks that were formerly performed by their husbands. Some 52 per cent of men in contrast to 39 per cent of women hired people to work on horticultural crops. In both cases the hired labour was highly feminized with women constituting over 75 per cent of workers contracted to plant, weed, pick and grade French beans (primarily female-defined tasks).20 However, it is French bean income, and in some cases land appropriation, rather than labour, which has become the terrain of overt conflict between husband and wife. In general, women have not openly challenged the intensification of the labour process. While some women have diverted their labour to church groups, seeking both fellowship and their own choice of work, this practice falls within the parameters of prevailing norms of the ‘good wife’. In Meru maintaining the reputation of a good wife engenders considerable protections. It is intimately linked to the benefits that women derive from a household system where loss of social standing has dramatic material consequences. However, there are several women who are rumoured to have discarded the protections afforded by compliance with Christian norms of conjugal responsibility. These women have exerted a forceful claim against men’s refusal to compensate them for the labour used in French bean cultivation, and in some cases the appropriation of their usufruct land. The next section of the paper examines why this is, and more specifically why witchcraft discourses have become the loci of tensions between husband and wife.

STRUGGLES OVER LAND

In Meru land fragmentation has become increasingly prevalent, fuelled by high population growth and patrilineal inheritance practices that compel each man to divide his property among his sons. Deteriorating land quality and availability means that land has become a vitally contested resource, and a key field on which intra-familial contestations are expressed. Between 1983 and 1994 the number of land disputes in Meru District doubled from 20. See Dolan (2001) for an analysis of the impact of French bean production on household labour allocation.

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460 to 946 cases. Further, close to 10 per cent of all murders committed in the district between 1979 and 1989 were due to land disputes.21 Over 69 per cent of people in this study felt that land disputes are more severe today than ten years ago and 48 per cent of people have experienced land or boundary disputes themselves. As one interviewee noted, ‘we have so many of these land disputes between families or neighbours. Everybody is fighting for a portion of land which everyone claims is theirs’. Land scarcity is particularly inimical for women, especially for those who are unmarried, ‘fail’ to give birth to sons, and/or those who have lost their usufruct rights due to their husband’s or male kin’s appropriation. Despite statutory laws that permit women to own land regardless of marital status, over 95 per cent of land is registered to men. In Meru, as in other parts of Kenya, women’s rights to land remain predominantly embodied in customary law (founded on patrilineal inheritance practices), and are contingent on their status as wives, mothers and daughters. In fact for many women access to land has remained virtually the same since the pre-colonial period, with use rights to garden plots derived from their husbands upon marriage (Laughton, 1938). Prior to the introduction of French beans, these gardens were earmarked for local vegetables grown for household consumption and sale at local markets. Most importantly, women had the right to dispose of income from crops grown on these fields, providing them with some measure of autonomy. It is these fields that have become a vitally contested resource since the inception of export horticultural production. Studies (Aspaas, 1998; Bryceson, 1995) have shown how agricultural commoditization can lead to male encroachment on female property, either undermining women’s ability to fulfil subsistence needs or to produce cash crops over which they might have control. This is particularly true in regions that have developed specialized market niches such as export horticulture. In Meru, the gendered nature of property rights circumscribes the benefits that women derive from French bean production. Due to the grave land scarcity in the area, women are not in a position to expand their horticultural production without repercussions for local vegetable production. There is an inverse relationship between the land allocated to export horticulture and local crops: as fields devoted to the former expand, those apportioned to the latter contract. Because tea remains highly profitable and coffee cannot be legally uprooted, the only reserve of land to appropriate is that which supports local crop cultivation (including maize, vegetables and fruits). Because women retain control over the income from the sale of local vegetables, it is in their interest to allocate more land to them than to French beans. However, over 33 per cent of the women interviewed claimed that their husbands had either compelled them to grow French beans on their

21. Meru District Country Court Records, Civil Cases, Land Register, 1983–1994 and Meru District Annual Reports, 1983–1994.

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usufruct plots or retracted their rights to those plots altogether. This is a key breach of cultural norms as women’s rights to usufruct property, and to the income derived from that property, are encased in customary arrangements. Women claim that conflicts over their usufruct property have become particularly marked since the introduction of export horticulture. Many women who contest the appropriation of their usufruct property and inequitable inheritance practices do so via the courts. They bypass the clan,22 feeling that their interests are better served through statutory law, exploiting the Christian precepts of male obligation, on which statutory law is erected to press their claims in court.23 However, this is not the whole story. Witchcraft is allegedly employed to ward against the potential of future land appropriation. As one interviewee noted, ‘This is very common in Meru and around Tharaka and Tigania area. The person who wants to keep her land can also bewitch him [her husband] so that he dies or goes mad. When she threatens and carries out the threat, the husbands fear and give in to her demands’. Another interviewee claimed that ‘In the case where a woman is not satisfied with what is happening she can decide to grab her husband’s land anyway. So she uses witchcraft so that she can influence the judgement when they go to court and hence obtain her husband’s land’. Geschiere (1997) labels such action as the ‘levelling’ side of witchcraft, whereby jealousy incites aggrieved individuals to employ occult forms of aggression to force those in power to share their wealth. In Meru, this has its antecedents in the pre-colonial and colonial period, when the threat of witchcraft was intended to mitigate inter-personal hostilities before they became overly inflamed (Fadiman, 1993). For example, the curses issued by women’s kiamas were not so much to kill their husbands as ‘to force them to seek alternatives, preferably by providing . . . gifts sufficient to induce removal of the curse’ (ibid.: 160). In the same vein, women’s threats of witchcraft today act as a mechanism to effect equity in land allocation.

CONTROL OVER INCOME

While both labour and land allocation are grounded in cultural constructions of rights and responsibilities, income distribution is governed by patriarchal ideologies that privilege male prerogatives. The households in this study are not joint, pooling enterprises, but rather a constellation of individual undertakings in which the household head manages the production processes and controls its subsequent output. In contrast to parts of West Africa (Guyer, 1988; Hill, 1975) where distinct male/female axes of domestic

22. Dispute resolution is processual, undergoing four stages: family/household, clan, subChief/Chief, and ultimately statutory courts. 23. See Dolan (2001) for an elaboration of this process.

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Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition Table 1. Average Annual Income and Control Crop

Bananas Beans Cabbage Carrots Coffee French beans Maize Mangetout24 Onions Potato Passion fruits Pyrethrum Tea Tomato Wheat

Income Control Female (%)

Male (%)

10.0 72.7 50.0 53.6 14.0 38.0 53.3 52.0 61.1 49.2 90.0 0.0 6.7 75.3 0.0

90.0 27.3 50.0 46.4 86.0 62.0 46.7 48.0 39.9 50.8 10.0 100.0 93.3 24.7 100.0

Source: Bi-weekly Agricultural Production Survey, 1994–9525

budgets exist (‘separate purses’), income in Meru is intended to collectively insure the well-being of the household. However, while women ostensibly comply with cultural prescriptions regarding income control, their actual behaviour diverges considerably from those norms. Most women are careful to shield their earnings from their spouse lest they be compelled to pay for school fees, medical expenses or for household items that are normatively their husband’s responsibility. Part of this strategizing results from the significant disparities in women’s access to, and control over income. Women’s income averages one-third of men’s due to few opportunities for female wage employment and off-farm income generating activities. Over 85 per cent of women, in comparison to 32 per cent of men, garnered no income outside the sale of agricultural crops. Moreover, the primary sources of remuneration for men — coffee, tea, French beans and the sale of livestock — are generally more profitable than the sale of food crops (women’s primary income source).26 However, even within agricultural production, men control the vast majority of income (see Table 1) despite the fact that women perform a disproportionate share of labour. 24. Women are generally able to retain a higher percentage of mangetout income due to the lower quantity produced, and hence lower income generated. However, further research is needed to determine whether this situation has changed since the recent growth in the mangetout market. 25. This survey collected data on labour allocation and income generation for 113 men and 94 women cultivating French beans. 26. Women only sell between 8 and 14 per cent of food crops as the majority of food crops are consumed.

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Catherine S. Dolan Table 2. Control of Income Over all Crops versus Labour Performed

Men Women

Labour Performed (%)

Control over Income (%)

18 82

66 34

Source: Bi-weekly Agricultural Production Survey, 1994–95

As Table 2 indicates, there is an inverse relationship between the level of women’s labour participation and their control over agricultural earnings. Struggles over Export Horticulture Income While French bean production can potentially increase overall household incomes, there is a wide disparity in the distribution of income between men and women. Women perform 72 per cent of the labour for French beans, and obtain 38 per cent of the income. In many cases the profitability of French beans has piqued men’s interest, prompting them to assume control of the income, despite the fact that women perform the majority of the labour and customarily control all horticultural crops. For most women, control over French bean income is contingent upon the leverage that they can exert within their households or more commonly, upon the goodwill of their husbands. As one interviewee claimed, ‘I am not financially independent from my husband. I plant and grow and sell the French beans. When I give the money to my husband sometimes he refuses and gives it back to me for my own needs. Other times not’. While it might be argued that women maintain a higher percentage of French bean income relative to other African export crops such as coffee, tea or cocoa, two points need to be considered. The first is that French beans (and other horticultural export crops) are grown on women’s usufruct property, and rights to income from this property have conventionally been enshrined in cultural norms. While cultural meanings are, of course, subject to (re)negotiation and overlapping claims, it is nevertheless interesting to understand the conditions under which cultural entitlements are subject to revocation. In the Meru case, we can clearly see how rapidly cultural purity dissolves in the face of economic imperatives and patriarchal prerogatives. The second point is that even where women receive money, they are often compelled to contribute this cash to household expenditures that would have typically been their husband’s responsibility. Women often accuse their husbands and brothers of squandering French bean profits on alcohol and miraa 27 and abandoning their family to the desires of their body. One woman cursed men on market day, proclaiming ‘You speak this afternoon 27. Miraa is a stimulant grown in the area.

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but tonight when you sleep the devil will come’. Another woman passing the market proclaimed, ‘Money of the people taken in the wrong way will always be misused but the one who is using his own sweat will eventually reap the fruits’. Conflicts between husbands and wives over the allocation of income from French beans are commonplace and often escalate into household violence. As one female interviewee claimed: ‘The crops that result in wife-beating today are coffee and tea, because they are termed as a man’s crop. Many husbands misuse money from these crops and when asked they beat their wives. Michiri [French beans] are also cause for beating. When we try to keep our money, our husband asks where it is. If we don’t give it to him we are beaten. These crops cause us many problems’. This was supported by a village man who said, ‘If the wife misuses money from milk or crops she is beaten. Many women misuse money from these crops and when they are asked [for the money], they don’t have it. They are beaten for this’. Most men interviewed agreed that wife-beating was necessary to sustain the moral order of the home. ‘Wife-beating brings respect to the household — women become more disciplined due to beating’. Christian norms of wife obedience have legitimated the escalation in domestic violence against women by providing aggrieved husbands with a justifiable means of retribution. For example, the following words were spoken at a baraza summoned by the Chief and village politicians of Githongo Location to lecture women on norms of female obedience. This was in the wake of the poisoning of a village man, whose wife claimed that he refused to allocate any French bean income to her. You must accept your husband whether he is good or bad to you . . . You must always appreciate your husband. If he comes in late or has been with other women you must not quarrel but accept and appreciate him. Never chase him away just pray to God that he becomes better. You must never move about with other men; if you do you deserve the abuse that your husband serves you.

As a result of such violence, myriad women are either leaving or divorcing their husbands. Divorce cases increased by 400 per cent between 1982 and 1992,28 with women’s motivation for divorce strongly linked to both physical abuse and men’s default on marital responsibilities. This is a striking rise not only because divorce is censured by the Church, but also because marriage and fertility are a key aspect of women’s identity and status. While divorce may be seen as empowering for women, it nevertheless involves considerable ‘patriarchal risk’ (Cain et al., 1979). This risk — the loss of economic security and social position — can engender social exclusion, landlessness, and deprivation in a rigidly patrilineal society such as Meru.29 Nevertheless, despite the vulnerability that divorce can entail, it is one way that women

28. Meru County Court, African and Christian Marriage and Divorce Records, 1982–1992. 29. In the case of divorce a woman is required to return to her natal family, and the bridewealth paid for her must be returned.

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assert a claim against male authority in both the appropriation of household income (such as French beans) and against physical abuse in their marriage.

WITCHCRAFT AND WOMEN

This notion of patriarchal risk extends equally to those women who challenge their ascribed position within the social system by threatening to bewitch or poison their husbands. By invoking the potential of witchcraft (whether or not it is actualized) women are defying the patriarchal bargain,30 breaking with the normative rules regulating gender relations and the explicit code of behaviour expected of a ‘good wife’ (Dolan, 2001). It is important to acknowledge what this risk entails; as a woman bereft of a husband, the witch potentially inhabits a position of complete vulnerability, stigmatized socially and marginalized economically. Yet despite the very real sanctions that exposure to witchcraft accusations entails, some women are willing to take this unthinkable risk. It is particularly in contestations over household income rather than over inequitable labour allocation that women transcend the parameters of patriarchal constraint through the threat and/or exercise of witchcraft. One woman explained the reason this way, ‘Many women end up being frustrated because after days go by, the men find it not useful to bring home the money, but instead spend it in towns with young beautiful ladies. The women feel bad, frustrated, and start looking for alternatives. The best advice they lay their minds on is ‘‘if I bewitch my husband, I will control all the income’’. It really works and the man at the end of the month brings home all the money . . . If my husband was like this, I would do the same’. Rumours of kagweria use in income conflicts have become increasingly common in Abothuguchi West. In 1993 a thirty-five-year-old woman in Githongo Location was accused of administering the potion to her husband, who suffered from dementia and later, psychosis. When the Chief interrogated her, she disclosed that there was a group of four women in the Location who had supposedly perfected the recipe and were distributing it to other women. One interviewee described women’s involvement with kagweria in the following way. Women buy [kagweria] from Tharaka, Tigania, Chuka and Embu from other women who are old. Kagweria is a charm given secretly by women to their men that changes men’s mental ability to a worse state. Once a man is fed with kagweria, he stops giving orders to his woman and therefore the woman becomes the head of the family. This [use] has increased because we are dealing away with our traditional customs. Before, the clan would intervene in husband and wife cases. Now the clan doesn’t do much for us, so we get a solution for ourselves. Men don’t respect their wives or they are not all that faithful like before. They still love with other

30. The patriarchal bargain conveys the protections that women are afforded in marriage in exchange for acquiescing to inequalities, thus maximizing their interests (Kandiyoti, 1988).

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women and this annoys the wives. Most women do not want to accept that a woman should always be under a man, like they tell us. We are envious of the progressing way of other women who have freedom. A way to have freedom is to give kagweria . . . [and obtain] power over the wealth, especially from the good crops.

Women claim that bewitching is on the rise due to men’s adultery and appropriation of household income. One particular interviewee knew of seven cases of bewitching over a two-year period, all provoked due to intrafamilial struggles over French bean income. One particular case concerned the poisoning of a village man, whose wife claimed that he had hoarded French bean income. A village woman described the incident in the following way: In Katheri, a wife worked with her daughters to bewitch her husband and take all the wealth. The man was forced to stay in the house for three weeks with vomiting and diarrhoea. The church is taking the duty to preach against bewitching now. In June the Four Square preachers held a crusade and prayed and pointed out one of the women from Kiithe village who has been supplying kagweria. They chastised her. But usually these women aren’t found because witchcraft can only be carried out at night. It is very secretive . . . Only talked about . . . Never seen with the eyes.

Churches, in partnership with local politicians, regularly organize women’s seminars to preach against witchcraft and to teach women how to ameliorate household struggles through Christian service. For example, during the baraza discussed above one of the speakers read part of Proverb 31, emphasizing the merits of an industrious and virtuous wife, and then said: You must be a good manager of your home, wake up early and prepare the fire for tea before your husband awakes. It is very important that you manage your household well. . . In some homes women have more power than men and that is very bad and a sign of terrible management . . . If a woman is a poor household manager, she tries to kill her husband or make him crazy by feeding him medicines or poisons.

As this excerpt illustrates, the baraza is a powerful instrument of social control, inculcating and enforcing normative gender roles and responsibilities through discourses on morality and proper female behaviour. As such, it captures the tensions in social relations, exposing the cracks in conjugal relations to the arsenal of Church and State (Haugerud and Njogu, 1991).

Witchcraft and Agency In Meru, the gender implications of export horticultural production have created fertile ground for the expression and elaboration of witchcraft and religious revivalism. While these particular discourses certainly reflect much broader configurations of social and economic change than those engendered by horticultural contracting alone, it is interesting to explore why women choose to deploy one set of discourses rather than another in the face of agrarian transition. How do we understand some women opting

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for Christian conversion while others seek to redress inequities through threats of witchcraft? And how do we understand the same woman assuming the identity of the witch and the good wife? Firstly, the prevalence of ostensibly contradictory forms of spiritual expression is certainly not unique, as the widespread interpenetration of African traditions and Christian cosmologies testifies. Myriad recent studies (such as Ashforth, 2001; Gifford, 1998), for example, have shown how the boundaries between Christianity and the occult are often slippery, with individuals invoking idioms of both situationally. Secondly, the enactment of a certain subject position (the good wife, the witch, the Christian, the mother, the Ameru, the Kenyan, etc.) is contingent, as women are embodied in, and constitutive of, multiple, overlapping, and often competing discourses (Pratt, 1999). In Meru, both Christian conversion and witchcraft may be seen as ways that women express agency in a context of patriarchal constraint, whether through apparent compliance or overt conflict. As Kabeer (2000) notes, agency — the capacity to define one’s goals and act upon them — can adopt many forms, including but not limited to bargaining and negotiation, deception and manipulation, and subversion and resistance. Yet it is misguided to interpret agency as simply a matter of choice as some subject positions encompass considerable reward while others can result in sanctions and even ostracism from the community (Kabeer, 1999; Moore, 1994). For example, Rohatynskyj (1988) has documented how wives who do not obey the wishes of their husbands risk being labelled as witches, and Schroeder (1996: 72) has shown how women who continue to work in their own market gardens are ‘demonized . . . as bad wives’. To speak of meaningful choice, however, implies the ability to have chosen otherwise, to have alternatives that are materially and ideologically feasible (Kabeer, 2000). Whether women are willing to risk material uncertainty and/or social exclusion largely rests on their social, economic and political circumstances and their capacity to forfeit the rewards of the patriarchal bargain (Agarwal, 1994). As I have argued elsewhere (Dolan, 2001), in Meru participation in Christian groups is most prevalent among women who have a high stake in the stability of the household system, and few prospects for material autonomy. In this context, women’s power to choose otherwise is limited, as most are bounded by the cultural constructions of gender that shape their economic options (Kabeer, 1999). However, within the boundaries of patriarchy and cultural constraint, there is clearly some space for manoeuvre and varying options for women to exert active and passive resistance in the face of oppression (Kandiyoti, 1988: 274). Not all women experience power and subordination in the same way and each encounters horticultural production with different histories, subjectivities, material positions, and social circumstances that inform their capacity to act. Those women who are willing to overtly challenge the conjugal contract tend to be those with less investment in the preservation of the household system, largely due to their access to sons and/or to the

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presence of alternative income generating possibilities. For these women, who are willing to risk the loss of social security in the expectation of economic gain, witchcraft (whether it is simply a threat or it is carried out) can have a strong appeal. It not only enables them to challenge the power and authority of the conjugal contract in a way that Christianity proscribes but it also provides a clear vehicle through which to exercise agency in an area where women are customarily denied direct expression of their will (Drucker-Brown, 1993). By engaging in witchcraft, these women have contested the realm of doxa (Bourdieu, 1977), the tacit, unquestioned, ‘naturalized’ aspects of gender relations that define men and women’s position in the social hierarchy. Normative gendered rights and responsibilities — the doxa of social relations — are now the fodder of discourse, a discourse that is publicly defended and reinforced by Church and State (Kabeer, 2000). Hence witchcraft discourses are not simply about confronting the appropriation of French bean land and income, but more broadly, subjecting the inequity of gender norms to public scrutiny.

CONCLUSION

This article has described the social repercussions of contract farming among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. In Meru, horticulture — the ‘traditional’ domain of women — has been rapidly intensified and commoditized in response to a growing world market. This would appear to offer women an opportunity to capitalize on cultural conventions that define horticultural land and income as female. However, this assumption overlooks the salience of intra-household power relations that place male interests at the heart of the household system. With the introduction of the export horticulture, it is these power relations that have deepened gendered conflicts over labour, land and income. The contracting of French beans is dependent on the exploitation of household labour to be profitable, and more particularly the intensification of female labour. Yet it is not simply women’s labour, but also women’s land that has become key to the viability of contracting. Because horticultural production occurs predominantly on women’s usufruct property, many women have either lost their usufruct rights due to their husband’s appropriation, or claim that their husbands have required them to grow French beans on these plots. While most women have responded to the intensification of the labour process with apparent compliance, it is men’s failure to compensate women for their labour and land that has provided the fodder for heightened marital discord. For some women male appropriation of French bean income has not only breached cultural expectations of male responsibility, but also undermined their material security. As men’s individual ambition has overridden their household responsibilities, several women have forsaken

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the patriarchal bargain, articulating their grievances through threats and acts of witchcraft. These women have made clear the limits of ‘conjugal contract’, invoking witchcraft to redress their husband’s evasion of marital responsibilities and the asymmetry of household power relations. While witchcraft accusations can expose women to risks of social alienation and financial deprivation, it nevertheless remains a powerful weapon through which women can level intra-household disparities and more broadly, challenge the legitimacy of social practice. In Meru witchcraft discourses reveal how the fault lines of social change are constituted locally, and are a key arena through which the gender implications of agrarian change are registered.

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Catherine Dolan is an anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. Her research is focused on the social impacts of globalization and agrarian change on rural livelihoods, particularly in Eastern and Southern Africa. She is currently engaged in research on ethical trade, gender and rights in African agriculture.