extensive use of archival maps. Geographic literacy produced its own “tin-trunk” literature, to use Karin Barber’s terminology, found in the personal, hidden documentation produced by elites and nonelites alike that helped advance African political argumentation.120 Maps drawn for local land courts, in partisan histories, in political tracts, and for colonial boundary commissions produced a vast archive of cartographic representations. These sources do, however, present challenges. As they are often viewed as addenda or supplements, they are particularly susceptible to disappearance and destruction. On a recent visit to the Kenya National Archives, I found that one of the largest files of maps submitted to the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission, which provided much of the evidence for chapter 9 of this volume, has now disappeared in the process of recataloguing. Maps mentioned in reports, petitions, land cases, and other correspondences were often impossible to trace. The material nature of maps, which require frequent handling and copying, also make these sources susceptible to deterioration. Many of the maps I consulted were falling apart, literally offering only fragments of the past. Still, the variety of maps drawn by official hands as well as those drawn by local landowners and ethnic patriots provide a particularly rich source base. As with literacy itself, these maps revealed the “hidden powers” of territory inscribed on paper.121 Long passed over or ignored entirely, the symbols and cartographic metaphors operating inside and outside the map itself provide a means of accessing and interrogating evolving arguments over geographic imaginaries.
In the tradition of social history, an extensive oral history project conducted over the course of 2007 and 2008 also sought to capture the testimony of elders from what is, in many ways, the last colonial generation. Since the pioneering work of Jan Vansina, oral history has privileged “tradition” and the ability of the historian to separate verifiable truths from the performative aspects of oral accounts.122 However, over the past twenty years or so, a major theoretical and methodological shift has moved toward the use of oral histories as important sources unto themselves, with all of their subjectivity, theatricality, and ambiguity.123
Life histories have become a particularly popular means of accessing the social world and alternative histories. In my own work, early group interviews collecting oral traditions quickly gave way to more personal, life history–style interviews. My first forays into group interviews were often interrupted and at times hijacked by local political officials or self-appointed village experts. While these interventions produced valuable and insightful contestations, they took control of the interview process and setting away not only from me as an interviewer but moreover from the chosen interviewees, whose histories did not always match the priorities and privileged narratives of “official” figures. The life history format, though still embedded in wider familial and communal networks that meant interviews were rarely a one-on-one event, allowed for a greater degree of intimacy, privacy, and rigor.
The primary nucleus of informants came from the Luyia Council of Elders, a formal organization composed of twenty men, each representing a recognized constituent community within the Luyia fold. While representing themselves as the producers and guardians of this ethnic project, these men rarely subsumed their divergent narratives or personal histories under a codified historical narrative. Rather, the variety of politics espoused by these elders revealed the diversity of political thought and the competing forms of community still debated within their council meetings. In interviews with these sanctioned male elders, wives, sons, daughters, neighbors, and onlookers often interjected, providing a wider range of engagements and new sources of historical perspectives. Other informants came from a broad cross-section of backgrounds, from former rebel fighters to local men and women who had never traveled outside western Kenya, and from the first female councillor to a former vice president.
The sheer number of different dialects and languages in the region was overwhelming. Every interviewee spoke multiple languages with great fluency. To clear this linguistic hurdle, I opted to allow informants to choose the language of the interview, and if necessary interpreters would be chosen in consultation with the informant. Many chose to speak in English, allowing them, as one elder put it, to control the “terms of their translation,” though debates on appropriate terms and translations were common. And yet, as explored in chapter 4, the choice of language may also reflect deeper concerns of the interviewees around political and intellectual positioning.
I was often amusingly reminded of my own position as a single, white, female, and specifically Canadian, researcher. When meeting with former rebels of the Dini ya Msambwa movement in Kimilili, I was asked why “white Canadian women always want to know about Dini ya Msambwa”—referring of course to the pioneering work of Audrey Wipper on the movement in the 1970s.124 Msambwa followers had crafted very formal, if not always strict, gender discipline practices. My position as both an honored guest and as a woman caused some dissention among the group as to where I should sit: in outdoor meetings and formal gatherings, men and honored guests would be given the often-limited chairs while women customarily sat on the ground. A compromise of sorts was reached when a “chair” of animal skins was constructed on the ground for me to sit on—the “invention of tradition” in action. I was acutely aware in this context that the women in the group would not be able to add their voices freely, adding strategic silences, though not absences, that were only partially overcome with further, more intimate and informal interviews.
In another case, a prominent Bukusu businessman accompanied me to an interview with a well-respected elder on Bukusu customs, Mzee Mombasa as he was known to friends.125 Mzee Mombasa made repeated pronouncements that outsiders, and more specifically women, could not bear witness or be privy to the sacred inner workings of Bukusu customs. And yet the interview proceeded as usual, with my Bukusu interlocutor repeating my questions verbatim and Mzee Mombasa responding in my presence, though officially acknowledging only my male companion.
Perhaps the most impinging but also revealing context for this project was the political. The majority of the interviews took place during the 2007 electoral campaigns in Kenya and their direct aftermath in 2008. This heightened political context inevitably shaped the oral histories collected. Informants continually related and compared their life histories to the contemporary social and political issues being debated in the campaigns.126 At times, the elections would directly intervene into the interview process: several interviews with important former trade unionist and independence leader Arthur Aggrey Ochwada had to be suspended and postponed when a fleet of black SUVs appeared on the horizon, indicating that Ochwada’s close friend and political confidante, current vice president Moody Awori, had traveled home to seek his counsel.127 Among the Dini ya Msambwa former rebels and family members of former leader Elijah Masinde, election time always proved frenetic as local politicians vied to sit on Masinde’s stool in the Msambwa shrine—a sign of prophetic approval.128 The atmosphere at these interviews was palpably charged, as former rebels and extended family members sought to position themselves as the guardians of this history and its political import for contemporary electoral contests. In this setting, the past refused to stay past: the pasts expressed were restless, mobile, and irrepressibly present.
These life histories are not left to tell an unmediated narrative. Rather, I treat these testimonies as social texts that, when read with and against documentary archives, provide important contexts, heated points of debate, multiple and often fragmented meanings, and critical historical interventions. Further, they helped me map a kind of intellectual and social network throughout western Kenya and beyond. Like the past itself, these interviews rarely stayed put: stories, and even actual interviews, crossed borders and traveled to urban centers. Daily I would travel by local bus, bicycle, and foot up to six or seven hours with my research aide, Henry Kissinger Adera (yes, his father was a great admirer of Kissinger). Henry provided a crucial service, not only as my point of access to many of the interviewees but also as an interlocutor and impressively diplomatic negotiator. As a Luo, and son of an important elder on the Luo Council of Elders, Henry stood somewhat outside of the political histories and tensions of the Western Province. Many interviewees encouraged him to join politics, saying he could win even in the Western Province.
