has begun to interrogate the moral and intellectual organization of precolonial African communities. In their classic study on the Luo identity in Siaya, David Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo argued that “friendship fortifies kinship,” a challenge to mainstream anthropology that treats kinship as “an enclosed autonomous locus of structure.”41 In her study of the Bagisu, close relatives of the Bukusu on the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon, Suzette Heald demonstrated that segmentary lineage systems and descent-based kinship ideologies were not inherently at odds with the practices of territoriality or creative reformulations of kinship.42 Less the basic and innate structure of community envisioned by colonial administrators and European anthropologists, clans were the historical products of imaginative social work and provided a locus of belonging amid multiple shared sites of identification and interaction.
Among those who settled northeast of Lake Victoria, the clan was often the largest and most constant source of identification and support. The clan acted as a unit of agency, a tool in the management of social relations that offered cognitive structure to mappings of community and territory.43 Clans were often a heterogeneous mixture of families and small groupings linked together by common ancestry, common migration, or common settlement. However, the terms of membership and size of the clan were as flexible as the new environments in which they settled required. Exogamy, the practice of marrying outside the clan, and patrilineal descent underlined the gendered nature of community membership. Wagner found that “each tribal community (particularly its male half) derives its ‘group consciousness’ first and foremost from the belief that all or the large majority of its constituent clans have descended in an agnatic line from a mythical tribal ancestor.”44 However, as earlier alluded, the primacy of descent and ancestral myths proved more illusory than this unqualified assertion.
As with partisan histories of migrations, the nomenclature of “clan” and “tribe” represented terms of imagined political communities continually contested and reworked within larger cultural projects. Some larger “tribal” associations of clans, such as the Wanga, the Logoli, and the Bukusu, did emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but these communities were the products of the same imaginative work as clan communities on a larger scale. For the purposes of this study, these “tribal” names suggest not articulated structures of political authority but rather larger communities of clans that were recast in the colonial era to defend precolonial autonomy.
Beyond changing ethnonyms and constraining lineage-based models of kinship, the basis of clan formations in western Kenya relied on the ability of the group to effectively settle and civilize new ecological niches. Neil Kodesh has argued that the variety of terminology for clan structures in the Great Lakes region, including ubwoko in Kinyarwanda, kika in Luganda, and ruganda in Lunyoro, suggests that “the ideology and practices of clanship developed along different lines in various settings within the region.”45 Among the Bantu communities of this compact area, terms for clan organization varied from oluhia and olugongo to ibula and ehiri.46 These terms reflected not only varying forms of political organization but also the varied environments that constrained as well as sheltered.
Environmental conditions taught these inhabitants lessons in how to structure political and social relations. Ecological niches prompted the development of specialized economic production and skills that fostered distinct communal identities. Some, like the larger groups of the Tiriki and the Bukusu, became frontier communities as they settled on steep hills and beside rich forests that offered opportunities for expansion.47 The expanding Bukusu promoted strong military leadership (in the figure of the Omugasa), built fortified, walled villages into the landscape, and transformed territorial msambwa ancestral spirits into “ancestral ghosts,” akin to those in Buganda, so that they could inhabit the caves and springs of their new territories.48 Throughout eastern Africa, msambwa sites on the edges of settlements provided important sacred spaces linking the “health of the land” to the health of residents and their descendants.49 Living on the imagined edge of this landscape, these frontiersmen would pose distinct problems for both colonial officials and ethnic architects seeking to territorialize ethnic identity.
Others, such as the southern clans of the Bahayo, Banyore, Batsotso, and Idakho settled into pockets isolated by hills and ridges and well suited for intensive agriculture. Among these more dispersed settlements, patriarchal clan heads and councils of elders provided only symbolic leadership linked to their ability to amass material and human wealth and maintain peaceful relations.50 Among the large but scattered clans of the Logoli, the weng’oma, or “one of the drum,” would beat a drum across the hills to gather clan heads together in times of war.51 Early anthropologists such as Wagner viewed these systems of political authority as “inarticulate,” not “linked up with clearly defined rights and privileges, such as usually associated with institutionalized chieftainship.”52 Even in warfare, as Sir Harry Johnston noted, precolonial raiding patterns were individualistic and “almost entirely defensive.”53 However, despite these varied structures, political authority was neither “inarticulate” nor merely “defensive”: political power among the communities of western Kenya was heterarchical, organized along horizontal lines that allowed for flexible patterns of interdependence, defense, environmental management, and multiple sites of authority.54
One glaring exception existed alongside this depiction of decentralized political life. The Wanga crafted the most hierarchical political culture in the region, having a royal family and a king, the nabongo, who ruled over Wanga clans. Much has been written on the Wanga royal family and the power struggles between different clans over leadership.55 The Wanga kingdom functioned somewhere between the large and powerful lake kingdoms further west and the more horizontally organized communities of the east.56 Simon Kenyanchui better described the Wanga political structure as “a confederation of co-equal clandoms.”57 Later political accounts would map the extent of the Wanga kingdom from Lake Victoria to Lake Naivasha, but little evidence supports this expansive claim and the numerous clans described above jealously guarded their autonomy against claims of rule or tribute by Wanga kings.58 In the nineteenth century, Wanga monarchs used Maasai mercenaries to extend their range of tribute and territorial rule, prompting these independent communities to seek refuge in their protective environments and buttress their own political structures against these monarchical state builders.
The first Europeans to arrive in the region were greeted by the recently ascended Nabongo Mumia, who quickly offered the new arrivals hospitality and aid. For many colonial administrators and later historians, the Wanga kingdom provided a recognizable political structure ideally suited to their ends and interests. Colonial administrators saw in the Wanga kingdom a hierarchical system of authority that could be usefully extended over the decentralized communities of the area. Later local politicians saw in the Wanga’s monarchical history a useful narrative of precolonial political sovereignty and organization. By the end of his study, Were became preoccupied with the hypothetical future of the Wanga kingdom had the British not interrupted its consolidation and expansion.59 The centralization of the Wanga kingdom, however, has not only been overstated by colonial officials and partisan historians but has also overshadowed the complex political interplay and almost defiant tradition of decentralization among the majority of western Kenya’s inhabitants.
Relations among these diverse but interdependent communities were not “of coercion and control but of separate but linked, overlapping yet competing spheres of authority.”60 Heterarchy allowed for multiple religious, political, and economic sites of power and identification to exist in parallel. Each clan maintained autonomous control of their own political affairs and yet depended on wider networks for economic, spiritual, and social exchange. Within and outside the reach of the Wanga kingdom, heterarchy also provided a measure of accountability, as it did within the kingdom of Buganda, further west.61 Among the Wanga, clans organized themselves in circular spatial patterns around the royal family, at once buttressing and constraining the power of the king. Succession was not determined necessarily by descent but rather
