Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya

Since independence in 1963, Kenya has seen the steady growth of mutual aid arrangements; a practice which creatively combines market logic with redistributive politics and older forms of reciprocity and solidarity. As a means to providing welfare and pursuing joint economic activity, mutual aid has flourished - despite the failures of neoliberal statecraft, and deepening asymmetries of power and wealth between and within different ethnic groups – and has been largely built up using a language of religious faith.

This book examines the often overlooked entanglements and affinities between emerging models of formal and informal finance and welfare with longer-running religious structures and concerns. Observing that many aspects of Christian and indigenous religious life play an integral part in shaping how Kenyans save, lend, distribute, fundraise, and entrust money and value in collective arrangements, Speaking of Trust illuminates and analyses the complex and innovative ways in which Kenyans are reimagining and renegotiating the terms of interdependence across social divides.