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 horti-
culture 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
660 Catherine S. Dolan

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 horti-
cultural 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.
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 661

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, respond-
ing 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 particu-
larly 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 oper-
ating 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.
662 Catherine S. Dolan

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 Bülow 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 Bülow 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 under-
mined 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
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 663

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 view-
ing 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 accentu-
ates 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 witch-
craft 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).
664 Catherine S. Dolan

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 mani-
festation 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.
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 665

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 prac-
tices.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 witch-
craft 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 witch-
craft, ritual murders, and other ostensibly occult practices brewing through-
out 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).
666 Catherine S. Dolan

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 witch-
doctor 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).
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 667

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, co-
wives, 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. Cur-
rently 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.
668 Catherine S. Dolan

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 intensi-
fication 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 conse-
quences. 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 culti-
vation, and in some cases the appropriation of their usufruct land. The next
section of the paper examines why this is, and more specifically why witch-
craft 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.
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 669

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 custom-
ary 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 horti-
cultural 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.
670 Catherine S. Dolan

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 in-
equitable 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 ante-
cedents 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 construc-
tions 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, sub-
Chief/Chief, and ultimately statutory courts.
23. See Dolan (2001) for an elaboration of this process.
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 671

Table 1. Average Annual Income and Control

Crop Income Control

Female (%) Male (%)

Bananas 10.0 90.0

Beans 72.7 27.3
Cabbage 50.0 50.0
Carrots 53.6 46.4
Coffee 14.0 86.0
French beans 38.0 62.0
Maize 53.3 46.7
Mangetout24 52.0 48.0
Onions 61.1 39.9
Potato 49.2 50.8
Passion fruits 90.0 10.0
Pyrethrum 0.0 100.0
Tea 6.7 93.3
Tomato 75.3 24.7
Wheat 0.0 100.0

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.
672 Catherine S. Dolan

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

Labour Performed (%) Control over Income (%)

Men 18 66
Women 82 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 inde-
pendent 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.

Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 673

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.
674 Catherine S. Dolan

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 witch-
craft (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 interro-
gated 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).
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 675

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 intra-
familial 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 follow-
ing 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 responsi-
bilities 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
676 Catherine S. Dolan

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 dis-
courses (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 docu-
mented 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 un-
certainty 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 construc-
tions 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
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition 677

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 responsi-
bilities — 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 confront-
ing 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 horti-
cultural 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
678 Catherine S. Dolan

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.