world.”89 As attested to in postcards and photographic collections, the “naked Kavirondo” became an alluring tourist attraction in these early years of imperial travel in eastern Africa (fig. 1.6).90 Images of naked women standing in fields, pulling a hippo across the shore or sunbathing on rocks became collectibles for travelers from coastal traders to Theodore Roosevelt.91 Early explorations and imperial travels pictured “Kavirondo” as an untouched landscape, remote and unknown, filled with culturally exotic and morally “naked” people.
The term Kavirondo first appeared to administrators as a distant mapped space on E. G. Ravenstein’s maps near the end of the 1870s.92 In 1884, Joseph Thomson noted with surprise that “Kavirondo does not at all occupy the place which has been assigned to it on the map.”93 Bewildered by the sheer “number of very distinct tribes,” the term Kavirondo was applied to both the Nilotic and Bantu communities of the lake region, though it progressively came to more specifically denote “all those natives speaking Bantu dialects west of Busoga and north of Kavirondo Bay.”94
Bringing this confusion under colonial control required the remapping of local geographies. In 1890 the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC, or IBEA) signed treaties with “Sultan Mumiya” of “Upper Kavirondo,” with the nabongo, or king, of the Wanga, and with the Bukusu clan head “Majanja, Sultan of the Kitosh.”95 In signing these treaties, these two leaders ostensibly “ceded to the said Company all his sovereign rights and rights of government over all his Territories, Countries, Peoples and Subjects.” Ravenstein’s map for the IBEAC visualized the area of Kavirondo as an important thoroughfare in the economic trading path between the coast and the large kingdoms of the Uganda Protectorate, centering on the town of Mumias. Nabongo Mumia provided the British with a base for trade running between the coast and Uganda and ample supplies of food and manpower for their journeys (fig. 1.7). The space northeast of Lake Victoria, however, remained barely surveyed. Early maps traced complex webs of escarpments and rivers amid whole sections of undifferentiated landmass. Treaties and other informal arrangements led to the incorporation of the region as the Eastern Province of the Buganda Protectorate in 1894.96 Misreading the political landscape of this region, colonial officials pictured its communities as “unsettled,” with no recognizable systems of political structure aside from the Wanga kingdom. In 1895 it became C. W. Hobley’s task to “gradually establish an administration over the various sections of the turbulent collection of tribes, collectively known to the coast people as the Kavirondo.”97
FIGURE 1.6. Mombasa postcard, postmarked 1899.
FIGURE 1.7. IBEAC map of East Africa, 1891–92, by E. G. Ravenstein. Lugard, “Travels from the East Coast.”
For Hobley, this reconnaissance work was one of both topographical surveyance and ethnographical investigation (fig. 1.8). The ethnonyms identified by Hobley curved and contorted amid a mess of complex topographical features, aiming to organize space in ethnic terms. The crowded “Isukha” branched out from and over rivers and forests; the “Marama” curved and fitted into a pocket of empty space; the “Ketosh,” the name known to Hobley for the Bukusu clans, stretched and expanded across vast territories in the north. In this early map, the territory of these ethnonyms remained amorphous and undefined either by geographic markers or internal boundaries. In his 1896 report on Kavirondo District, Hobley noted, “The fact of the county being split up into so many sub-tribes without any really powerful Chiefs has induced a more complicated situation than would otherwise be the case.”98 As Sean Hawkins has argued, the failure to read topographical features that functioned as “mnemonic devices” in local cognitive mappings led the British to believe these communities had no “inscribed past” and no geographic system of social organization.99
FIGURE 1.8. C. W. Hobley, map of Kavirondo, 1898. Hobley, “Kavirondo.”
More than mere lines on a page, colonial mapping practices worked to transform previously relational geographies of exchange and community into top-down, scientific, and measurable demarcations. Local geographical concepts proved difficult to translate, as they were relational and relative rather than constant abstract points of reference.100 The fixed compass points of north, south, east, and west had no corresponding terms in any of the local languages. The term masaba for most communities translated as north but referred specifically to Mount Masaba, known by colonial officials as Mount Elgon, the northern frontier of this region.101 In the Trans Nzoia, an area parallel to the mountain, masaba translated as west. Group names like Isukha and Idakho translated as forward and backward or lower and thus similarly reflected situated, geographic relationships and histories of migration and settlement.102 The Luo referred to the Banyore as “those people from the other side of the hill.”103 Spatial relations thus shifted depending on the positioning of the subject. Colonial conquest not only imposed new and ever more fixed territorial boundaries but also brought with it a new vision of geographic relations.
Conquest and pacification expeditions from 1894 to 1908, numbering fifty separate military operations as catalogued in John Lonsdale’s authoritative account, helped fill in Hobley’s map and establish internal boundaries around his curving ethnonyms.104 The hierarchical Wanga kingdom provided the British with a ready army of Wanga and Maasai troops mobilized not only against their Bantu neighbors but also in battles against the Sudanese mutiny of 1897 and Luo and Nandi uprisings.105 Other communities in the region reacted to colonial incursions with varying degrees of interest, trade, alliance, and resistance. Many viewed the British as pawns of Wanga territorial ambitions.106 The construction of colonial sovereignty required a great deal of violence and the use of what Christopher Vaughan has called a “hybrid regulatory order,” an ambiguous and not always controlled devolution of power and the means of violence to local chiefs, particularly in border regions.107 The most protracted resistance came from the Bukusu, whose battles at Lumboka and Chetambe’s Fort received vivid portrayals in both Hobley’s writings and local oral narratives.108 Lonsdale pointed to the relative geographic isolation of the Bukusu population, in the northernmost extent of the region around Mount Elgon, as key to their protracted resistance to outsiders.109 As in precolonial conflicts, the slopes and caves around Mount Elgon provided safe haven for those escaping the grasp of would-be state builders.110 After winning the final major battle against the Bukusu, in 1895, “Hobley had no more to fear from the Luyia. He had been greatly aided in their pacification by their historic disunity.”111 This “historic disunity,” however, can in actuality be understood as a strategy, an alternative way of thinking and practicing geographic and social relations, and a means of resistance that while failing to prevent colonial conquest persisted in dogging colonial rule.
Christian missionaries arrived by similar paths as explorers and colonial surveyors from earlier positions in Uganda and on the coast at the end of the nineteenth century. Tales of Bishop James Hannington’s visit, in 1885, and Mumia’s warning to him not to travel to Buganda, where he died soon after, have taken on legendary status. The North Kavirondo District was unique in the region for the sheer number of missionary groups that gained footholds, numbering as many as ten by the 1920s. The American Quakers with Friends African Mission (FAM) were the first to establish themselves, in 1902. In quick succession the Catholic Mill Hill Missionaries, the Church of God (originally known as the South African Compounds and Interior
