Despite our focus on the social truths that were inscribed in the Ward case, and the ways in which Julie Ward's death in Kenya and the subsequent quest for her killers convened a set of contact zones, providing important forums where various concerns were debated in the course of the interactions between the different constituencies, it is hard to overstate the horrible human tragedy at the centre of this book: a young woman was brutally murdered and her body was disposed of in a most inhumane way. For more than 25 years, a family has been subjected to layer upon layer of deceit, sabotage and contempt in its search for truth and justice.

The search for the murderer(s) is still on, and new reports and allegations continue to emerge. On 11 October 2009, reports of a new collaborative investigation between the Scotland Yard and Kenyan police emerged; their hopes lay in human DNA collected from the scene of the remains and preserved since then. In November 2011, BBC News reported that a team of six Scotland Yard investigators had flown to Kenya to launch new investigations into the murder.

This book has offered a reflection on the conceptual and empirical reach of binary categories of understanding the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and, by extension, Africa and Europe. Where much of the existing literature dismisses such binaries as a thing of the past, and celebrates their demise with such ‘inclusive’ discourses as multiculturalism, hybridity and globalization, our reflection on the developments and narratives regarding the Ward murder points to different conclusions. First, far from being extinct, these binaries continue to be mobilized in understanding contemporary Africa and Africans, perhaps not with the same crudeness, but certainly from the same impulse. Second, far from fixing them immutably under an oppressive gaze, within the deployment of these binaries are interesting sites for subversion, resistance and critique. In this respect, our exploration of the contact zones that were convened by the Julie Ward case revises our understandings of modernity, especially in relation to its pillars of rationalism/reason, unity of the subject and their assumptions about Africa.