a situation, women are invisible, sunk, contained within the ‘naturalised’ domain of the dominant ideology.”67 The reactive fallback notion of “the invisible woman” within ethnic studies has allowed for uncritical approaches to this subject.68 African women often disappeared in histories of ethnic imagining precisely because “patriotic” men sought to subsume them.
Ethnic identity for Luyia women was not so much “invisible” or even “subsumed” as it was transformable. While culturalist projects like the Luo Union and the Haya Union sought to rein in the moral conduct and reproductive capabilities of their women, Luyia entrepreneurs shied from these cultural politics and instead integrated “Luyia” women strategically into their demographic projects through a progressive discourse of universal suffrage and ethnic diversity. In theory, intermarriage among Luyia groups required women to follow their husband’s customs and raise their children within the patrilineal culture. As Charles Ambler noted for the nineteenth century, patrilineal absorption allowed women to move between groups with ease, without requiring the special initiations often demanded of foreign men.69 However, with a private wink and a nod, wives and mothers transmitted many aspects of their former cultural identities to their children in language and custom.70 That women could carry ideas, customs, languages, and networks throughout the territorial space of the Luyia underpinned the processes of interpenetration and intermarriage that defined the very plural nature of the late colonial Luyia discourse. Perus’s dilemma before the census enumerator dramatized the tensions that existed for women in the production of ethnic communities.
For such women, cosmopolitan ethnic patriotism was then, in many ways, second nature. While Luyia political thinkers remained more concerned with electoral projects and census numbers than with any culturalist agenda, they still engaged in a gendered discourse of morality, movement, and home. The tension between a gendered nativist politics and a progressive cosmopolitanism proved a critical, if challenging, feature of Luyia ethnic patriotism. This cosmopolitan ethnic patriotism also proved potentially dangerous: patriotic competitors would decry such cosmopolitanisms as rootless, ungrounded, so much so that being “cosmopolitan” became an insult often hurled in their direction.71 As will be seen throughout this story, the limited and often failed cultural projects of Luyia entrepreneurs in language, gender discipline, customary law, and history writing prompted a more minimalist approach to the formulation of political community and revealed the attenuated character of this ethnic project.
Despite the recent historiographical emphasis on fluctuation, negotiation, and cultural production in the imagining of ethnicity, these models continue to rely on a teleological insistence on ethnic invention, enforced consensus, and exclusion. Gabrielle Lynch’s recent work on the Kalenjin, whose composite communities, like those of the Luyia, came to be recognized by this appellation only in the 1940s, has argued that this ethnic alliance succeeded through the consolidation of lineage-based myths of origin and an “emotive (and inherently exclusive) narrative of territorial association.”72 What is still missing is a way to understand the plurality and dissent not only at the borders but also within these patriotic discourses and the multiple and overlapping localities in which they evolved.73 While the Luyia were not unique in this process, they were perhaps uniquely self-conscious. The imagining of a Luyia community reflects less an exception to the rules of ethnic invention and more the creative energies mobilized to rationalize plurality and dissent. Luyia ethnic architects grounded their patriotism within a distinct geographic vision. Lacking the consensus and consolidation of a more thoroughgoing culturalist agenda, they were left with a mapped outline from which to build a new form of demographically inclusive, politically plural community. For Luyia cosmopolitans, territorial nationalism provided a language, a form of argumentation capable of tapping into the geographic imaginations, multiple sites of identification, and histories of regional interdependence and interaction among their plural and irrepressibly diverse constituents.
GEOGRAPHIC IMAGINATIONS: MAPPING POWER, COUNTERMAPPING DISSENT
In an interview with the editors of the French Marxist geography journal Hérodote in 1976, Michel Foucault begins by defending his lack of interest in geography as a subject.74 When confronted with the profusion of spatial and geographic metaphors in his work—position, displacement, terrain, archipelago, landscape—Foucault defends these terms as reflecting more historical and political power structures rather than geographic ideas in and of themselves. By the end of this exchange, however, the editors prompt Foucault into an about-face: “I must admit . . . Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. . . . Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns.”
Geography and the encounters between communities and the landscapes they inhabit have long produced sites of imagination and contestation through which African communities expressed their histories, their moral economies, and the limits of their political communities. And yet, as Foucault realized, despite a profusion of geographic metaphors, very little scholarly attention has interrogated the geographic imaginations behind these metaphors that made possible the variety and durability not only of knowledge production and power structures but also of subaltern political imaginations.75
The spatial turn in African history over the past few years has prompted a move away from restrictive, relatively recent, and colonially contingent national and ethnic units of analysis toward a focus on “regions”: geographic spaces defined by the extent of “networks of interaction, whether political, economic, social, or cultural.”76 This regional approach not only breaks away from colonial timelines and boundaries but also exposes the diverse and dissenting interactions and exchanges within these spaces. This is not to suggest, as some have, a simple replacing of an “ethnic” grammar with a “geographic” one; rather, this approach responds to Achille Mbembe’s call for an investigation into the “imaginaires and autochthonous practices of space.”77 These “imaginaires” revealed themselves in many forms: in the histories told; in the geographic work of language, customary practice, and demographic control; and in the spatial delimitation of land, movement, power, and belonging.
Social formations among the constituent communities of the Luyia reflected an “imbrication of multiple spaces” of belonging, exchange, and authority before colonial conquest.78 While this geographic imagination continued to inform the organization of political relations and strategies of resistance into the colonial period, the territorial outline drawn by imperial surveyors offered a new coherence, a framework from which new political thinkers could claim the right to speak for an enlarged ethnic constituency. Contrary to instrumentalist understandings of colonial boundaries constructing ready-made ethnic territories from which African politicians mobilized their constituents, colonial maps did not invent new identities wholesale but rather introduced new tools in the visual illustration of history and community.79 Mapmaking provided a way of “writing the world,” a way of making legible spatial relationships and territorial claims.80 And while geography constituted social practice, cartography, as introduced in the colonial era, became political action.
A recent historiographical trend has focused on the importance of mapping and strategies of territoriality to the imperial project. For Lord Curzon, boundaries represented “the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations.”81 Geography made possible the possession of distant territories, bringing “light” to dark, unknown places and peoples: “To govern territories, one must know them . . . unless a region is first conceived of and named, it cannot become the specific subject of a map.”82 Historians have made great use of geographer Robert Sack’s theory of territoriality to reconstruct the links between territory and power, geography and governance, and mapmaking and identity. In Sack’s terms, ‘“ territoriality . . . forms the backcloth to human spatial relations and conceptions of space. . . . Territoriality is the primary spatial form power takes.”83 Territoriality was then a strategy of social interaction, of rule, and of state building.84
Taking
