Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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arrival of imperial cartography elevated the power of the map in Africa and offered new opportunities for countermapping resistance. Sumathi Ramaswamy has drawn attention to the geographic work of those she termed “barefoot cartographers”: amateur mapmakers who adopted the tools and symbols of “command” cartography to produce and reinscribe the mapped “logo” of the nation.113 While such terminology risks reifying an orientalist dialectic between the naked, unscientific nature of local geographic imaginations and the booted, scientific work of imperial cartographers, it does importantly dislodge the practices of mapping from its official uses and point to the popular and patriotic production of mapmaking cultures. The drawing of maps and the clerical work involved in defining and defending territory provided partisans across Africa with another avenue for self-representation, for recasting their histories, and for forwarding their political agendas. For Luyia ethnic patriots, mapping enabled them to order and naturalize the space of belonging, to marshal their plural and often dissenting constituents, and to minimally outline their political and cultural project along territorial lines. There was thus “no catastrophic erasure by the natives of ‘precolonial’ or ‘indigenous’ conceptions of land with the arrival of new modalities of visualizing territory ushered in by the colonial state through the mediation of the modern science of cartography.”114 Rather, mapping provided a concrete tool mobilized by local patriots in the articulation of new identities in a wider and increasingly crowded political arena.
In a recent study on the “spatial factor” in African history, Allen Howard and Richard Shain have suggested that “perhaps the ‘ethnic’ approach to African history has most determinedly blocked the application of spatial analysis.”115 The present study works to redress this gap, creating a dialogue between the voluminous historiography on ethnic identity and the growing literature on territoriality and geographic imaginations. Instead of understanding territory as solely part of high-modernist colonial projects or as simply a strategic resource of “political tribalism,” this study suggests a methodological shift toward exploring the multiple ways local communities and ethnic patriots adopted and reworked mapping strategies to their own ends. Linking the study of moral ethnicity with territorial politics, this study further investigates the ongoing debates over the meaning of the Luyia political community, debates often expressed as arguments over maps and borders. Boundaries, be they cognitive or geographic, both marked and managed the extent of political communities. Colonial mapping strategies produced new geographic imaginaries and a form of “map-mindedness” appropriated by African communities in their reformulations of identity, community, and territory.116
A NOTE ON SOURCES
In a recent nonfiction piece on Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu, compatriot Binyavanga Wainaina began with a historical declaration: “We are made by our archives.”117 In the context of a study of encounters—between people and landscape, between the colonial map and local geographic imaginations, between systems of knowledge and grammars of community—this statement rings especially true. The research for this project necessitated an engagement with multiple historical modes and my own encountering with a wide variety of sources—archival, vernacular, oral, and pictorial—across multiple times and spaces.
Researching a borderland that exists at the crossroads of several competing histories required archival work across three continents, from the borderlands of Uganda and Kenya through to Birmingham and Cambridge, England, and even across the Atlantic to Richmond, Indiana.118 Such archives included national, provincial, missionary, and personal holdings. Sources from the Uganda National Archives, in Entebbe, presented a relatively untapped and rich, if elusive, avenue for exploring regional and cross-boundary histories. Missionary records from across three continents, too often used only in missionary or religious histories, provided rich evidence of linguistic projects, political work, and the interaction of new religious ideas with the patriotic imagining of new communities. Newspapers, both vernacular and national, offered important insights into local and national transformations in political thinking and language. The present study also pays particular heed to the documentation of oral testimonies in court cases, in colonial commissions, and in local history-writing projects. While set within the performative theaters of colonial production, this kind of testimonial documentation allows the “voices” of African petitioners to be read in and through colonial documents.119
More exceptionally, this project makes extensive use of archival maps. Geographic literacy produced its own “tin-trunk” literature, to use Karin Barber’s terminology, found in the personal, hidden documentation produced by elites and nonelites alike that helped advance African political argumentation.120 Maps drawn for local land courts, in partisan histories, in political tracts, and for colonial boundary commissions produced a vast archive of cartographic representations. These sources do, however, present challenges. As they are often viewed as addenda or supplements, they are particularly susceptible to disappearance and destruction. On a recent visit to the Kenya National Archives, I found that one of the largest files of maps submitted to the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission, which provided much of the evidence for chapter 9 of this volume, has now disappeared in the process of recataloguing. Maps mentioned in reports, petitions, land cases, and other correspondences were often impossible to trace. The material nature of maps, which require frequent handling and copying, also make these sources susceptible to deterioration. Many of the maps I consulted were falling apart, literally offering only fragments of the past. Still, the variety of maps drawn by official hands as well as those drawn by local landowners and ethnic patriots provide a particularly rich source base. As with literacy itself, these maps revealed the “hidden powers” of territory inscribed on paper.121 Long passed over or ignored entirely, the symbols and cartographic metaphors operating inside and outside the map itself provide a means of accessing and interrogating evolving arguments over geographic imaginaries.
In the tradition of social history, an extensive oral history project conducted over the course of 2007 and 2008 also sought to capture the testimony of elders from what is, in many ways, the last colonial generation. Since the pioneering work of Jan Vansina, oral history has privileged “tradition” and the ability of the historian to separate verifiable truths from the performative aspects of oral accounts.122 However, over the past twenty years or so, a major theoretical and methodological shift has moved toward the use of oral histories as important sources unto themselves, with all of their subjectivity, theatricality, and ambiguity.123
Life histories have become a particularly popular means of accessing the social world and alternative histories. In my own work, early group interviews collecting oral traditions quickly gave way to more personal, life history–style interviews. My first forays into group interviews were often interrupted and at times hijacked by local political officials or self-appointed village experts. While these interventions produced valuable and insightful contestations, they took control of the interview process and setting away not only from me as an interviewer but moreover from the chosen interviewees, whose histories did not always match the priorities and privileged narratives of “official” figures. The life history format, though still embedded in wider familial and communal networks that meant interviews were rarely a one-on-one event, allowed for a greater degree of intimacy, privacy, and rigor.
The primary nucleus of informants came from the Luyia Council of Elders, a formal organization composed of twenty men, each representing a recognized constituent community within the Luyia fold. While representing themselves as the producers and guardians of this ethnic project, these men rarely subsumed their divergent narratives or personal histories under a codified historical narrative. Rather, the variety of politics espoused by these elders revealed the diversity of political thought and the competing forms of community still debated within their council meetings. In interviews with these sanctioned male elders, wives, sons, daughters, neighbors, and onlookers often interjected, providing a wider range of engagements and new sources of historical perspectives. Other informants came from a broad cross-section of backgrounds, from former rebel fighters to local men and women who had never traveled outside western Kenya, and from the first female councillor to a former vice president.
The sheer number of different dialects and languages in the region was overwhelming. Every interviewee spoke multiple languages with great