territorial nationalism provided Luyia entrepreneurs a language, a form of argumentation capable of tapping into the geographic imagination of their plural constituents. Through census campaigns, electoral projects, and cultural reforms, Luyia leaders in the late 1940s transformed the Luyia ethnic project from the messy, fractured politics of the locality into a vehicle of national politicking. They managed a careful balance between a cosmopolitan, territorial nationalism and a rooted ethnic discipline, mapping an ethnic homeland in western Kenya through the enforcement of customary control and the formulation of gendered and territorial belonging.
In chapters 6 and 7, the late colonial politics of loyalism and dissent prompted a remodeling of the Luyia idea and entrenched the map and the politics of territoriality as tools of dissent and imagination. While much of the research on national politics in Kenya has followed a teleological path tracing whether the Kenya African Union (KAU), the first national political party, eventually led to the militant Mau Mau rebellion, accessing the “deep politics” of late colonial Kenya requires a decentering of this national history and an examination of the negotiated spaces not between binary poles but rather among the plural expressions and uses of territorial nationalism.133 The national crisis posed by the Mau Mau rebellion polarized the political landscape of Kenya, between ethnic and national, educated elite and worker, and loyalist and radical. Too often administrators, political commentators, and historians have labeled those beyond the borders of central Kenya as unproblematically “loyal,” outside the conflicts and moral debates of the Mau Mau rebellion. In western Kenya, however, the politics of loyalism and dissent not only already existed but also prompted Luyia cultural brokers to forward an idea of plural political community capable of providing flexibility and opportunities to exercise agency in the late colonial era.
The religious and anticolonial Dini ya Msambwa movement challenged both colonial and ethnic patriotic geographies. Through their religious pilgrimages, cultural reforms, and anticolonial activism, these frontier rebels threatened to unground the progressive discourse and civic reputation cultivated by Luyia patriots. By the late 1940s both colonial officials and Luyia thinkers had come to organize law and culture territorially, fixing diverse communities to “tribal” geographies and disciplining those who moved beyond these territorial confines. Unwittingly, the Dini ya Msambwa movement acted as antecedent for later debates around closed ethnic geographies and colonial counterinsurgency tactics later perfected during the Mau Mau rebellion.
In the 1950s, as the Mau Mau rebellion prompted a new kind of ethnic politicking, Luyia political thinkers fashioned a more flexible form of territorial consciousness. Chapter 6 traces the social history of this new Luyia idea that would allow Luyia cosmopolitans, farmers, and workers to move more freely through Kenya’s polarized political landscape. The chapter does not aim simply to insert another region, another ethnic group, back into the history of Mau Mau and 1950s Kenya.134 Neither does it assume that simple comparison or jockeying for position between Mau Mau and western Kenya’s own rebellion, in the form of Dini ya Msambwa, is enough. Rather, it argues that the myopic study of Mau Mau and anticolonial dissent more broadly solely from the perspective of central Kenya has left a great deal of the story out, not only of Mau Mau itself but also of the larger context of social change in eastern Africa at the time. In the 1950s, Luyia political thinkers marshaled a theory of ethnic pluralism and mapped a moral geography of belonging to navigate the Emergency era politics of loyalism and dissent.
As decolonization neared, the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission of 1962 witnessed the ascendency of the map in debates over the terms of sovereignty and alternative models of political community. While many recent studies of African history have made an admirable and long overdue move away from the colonial/postcolonial periodization, the end point of this study, in chapter 7, comes in the 1960s precisely because of the self-conscious remapping of community that occurred during decolonization and that was subsequently suppressed, though not erased, in postcolonial discourses. During the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission, mapping became the primary tool of dissent, as it was those African communities most invested in the reengineering of colonial boundaries ahead of independence that would engage in this competitive mapmaking. In countless memorandums and political tracts, Luyia organizations demanded their own territory by redrawing colonial boundaries, shoring up demographic numbers, and telling cartographic histories of lost sovereignty. Chapter 7, more than any chapter preceding it, turns to a more thorough examination of the literal, pictorial maps drawn by ethnic patriots to visualize their histories of community, sovereignty, and belonging and to contest spatial, territorial, and political relations on the eve of independence. Within these debates, the geographic imaginations explored through this study proved to be the most constant and most affecting doctrines of the Luyia ethnic identity. While often frustrated, such alternative political imaginations found in the map a way of visualizing their claims. For both nationalists who sought to maintain colonial boundaries and dissenters seeking alternative political futures, the map became the fetish of postcolonial belonging.
. . .
In tracing the contested genealogy of cartographic political imagination in western Kenya one constant emerged: where land divided, territory united. Where the mapping of land enabled competitive claims to resources and locality, the mapping of territory enabled the imagining of a patriotic idea. Internal dynamism characterized the Luyia ethnic project and fostered an almost defiant history of cosmopolitan patriotism, federal belonging, and rooted pluralism. And yet, this is not to say the Luyia were entirely unique. As dramatized in Perus’s dilemma before the 2009 Kenya census, the question for many Kenyans, and indeed Africans more broadly, was not so much one of identity but of the multiple and overlapping sites of identification; not so much of ethnicity but of the creative and unfinished process of ethnogenesis.135 And while ethnogenesis provided the language, geographic work often provided the practice.
1
The Geographies of Western Kenya
Slippery ground does not recognize kings.
—Abaluyia proverb1
FROM THE shores of Lake Victoria to the foothills of Mount Elgon, the landscape of what would become western Kenya undulates with immense ecological and topographical variety, from gentle hills and flat-bottomed valleys to deeply gorged rivers fringed with lush tropical rainforests. For centuries, African settlers moving through this area greeted each other with the term “Mulembe.” In its many variations, “Mulembe” asked visitors where they had been, where they were going, and entreated them to come and go in peace.2 A Luganda-English dictionary defined the term as “may he bring you in peace to your community.”3 Community members struck the murembe tree, with its brilliant red flowers, to undo taboos or to consecrate peace between warring communities.4 Despite its wide use across eastern Africa, Luyia elders in western Kenya claimed the term as central to their formulations of community, migration, and home: anywhere they traveled, “to be Muluyia was to say ‘Mulembe.’”5
The environmental diversity northeast of Lake Victoria invited a host of African settlers to cultivate the land and graze their cattle. Diverse migratory routes and relatively recent patterns of settlement created a linguistically and culturally mixed region: in the words of the doyen of Kenyan history, Bethwell Ogot, “lying in an ancient migration corridor, the traditional history of the district is one of the most confused and complex in the whole of East Africa.”6 This traditional history was a continual source of contention and argumentation, complicated by regional networks of trade and cultural exchange across complementary ecological zones. Migrating communities practiced a particular form of itinerant territoriality, a portable ideology of territorial control
