Mumiani Season: Visual Aspects of a South Coast Kenyan Rumor

Abstract

This article analyzes visual aspects of an otherwise verbal communicative genre: rumor. The focus is an episode of public panic in southern coastal Kenya in 2013, about “mumiani”—politically connected gangs said to murder children for their eyes. I argue that widespread defacement of public images during the panic expressed dimensions of mumiani imaginaries that went unspoken in the verbal spread of rumors about them. These defaced images—the eyes of which were scratched out—also evoked regional cultural motifs relating to power, value and rain, expressing in a visual modality both the content of contemporary mumiani fears and the historical associations that make such rumors plausible.