On 17 September 1988, the Daily Nation featured a short article titled ‘British tourist eaten by beasts’. The Kenyan newspaper quoted Kenyan police as saying they did not know how the woman had died or which animals had eaten her, but that lions, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards were among the animals in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve where the remains had been found five days earlier. The woman in question was Julie Ann Ward, a 28-year-old British tourist. She had been reported missing on 6 September, before her remains were found on 13 September. This book is about Julie Ward's death.

I did not set out to write about Julie Ward. My journey to the story of her life and brutal death was far less deliberate. In fact, Julie Ward found me. Initially, I wanted to write about rumours of political and politicized assassinations in Kenya. Growing up in Kenya, rumours about politicians’ misadventures and highprofile court cases rubbed shoulders with tales of Abunuwasi's escapades in our story-telling worlds. Some of these tales found their way into what T. Michael Mboya terms ‘soundtracks of our youth’. So, while the state broadcaster Kenya Broadcasting Corporation religiously flooded the airwaves with ‘patriotic’ songs in praise of the then ruling party, Kenya African National Union (KANU), and the Daniel Toroitich arap Moi presidency, the rumour networks collaborated with rugby fans and students, to produce cover versions of such songs. In place of patriotic songs like ‘Kenya Nchi, yangu / Kenya Nchi yangu na ninaipenda!’ we sang ‘Kenya Nchi, yangu / Kenya Nchi, yangu na ‘toto Jonathan!’ We never realized it at the time, but on hindsight, these songs were accurate commentaries on the political elite's sense of its ownership of the country: Kenya belonged to the political elite and those in their networks, as a culture of personal rule and patronage took root, first in the Jomo Kenyatta regime of 1963–1978 immediately after flag independence, then in the Moi regime of 1978–2002, later to be perfected by the Mwai Kibaki regime of 2002–2012 and then the current Uhuru Kenyatta regime that took over in 2012. This prompted Kenyan rumour mills to update the terminology for this plutocracy by coining new terminology: wananchi (ordinary citizens) and wenyenchi (owners of the country).