Mumiani Season: Visual Aspects of a South Coast Kenyan Rumor Zebulon Dingley 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. In the waning months of 2013, Kenya’s Lunga Lunga Constituency was in tur- moil. 1 The Mombasa High Court had just nullified Khatib Mwashetani’s elec- tion to the newly-established National Assembly, ordering fresh elections to be held by the end of that year. A nationwide teachers’ strike had recently ended, leaving students and their parents concerned about their readiness to sit for their annual exams (which are daunting under the best of circumstances). And the vuli short rains had not arrived as anticipated, threatening the small-scale, rain-fed agricultural livelihoods of most of the region’s inhabitants. At the same time, sinister occult forces seemed to be gathering strength. In early October, inspectors at Mombasa’s Kilindini port discovered what was reported to have been an unnamed senior politician’s “devil worship para- phernalia” hidden inside a shipping container of Chinese provenance (Nyassy 2013). Within weeks of that story breaking in national news media, word began to spread that a second container had now been found full of Kenyan heads bound for China. This, in turn, was connected to a more general fear: that “mumiani” had returned, after a long absence, to prey on Lunga Lunga’s vulnerable population (Dingley 2022). But who (or what) are mumiani, and what, if anything, might these events have to do with one another? “Mumiani”—the term and its multiple referents—have a long history in East Africa and the western Indian Ocean (Dingley 2018, 2022; Brennan 2008; White 2000; Pels 1992). I outline key aspects of this history below, but for the moment it is enough to note that in contemporary coastal Kenya the term ZEBULON DINGLEY is an Asst. Professor in the Department of History at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. His research explores the history of “occult” ritual and rumor in coastal Kenya from the 19th century to the present. E-mail: dingleyz@cofc.edu 229 Visual Anthropology, 36: 229–248, 2023 # 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print/1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2023.2203295