Communities, two pioneering studies in this young field, Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped and Christopher Gray’s Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, both emphasized the instrumental role of imperial mapmaking in the formation of new ethnic and national communities.85 Both studies began by sketching the cognitive mapping of space that existed before the intervention of colonial geography.86 Winichakul explored the sacred topographies of Buddhist thought alongside the ancient maps of Southeast Asia to demonstrate the “coexistence of different concepts of space.”87 Gray, on the other hand, built on Jan Vansina’s theory of “cognitive landscapes” that spatialize ideology on an intimate scale.88 For Gray, the cognitive mapping of kinship and clan hierarchies among the stateless communities of South Gabon allowed for the development of a socially defined form of territoriality.89 For both Winichakul and Gray, the introduction of colonial mapmaking constrained local practices of space, imposed imperial understandings of geography, and encoded boundaries as the delimiters of new ethnic and national bodies.
Historians of colonial territoriality have investigated the use of mapping in the spatial organization of gender relations, the micropractices of power and governmentality, and the relations and identities formed on frontiers and across borderlands.90 Postcolonial studies have further looked at colonial boundaries variously as artificial barriers, as delimiters of citizenship, and as conduits of exchange and interaction.91 But the underlying argument remains virtually the same: the introduction of modern mapping technologies marked a radical break that displaced older forms of geographic knowledge and prompted new formulations of community and identity. By focusing too narrowly on imperial and “official” maps, these studies risk eliding the “cartographic anxiety” that such processes produced and occluding the ways Africans, or indeed subalterns across the colonized world, informed, contested, and appropriated these colonial impositions.92
The introduction of cartography reflected broader histories of scientific exchange and literacy in the colonial world. Imperial state builders, according to James Scott, required spatial ordering to make their power legible, but these “state fixations” were often frustrated—unmapped lands were not blank spaces waiting to be filled, and local populations did not “stand idly by when surveyors came into view.”93 Cartography represented a contested enterprise in which local communities, as much as European experts and scientists, worked to produce knowledge and constitute communities. In counterpoint to the work of Tim Mitchell and Scott, mapping was not the sole property of high-modernist imperial planners.94 Mapping, as a tool of power, imagination, and dissent, was much more broadly distributed and proved to be a useful political strategy for subaltern activists and ethnic patriots alike. Whether by the state or in the hands of local amateur surveyors, mapping obliged both cartographers and readers to understand themselves in relation to the map.
The colonial obsession with territorial ordering and cataloguing incentivized the development of cartographic literacy and produced distinct modes of competition in local moral economies. Mapping, as with all colonial strategies of rule, was a negotiated, historically contingent process. Africans, serving as guides, porters, and assistants in the work of mapping of western Kenya, quickly leaned lessons in reconnaissance, surveying, triangulation, and a whole host of cartographic techniques and languages. Missionary and later government schools held formal classes in geography. In the 1940s, District Social Welfare Officer Ryland reported that geography was among the most popular subjects at his Development Centre.95 Though the exact lessons and mapmaking exercises used by missionary and government teachers remain difficult to ascertain, mapping proved an indispensable tool in the emerging colonial economy.
In classrooms, in courtrooms, and before colonial land commissions, Africans practiced their cartographic skills and produced maps to defend their landholdings and household economies. The most explicit training ground for local mapmaking skills came from colonial courts. In her study of mapping in Mozambique, Heidi Gengenbach noted that “of all types of colonisers’ maps, cadastral maps impinged most directly and disruptively on the lives of Africans.”96 Land cases called upon claimants to draw instrumental pictorial representations of their farms and surrounding environments. Native tribunals in western Kenya were constantly congested with land cases that often dated back over generations and included multiple overlapping claims.
Court cases were replete with competing maps that used increasingly sophisticated methods of representation. Symbols and legends guided the court’s readings of these maps. When “trespassers” entered the farmland of recently deceased Jeremiah Nabifwo, his sons created a detailed map of their father’s landholdings to present to the court.97 A “key” guided the court through mazes of dotted lines, shaded spaces, and interlocking properties (fig. i.1). Nabifwo’s sons worked to prove the violation of their father’s lands by visualizing the rivers, borders, and tenant farms that defined the limits and terms of access to his property.
FIGURE I.1. Sketch map of Jeremiah Nabifwo’s property. 19 January 1959, KPA, WD/4/5.
In other cases, claimants sketched detailed histories into the landscape. In the case of M. Mbango s/o Linyonyi, a map offered multiple decades of information, tracing lines of ownership, use, court appeals, and competing claims (fig. I.2). In such maps, individual claims overlapped, intersected, and at times competed with larger claims to clan lands. These cases became increasingly complex by the late colonial period as plaintiffs moved in and out of the district, complicating land claims that often privileged use and mapped accuracy over genealogy and custom.98 These land maps revealed the increasing sophistication, complexity, and careful attention to pictorial detail of cartographic representation in western Kenya.
This mapmaking was never, however, a simple translation of the world of experience into the world on paper, as argued by Sean Hawkins. Hawkins drew too sharp a distinction between literal maps and cognitive mappings, seeing cartographic practices as a “text” that imposed new forms of historical consciousness.99 The transnational literature on territoriality is often inclined to contrast a notion of precolonial spatial fluidity and multiplicity with colonial mapped fixity, indeed mirroring the literature on ethnic identity.
FIGURE I.2. Sketch map of M. Mbango s/o Linyonyi’s property. 16 June 1956, KNA, PC/NZA/3/15/68.
As cartographic literacy gained prominence, new mapping techniques grafted onto older environmental and social negotiations on the ground. Claimants in western Kenya continually demanded that maps of landholdings be substantiated through reference to older measures of land tenure and asked for the intervention of elders “who know very much about our grand-grand fathers boundaries.”100 Courts often required “proofs” of boundaries in the physical landscape and expert testimony alongside pictorial representations. Maps produced for the courts were taken out to the disputed areas, where lines on the page were matched to physical realities. In the case of Musa Mamai versus Jonathan Wepukhulu over land in Kolani, Chief Barasa called for observers from the surrounding population to witness the new boundary demarcation. At the site of the conflict, Mamai and Wepukhulu both agreed for the “boundary to run as drawn on the . . . map.”101 In other cases, maps were “drawn” on the floor of the court itself.102 Maps produced for these colonial land courts never provided the final word on landownership; rather, local communities debated, negotiated, and redrew these maps. While colonial mapping affixed land to the page as never before, these practices grafted on top of older environmental and social negotiations on the ground and encouraged the production of new cartographic metaphors and symbols.
The
