Awino Okech. Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya. New York: Routledge, 2021. 78 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $23.19. Paper. ISBN: 9780367788049.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: In Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya, Awino Okech examines the practice among Luo communities in Kenya, focusing on its reception among widows and the wider Luo community.Okech argues that widow inheritance, like so many cultural rites that focus on women's bodies and sexuality, is understood and mobilized in the face of repeated experiences of structural and physical political violence, and other threats to Luo cultural integrity.The book presents five succinct chapters with an introduction and conclusion, and is based on a case study of a specific set of villages just outside Kisumu city in 2008-09.Okech conducted interviews and focus groups with women who had experienced widow inheritance, as well as men who held roles within the rite, and cultural leaders.The roles of women and the centrality of their bodies in preserving Luo cultural practice and identity in the face of the postcolonial Kenyan national project are explored through an examination and assessment of their performances of culturally appropriate femininity-gendered performances that have the capacity to reinforce and reconstitute Luo identity.Okech locates her study within African feminist scholarship, rejecting the deficit framing of previous work on widowhood and inheritance.This literature, she argues, has emphasized "the lack of agency of women" (1) and relies on wellworn oppositional binaries including modernity/urbanity, Christianity/African cultural traditions, and rurality/civilization.In contrast, Okech's work touches on several expansive themes-the origins and contemporary motivations of widow inheritance; gendered citizenship; the limits of international development discourses in supporting Kenyan, and by extension, African woman; and the sexual and reproductive public health implications of widow inheritance.Chapter One foregrounds the modernity/tradition binary, and the ways in which women's bodies continue to be sites of contestation where "states and nations continually define and redefine themselves" (10).Here Okech argues that "African culture" was a primary mode of anti-colonial resistance, where the treatment of, and access to women's bodies were, and continue to be positioned as the antidote to colonial and neocolonial erasure.Chapter Two addresses the heteronormativity at the center of Luo family organization, which requires widow inheritance as an exercise of control over single women.A central thesis of this chapter is that the experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has shifted the moral location of widow inheritance, with women who refuse, or negotiate out of
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.244
Author: Christina Kenny
Institutions: University of New England, University of New England
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408843306