Lynchings in Modern Kenya is a book about mob-(in)justice murders, aka lynchings, in post-independence Kenya. Its body consists of three conference papers, a postscript, and addenda, as grounded not in participant observation, but rather in a large, linked, digitized database of mostly Kenyan media pieces, reports, and other materials. It has a foreword by Robert W. Thurston, Professor Emeritus of History, Miami University, Ohio, author of Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashgate, 2011). In calling for Kenya's lynchings to stop because an evil practice, the book is 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 3,437 lynched persons for Kenya for February 1986-November 2025, but with that number 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 conference paper presented at the March 19-23 annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology at Denver, CO. That paper's full title, showing the paper's relation 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, but especially ones that report the cases of that period's roughly 1,500 lynching victims. According to those materials:
Modern Kenyan lynchings are (1) common, (2) savage, (3) for numerous alleged reasons (though mostly for alleged crimes), (4) rarely prosecuted, (5) with inequitable access to basic resources as one of their contributing causes, (6) a major human rights scandal, and (7) while they continue apace, likely to hinder Kenya’s development in the twenty-first century. Kenya's annual lynchings numbers, both raw and per capita, sometimes greatly exceed those of even the worst years of America’s recorded lynchings history—with, e.g., the US Department of State (USDOS) Kenya human rights reports for 1992 and 1993 reporting "almost 500" and 508 mob-violence murders, respectively, and Kenya's National Police Service reporting 543 and 509 mob-justice killings for 2011 and January-November 2013, respectively. Kenyan lynchings are by numerous cruel methods—e.g., by stoning, beating, hacking, burning, and combinations thereof; they are rarely if ever by America's historically most common methods of hanging and shooting. Among alleged reasons for Kenyan lynchings are larcenies of various kinds (of which "robbery with violence" the most serious), 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. Part of the human rights scandal of Kenyan lynchings has been the generally increasing downplaying in USDOS Kenya human rights reports of Kenya's shockingly numerous lynchings as compared with relatively 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 2015 conference paper presented at the September 18-20 national conference of the Evangelical Missiological Society at Dallas International University (then still the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics), Dallas, TX. That paper’s full title was “More on Lynchings in Kenya: USDOS Kenya Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as a Source on Kenyan Lynchings.” For the years concerned, three things the chapter concludes are, first, that the reports were far from a consistently reliable source for accurate figures/numbers for these lynchings; second, that they showed, from 2009, a decrease in US government concern for lynchings as a human rights issue; third, that they left wide open the possibility that, where the US, according to Tuskegee Institute/University records, had 4,743 lynched persons (of whom 1,297 white) from 1882-1968, Kenya may have had many more than 10,000 for the less-than-thirty years 1991-May 2019. In illustration of the first conclusion, more than half of the 1992-2018 reports provided no lynchings figure at all—e.g., the 1994 report said simply that mob-violence killings "remained a serious problem," the 2004-2007 reports only that there were "numerous instances" of these killings, the 2008-2010 only that "[m]ob violence and vigilante action resulted in numerous deaths," the 2015-2017 only that “[m]ob violence and vigilante action were common and resulted in numerous deaths.” In illustration of the second, there is the fact that mob violence and vigilante action are, from 2011, relegated from the reports' first major section to the last part of the sixth (of seven), from under "[respect for the integrity of the person, including freedom from arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life]" to under "[other societal violence, abuse, and discrimination]." Supporting the third, there is no report from the whole period 1992-2018 that notes any decrease in the frequency of the country's lynchings; there are only, from the "almost 500" and 508 figures of the 1992 and 1993 reports, respectively, expressions indicating that lynchings remained a serious problem, were numerous and/or common, or even increased in frequency.
The first of four preliminaries in the introduction to chapter 2 explains briefly but adequately the book's Christian anthropology. It is this anthropology that grounds the book's judgment of Kenya's (as all other such) lynchings as evil.
Chapter 3: "Tell the World the Facts" is a revision of a 2019 conference paper presented at the March 19-23 annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology at Portland, OR. The paper's full title was “‘Tell the World the Facts’: Database Facts and More about the Human Rights Scandal of Modern Kenyan Lynchings.” The chapter has four major sections and four appendices. The first major section concerns the apparent mushrooming of Kenyan lynchings from ca. 1991, with Crary (AP News, 1986) providing an approximate mid-1980s takeoff level of just a couple dozen lynchings annually. The second major section summarizes Thurston's (Ashgate, 2011) thesis that it is turbulent, changing times, especially of political crisis and faltering political legitimacy, that are fundamental to their being large numbers of lynchings; the third, largely from Hornsby's (I. B. Tauris, 2012) history of Kenya since independence, shows such turbulent, changing times as the context of the mushrooming and continuing high level of Kenyan lynchings. The fourth major section then pivots to talk about, and to illustrate in part by appendix material, the Kenya Lynchings Database. The KLD, in brief, is a file directory of materials that report or otherwise concern Kenyan lynchings, plus a related spreadsheet that at least minimally documents the mob murder of each of its reported victims. The spreadsheet's organization is described—one lynched person per spreadsheet row, dozens of columns intended together to cover greatly the news/information reported about each lynching event; the spreadsheet’s being a work very much in progress is acknowledged and discussed; police-involved summary-execution lynchings are noted as the subject of one of the spreadsheet’s nascent columns. For the author, the KLD’s purposes are most notably three: to begin an historical record of as many as possible of Kenya’s lynchings from independence; to provide the author and interested others with a basis for studying and developing quantifiable generalizations about them, as they have been written about in various media; and, from worldwide telling of the KLD’s reported facts, to raise international awareness of Kenya’s continuing lynchings problem, to the end that the lynchings stop. The spreadsheet’s state of incompleteness notwithstanding, it already (from when the KLD’s materials concerned something over 2,600 lynched persons) appears to support clearly enough a number of generalizations about Kenyan lynchings—e.g., that Kenya’s media do not hesitate to call them by this term; that they are virtually all black-on-black—i.e., virtually never cross-racial; that they are virtually never by hanging, with “the noose” in Kenya iconic rather of suicide. The paper concludes with some questions and concerns—e.g., Why does the 2018 USDOS KCR say nothing more damningly telling about Kenya’s very high number of continuing lynchings—about one of the facts the world stands to know about these lynchings—than, “Mob violence and vigilante action were common in areas where the populace lacks confidence in the criminal justice system?” Regarding the KLD goal of allowing interested others (besides the author) a basis for studying Kenyan lynchings, the author notes that his school, Dallas International University, agreed to host the KLD at least provisionally on its website (which hosting continues through the book’s 2025 update via a DIU SharePoint site).
The book's postscript—part of its initial, end-2021 version—is in seven sections, which concern, in order: that Kenya's lynchings are an ongoing problem; several of the few literature mentions of the McKee (GIAL SEP, 2013) article from which the book's chapter 1—e.g., Chułek's (African Studies 78, 2018) mention in “Mob justice and everyday life: The case of Nairobi’s Kibera and Korogocho slums,” and Howell & Paris's (Baker Academic, 2019) in their introduction-to-cultural-anthropology book chapter on authority and power; several additional sources relevant to understanding Kenyan lynchings—e.g., Luongo (Cambridge UP, 2015), in part of which she treats witch-allegation killings of Kenya’s colonial period, some of them extra-customary, and journalists such as Keith Richburg, with the Washington Post from Nairobi in the early 1990s period that saw Kenyan lynchings mushroom as they did; that Kenyans evidently do not lynch based on anything to do with their targets’ sexual orientation or gender identity; that Kenyan lynchings are virtually never cross-racial, and never white-on-black; the question of whether we, in America today, are not at risk of seeing lynchings resume, of all kinds and even in great numbers; a call to stop all lynchings now, as expressed in part for Africa by former NFL star Ben Watson’s (Fox News, 2020) challenge to activists in America to "also consider advocating for justice and peace across the Atlantic in the homeland.”
The book's addenda—additions, most of them relatively brief, to its end-2021 version—are primarily intended to drive home that Kenya's lynchings are ongoing, that they are not part of the country's unchangeable past, that they are an evil that people have the opportunity to do something about today. But they are also about a variety of matters otherwise related to Kenya's lynchings—e.g., about the question of whether there have been LGBTQ+ people among Kenya's lynched; about the book's only review (of its initial version), including, in a response, nine screenshots from a Drix Videography production concerning a police-perpetrated double-lynching of two alleged thieves; about lynching statistics from several other sub-Saharan African countries, for comparison with ones from Kenya—e.g., for South Africa, from Kemp (Penguin Random House South Africa, 2024) and South Africa Police Service annual crime reports, 1,894 mob-justice murders for calendar 2022, 2,124 for FY 2022/23 (April-March); about news concerning past American lynchings—e.g., concerning the Equal Justice Initiative-assisted erection of historical markers at/near the lynching sites of a number of black victims—even as news of the latest present-day Kenyan victims was breaking. The addenda are not, in any case, unimportant add-ons or afterthought; they are an important additional seventy-plus pages of the book.
Among the book's most recent Kenyan lynching statistics are RUSI Nairobi's 2,459 "mob retribution" deaths for a now-completed project's 6.25-year period of 2019-March 2025. With RUSI Nairobi making no claim that this 2,459 number is or even approaches Kenya's lynchings total for the period concerned, it still makes for an average annual figure of 393.5.
The book's present update is the last planned one; however, as the author willingly grants, even the best-laid plans sometimes change.
