a much larger trend. Mastering mapping skills was proving increasingly indispensible to local competitions over scarce resources. Chiefs and district officials often remarked on the quality of maps in their judgments. Further, these maps became part of a permanent record, an archival patrimony that was frequently called up in later land disputes. While geographic literacy served “symbolic, cognitive and pedagogic” roles, mapmaking itself became an instrumental resource for the reproduction of class, wealth, and power in the moral economy of western Kenya.103
But the importance and uses of mapping went far beyond this instrumental function. Mapping also proved a critical tool for ethnic patriots, particularly for those ethnic patriots whose constituents were also cosmopolitan and plural. Maps could provide the engines to transform their “social energy into social work.”104 Local cartographic practices, both on an intimate and on a patriotic scale, allowed for the development of what contemporary geographers term countermapping. Also called ethnocartography, countermapping refers to community-based mapping projects, particularly in postcolonial and indigenous land cases, used to “resist the power of the state.”105 As contemporary legal systems, both local and international, consider carefully drawn maps obligatory and often paramount evidence in questions of land rights, countermapping provided the means to make the land claims of indigenous peoples “legible” and legally viable.106 In recent years, technological advances such as geographic information systems and the Global Positioning System have democratized the tools of mapping and aided these countermapping campaigns. While these new technologies have added to the “excitement” around such projects, countermapping also relies heavily on a much wider range of lower-tech and lower-cost techniques, such as sketch mapping and scale model constructions.107 Countermapping offered the power, or at least potential, to transform individual land into property and communal land into territory. In this way, countermapping served both a counterhegemonic purpose—mapping against the state—and a generative purpose, capable of mapping new states of political imaginations.
The social work of countermapping has a much longer history than assumed in the literature on indigenous rights and community based activism. If defined as an essentially counterhegemonic practice, then countermapping preceded cartography, as local communities used spatial strategies to resist state-builders of all kinds. In a recent study, James Scott has demonstrated how “hill peoples” in central Asia used spatial strategies to escape state builders, taking refuge in remote hills that served as spaces not only of resistance but also of “cultural refusal.”108 “Statelessness,” in this conception, should not be understood as disorganization or as a lack of social structures but as a strategy and an art form. Spatial analysis has opened new avenues for the study of social formations characterized by heterarchy, systems of organization exemplified by overlaps, multiplicity, and divergent yet coexistent patterns of relations, power, and authority.109 Whether in parallel or in contest with hierarchal systems, heterarchy provided a strategy of “(horizontal) social complexification,” and a means of evading or checking centralizing political forces.110 While the kindom of Buganda used spatial organization to order power and discipline their subjects, this same spatial ordering also allowed members of the court to allocate measures of accountability: through the complex spatial organization of different forms of religious and political leadership, citizens of Buganda “made their rulers accountable not by centralizing power but by keeping things complicated.”111 Alternative sites of authority also provided overlapping mappings of power and strategies of resistance, as in healing sites and the territorial spirits of the Great Lakes region.112 Absent the cartographic tools of mapping, states and local actors alike used spatial strategies to organize and contest power, to assert and avoid obligations, and to define and redefine community.
The arrival of imperial cartography elevated the power of the map in Africa and offered new opportunities for countermapping resistance. Sumathi Ramaswamy has drawn attention to the geographic work of those she termed “barefoot cartographers”: amateur mapmakers who adopted the tools and symbols of “command” cartography to produce and reinscribe the mapped “logo” of the nation.113 While such terminology risks reifying an orientalist dialectic between the naked, unscientific nature of local geographic imaginations and the booted, scientific work of imperial cartographers, it does importantly dislodge the practices of mapping from its official uses and point to the popular and patriotic production of mapmaking cultures. The drawing of maps and the clerical work involved in defining and defending territory provided partisans across Africa with another avenue for self-representation, for recasting their histories, and for forwarding their political agendas. For Luyia ethnic patriots, mapping enabled them to order and naturalize the space of belonging, to marshal their plural and often dissenting constituents, and to minimally outline their political and cultural project along territorial lines. There was thus “no catastrophic erasure by the natives of ‘precolonial’ or ‘indigenous’ conceptions of land with the arrival of new modalities of visualizing territory ushered in by the colonial state through the mediation of the modern science of cartography.”114 Rather, mapping provided a concrete tool mobilized by local patriots in the articulation of new identities in a wider and increasingly crowded political arena.
In a recent study on the “spatial factor” in African history, Allen Howard and Richard Shain have suggested that “perhaps the ‘ethnic’ approach to African history has most determinedly blocked the application of spatial analysis.”115 The present study works to redress this gap, creating a dialogue between the voluminous historiography on ethnic identity and the growing literature on territoriality and geographic imaginations. Instead of understanding territory as solely part of high-modernist colonial projects or as simply a strategic resource of “political tribalism,” this study suggests a methodological shift toward exploring the multiple ways local communities and ethnic patriots adopted and reworked mapping strategies to their own ends. Linking the study of moral ethnicity with territorial politics, this study further investigates the ongoing debates over the meaning of the Luyia political community, debates often expressed as arguments over maps and borders. Boundaries, be they cognitive or geographic, both marked and managed the extent of political communities. Colonial mapping strategies produced new geographic imaginaries and a form of “map-mindedness” appropriated by African communities in their reformulations of identity, community, and territory.116
A NOTE ON SOURCES
In a recent nonfiction piece on Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu, compatriot Binyavanga Wainaina began with a historical declaration: “We are made by our archives.”117 In the context of a study of encounters—between people and landscape, between the colonial map and local geographic imaginations, between systems of knowledge and grammars of community—this statement rings especially true. The research for this project necessitated an engagement with multiple historical modes and my own encountering with a wide variety of sources—archival, vernacular, oral, and pictorial—across multiple times and spaces.
Researching a borderland that exists at the crossroads of several competing histories required archival work across three continents, from the borderlands of Uganda and Kenya through to Birmingham and Cambridge, England, and even across the Atlantic to Richmond, Indiana.118 Such archives included national, provincial, missionary, and personal holdings. Sources from the Uganda National Archives, in Entebbe, presented a relatively untapped and rich, if elusive, avenue for exploring regional and cross-boundary histories. Missionary records from across three continents, too often used only in missionary or religious histories, provided rich evidence of linguistic projects, political work, and the interaction of new religious ideas with the patriotic imagining of new communities. Newspapers, both vernacular and national, offered important insights into local and national transformations in political thinking and language. The present study also pays particular heed to the documentation of oral testimonies in court cases, in colonial commissions, and in local history-writing projects. While set within the performative theaters of colonial production, this kind of testimonial documentation allows the “voices” of African petitioners to be read in and through colonial documents.119
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