Grief and fury met in Nyamakoroto village yesterday as four coffins — two parents, their 23-year-old daughter Maryanne Makini and a three-month-old baby — were lowered into the earth. The deaths were not a slow illness or accident: police investigators concluded the house had been locked from the outside and petrol containers were found at the scene, suggesting a deliberate, targeted arson attack that killed three and left one child the only survivor. Villagers asked the same question aloud: who would set a sleeping family alight — and why?
This is not an isolated horror. Over the last two years waves of killings and lynchings in Kisii and the neighbouring Nyamira County have been blamed locally on witchcraft, ritual jealousy — and vengeance. But beneath the language of superstition lie recurring patterns: disputed land, contested inheritance and a property squeeze that makes every plot of soil politically and personally combustible. Officials, rights groups and local elders now say many of the incidents labelled “witchcraft” are shorthand for a much cruder motive: taking land.
The scene and the suspicion
According to police and multiple local reports, Maryanne Makini’s family home was attacked in the small hours of August 23. Two teenage girls sleeping in an adjacent structure escaped; a 12-year-old suffered minor burns but survived. Witnesses described assailants who locked the house from outside before the blaze. The community’s outrage was palpable at the funeral; elders demanded swift arrests and justice, and asked why such wanton violence could be carried out in broad daylight in a tightly knit village.
That anger is not simply directed at an abstract “evil.” Across recent months in Gusiiland, conversations — in bars, at church, in the county assembly — move quickly from mourning to a single recurring accusation: land. Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has publicly told audiences that most of the violent deaths in Kisii blamed on witchcraft are actually tied to land inheritance disputes, arguing that young people sometimes “eliminate” older relatives to hasten access to title deeds. Human rights observers back this reading: weaponised accusations of witchcraft, they say, have become an often-successful route to dispossess widows and elders.
Witchcraft as cover, land as prize
To understand why “witchcraft” remains the dominant explanation, you must look at social, legal and economic incentives.
First, the cultural resonance: beliefs in witchcraft and spiritual harm are real and widely held. Accusations can ignite mob fury, and in many communities the narrative of an “evil” elder or neighbor is easier to mobilise than a complex land dispute. Second, the legal and evidential gaps: local police and courts are under-resourced; prosecutions of ritual or arson attacks are slow, and traditional leaders sometimes prefer mediation that leaves property lines fuzzy. Third — and crucially — land scarcity has made ownership a life-and-death prize. In tightly parceled Gusiiland, where generations have subdivided farms into ever-smaller strips, an uncontested title to a homestead plot can be worth a lifetime’s security. When that security is threatened by the death of a husband or patriarch, accusations of witchcraft against widows or seniors often follow — and those accusations can clear a path for relatives to seize land.
A reporter who has worked in the region for more than five years told us that when a man dies “suddenly” in these counties, the first people to gain new access to the title are often close relatives already pressing an inheritance claim. The accounts match documented cases: courts in Kisii have in recent years convicted groups who lynched elders whose land they wanted, and human-rights NGOs have documented how accusations concentrate on the vulnerable — widows, older women, those with formal title deeds.
Patterns, prosecutions and impunity
There are signs of police work and prosecutions: DCI and county police units have on occasion tracked suspects and brought them to court, and some convictions have been secured in high-profile lynching cases. After earlier witchcraft-labelled murders, four people were recently sentenced for a brutal lynching in the region — a signal that the justice system can act. But community members complain of slow investigations and of suspects being released or prosecuted only after public pressure. That gap between crime and punishment feeds a sense of impunity that emboldens others.
In the Nyamakoroto case police said they found evidence of petrol containers and forced locking — details that pointed to arson rather than some spontaneous communal ritual. Yet the motive remains opaque to many residents; without transparent, fast court proceedings the space for rumours — and the recycling of old motives like witchcraft — remains.
Who benefits?
Ask villagers and the answer is blunt: those who stand to inherit. In a region where land is finite and urban migration leaves a young, land-hungry generation at home, a dead elder is a transfer of wealth in the most literal sense. Elders with titled land are often targeted; widows, especially, are vulnerable because the formal mechanisms that should protect their ownership are weak or seldom enforced. That pattern turns private feuds into public violence.
What needs to change
Ending this cycle requires more than blaming superstition. It demands practical, structural fixes:
• Fast, transparent criminal investigations into arson and lynching, with routine public updates so communities can see justice is being done. (The state has moved in this direction in some cases, but inconsistently.)
• Strengthening property registration and protection for vulnerable heirs — especially widows — through legal clinics, mobile land-title services and legal aid that can prevent disputes from turning violent.
• Community education campaigns that address belief in witchcraft as a social problem and promote non-violent dispute resolution, backed by local leaders and faith groups. Human rights organisations have urged criminalisation and protection measures for witchcraft-related violence.
The unanswered question
For the Makini family, the answers will not arrive quickly enough. As their coffins were carried past a crowd of neighbors on September 19, people wept and whispered the same uneasy thought: if this was about land, then justice will require more than arrests — it will require a public reckoning about why property, inheritance and fear of spiritual harm push ordinary people to murder their neighbors.
Local and national authorities say they are investigating. But in a part of Kenya where the claim “they were witches” has become shorthand for “take their land,” investigative reporters, prosecutors and civil society face a larger task: exposing the economic incentives that hide behind accusations of the supernatural, and building the legal and social shields that will stop greed from being disguised as belief. Until then, villages like Nyamakoroto will bury their dead and keep asking the same bitter question: who would set a family alight — and how many more will follow?
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