Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption, and Friendship in Global Africa

by James H. Smith, Ngeti Mwadime

Email from Ngeti is a captivating story of sorcery, redemption, and transnational friendship in the globalized twenty-first century. When the anthropologist James Smith returns to Kenya to begin fieldwork for a new research project, he meets Ngeti Mwadime, a young man from the Taita Hills who is as interested in the United States as Smith is in Taita. Ngeti possesses a savvy sense of humor and an unusual command of the English language, which he teaches himself by watching American movies and memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary. Smith and Mwadime soon develop a friendship that comes to span years and continents, impacting both men in profound and unexpected ways. For Smith, Ngeti can be understood as an exemplar of a young generation of Africans navigating the multiplicity of contemporary African life―a process that is augmented by globalized culture and the Internet. Keenly aware of the world outside Taita and Kenya, Ngeti dreams big, with endless plans for striking it rich. As he struggles to free himself from what he imagines to be the hold of the past, he embarks on an odyssey that takes him to local diviners, witch-finders, Pentecostal preachers, and prophets. This is the fascinating ethnography of Mwadime and Smith, largely told through their shared emails, journals, and recorded conversations in the field. Throughout, the reader is struck by the immediacy and poignancy of coauthor Ngeti's narrative, which marks a groundbreaking shift in the nature of anthropological fieldwork and writing.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Elena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption, and Friendship in Global Africa is a pioneering, reflexively co-authored work that redefines traditional anthropological fieldwork for the digital era. Published by the University of California Press across 241 engaging pages, anthropologist James H. Smith and his Kenyan interlocutor-turned-coauthor Ngeti Mwadime offer a deeply intimate, dialogic study of youth, ambition, and existential struggle in 21st-century global Africa.

Through a rich compilation of shared emails, personal journal entries, and recorded field conversations, the book follows Ngeti, a quick-witted young man from Kenya's Taita Hills as he navigates the complex social pressures of post-colonial life. Struggling to escape perceived generational curses and occult forces, Ngeti’s quest for economic redemption leads him to diviners, Pentecostal preachers, witch-finders, and global internet networks. By dismantling the conventional barrier between anthropologist and subject, Email from Ngeti delivers an empathetic, methodologically radical text that is essential reading for Africanist scholars, digital anthropologists, researchers of contemporary religion, and students of global youth culture.