Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur

      INTRODUCTION

      Mapping Political Communities in Africa

      ON 25 August 2009, Perus Angaya Abura sat drinking her morning tea in her home, in the Amalemba Estates outside Kakamega, in Kenya’s Western Province, anticipating a knock at her door from a “census enumerator.” The 2009 Kenya census sparked controversy when government officials opted to resurrect a section on ethnic background on their questionnaires. Responding to concerns over ethnic violence, official manipulation, and minority rights, Kenyan officials expanded the list of forty-two “tribes” recognized in the last census a decade before to 114. The new list contained several tribes Perus had identified with at various points in her long life.¹ For the first time, “Kenyan” appeared as an option on a national census. “Luyia,” the ethnic group ascribed to Perus since the first colonial census, in 1948, when she was but a teenager, also appeared.² Under “Luyia,” a collapsible list of several different names unfolded for the first time: “Kisa,” the administrative name given to the clans within Perus’s home location during the colonial demarcation of 1909; and “Isukha,” her husband’s community and thus the community of her children, now appeared as official ethnic identities. Here laid out before Perus were some of the multiple identities she had come to wear: in Perus’s words “Kenyan, Luyia, Kisa, Isukha, how can I choose? I am all of these.”

      Official inquiries into ethnic identity in Kenya threatened to pour salt on the fresh wounds of violence and political instability that engulfed the country after the 2007 national elections. The tightly fought campaign between incumbent Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), led by Raila Odinga, quickly gave way to allegations of electoral fraud and massive demonstrations. The violence that ensued was graphically depicted by both Western media and many in the Kenyan government as “tribal” or “ethnic” in nature: the evils of political tribalism—the pitting of tribal communities against each other in an all-out competition for political power and resources—again rearing its ugly head in postcolonial Africa.

      The opposition party ODM was born out of popular protests against Kibaki’s proposed constitutional reforms in 2005 that did little to limit executive power or reform “Kenya’s ‘top heavy’ political system.”³ Headed by a “pentagon” of five leaders with prominent Luo politician Raila Odinga at the helm, ODM hitched its campaign onto deeply historical arguments, telling histories of lost sovereignty, prophesizing interethnic cooperation, and envisioning a devolved, federated state.⁴ Their strategy was a regional one: each of the five leaders in the pentagon represented a different regional polity, and their platform promised a more equitable “sharing of the cake” across the country. Debates during the campaign highlighted the multiple social inequalities, historical grievances, and regional disparities in development that cut across simplified “tribal” allegiances.⁵ The two months of postelection violence left over one thousand people dead and seven hundred thousand internally displaced and ended with a compromised coalition government, with Kibaki continuing as president and Odinga instated in the newly created position of prime minister. Ethnic arguments certainly played a role in voting patterns and in the subsequent violence, but to label the two-month conflict that inaugurated 2008 as merely the cyclical bloodletting of “age-old tribal hatreds” was to misread not only the deep social anxieties and urgent political questions at stake in these elections but also the complex histories of the making and unmaking of political communities in eastern Africa.

      Ahead of the 2009 census, newspapers, blogs, and other popular forums filled with debates over the nature of identity in Africa. In an article for the Standard, Otuma Ongalo pondered his census choices:

      I’m a son of a Luo man from Nyanza and Mnyala woman from Kakamega who migrated from Ugunja and established a home among the predominantly Bukusu in Bungoma in early 1960s. . . . Part of my family born before mid 1960s speaks fluent Luo, Kinyala and Kibukusu. . . . I’m married to an Isukha woman but our children cannot speak Kisukha, Kinyala, Luo or Kibukusu. So, when enumerators turn up in our homestead they will find a nation, not a tribe.⁶

      Mama Ida, wife of Prime Minister Raila Odinga, drew laughs when she responded to the census question with, “I’m half-Luo, half-Luhya—you know, 50–50!”⁷ With no provision for such mixed families, Ida Odinga was enumerated as a Luo, the community of her husband.⁸ One columnist jokingly pictured these plural families as products of a distinct moral economy: “exchanging goats for the tribe.”⁹ In western Kenya, as across the country, long histories of migration, intermarriage, and interethnic exchange complicated bureaucratic efforts to align people into neatly ordered columns of sanctified and unchanging tribal groupings. As Ongola’s response eloquently captured, the grammar of identity had a history and a geography that made sense of the plurality and multiplicity of identities in postcolonial Africa.

      In response to petitions from “minority communities” in this minority nation, respondents for the 2009 census would be “at liberty to break away from the broader Luhya, Kalenjin, Mijikenda, Swahili or Kenyan Somali and identify with one or the other of the numerous sub-groupings under them.”¹⁰ The groups targeted in this process of disaggregation at first glance appeared quite diverse, and yet they shared a common history of ethnic imagination at odds with contemporary understandings of ethnogenesis. All extend across national and colonial borders; all have recent histories of confederal alliances among diverse communities; and all have been at the forefront of federalist debates and secessionist campaigns in postcolonial Kenya.¹¹ Of the Mijikenda, a confederation of nine communities along Kenya’s coast, Justin Willis has argued that their modern articulation of ethnicity was “a history, and an identity, of recent origin; a truth whose ambiguity is constantly reflected in historical presentation.”¹² It was this ambiguity, this plurality and dissent within territorially unbound ethnic bodies, that government officials in Kenya painted as potentially subversive and destructive to national stability.

      The census enumerator never arrived at Perus’s door. Despite a projected success of 97 percent of households across the country, delays, errors, and confusion marred the census in the Western Province, returning only 79 percent of its recorded household data.¹³ Perus’s dilemma, though, revealed a deeper history of the multiplicity and ambiguities of belonging in postcolonial Africa.

      In all these recent political developments in Kenya—the 2005 constitutional referendum, the 2007 elections, the 2009 census, and again in the 2013 elections—one question plagued officials and repeatedly grabbed headlines: how will the Luyia answer?¹⁴ With the second-highest voting numbers in the country, the Luyia represent a powerful regional power broker and crucial factor in any electoral contest. However, the political plurality of Luyia constituents consistently defied the tenets of political tribalism, never historically voting

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