inhabitants toward those who claimed centralized authority.21 Audience members refused to be silent witnesses to this drama, actively interjecting their voices into the cultural production of authority and tradition.
For the diverse representatives before the NLTC, the “common stock of stories” available to Kikuyu spokesmen did not exist. None claimed a common founding father, common migratory path, or common set of prophetic figures from which all communities in the district sprang. Their stories, instead, fractured purposefully to defend the autonomy and autochthony of their particular communities. Fault lines appeared in their diverse accounts of clan histories, migration, and land tenure practices.
Locational representatives produced histories that drew together the congeries of clans within their specific territories. Representatives told clan histories through codified lists of clan names, clan heads, and clan settlements. When Chief Sudi rose to provide an authoritative account of Bukusu clans, “considerable confusion and dissension” erupted among audience members. The committee adjourned the meeting so that a “correct list” of clans could be compiled. Bukusu headman Dominiko Sianju returned with an impressive table in hand, an extensive list of the names of clans and their current heads from across the Bukusu locations. Representatives actively reformulated ancestry and kinship networks through the secretarial conceit of the list to defend novel political communities built in and around colonial boundaries. In the Kisa location, multiple narratives of founding fathers and important lineages coexisted. Lala, representative for Kisa, had to be replaced when audience members charged him with erasing one of the founding father’s sons from his official list. For Lala, erasing this “son” put his own clan in more direct line of descent from the founding father. Representatives argued that this tabulated “common ancestry” provided evidence of the community’s “natural boundary.”22 However, what is clear from the ethnographic work of Wagner, representations before the NLTC, and the historical texts of patriotic historians J. D. Otiende, Gideon Were, and John Osogo, is that accounts of founding fathers and lists of clan names were in constant flux, responding to contemporary conditions and the complicated arithmetic of kinship. For local representatives, the process of tabulating kinship through list making provided a central grounds for the political work of aligning constituents and enclosing dissent.
In reality, these clan histories were quite shallow. Although the committee concluded that “almost every tribe has a history of migration,” most representatives avoided or denied these histories entirely.23 Conducting his research at the same time, Wagner also noted the “meagreness of traditions” of migration.24 Many representatives claimed to have “no tradition of migration.” Often representatives traced their clan histories only to the moment of arrival in their present settlements. While contemporaneous anthropological sources cast these communities as “people on the move,” representatives pictured their constituents as thoroughly settled, undisputed owners of their lands as witnessed at the arrival of colonial rule.25 Embodied in the figure of C. W. Hobley, whose primary task was to bring spatial order to this disarray of decentralized agriculturalists, colonial conquest and imperial mapping emerged as the most prominent “common stock” of stories told to defend a history of political autonomy from Hobley’s Wanga allies. Representatives told uncluttered histories, geographically pitching the birth of their people as a discrete corporate body within the grounds of their current administrative units, sewing different threads of clan movements together within the location. These shallow traditions of migration suppressed diverse linguistic origins and naturalized western Kenya as a rightful, autochthonous homeland. Locational representatives and audience members produced and reproduced histories of migration and settlement before this committee to build recognizable, bounded “tribes” for the benefit of colonial commissioners.26
These local histories also served to reinforce divergent claims to landownership. Two schools of thought emerged in the testimony for the defense of land acquisition: the right of force and the right of first cultivation. While Chief Mulama argued in his opening address that “the first man to come into this country acquired his rights by strength,” most claimed land rights through the civilizing of previously unoccupied and untilled land. All locational representatives firmly stated that there was no tradition of selling or buying land. Differences in land practices reflected the environmental diversity and political decentralization of the local land economy (see chapter 1). Before this commission, this diversity was turned to political strategy. Most representatives placed landownership firmly under the control of clan heads. Only Wanga representatives spoke of a differentiated system whereby the nabongo owned the “soil” of the corporate territory, the clan controlled its own boundaries, and individual heads of families owned their homesteads. Many representatives, whose constituents were in the throes of anti-Wanga campaigns, defended their historic autonomy through repeated references to never having paid tribute to any “king” or foreign patron. Very few clans claimed to practice any formalized system of boundary demarcation beyond the use of physical landmarks, such as stones, trees, and furrows. Locational representatives promoted divergent traditions of land tenure to secure their own position as the rightful guardians and arbitrators of their community’s customs.
Testimony before the committee provided a window into the fragmented, argumentative, and discursive nature of political thought in North Kavirondo. Apparent from this testimony was a strong skepticism toward centralized authority. Even among the highly centralized Wanga, audience interruptions forced Chief Mulama to adjust his list of Wanga clans at several points. While the anti-Wanga campaigns prompted political thinkers to voice dissenting versions of history to offer proof of their right to particular tracts of land and of their traditions of political autonomy, their evidence before the NLTC reflected more the heterarchy and overlapping nature of traditional practices and long-running arguments over authority in western Kenya. Representatives continually disagreed on the land rights of women, customs involving inheritance and the distribution of land among clan members. While these practices often overlapped or intersected across different locations, representatives remained intent on accentuating the cultural and often linguistic nuances of their particular cultural traditions.
Despite this plural and dissenting picture of land tenure in North Kavirondo, the NLTC recommended the codification of native land tenure practices into a stratified legal land register to include “the name of the tribe, the name of the clan, the name of the clan head, descriptions of external boundaries, the name of contiguous clans, and the number of families with holdings.”27 The codification of previously negotiated processes involving strangers or tenant rights effectively placed land tenure outside the immediate control of the clan. With no title deed, dependents and smaller clans were reliant on benevolent landlords for use of their land. In response, smaller clans in North Kavirondo began demanding an “oath” from the government to secure their land. Land conflicts between locations subsequently called up evidence given before the committee as proof. The testimony given before such commissions were thus self-consciously understood not solely as opportunities to debate competing versions of land traditions but moreover as strategic tools in the documentation of evidence for future conflicts over land rights.
The LNC warned the district commissioner that the failure to implement the findings of such enquiries would mean that “further enquiries would only be met by lying answers.”28 The years 1930 and 1931 were a time of heightened politicking over land and authority. The depression of 1929 further exacerbated land conflict in North Kavirondo, collapsing local export prices and throwing both labor and cash cropping into crisis. A severe locust infestation ravaged North Kavirondo in 1931, causing food shortages and crop destruction: many locations lost up to 60 percent of their maize and wimbi (brown millet) crops.29 And it was at this point that the discovery of gold would interject dramatically thrust these local contests onto the national stage.
THE KAKAMEGA GOLD RUSH
The discovery of gold forever altered the landscape of land and political thought in western Kenya. With gold in their eyes, “colonial officialdom” swiftly reduced the Native Lands Trust
