province during the 2007 Kenya elections, the province did not witness the levels of violence and retribution that spread around its borders. Even with one of their “own,” in the form of Musalia Mudavadi, vying for the presidential seat in 2013, Luyia voters continued their tradition of defiantly plural politics, splitting the vote yet again between multiple candidates and parties.15
The political landscape of western Kenya is “slippery” terrain: “just as the Luhya’s favourite food, ‘mrere’ is slippery, so too is anyone that banks on the Luhya to vote in bulk for them.”16 Many have asked whether they were indeed a proper “tribe”: in the words of one Kenyan columnist, the Luyia were “created by the colonial administration some time in the 1940s. They did not exist before then and have no history as a ‘tribe.’”17 And this questioning of Luyia “credentials” as a tribe extends far beyond Kenya’s popular and political discourses: mentors, advisers, and colleagues at academic conferences and in casual conversations have similarly asked me, “but are the Luyia really a tribe?”18
These questions formed the original stimulus for this book, asking how and to what ends the Luyia community developed this seemingly plural and unpredictable ethnic identity. Indeed, the “Luyia” did not exist as a discrete ethnic appellation before the 1930s; precolonially, and well into the colonial era, they were instead multiple discrete and distinct political communities that defied ethnic categorization and crossed environmental, linguistic, and colonial boundaries. Nevertheless, in 1948, after four decades of British rule in Kenya, a previously unknown ethnic name suddenly appeared atop the first official census. From nonexistence, the “Luyia” appeared with 653,774 enumerated and named constituents. By the 2009 census, Luyia numbers had risen to 5.3 million, the second-largest ethnic affiliation in the country. Despite their recent and self-conscious history of ethnogenesis, Luyia elders interviewed throughout my research described their community within the idiom of “tribe”: to be Luyia was to be “of the same blood,” to “gather together,” to “speak the same language.”19
This story, then, begins in this slippery terrain, in the undulating landscape of what would become western Kenya. From the shores of Lake Victoria to the foothills of Mount Elgon, the immense ecological and topographical variety of this compact region invited a complex mix of African settlers from divergent migratory routes and linguistic backgrounds. While European geographers and administrators mapped a singular, neat territory to order this complex landscape, its diverse inhabitants proved resistant to would-be state builders. With the discovery of gold in their lands in the 1930s, a territorial crisis prompted local political thinkers to imagine, for the first time, an enlarged ethnic polity in western Kenya.
The threats to land and local moral economies brought by colonial rule prompted many communities across eastern Africa to imagine new ethnic polities. However, for the communities of western Kenya, no single vernacular language ever united their disparate speakers; no common narratives or mythic founding father bound their members within historical lineages; and no set of cultural practices defined their community membership. Lacking these traditional, or at least recognizable, reservoirs of ethnic politics, Luyia political thinkers instead mapped new limits of authority, moral accountability, and political community along territorial lines: they worked to territorialize custom and institutionalize plurality; they mobilized a civic language of territorial nationalism to rationalize their differences; they imagined a territory of cosmopolitan people bound not by common lineage or past myths but by a common geographic imagination. While narratives of ethnogenesis among the Luyia claim no common founding father or point of origin, they insist on a geographic identity. This geographic space, defined by the regional networks and exchanges made necessary by environmental interdependence and the multiplicity of communities, provided the most constant source of inspiration and mobilization for the creative re-imaginings of the Luyia community.
While framed, and continually frustrated, in the colonial terms of the ethnos, the creation of a plural and civic-minded Luyia identity proved impressively durable, and flexible enough to allow Luyia partisans to defend against encroaching European settlers and African neighbors, to productively navigate the politics of loyalism and dissent during the Mau Mau rebellion, and to foster a vibrant and fiercely plural political culture. Understanding this dynamic, confounding, and diverse political project requires a reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, prompts an investigation into the geographic imaginations of African communities, and provides a challenge to contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.
LINES OF ARGUMENT: IMAGINED POLITICAL COMMUNITIES
This book advances three lines of argument based on three intertwined concepts that while abstract and multiple in their meanings have material and situated implications and reflect the high stakes and changing political economies of African political imagination. The first follows the argument of “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s now famous phrasing, of understanding national and ethnic identities as thoroughly historical and intrinsically creative processes.20 Such imagined communities formed on the basis of multiple impetuses: national, religious, linguistic, ideological, and genealogical. Yet while ethnos provided the language for much of this imagination in colonial Africa, what was imaginable had historically contingent limits. To address the constraints and possibilities of these imaginings, the second line of argument seeks to unpack the emergence of a particular form of ethnic patriotism that demonstrates the complex interplay of nativism and cosmopolitan pluralism within African political thought. Finally, I argue that these seemingly contradictory claims were made possible by the mobilization of geographic imaginations capable of articulating and at times enforcing the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. At its analytical core, this study argues for a social history of cartographic political imaginations.
In colonial Africa, the European belief that all Africans belonged to timeless, bounded, primordial “tribes” meant ethnicity was the only framework recognized by imperial surveyors, missionaries, and colonial officials, and in turn became the dominant language of African culture and politics. But this does not mean that African imaginations of tribe, and later nation, were merely “derivative discourses” trapped in European constructs and ideologies.21 While most contemporary historians shy away from the term, due to its imperial roots and primordial implications, tribe has rarely represented a problem for self-description within African patriotic discourses. Indeed the idiom of “tribe” has proven incredibly resilient despite the vilification of its twin head, “tribalism.” While I hesitate to endorse a wholesale rehabilitation of the term, the language of tribe continues to hold great relevance and currency in the everyday political imaginings of self and society in Africa.
Until the late 1970s, these two analytical thrusts—one viewing tribes as primordial communities bound by blood kinship relations and the other viewing tribes as instrumental political identities, circumstantial and open to manipulation—governed both colonial and academic understandings of ethnic identity.22 Both these theories understood ethnic identity as a fact and their tenets continue to dictate popular representations of Africa, as witnessed in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenya elections. However, both failed to account for the continuing salience and changing meanings of ethnicity in contemporary African societies.
In the 1980s a new cohort of African scholars questioned the “fact” of ethnic identity and championed a new theoretical model that still dominates today. In Leroy Vail’s seminal edited volume The Creation of Tribalism, contributing scholars theorized the “invention of tradition” through the codification of customary law, the standardization of African languages, and the effects of migrancy on the construction of new lines of community under colonial rule. As John Iliffe argued, “Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.”23 For these constructivists, ethnicity was not a fixed condition but rather a modern expression of historical processes, socially constructed by colonial officials, European missionaries, and African political thinkers.
Postcolonial studies have largely endorsed these instrumentalist
