Abstract
The study explores the narratives on the 1988 death of 28 year old British tourist, Julie
Ann Ward in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve. Julie Ward's death in Kenya attracted
widespread attention in Kenya and Britain culminating in at least three true crime books,
significant media coverage and rumours in Kenya. The study reflects on the narratives on
Julie Ward's death, with particular interest in the discourses that gained expression
through, or were inscribed, on Julie Ward's death and the quest for her killers. The study
is also interested in the ways in which the Julie Ward case and the discourses it inspired
offer a critique of rationality, and the accompanying unity of the subject, expressed
through a logocentric impulse as key tenets of a Western modernity that continues to
mediate metropolitan readings of postcolonial Africa.
The study reveals that Julie Ward's death traversed various discursive sites, which were
laden with specific ideas on race, gender, the postcolonial African state, Western
modernity, female sexuality and black male sexuality, among a host of other issues; all of
which tinted British and Kenyan narratives on the circumstances surrounding the death.
The study argues that the authors of the three books on the Ward tragedy rely on colonial
archives on Africa, and actively mobilize notions such as the myth of the uncontrollable
black male libido and its threat to the vulnerable white woman in understanding the Ward
tragedy. While these writers cling to these notions of the black peril, the noble savages,
Africa as the tourist's wildlife paradise, and the dysfunctional postcolonial state; Kenyan
publics read the murder as another symptom of a criminal political elite's brutal
deployment of violence to secure immunity for its criminal activities.However, the two sets of ideas are largely disarticulated, and as the study reveals, the
British stakeholders in the case are blinded by a rigid polarization of Kenya and Britain,
which presumes a superior British moral and technological integrity. These assumptions
blind the Ward family to British complicity in the cover up of the truth in Julie Ward's
murder; while at the same time, rendering them illiterate in the local textualities which
remain inaccessible to the instruments of Western modernity that are privileged in the
quest for truth and justice in the Julie Ward murder.
Julie Ward’s presence in Kenya, her death and the subsequent quest for her killers is
consistently haunted by neat dichotomies, derived from various masternarratives. The
study traces these dichotomies, in a bid to outline their configurations and the outcomes
of their deployment, while consistently keeping the grey areas of entanglements between
these dichotomies in sight. It is in these grey areas that we see the contradictions,
blindspots, critiques, complicities and forms of agency that were at play just under the
radar of these neat polarities. From these grey terrains, we catch glimpses of the workings
of these dichotomies as discursive masks which conceal the faultlines that rend the
masternarratives.
The study finds that in many ways, Julie Ward's death in Kenya may be positioned in a
transitional space between colonial whiteness and an emergent postcolonial whiteness,
which betrays heavy imprints of the grammars of colonial whiteness, including the
messianic white male authority, wildlife tourism and conservation. To this end, the study suggests, one of the factors that hampers the quest for truth and justice in the Ward case
is the failure to forge viable grammars of whiteness in the postcolonial context. Such
viable grammars would be able to access local textualities and retain an awareness of the
underlying complicities and faultlines that now rig colonial Manichean binaries, which
are largely mediated by the interests of capital. The novel The Constant Gardener and the
film Ivory Hunters (1989) - both of which make implicit allusions to the Julie Ward case
– eloquently articulate these complicities and faultlines.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/6801 |
| Date | 25 March 2009 |
| Creators | Musila, Grace Ahingula |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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