Abstract
This article examines speculations on the circumstances surrounding the 1988 murder of the 28-year-old British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya, with a particular focus on how circulating discourses in Kenyan and British social imaginaries shaped these speculations. The article suggests that Ward's death took place in a discursive landscape marked by deeply layered and intermeshed contours of British and Kenyan social memories, which have over time crystallised into popular wisdom regarding the multiple intersections between sex/uality, race, gender and state power in Kenyan and British social imaginaries. Against this background, an understanding of social memories yields insights into the interpretative patterns emerging from the Julie Ward mystery, and the prominence of sex/uality in these speculations, as mapped along tropes of interracial rape, female sexual moralities and phallic state power.