indispensible, as did his company as a fellow traveler through unpredictable terrains. This study owes much not only to these formal interviews but also to the debates about politics and competing versions of history discussed with Henry and with a wide array of fellow passengers on long matatu bus rides across the country and on the backs of boda boda bicycles throughout western Kenya.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN: A ROAD MAP
The imbrication of so many manifestations of geographic imaginations of community required this study to traverse a wide intellectual terrain. While following a chronological and thematic logic, each chapter builds on different kinds of geographic work, investigating the multiple meanings and uses of mapping: as activity, as metaphor, as colonial science, and as patriotic idea. Each chapter tracks episodes of geographic encounter that when read together comprise the intellectual architecture of the construction of and contestations over the making of the Luyia identity in colonial Kenya.
In Chapter 1 the diverse communities of western Kenya find their varied geographic imaginations confronted and eventually transformed by the power of the map. The ecologically rich and topographically diverse terrain of western Kenya taught its African settlers lessons in agronomy, social organization, and political authority. Using linguistic analysis, oral sources, and recorded narratives of migration and settlement, this chapter first reconstructs the evolving forms of identification and geographic practices that existed up to the late nineteenth century. These precolonial geographies of interpenetration, of itinerant territorialities, and of regional exchange were neither lost nor completely displaced by the arrival of colonial cartography; rather, local inhabitants reworked their spatial conceptions and geographic practices to countermap the tools of surveyors and contest imperial geographies. Some, like the Wanga, invested early in imperial cartography, providing men, supplies, and local, though self-promoting, knowledge to the British as they “beat the bounds” of these new boundaries. Others negotiated and subverted the work of imperial cartographers, pushing through colonial boundaries, sabotaging the symbols of surveyors, and drawing their own maps alongside older practices of space. In this encounter between different geographic imaginations, mapping became both the tool of territorial acquisition and the means of its subversion.
Chapter 2 traces the transformation of mapping from a novel tool in local competitions over resources, power, and patronage into a tool of patriotic imagination. In the early decades of colonial rule, internal struggles over chiefly authority and local definitions of lineage and land rights fractured along clan and administrative lines. Local political actors reformulated kinship and invented ancestors to defend their diverse practices of land tenure and political authority from colonial hierarchies and bureaucratization. Boundaries became flashpoints in these contestations, and cartography became an instrument of political action.
Into this picture of competitive mapping, the discovery of gold in North Kavirondo threatened African land rights on an ever-larger scale. Conflicts over land and mineral rights encouraged local political thinkers to begin thinking of an enlarged ethnic polity in western Kenya as a means of defense against colonial interventions into their lands and competition with their African neighbors. Before the Kenya Land Commission of 1932, representatives from North Kavirondo consolidated their diverse practices of land tenure, suppressed recent internal fragmentations over political authority and kinship measures, and transformed local practices of mapping into a means of imagination. Before they had a name, these representatives declared themselves the spokesmen of a “tribe,” and the map provided the concrete evidence of their political existence.
While chapter 2 reveals the impetus for this patriotic investment in the map, in chapter 3 this investment pays dividends, informing innovations in the patriotic work of ethnogenesis and history writing. Having declared themselves a tribe, ethnic patriots in western Kenya went in search of name. In choosing Luyia—a term that translated for many as the fireplace where the elders of clans would gather—these young political thinkers turned away from the genealogical arguments created by naming communities after mythic founding fathers and instead chose a corporate name that privileged a horizontal drawing together of discrete, autonomous clans into one discursive and political space. This innovation would prove a larger trend: later ethnic projects, like the confederate Mijikenda or the Kalenjin who literally called to each other by naming themselves “I say to you,” employed ethnic names that similarly spoke to a new political ethos of kinship and community.129 The interwar period proved a high tide for this kind of ethnic patriotism. Throughout the 1930s, Luyia patriots worked fill this mapped space with historical and “emotional” resonance through the creative work of writing histories, electing leaders, and defending the political, moral, and territorial borders of this novel community.130
Chapters 4 and 5 then follow the emergence of a new, more self-consciously fashioned generation of Luyia ethnic patriots in the 1940s who embarked on patriotic work in multiple fields—linguistic, demographic, and customary—to rationalize the diversity among their disputatious constituents and defend their work against the deconstructive politics of the locality. In Chapter 4 recent graduates from Uganda’s Makerere College championed the work of the Luyia Language Committee to standardize one written Luyia language out of the multiple and distinct dialects of the region. The work of language consolidation created an environment of competitive linguistic work, often faltering precisely on the translation of terms that related to land, power, and belonging. This linguistic work threatened to undermine oral traditions of accommodation and flexibility and promoted defensive vernacular cultures. While no printed vernacular-Luyia linguistic culture ever materialized, “speaking Luyia” remained central to “being Luyia.”
In Chapter 5 the moral anxieties of the early 1940s, manifested in crises over land, mobility, and gender discipline, prompted a turn to the locality that threatened to disaggregate the fragile work of Luyia ethnic patriots. As sons and daughters left western Kenya in ever-larger numbers, smaller-scale ethnic associations formed to defend diverse moral economies and to enforce a gendered discourse of male fraternity and female deviancy through the creation of urban football teams and “antiprostitution” campaigns. By the late 1940s this turn to the locality and concern over movement and morality took its most dramatic form in a crisis over female circumcision. Controversy sparked when young women of the Tachoni were found to be engaging in secret circumcision ceremonies or leaving the district to be circumcised. These conflicts were about more than customary and gendered control: they were about the demographic health of the community and about the very frontiers of respectability.
The crisis over female circumcision brought home the limits of plurality and threatened the progressive and mannered values purported by Luyia cultural brokers. In response, the new generation Luyia politicians embarked on electoral and demographic projects that sought to make national politics consequential for local political thought. The duality and incompatibility of ethnicity and nationalism have dominated the study of African history in the twentieth century. Although local narratives of nationalism have challenged the national metanarratives reified in the postcolonial era, it is of equal importance to break down the national center—ethnic periphery model.131 Nationalism did not, as some have argued, necessarily represent a “mortal challenge” to the work of ethnic patriots.132 The circular movement of leadership and ideas created feedback and strategic borrowing between national and ethnic imaginings. Luyia leaders were, in some ways, ideal protonationalists—coming from a young ethnic project that privileged the language of territorial nationalism and cosmopolitan patriotism over calls to genealogical depth or ethnic conformism.
With
