negotiations with the various clans of the Wanga ruling elite allowed non-Wanga clans to maintain a great deal of autonomy and protection.63
Outside the reach of Wanga tribute, clans used horizontal and complex systems of social organization, strategic alliances, and spatial encampment. The term oluhia, from which later cultural entrepreneurs would find a name for their imagined community in the 1930s, reflected this heterarchy and the primacy of place in the social formations of the region. Sometimes translated as clan or clansmen, oluhia in many of the languages in the region referred to the “fire-place on a meadow,” where the heads of associations of clans would meet.64 The oluhia served as a sort of assembly site for initiation rituals, for political negotiations, and for the burial of clan heads: it was a “microcosm . . . the place of practical everyday life.”65 This term embodied the horizontal coming together of representatives from different clans in one symbolic and physical space, reflecting the close relationship between place, belonging, and communal identity among these diverse communities.
Despite these multiple sites of identification, land and the practices of territoriality played crucial roles in the spatial organization of belonging. For Osogo, limited tribal structures represented loose linguistic and cultural affinities, while clans performed their most important function as “owners and bequeathers of property,” or, more accurately, land use.66 Land tenure practices varied greatly across the region, producing “different systems from a common background.”67 A common term for the clan and clan territory, olugongo, literally translated in many linguistic traditions to “a ridge.”68 Within each olugongo, the clan leadership determined how to allot land to each family and how to absorb and manage the land claims of “strangers.” Although clan heads were responsible for negotiating internal boundary demarcations, the limits of their olugongo were “known by their natural boundaries.”69 Uncultivated virgin bush land, oluangeraka, or “what is beyond” among the Logoli, allowed clan lands to expand and contract in response to seasonal environmental changes, demographic pressures, and interclan disputes.70 This practice facilitated crop rotation and the strategic fallowing of lands to avoid the overuse of any one area of cultivation. The edzinzalo, a common term for uninhabited mile-wide buffer zones, similarly provided an important precolonial territorial strategy for managing conflict over land and resources. During war times, these buffer zones provided fields of contest and a space for the meeting of warring factions; however, “in times of peace, grazing [was] communal.”71 Wagner noted that these buffer zones acted as political frontiers, as clans did not enforce the “subjugation of neighbouring” groups but rather enacted a strategy of “political integration through territorial continuity of clan.”72 The terms and practices of land tenure in the nineteenth century reflected the processes of segmentation—of fission and fusion—that characterized social formations on still-expanding frontiers.73
Niche settlement patterns translated directly into distinct practices of territoriality. Among the Banyore, the hills they inhabited became central to their “situational identity.”74 The Bunyore hills, from whose geographic characteristics clans found their names, represented not only the place where their forefathers first settled but also a protective barrier that defined friends from foes. In the other direction, place-names taken from clan names or important individuals also told stories of migrations and interethnic exchange.75 Terms for lineage often overlapped with a sense of geographic enclosure. The terms enyumba, eshiribwa, and indzu all could be translated as both lineage and the physical enclosure of the clan or gateway of a homestead.76 In Marama, minor clans who had only recently joined the larger network were referred to as emikuru, veranda poles that propped up the household structure of the larger clans.77 As Christopher Gray has argued, the mistranslation of these terms into simply “land,” “clan,” or positions of authority by later colonial administrators would elide “the whole complex series of obligations and duties owed to lineage heads by their dependents, and as such . . . the relations of production for these societies.”78 This linguistic variety revealed the intimate connection between community formations and the territory they inhabited.
Despite the multiplicity of precolonial social relations, the practice of territoriality was central to the functioning of these communities. This was not the “aterritorial kinship ideology” Gray found practiced in Gabon.79 Aterritorial practices did provide social entities with the flexibility to account for complex trade and exchange patterns as well as pressures on the land, whether from the environment or warfare. However, African communities in this region practiced a form territoriality that developed out of their complex migrations and niche environmental settlements. As introduced at the outset of this chapter, the greeting term mulembe carried within it this itinerant territoriality that linked who one was with where one came from and where one was going. Addressing the territoriality of these clans, Wagner lamented that “the extent of the geographical ‘horizon’ of the various sub-tribes in pre-European days I found very difficult to discover. The traditions of some tribes refer to places which are hundreds of miles away from their present homes.”80 Wagner’s frustration rested in the mobile form of territoriality practiced by these settlers, carried within kinship ideologies and modes of political authority. Clan representatives often recounted their histories as a people on the move: they “moved in clans” and carried into their new settlements a sense of territorial community membership.81 Despite long migrations and new environmental settlements, clans often repeated former spatial configurations in their new settlements, reestablishing the spatial ordering of families and figures of authority.
By the nineteenth century many of the communities northeast of Lake Victoria lived as agriculturalists in defined territorial settlements, despite constant pressures from expanding agriculturalist neighbors and continuing cultural and economic trade with surrounding pastoralists. However, the nineteenth century brought with it a time of political and environmental upheaval in eastern Africa, what Gideon Were termed the “age of confrontation.”82 Population growth and continued migrations in the first half of the century caused almost constant warring. Although on the periphery of long-distance trading emanating from the coast, by the late nineteenth century Swahili traders were regular visitors to the area and stories of the infamous slave trader Sudi of Pangani circulated widely, though actual slave trading in the region seems to have been limited.83 From 1890 the Nyanza basin suffered a series of droughts and diseases that decimated much of eastern Africa.84 The devastating rinderpest outbreak that caused widespread stock loss, as well as a smallpox epidemic in the 1890s, compounded by the arrival of colonial conquest, undermined traditional practices of land and bush management that had kept disease at bay.85 These factors forced communities to push into the bush in search of new lands, thus unleashing the threat of trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, spread by tsetse flies across the region.86 By the end of the century the political and territorial sovereignty of the communities northeast of Lake Victoria was under threat—from expanding neighbors, from disease and drought, and from the arrival of imperial surveyors.
BEATING THE BOUNDS: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHIES
From the earliest explorations of Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Thomson, and Frederick Jackson, explorers, administrators, and missionaries wrote widely of the rich diversity and warm hospitality they encountered northeast of Lake Victoria.87 These first European visitors universally commented on the plentiful food production, the variety of languages, the diversity of cultures, and the “confusion” of political structures among the African inhabitants they called Kavirondo. Early explorers described the Kavirondo as “industrious” and the “most moral of all tribes.”88
Morality and gender relations seemed to preoccupy these early European visitors to the lake region. They marveled at the Kavirondo men and women working in the fields together in complete nudity. Comparing the naked Kavirondo women to the covered “ladies of Lamu,” Sir Charles Eliot mused, “In Africa, female respectability is in inverse ratio to the quantity of clothes worn, and the beauties of
