A new thrust seems to be reinvigorating primordialist arguments and debates around whether colonial regimes did, in fact, invent ethnic and racial hierarchies or rather simply added a new language for racial or ethnic thinking.25 In global and transnational studies of ethnogenesis, there exists a growing trend toward examining the “entanglements” of ethnicity, the interrelationships of ethnicity, race, nationalism, class, gender, and sexuality.26 In colonial contexts, these studies examine ethnogenesis both as a strategy of subaltern resistance and as a means of exercising and consolidating dominance.27 Despite Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger’s warning that the “story of ethnic difference in Africa threatens to overwhelm the larger debate about postcolonial identity politics,” recent studies continue to emphasize instrumental political manipulation, lineage-based myth making, and the colonial legacies of the dichotomy between customary and civic models of belonging.28
Fixated as the constructivists have been on the colonial moment, what they still fail to account for are the very real attachments to and emotive potential of ethnic identification witnessed in modern Africa. As John Lonsdale has argued, “Ethnicity can scarcely be invented, or warmly shared, in a historical void.”29 The limits of “invention” soon became apparent even to its founding thinkers.30
More recent scholarship on ethnicity in Africa has heeded Lonsdale’s call to interrogate the moral debates and imaginative processes marshaled by African communities in the making of ethnic identities. In his groundbreaking work on Kikuyu society and the moral economy of the Mau Mau rebellion, Lonsdale redirected scholarly attention toward the internal moral debates of ethnic polities.31 He argued that “moral ethnicity” was primarily a culture of personal and civic accountability: “To debate civic virtue was to define ethnic identity.”32 Ethnicity thus represented a moral and political arena in which African communities debated and continually reimagined notions of belonging and citizenship, social obligation and civic responsibility, and moral authority and political leadership. In doing so, Lonsdale opened up the timeline of ethnic invention and created a language that allowed scholars to interrogate ethnicity as a creative moral project: in the words of Thomas Spear, to shift scholarly focus to “the dynamics of traditions, customs and ethnicities; on the contradictions of colonial rule; on shifting resource endowments and access; on how African and European intellectuals reinterpreted traditions in the colonial and postcolonial context; and on why others believed them.”33
While the “invention of tradition” school of thought and the more thorough accounting of “moral ethnicities” continue to offer important frameworks, both suffer from two interrelated shortcomings. First, scholarship in this vein too often takes the “inventors” of political communities at their word, elevating their versions of constructed community at the expense of the multiple, dissenting, and competing forms of community developed within and outside the linguistic and territorial confines of the “tribe.”34 Just as “invention” was not limited to the colonial period, neither was it the sole domain of the African cultural brokers who wrote patriotic histories. Tim Parsons has recently shown the “diverse ways of being” for the Kikuyu in colonial Kenya by refocusing attention away from the “inventors,” who constructed the illusion of consensus toward the ordinary “people who crossed ethnic boundaries.”35 As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argued in their oft-quoted but often misunderstood essay, an emphasis on identity, in its equally problematic “hard” and “soft” conceptions, can often mask the more complex, multiple, and mobile processes of identification.36
Second, the focus on the singularizing political imaginations of these “inventors” has obscured or at least sidelined other forms of imagination, and in particular geographic imaginations, that helped make these political imaginations viable or attractive in the first place. While such “inventions” were subject to constant revision by multiple actors, they were not open to just any interpretation. The material and symbolic base available for such imaginations conditioned and constrained the projects of ethnic “inventors.” As will be seen throughout this study, regional processes of exchange and interdependence created what Paul Richards has called a “common grammar” of social experience, despite differences in language, culture, or political organization.37 Across Africa, these “common grammars” emerged from common geographic visions and provided a mechanism for rationalizing plurality and managing dissent within ongoing projects of ethnogenesis.
ETHNIC PATRIOTISM: BETWEEN NATIVISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
“Ethnic patriotism” provided a particular currency in the moral economy of colonial eastern Africa: “ethnic” because of the particular colonial investment in the language of tribe and “patriotic” because of the in-turn investment by African political thinkers in the construction of a patria, a fatherland with countrymen to feel kinship among and a territory to defend.38 In the comparative politics of patriotism in eastern Africa, ethnicity offered a historically contingent and politically viable form of community building.39
Despite presenting one of the clearest cases of ethnic “invention,” where the terms of a Luyia ethnic identity literally did not exist before the 1930s, the history of ethnic imagining among the Luyia has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to the pioneering and voluminous scholarship on ethnicity coming out of Kenya.40 Newly “Luyia” historians began writing partisan histories as early as the 1940s, in line with patriotic history-writing projects taking place across Africa in the late colonial era.41 After the impressive body of work by Gideon Were, however, the historical and cultural production emerging from western Kenya tended to take as its subject the so-called subtribal ethnonationalisms.42 While scholars in various fields have traveled to western Kenya for their case studies of socioeconomic, educational, and religious change, the majority of these texts focus on specific communities that fall under the Luyia banner, neglecting the complex tensions and negotiations of difference among the constituent groups who came to form and at times refuse this corporate body.43
The most common explanation for the Luyia identity has fallen along constructivist lines, picturing the “Luyia” as a creation, either of colonial officials or of local political thinkers, “former students of Makerere College on analogy of BaGanda.”44 Yet the framework of the “invention of tradition” fails to account for how these actors fashioned an ethnic project without a common stock of historical myths and without a founding father from whom to imagine a patria. Unlike the more maximal cultural projects of the Luo Union, the Kikuyu Central Association, and the Haya Union farther afield, or even the more federalist projects of the Mijikenda and the Kalenjin, the “invention” of Luyia ethnic architects was not of a unified traditional past but rather of a corporate present and an interdependent future. While ethnogenesis among the Luyia seems to provide a challenge to scholars of “invention,” which perhaps explains their omission from this historiography, the large body of scholarly work on ethnicity signals the particular value and competitive nature of ethnic patriotism in colonial Kenya.
Luyia ethnic patriots emerged out of a particular set of discourses and social experiences within the colonial world. Take for example the life and political work of Ephraim A. Andere. Born in 1920 in Namasoli, North Kavirondo, Andere had a typical, if fairly elite, education at the Alliance High School before distinguishing himself as a writer and political thinker at Makerere College in Uganda.45 Upon his return to the district, in 1940, he gained a reputation as a respected schoolmaster at the prestigious Nyang’ori Primary School and later at Maseno School. But Andere’s real achievements were in the realm of ethnic patriotism. As general secretary of the Abaluyia Welfare Association, Andere worked toward the federation of smaller locational and clan associations under a Luyia umbrella. In 1948 he spearheaded the campaign that would put the Luyia name atop the first national census in Kenya. Throughout the 1940s he worked tirelessly with the Luyia Language Committee, whose goal it was to create one Luyia language out of the multiple and stubbornly diverse dialects in the region. Throughout Kenya, language committees proved a common tool for ethnic patriots and
