Council from western Kenya—Philip Ingutia, Paul Mboya, and B. A. Ohanga—played significant roles in their respective Luyia and Luo language committees.46 The Kalenjin Language Committee similarly included future politicians Daniel arap Moi and Taita arap Towett.47 While a Luyia language failed to materialize, for Andere this linguistic endeavor went hand in hand with his political and demographic work.
Andere’s name would be become most closely associated with the formulation of Luyia customary law in the 1950s. The project was ambitious and fraught. The overwhelming variety of customary practices among the constituent communities of the Luyia stumped early administrators, clogged local courts, and led to endless parochial conflicts among neighbors. For Andere, consolidating customary law seemed a natural extension of his earlier patriotic work. As secretary of the Luyia Customary Law Panel, from 1951 to 1954, Andere deliberately worked to bring in a diversity of panelists to avoid the appearance of favoritism or domination by particular communities that had doomed the Luyia language project.48 He further petitioned for representatives to come not from elders and chiefly authorities but from young politicians, teachers, and ethnic patriots like himself. Together, these young technocrats set out to define a common set of principles usable in various fields of local governance, political organization, language, and moral discipline. In multiple customary law publications, Andere ordered and tabulated the plurality of Luyia customary practices into a seemingly singular, coherent document.49 These publications are, however, quite amusing to read, riddled as they are with complicated tables, competing terminologies, sections on “local variations,” and recurrent qualifications. In Andere’s masterful hands, plural and dissenting cultural practice became the defining rather than defeating feature of Luyia “customs,” allowing for a variety of readings and open to constant revision. The creation of Luyia customary law was a technocratic feat and a victory for Andere.
Ethnic patriots did not work in isolation; they were members of complex social networks that clustered around religious denominations, schooling, government positions, and experiences of urbanism and international schooling. Andere served as longtime committee member on Muluhya, a magazine published by Luyia students at Makerere, alongside fellow ethnic patriots W. B. Akatsa and J. D. Otiende, among others. It would be fellow nominee Otiende who would recommend Andere for nomination to the Legislative Council in 1948.50 Ahead of the first national election, in 1957, the local council chose Andere to tour the district and collect testimony with the Coutts Commission alongside important politicians W. W. W. Awori and Pascal Nabwana.51 On panels, committees, and district councils, Andere worked alongside nearly every current and future political figure from western Kenya and made the work of ethnic patriotism into a profession.
Ethnic patriotism did not altogether offer a social identity as such. Rather, ethnic patriotism offered a self-conscious form of work, an occupation taken up in the context of a specific colonial context. While Luyia ethnic patriots shared similar biographies, and clusters did emerge, they also diverged and came from a variety of denominational and local filiations. Some, like Paul Agoi, moved in and out of these registers. After over a decade working in the native administration as a headman, councilman, and member on several boards, into the 1930s Agoi recognized the shifting tides and the growth of ethnic patriotism as a viable form of work. He became the president of the North Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association, where he protested local land policies and called on the people of North Kavirondo to name themselves. Before the Kenya Land Commission in 1932, Agoi revealed the growing sense of territorial nationalism within this project when he pronounced that the “proper boundary of the Black man is Mombasa.”52 In 1940, Agoi capitalized the colonial administration’s attempt to coopt young ethnic patriots and became chief of the Maragoli. While progressive and well remembered for his visit to Kenyan troops serving in the Middle East in 1943, as chief, Agoi embarked on a different kind of politicking.53 He began turning inward and fashioning himself along the lines of an invented royal tradition using symbolic elements from the Logoli past. He wore a special robe of leopard skins and took the title of Owuluyali (His Highness). In response to the institution of the Locational Council, whose nominations rested outside his control, Agoi formed his own advisory council, the Bulindi bwo Woluyali.54 Soon fellow ethnic patriots Lumadede Kisala and Solomon Adagala became suspicious of Agoi’s dynastic ambitions. They charged Agoi with undemocratic behavior and forced his early retirement in 1950.
Agoi’s miscalculations reflected a fairly unique quality and tension within the Luyia version of ethnic patriotism; Luyia leaders who made such parochial calls to past reservoirs of power soon found themselves out of step. While inventions of tradition and “tribal fantasies” were crucial components of the work of ethnic patriots across eastern Africa, Luyia ethnic patriots were also, from a very early stage, cosmopolitan patriots.55 The tension between nativism, characterized by autochthonous claims to pure ancestry and rooted geographies, and cosmopolitanism, defined by cultural mixing and mobility, has marked modern African politics of identity. Some have argued that both were colonial imports.56 Yet, both have much longer histories and wide currency in African thought. If we take Kwame Anthony Appiah’s central principles of cosmopolitanism—pluralism, revisionism or “fallibilism,” and an obligation to strangers—then the Luyia have always been cosmopolitans.57 Across Kenya, eastern Africa, and out into an international diaspora, to be Luyia is to say mulembe.58 As explored in chapter 1, for centuries this term greeted visitors and strangers alike by asking where they had been, where they were going, and entreating them to come and go in peace.59 The formal call and response reflected the mutual obligation contained within such greetings.60 What Appiah hints at, but never fully develops, is this long history of cosmopolitanism—of plurality, of mobility, of multilingualism, and of multiple identities—among African communities. This left Appiah open to criticisms that his “cosmopolitanism” was Eurocentric and available only to the privileged few.61 And yet it was in the confrontation between these local, historically rich cosmopolitanisms and colonial “modernity” that many of these communities became nativist, rather than the other way around; and the two were not mutually exclusive.
Nativist discourses of immutable, bounded tribes provided a certain capital within the colonial economy. Older cosmopolitanisms survived, however, and were mobilized within anticolonial politics and ethnic patriotisms alike, aiming not so much at eliminating differences as at recognizing and navigating through them.62 Cosmopolitanism, in Appiah’s view, was precisely about this kind of conversation without the necessity of consensus: “Even people who share a moral vocabulary have plenty to fight about”—a sentiment echoed in many Luyia proverbs.63 So while Andere and others took up the ethnic work of linguistic consolidation and the codification of customary law, their culturalist projects revealed not the suppression of difference but rather their insistent pluralism. The direction of this work—the ability of ethnic patriots to navigate the tensions between nativism and cosmopolitanism and to subsume their constituents under patriotic discourses—was never entirely new, nor did it remain in their hands alone.
These ethnic patriots shared another common feature: they were all men. As Lonsdale has noted, “Patriotic history tends to be masculine history.”64 While “patriotic” men formed the intellectual core of much of this work, they often called upon women to carry the weight of their inventive projects, to comport themselves as the bearers of children, of morality, and of their community’s cultural values. African women, by their biology and social energies, reproduced the moral communities these men sought to fashion. As scholars of the “invention of tradition” took the “inventors” of ethnic communities at their word, African women often disappeared in their studies of ethnic identity: as Leroy Vail put it, “Ethnicity’s appeal was strongest for men, then, and the Tswana proverb to the effect that ‘women have no tribe’ had a real—if unintended—element of truth in it.”65 Though some impressive studies have looked at African women’s agency in subverting male authority, in carving out new spaces of work and morality, and in crafting nationalist agendas, these studies often placed women as a category apart from the study of ethnic imaginings.66
