ABSTRACT
Blood sacrifice refers in the present work to offerings involving, but not necessarily limited to, the movement of blood outside the body. G. A. S. Northcote wrote in 1907 that Luo make offerings “at all important occasions in their daily life”. Underlying the sacrificial discourse and practice in Luo country, as else-where, are two important assumptions. One is that there can be no gain without pain. The second is that one being can symbolically substitute for another. The movement took firmest root among Luo and later among Gusii after the Kenya African Rifles and police had conducted violent punitive expeditions in the latter’s home area of Kisii between 1905 and 1908. Christian missionaries in western Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, have tried hard for a century to stamp out animal sacrifice to local ancestors or spirits. Mumbo was an avowedly anti-Christian movement; Omweri has thus far been a non-Christian one.
