and north from the administrative base in Mumias to direct the flow of labor and commerce away from Uganda and toward work on the railways, new European settlers’ farms in the highlands, and government public works projects within the limits of the new colony. Colonial commissioners worked to “impress all people with the necessity for their young, unemployed men going out to work.”127 Much to the frustration of colonial officials, African laborers from North Kavirondo negotiated seasonal contracts to fit agricultural cycles and displayed a preference “to work month by month and their dislike of definitely binding themselves by a written contract.”128
Many defied colonial demands on their labor and resources by migrating across the still poorly defined Ugandan border. Farmers on the Ugandan side of the border similarly evaded forced cotton cultivation and military conscription by crossing into western Kenya.129 These movements were not without risk and insecurity. Kenyan and Ugandan officials responded with joint taxation collections and punitive actions against clans on either side of the border.130 In 1917, as Kenyan officials raised hut taxes to fund World War I efforts and pressured chiefs to supply constant labor for the Carrier Corps, fifty Wamia families were forced to return to North Kavirondo from Uganda, where they had fled.131 The administration also put strict restrictions on the movement of cattle, seeing any form of pastoralism as “opposed to social or political advancement” and using boundaries to control the spread of sleeping sickness and rinderpest.132 Administrators introduced “census books” for the registration of residents within a given boundary to help control movement and enforce the payment of taxes.133 While chiefs went around their territories counting huts, they also subverted these processes by offering refuge to competing communities. In the case of Chief Sudi, his entire census had to be thrown out as he was found to have collected taxes and census data on villages on Mumia’s side of the border.134 Border patrols and the introduction of identity permits in the form of the kipande reinforced territorial boundaries as a central feature of colonial governance.
After quashing the final throes of outright resistance, in 1908, British officials set about demarcating internal boundaries and an effective local administration. That same year, Geoffrey Archer, acting district commissioner of North Kavirondo, began his demarcation tour.135 Archer found the undulating landscape of North Kavirondo, with its “many fixed points and much open rolling grasslands,” a “good training ground” for practicing his surveying skills.136 Archer enlisted local inhabitants as porters, guides, and aides and taught them lessons in cartography as he triangulated locations and called out instructions on the placement of markers. Archer gained a strong reputation for managing clan disputes across the interterritorial boundary and securing local support for “unsatisfactory” boundaries, earning him the difficult job of delimiting the Northern Frontier District and later the governorship of British Somaliland at the young age of thirty-two.137 Although officials professed a desire to make administrative boundaries coincide with the “tribal” areas mapped by Hobley, Archer struggled to collect accurate clan numbers and to consolidate boundaries along the lines of “native laws and customs.”138 Archer complained that the “Kavirondo are the most pronounced land grabbers.”139 Like Francis Fuller among the Asante in the Gold Coast, Archer believed that boundaries fixed to a topographical map would make sense of the confusion of local customs;140 and yet, as Sara Berry argued, “However precisely they were drawn on paper, boundaries could be remarkably elusive in practice.”141
The Wanga royal family and their emissaries invested early in the ideology of boundaries and acted as surveyors in the creation of the basic units of authority and territorial control within the district. Nabongo Mumia and his half brother Murunga were the only Africans officially consulted on Archer’s demarcation tour.142 Archer sent out Wanga chiefs as territorial agents to construct “locations,” the smallest administrative unit in the district. In this initial demarcation, only eight locations were drawn around the multiple communities of the region. Throughout the demarcation tour, the Wanga proved not only their usefulness but also their ability to benefit from the colonial processes of mapping. As later reported by Provincial Commissioner C. M. Dobbs, Archer gave “Mumia the biggest sub-district as . . . he alone had ‘capable men who are fit to be appointed as headmen over the various sub-divisions of this area.’”143
Between 1904 and 1909 the British elevated their Wanga allies to the position of chiefs over the diverse range of clans never previously subject to Wanga power. On 15 November 1909, the colonial government confirmed their alliance with the Wanga by appointing Mumia “paramount chief” over the entire district. This official title would come to haunt the British administration as later African politicians attempted to claim the legitimacy and authority of a paramount chief. Colonial officials reinforced the new “native authority” of Wanga chiefs with the power to arrest, issue orders on the movement of people, compel labor, preside over local disputes, and collect taxes.144 In the Wanga the British found the local source of “indirect rule” they needed to enforce colonial boundaries.
However, written into the very processes of boundary demarcation and colonial authority were the tools of its subversion for local actors. Countermapping strategies reflected both local geographic practices and the adoption of colonial technologies of mapping. The most commonly used tactic, as had been the case for centuries, was evasion. Local inhabitants, particularly along the interterritorial border, strategically moved throughout geographic networks that extended around and beyond these new borders to evade tax collection, to defy new authorities, and to confuse colonial officials. These cross-border movements took on cyclical patterns and created new networks later used in illicit trade and movements of rebellion. Others, particularly in the north and east, found refuge in the hills and mountains that provided geographic protection from the reaches of the state. While these movements built on and created networks of clan associations, they also produced new sites of conflict, as different communities responded to colonial impositions and incentives in diverse ways.145 Border clashes in the early years of colonial rule continually disrupted the work of colonial surveyors and often arose strategically to pressure colonial officials, who often only addressed the complete demarcation of locational boundaries as a result of these local “boundary riots.”146 The construction of colonial boundaries was a messy affair, continually interrupted and confused by the activism of local communities.
Local activists also used previous geographic knowledge and their early lessons in cartography to subvert the work of colonial surveyors, through subterfuge, trickery, and outright manipulation. Africans destroyed cairns, moved beacons, and uprooted pillars to move the colonial boundaries set by surveyors. Often the same men who carried and placed the boundary beacons for the British during the day were suspected of, or boasted of, removing them by night.147 In one example, Wanga chief Murunga was said to have warned the Bukusu that the British wanted to cut them off from land in the northern area of Kamakoiya. Murunga advised the local population to take the beacon and move it, using the British officers’ lack of mastery over pronunciation of river names to trick them into accepting the new boundary.148 The arrival of new European settlers in the Trans Nzoia lands north of the Kamakoiya River after 1912, however, would again push this boundary back and constrict the northern expanses of the district.149 The environment, too, revolted against the symbols of boundary demarcation as grasses and shrubs overgrew beacons and hid boundaries from view.150 These countermapping strategies became so pervasive that in 1911, British officials proclaimed harsh penalties for the “destroying or moving or diminishing the utility of any Land Marks fixed by public authority.”151 Colonial officials suggested the use of increasingly permanent markers such as “iron posts sunk in cement” and cairns alongside survey pegs within African farmlands that more starkly mapped the landscape.152 However, the symbols of surveyors continued to prove susceptible to the countermappings of African activists.
Colonial surveyors thus encountered what Raymond Craib has termed the “fugitive landscapes”: territories characterized by multiple and overlapping geographic systems that were not landscapes at all but “places created and recreated through
