1. Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 58–69; Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey 1997), 59, 126–27; provincial commissioner, Coast Province, to colonial secretary, Nairobi, “Legal Ownership of Huts by Independent Women,” 23 June 1930 (Kenya National Archives [henceforth cited as KNA], PC/Coast/59/4).

2. Jack Goody and Joan Buckley, “Inheritance and Women’s Labour in Africa,” Africa 43, 2 (1973): 108–20; Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1974), 75–76; Achola Pala Okeyo, “Daughters of the Lakes and Rivers: Colonization and Land Rights of Luo Women,” in Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1980), 186–213; Margaret Jean Hay, “Women as Owners, Occupants, and Managers of Property in Colonial Western Kenya,” in id. and Marcia Wright, eds., African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1982), 110–23.

3. Harold Mackinder Papers, 20 July 1899, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. r. 29.

4. Janet M. Bujra, “Pumwani: The Politics of Property” (mimeographed SSRC [U.K.] report, 1972), 9–13, 51–54, and “Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi,” Canadian J. of African Studies 9, 2 (1975): 213–34; Charles H. Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 139–40; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

5. Christine Obbo, “Dominant Male Ideology and Female Options: Three East African Case Studies,” Africa 46, 4 (1976): 371–88; L. S. B. Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu before 1903 (London: Academic Press, 1977), 800–801; Regina Smith Oboler, “Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya,” Ethnology 19, 1 (1980): 69–88; Patricia Stamp, “Kikuyu Women’s Self Help Groups,” in Claire Roberstson and Iris Berger, eds., Women and Class in Africa (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 27–44; Fiona MacKenzie, “Land and Territory: The Interface between Two Systems of Land Tenure, Murang’a District,” Africa 59, 1 (1989): 91–109; Ivan Karp, “Laughter at Marriage: Subversion in Performance,” in David Parkin and David Nyamwaya, eds., The Transformation of African Marriage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 137–54.

6. Kayaya Thababu, Pumwani, 7 January 1977.

7. White, Comforts of Home, 45–48, 51–78, 80–83, 126–46.

8. Okeyo, “Daughters of the Lakes”; Hay, “Women as Owners”; Henrietta Moore, Space, Text, and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Markawet of Kenya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 65–71.

9. Gretha Kershaw, “The Land Is the People: A Study in Kikuyu Social Organization in Historical Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1972), 54–55; Peter Rogers, “The British and the Kikuyu, 1890–1905: A Reassessment,” J. African Hist. 20, 2 (1979): 255–69; Fiona MacKenzie, “Local Initiatives and National Policy: Gender and Agricultural Change in Murang’a District, Kenya,” Canadian J. of African Studies 20, 3 (1986): 377–401; John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in id. and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, bk. 2, “Violence and Ethnicity” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 315–504; Carolyn Martin Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 28–59; Claire E. Robertson, “ Trouble Showed Me the Way ”: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

10. M. P. K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in Kikuyu Country (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1967), 52–71; Robert Bates, “The Agrarian Origins of Mau Mau: A Structural Account,” Agricultural History 61, 1 (1987): 1–28. Gretha Kershaw, “The Land Is the People,” notes that land consolidation in Kiambu was not a reform of land tenure “but has become a statement about who had tenure and to what extent” (61n).

11. Central Province District Annual Report, 1939–41, 3 (KNA, PC/CP 4/4/1).

12. Celestina Mahina, Mathare, 14 March 1976; Esther Kimombo, Mathare, 9 June 1976; Sara Waigo, Mathare, 1 July 1976; Amina Hali, Pumwani, 4 August 1976; Salim Hamisi, Pumwani, 29 March 1977.

13. The classic critique is David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

14. Amina Hali, interview cited n. 12 above.

15. Kayaya Thababu, Pumwani, 7 January 1977. The “coming of the Italians” refers to the 20,000 Italian prisoners of war captured in Ethiopia in 1940 and marched to Kenya, and to World War II, called in Swahili “the fighting of the Italians.”

16. Kibibi Ali, Pumwani, 21 June 1976.

17. Tamima binti Saidi, Pumwani, 15 March 1977; Thomas Colchester, former municipal native affairs officer, Nairobi, London, 8 August 1977.

18. Sara Waigo, Mathare, 1 July 1976.

19. White, Comforts of Home, 119–22.

20. Tabitha Waweru, Mathare, 13 July 1976.

21. Ibid.

22. Ivan Karp, Fields of Change among the Iteso of Kenya (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 87–88.

23. Ivan Karp, “New Guinea Models in the African Savannah,” Africa 48, 1 (1978): 1–16; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Zande Blood Brotherhood,” Africa 6, 4 (1933): 469–501; T. O. Beidelman, “The Blood Covenant and the Concept of Blood in Ukaguru,” Africa 33, 4 (1963): 321–42.

24. Evans-Pritchard, “Zande Blood Brotherhood,” 397; Beidelman, “Blood Covenant,” 328; I have argued that blood brotherhood creates an idealized version of kinship between men; see Luise White, “Blood Brotherhood Revisited: Kinship, Relationship and the Body in East and Central Africa,” Africa 64, 3 (1994): 359–72. Mixing men’s blood and women’s menstrual blood was very risky, however: “When you have your monthly period and after you bleed for three days you then urinate a lot, and if during those days after you go with a man whose blood does not match yours then you will develop kisonono [gonorrhea],” Amina Hali said (cited n. 12 above).

25. J. M. Beattie, “The Blood Pact in Bunyoro,” African Studies 17, 4 (1958): 198–203; F. Lukyn Williams, “Blood Brotherhood in Ankole (Omukago),” Uganda Journal 2, 1 (1934): 33–41; White, “Blood Brotherhood Revisited.”

26. Ambler, Kenyan Communities, 83; see also Williams, “Blood Brotherhood in Ankole,” 40–41; Beattie, “Blood Pact in Bunyoro,” 198.

27. Kenya Land Commission, Evidence and Memoranda, (London: HMSO, 1934), 1: 285, 271, 329. It is unlikely that these Dorobo were Okiek misnamed by colonial authorities, inasmuch as the term incorporated a number of peoples living in the area; see Corinne A. Kratz, “Are the Okiek Really Maasai? or Kipsigis? or Kikuyu?” Cahiers d’études africains 79, 20 (1981): 355–85, and Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 60; J. E. G. Sutton, “Becoming Maasailand,” in Thomas Spear and Thomas Waller, eds., Being Maasai, 38–60 (London: James Currey, 1993); and John G. Galaty, “‘The Eye That Wants a Person, Where Can It Not See?’: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Boundary Shifters in Maasai Identity,” in ibid., 174–94.

28. White, “Blood Brotherhood Revisted,” 268–39; Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: History and Anthropology in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 174.

29. Timotheo Omondo, Goma Village, Yimbo, Siaya District, 22 August 1986.

30. Nyakida Omolo, West Alego, Siaya District, 19 August 1986.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Zebede Oyoyo, Goma, Yimbo, Siaya District, 13, 23 August 1986.

35. “Adiyisadiki” (“Believer”), letter to the editor, Mambo Leo, November 1923, 13–14.

36. Pius Ouma Ogutu, Uhuyi Village, West Alego, Siaya District, 19 August 1986.

37. Hadija bint Nasolo, Pumwani, 3 and 8 March 1977.

38. Gathiro wa Chege, Mathare, 9 July 1976.

39. Fatuma Ali, Pumwani, 21 June 1976; see also Bujra, Pumwani, 28–29.

40. Chepkitai Mbwana, Pumwani, 1 and 2 February 1977. Being late for work often maintained alternate systems of time-keeping and work discipline; see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38 (1968): 56–97, and Keletso E. Atkins, “‘Kaffir Time’: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labor Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Natal,” J. African Hist. 29, 2 (1988): 229–44.

41. Miriam Musale, Pumwani, 18 June 1976. Some women said it was 8 o’clock (e.g., Elizabeth Kaya, Pumwani, 17 August 1976).

42. Chepkitai Mbwana.

43. Zaina Kachui, Pumwani, 14 June 1976.

44. Chepkitai Mbwana; Kayaya Thababu; Miriam Musale; Zaina Kachui.

45. These points come from two very different studies of time-keeping, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time,” in J. Pitt-Rivers, ed., Mediterranean Countrymen (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 55–72, and Nigel Thrift, “Owners’ Time and Own Time: The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness, 1300–1880,” Lund Studies in Geography, ser. B, 48 (1981): 56–84.

46. Anyango Mahondo, Sigoma, West Alego, Siaya District, 15 August 1986.

47. Zaina Kachui; Christina Cheplimo, Pumwani, 17 March 1977. “In Pumwani, you women were taken to a friend of their mother’s to explain menstruation” (Zaina binti Ali, Calyfonia, 21 February 1977).

48. Wangui Fatuma, Pumwani, 29 December 1976.

49. Asha Wanjiru, Pumwani, 23 December 1976.

50. Margaret Githeka, Mathare, 2 March 1976; Mary Salehe Nyazura, Pumwani, 13 January 1977.

51. E. M. K. Mulira, Mengo, Uganda, 13 August 1990.

52. Domtita Achola, Uchonga. West Alego, Siaya, 11 August 1986.

53. Nyakida Omolo; Nichodamus Okumu-Ogutu Uhuyi, Alego, 20 August 1986; Raphael Oyoo Muriar, Uchonga Village, Alego, 21 August 1986.

54. Salim Hamisi, Pumwani, 29 March 1977; Raphael Oyoo Muriar, Uchonga Village, West Alego, Siaya District, 20 August 1986.

55. E. E. Hutchins, DO, Morogoro, Morogoro District Book, vol. 1, August 1931. I am grateful to Thaddeus Sunseri for taking notes on this file for me. Darrell Bates, The Mango and the Palm (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 47–55; “‘Witchcraft’ Murder of Geologist,” Tanganyika Standard 2 April 1960, 1; William Friedland Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Summary of Vernacular Press, Ngwumo, 4 October 1960; H. K. Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga: The Fight for Land and Freedom, ed. Robert Whittier (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975), 143; Peter Pels, “Mumiani: The White Vampire. A Neo-Diffusionist Analysis of Rumour,” Ethnofoor 5, 1–2 (1995): 166.

56. White, Comforts of Home, 86–93, 116–24.

57. T. O. Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 35; Moore, Space, Text, and Gender, 181

58. Jean S. LaFontaine, “The Ritualization of Women’s Life-Crises in Bugisu,” in id., ed., The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards (London: Tavistock, 1972), 159–86; Leakey, Southern Kikuyu, 1: 163–66; 3: 1241; Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottleib, “A Critical Appraisal of Theories of Menstrual Symbolism,” in Buckley and Gottleib, Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 3–40.

59. Anyango Mahondo; Alec Okaro, Mahero Village, West Alego, Siaya District, 12 August 1986.

60. Peter Stallybrass and Alon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 140–51; Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground, An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

61. This is E. P. Thompson’s point about factory design in the eighteenth century in “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”

62. Kenya Land Commission, Evidence, 1: 222.

63. Muriuki, History of the Kikuyu, 76; MacKenzie, “Land and Territory,” 99.

64. H. W. O. Okoth-Ogendo, “Some Issues of Theory in the Study of Tenure Relations in African Agriculture,” Africa 59, 1 (1989): 6–17.

65. In 1950s Dar es Salaam, according to Lloyd William Swantz, “The Role of the Medicine Man among the Zaramo of Dar es Salaam” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dar es Salaam, 1972), 337, it was said that several women of the Tanganyikan African National Union’s Women’s League would entice men to their rooms and take their blood; they were said to be employees of the fire brigade.

66. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 119–45; see also Beidelman, Moral Imagination, 102–3, 116–9.

67. Hannah Mwikali, Kajiado, 8 November 1976.

68. Mwana Himani bint Ramadhani, Pumwani, 4 June 1976.

69. Muthoni wa Karanja, Mathare, 25 June 1976.

70. White, Comforts of Home, 132–46.

71. Miriam binti Omari, Pumwani, 25 March 1977.

72. Hadija Njeri, Eastleigh, 5 May 1976; Sara Waigo, Mathare, 1 July 1976.

73. Nairobi Municipal Council Minutes, 18 September 1939 (KNA/PC/NBI/2/54).