founded missions in these early years. Colonial officials hoped mission influence would help bring the “most independent and unruly” Bantu communities under colonial control.112 Missionaries made deals with local elders and competed for land claims to secure territorial “spheres of influence” as first laid out in the 1885 Treaty of Berlin.113 These negotiations for evangelizing rights in particular areas added yet another layer of mapping onto the multiple colonial processes of territorial demarcation. However, unlike the territories of colonial administration, religious spaces were not always contiguous. Mission grounds and Christian villages crossed, jumped, and intersected different community spaces, creating hybrid sites of cultural contact and imposition, refuge, and exchange. This more dispersed spatial organization would have distinct consequences for later political and social movements.
Colonial conquest brought with it a flurry of mapping projects, from the railway that arrived at Kisumu in 1901 to the carving out of roads, trading posts, and administrative sites. The administrative mapping of the Uganda Protectorate created internal boundaries and delimited top-down spaces of administration and authority that could now be imposed and altered by British bureaucrats, even at great distances (fig. 1.9). In 1902 a decision from the Foreign Office in London to dramatically redraw the eastern boundary of the Uganda Protectorate prompted a more concerted mapping of colonial boundaries in eastern Africa. With the boundaries of the Uganda Protectorate already mapped, British officials in London could, by the stroke of a pen, transfer a large portion of the Central Province and all of the Eastern Province of the Uganda Protectorate to the East Africa Protectorate, renamed the Kenya Colony in 1920.
FIGURE 1.9. Map of the Uganda Protectorate, 1902. Johnston, “Uganda Protectorate, Ruwenzori.”
The motivations behind this transfer remain difficult to assess.114 The arrival of the railway at Kisumu, in 1901, provided at least one factor in the reorientation of the province, aiming to maintain the whole railway from the coast under one authority (fig. 1.10). As the arrival of the railway and road surveys demonstrated, Kavirondo was increasingly being positioned on the map not as a midpoint on the way to Uganda but as a terminus of trade and administration emanating from the coast. Further, the concurrent arrival of white settlers in the highlands prompted calls for land and labor within the boundaries of the East Africa Protectorate. Nyanza Province, formed out of this enlarged western frontier, effectively placed one of the most agriculturally productive and densely populated areas in the region at the disposal of this rapidly developing settler colony.
FIGURE 1.10. Map of road making and surveying in British East Africa. G. Smith, “Road-Making.”
Negotiations over the drawing of this new boundary revealed the competing knowledge systems involved in the colonial mapping projects. While some argued for the use of the “scientific” determinants of topographical features as “natural” boundaries, others argued ethnographic considerations should be paramount.115 The director of surveys, Raymond Alan, later laid out the “scientific” argument against Sir Frederick Jackson’s preference for foothills that often corresponded to the environmental ridges of clan boundaries: “As a surveyor, I prefer watersheds as the latter are definite and ascertainable and the former [foothills] cannot be determined by anyone and are, therefore, purely artificial.”116 Conflicts over the meaning and placement of boundaries often pitted imperial geographers against the “men on the ground” responsible for local governance.
At the turn of the century, Sir Harry Johnston, special commissioner of the Uganda Protectorate, and many other men on the ground favored the gradual amalgamation of the two protectorates and thus petitioned for a boundary that would entail the least disturbance possible to ethnolinguistic groupings. A flurry of correspondence in 1901 argued for the “well-known boundaries” that had been secured through barazas, meetings with African elders and clan leaders.117 For reasons obscured in the historical record, in 1902 the Foreign Office backed the “natural frontier” proposed by Sir Clement Hill in London, despite protests from the men on the ground that this new frontier “did not readily coincide with tribal boundaries.”118 Although the scientific arguments for “natural” boundaries prevailed, even these features remained disputed. In his later economic study of the region, Hugh Fearn argued that there was greater territorial logic in using the Nandi escarpment as the new boundary, placing the Bantu tribes in Uganda and the Luo in Kenya.119 Imperial debates over the logic of boundaries highlighted the conflicts and contradictions of colonial rule in eastern Africa.
It again fell to C. W. Hobley to demarcate the new boundary of the North Kavirondo District. In theory, this new district would contain all the Bantu tribes northeast of Lake Victoria, bordered by Uganda to the west, the Luo to the south, and the Kalenjin and Maasai in the Rift Valley to the east and north. In reality, the “Hobley line” ran through Lake Victoria, along the Sio River in the south, and jaggedly over Mount Elgon in the north, effectively dislocating the Samia community around the Sio River and severing the closely related Bagisu and Bukusu around Mount Elgon.120 Indeed the Hobley line cut through and across many of the curving ethnonyms he himself originally mapped in 1898 (fig. 1.11). This reorientation transformed the Nyanza region into a borderland, a space thoroughly caught between two colonies that were rapidly differentiating in terms of local governance, European settlement, and African rights. Interterritorial disputes over the exact limits of this border persisted throughout the colonial period and well into the postcolonial era.121 This process of remapping would have profound effects on the alignment and geographic imaginations of political communities in both territories.
Despite the 1902 boundary agreement, as late as 1927 the boundaries of North Kavirondo remained in flux.122 The creation of these boundaries first occurred on paper, redrawn over the detailed maps of the Uganda Protectorate, with written descriptions of boundaries circulated in British proclamations. Surveyors and administrators then set out on boundary tours, enlisting African laborers to carry heavy stones for cairns, erect large stone pillars, set beacons, and dig trenches across the new interterritorial boundary with Uganda and against the expanding white highlands.123 Colonial administrators would then take elders, headmen, and local villagers out to “beat the bounds” of the new boundaries, using drums and ornamental ceremonial flair.124 In this way, the imperial instruments of territoriality imposed a top-down cartographic spatial ordering while enlisting local communities to invest in the construction of these boundaries.
FIGURE 1.11. Map of the East Africa Protectorate, 1902. Beachey, History of East Africa, xii.
Officials used survey maps, the construction of roads, and the collection of taxes to construct and consolidate meaningful boundaries. As the colonial administration envisioned Nyanza Province as a potentially rich source of labor and cash crop production, the enforcement of boundaries became a tool in the territorial control of work and local production. With the arrival of the railway, the colonial administration introduced cotton and maize as new export commodities. While cotton production foundered due to local resentment and low prices, maize proved a profitable and exportable cash crop, quickly overtaking traditional crops such as millet, sorghum, and cassava as the staple food of African diets, particularly for laborers.125 North Kavirondo was fast becoming the “granary of East Africa” and the largest pool of potential laborers in the young colony.126
Colonial officials also
