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About the Book

Lynchings in Modern Kenya is a book about mob-(in)justice murders, aka lynchings, in the East African post-independence country of Kenya. Its body consists of three revised conference papers, a postscript, and addenda, as grounded, not in participant observation, but rather in a large linked database of mostly Kenyan media pieces, reports, and other digitized materials. It also has a foreword, by Robert W. Thurston, Professor Emeritus of History, Miami University, Ohio, and author of Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (2011). In presuming to judge Kenya's lynchings an evil practice to be abandoned, the book does so as activist Christian anthropology.

The book was first published end December 2021 and has since been updated three times—in May 2022, February/March 2024, and now November 2025. Its latest update has its linked database—the Kenya Lynchings Database (KLD)—with at least some information about more than 3,430 lynched persons for Kenya for February 1986-November 2025, but with these more-than-3,430 shown to be likely but a third or less of the total number lynched for that forty-year period.

Chapter 1: Lynchings in Modern Kenya is a revision of a 2013 paper presented in its initial form at the March 19-23, 2013 annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology at Denver, CO. That paper's full title, as relating to the conference theme, was “Lynchings in Modern Kenya and Inequitable Access to Basic Resources: A Major Human Rights Scandal and One Contributing Cause.” The chapter is more description than analysis, with its description based on KLD materials from August 1996-August 2013, especially on ones that report concerning that period's roughly 1,500 lynched persons. Those materials have modern Kenyan lynchings as (1) common, (2) savage, (3) for numerous alleged reasons (mostly for alleged crimes), (4) rarely prosecuted, (5) apparently with inequitable access to basic resources as one contributing cause, (6) a major human rights scandal, and (7) hindering, while they continue apace, Kenya’s development in the twenty-first century. Those materials have Kenya's annual per capita lynchings sometimes greatly exceeding those of the worst years of America’s recorded lynchings history, with the Kenya Police having reported, for example, 543 mob justice killings for 2011. They have Kenyan lynchings as by numerous cruel methods—e.g., by stoning, beating, hacking, burning, and combinations thereof—rarely if ever by America's most commonly used hanging and shooting. Reported among alleged reasons for Kenyan lynchings are larcenies of various kinds, murder, witchcraft (with greed for land sometimes apparent behind witch allegations), rape, adultery, sodomy, and gang membership—rarely if ever ethnicity (except sometimes around elections) or either sexual orientation or gender identity. As activist Christian anthropology, the paper judges that part of the human rights scandal of Kenyan lynchings has been the recent downplaying in U.S. Department of State (USDOS) Kenya human rights reports of Kenya's shockingly numerous lynchings over against its comparatively few cases—none lethal—of discrimination, abuse, and violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Chapter 2: More on Lynchings in Kenya is a revision of a [xxx].

Chapter 3: "Tell the World the Facts" is a revision of a [xxx]. [Include a statement about police-assisted lynchings & the screenshots from Drix's video.]

The book's postscript [xxx].

The book's addenda are intended primarily to underline the fact that Kenya's lynchings are ongoing, that they are not part of the country's even recent past, that they are an evil that people today have the opportunity to do something about. But they are also about a variety of matters related to Kenya's lynchings—e.g., about the question of whether there have been LGBTQ+ people among Kenya's lynched; about [xxx]; about [xxx].

In modern Kenya, according to Kenyan and other media reports about them, lynchings are virtually never by hanging (a favored method, rather, of suicides); they are never unambiguously with racial motivation (being virtually all black-on-black, never white-on-black); they are rarely, if ever, motivated by victims' sexual orientation or gender identity (which today, were the fact otherwise, the world would very likely have become aware).

What lynchings in Kenya are—again, according to Kenyan and other media reports—is common, savage, for numerous alleged reasons, rarely prosecuted, with inequitable access to basic resources as one apparent contributing cause, a major human rights scandal, and, as long as they continue, liable to hinder Kenya's development. What they nevertheless are as well, given what both America and Kenya see as higher security and other priorities, is no compelling human rights problem. What their high reported numbers from ca. 1992 to the present appear to be, in significant part, is an historically-shaped concomitant of Kenya's political instability, various larceny and violent crime rates, and societal anxiety, insecurity, and fear concerning the same (e.g., 508 "mob violence and vigilante action" killings reported for 1993 by the US Department of State; 543 "mob (in)justice" killings for 2011 by the Kenya Police Service; 473 "mob retribution" deaths reported for 2019 by RUSI Nairobi).

The book is context, description, and analysis of Kenyan lynchings that may average even more than 500 annually for 1992-2025, and thus even as many as 17,000 for that thirty-four-year period. In being greatly concerned about and condemning these killings, it is activist Christian anthropology, paying attention to contexts, doing description from mostly Kenyan media materials, doing analysis to try to understand, but not refraining from Christian-biblical value judgments of what it deems manifest evils.

The KLD is organized in a file directory and on an accompanying spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, while still highly incomplete, is yet a start toward a valuable analytical tool for the further study of Kenyan lynchings; and while the more than 3,430 lynching victims represent but a fraction (likely well less than a third?) of the total number of Kenya's lynching victims since ca. 1980, it is yet a start toward recording a more complete number and raising international awareness of a horrific, continuing Kenyan human rights problem.

Among the sobering mob-retribution/mob-justice/lynching statistics the book references are the following: a RUSI Nairobi "mob retribution" deaths total for Kenya of 2,459 for the 6.25-year period 2019-March 2025; a South Africa figure of [xxx], from both Kemp (2024) and South Africa Police Service annual crime reports; a Tanzania figure from Kaniki (2015) of 16,962 "mob justice" killings for the twenty-year period 1996-2015; a Uganda figure [xxx], mostly from Uganda Police Force annual crime reports.

The present update is the last planned one; however, as the author willingly grants, even the best laid plans sometimes change.

About the Author

Robert Guy McKee

Robert Guy McKee (Rob) was born September 21, 1952 at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD. He grew up in upstate New York and Framingham, MA, graduating from Rush-Henrietta High School (south of Rochester, NY) in 1970. His bachelor’s degree (1975), in Social Relations, is from Harvard; his master’s (1985) and doctorate (1995), both in Anthropology, are from the University of Rochester.

Rob married Carol Elaine Chiapperino on January 3, 1976. They became members of Wycliffe Bible Translators later that year and served nineteen years in Africa with Wycliffe’s partner organization, SIL International. From 2010 to the present, Rob has been part of the Applied Anthropology faculty at Dallas International University (formerly the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics) in southwest Dallas.

Besides Christian anthropology, Rob's professional interests include Mangbetu linguistics and anthropology, tale analysis, subtitles in ethnographic film, lynchings in Kenya, and more. He has published several Mangbetu linguistics papers (e.g., "Concerning Meegye and Mangbetu's Bilabial Trills"); his anthropology dissertation was on Meegye-Mangbetu death compensations as intergroup rites of passage. He has published two other Leanpub books—namely, Destination: Christian Anthropology (2022) and "Let's Understand Each Other!": Meegye-Mangbetu Death Compensations in the Forest of Alliances (2023).

Rob and his wife reside in Duncanville, TX, just outside Dallas. They have four adult daughters and seven grandchildren.