Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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Kenya went in search of name. In choosing Luyia—a term that translated for many as the fireplace where the elders of clans would gather—these young political thinkers turned away from the genealogical arguments created by naming communities after mythic founding fathers and instead chose a corporate name that privileged a horizontal drawing together of discrete, autonomous clans into one discursive and political space. This innovation would prove a larger trend: later ethnic projects, like the confederate Mijikenda or the Kalenjin who literally called to each other by naming themselves “I say to you,” employed ethnic names that similarly spoke to a new political ethos of kinship and community.129 The interwar period proved a high tide for this kind of ethnic patriotism. Throughout the 1930s, Luyia patriots worked fill this mapped space with historical and “emotional” resonance through the creative work of writing histories, electing leaders, and defending the political, moral, and territorial borders of this novel community.130
Chapters 4 and 5 then follow the emergence of a new, more self-consciously fashioned generation of Luyia ethnic patriots in the 1940s who embarked on patriotic work in multiple fields—linguistic, demographic, and customary—to rationalize the diversity among their disputatious constituents and defend their work against the deconstructive politics of the locality. In Chapter 4 recent graduates from Uganda’s Makerere College championed the work of the Luyia Language Committee to standardize one written Luyia language out of the multiple and distinct dialects of the region. The work of language consolidation created an environment of competitive linguistic work, often faltering precisely on the translation of terms that related to land, power, and belonging. This linguistic work threatened to undermine oral traditions of accommodation and flexibility and promoted defensive vernacular cultures. While no printed vernacular-Luyia linguistic culture ever materialized, “speaking Luyia” remained central to “being Luyia.”
In Chapter 5 the moral anxieties of the early 1940s, manifested in crises over land, mobility, and gender discipline, prompted a turn to the locality that threatened to disaggregate the fragile work of Luyia ethnic patriots. As sons and daughters left western Kenya in ever-larger numbers, smaller-scale ethnic associations formed to defend diverse moral economies and to enforce a gendered discourse of male fraternity and female deviancy through the creation of urban football teams and “antiprostitution” campaigns. By the late 1940s this turn to the locality and concern over movement and morality took its most dramatic form in a crisis over female circumcision. Controversy sparked when young women of the Tachoni were found to be engaging in secret circumcision ceremonies or leaving the district to be circumcised. These conflicts were about more than customary and gendered control: they were about the demographic health of the community and about the very frontiers of respectability.
The crisis over female circumcision brought home the limits of plurality and threatened the progressive and mannered values purported by Luyia cultural brokers. In response, the new generation Luyia politicians embarked on electoral and demographic projects that sought to make national politics consequential for local political thought. The duality and incompatibility of ethnicity and nationalism have dominated the study of African history in the twentieth century. Although local narratives of nationalism have challenged the national metanarratives reified in the postcolonial era, it is of equal importance to break down the national center—ethnic periphery model.131 Nationalism did not, as some have argued, necessarily represent a “mortal challenge” to the work of ethnic patriots.132 The circular movement of leadership and ideas created feedback and strategic borrowing between national and ethnic imaginings. Luyia leaders were, in some ways, ideal protonationalists—coming from a young ethnic project that privileged the language of territorial nationalism and cosmopolitan patriotism over calls to genealogical depth or ethnic conformism.
With the cultural projects of the 1940s faltering, territorial nationalism provided Luyia entrepreneurs a language, a form of argumentation capable of tapping into the geographic imagination of their plural constituents. Through census campaigns, electoral projects, and cultural reforms, Luyia leaders in the late 1940s transformed the Luyia ethnic project from the messy, fractured politics of the locality into a vehicle of national politicking. They managed a careful balance between a cosmopolitan, territorial nationalism and a rooted ethnic discipline, mapping an ethnic homeland in western Kenya through the enforcement of customary control and the formulation of gendered and territorial belonging.
In chapters 6 and 7, the late colonial politics of loyalism and dissent prompted a remodeling of the Luyia idea and entrenched the map and the politics of territoriality as tools of dissent and imagination. While much of the research on national politics in Kenya has followed a teleological path tracing whether the Kenya African Union (KAU), the first national political party, eventually led to the militant Mau Mau rebellion, accessing the “deep politics” of late colonial Kenya requires a decentering of this national history and an examination of the negotiated spaces not between binary poles but rather among the plural expressions and uses of territorial nationalism.133 The national crisis posed by the Mau Mau rebellion polarized the political landscape of Kenya, between ethnic and national, educated elite and worker, and loyalist and radical. Too often administrators, political commentators, and historians have labeled those beyond the borders of central Kenya as unproblematically “loyal,” outside the conflicts and moral debates of the Mau Mau rebellion. In western Kenya, however, the politics of loyalism and dissent not only already existed but also prompted Luyia cultural brokers to forward an idea of plural political community capable of providing flexibility and opportunities to exercise agency in the late colonial era.
The religious and anticolonial Dini ya Msambwa movement challenged both colonial and ethnic patriotic geographies. Through their religious pilgrimages, cultural reforms, and anticolonial activism, these frontier rebels threatened to unground the progressive discourse and civic reputation cultivated by Luyia patriots. By the late 1940s both colonial officials and Luyia thinkers had come to organize law and culture territorially, fixing diverse communities to “tribal” geographies and disciplining those who moved beyond these territorial confines. Unwittingly, the Dini ya Msambwa movement acted as antecedent for later debates around closed ethnic geographies and colonial counterinsurgency tactics later perfected during the Mau Mau rebellion.
In the 1950s, as the Mau Mau rebellion prompted a new kind of ethnic politicking, Luyia political thinkers fashioned a more flexible form of territorial consciousness. Chapter 6 traces the social history of this new Luyia idea that would allow Luyia cosmopolitans, farmers, and workers to move more freely through Kenya’s polarized political landscape. The chapter does not aim simply to insert another region, another ethnic group, back into the history of Mau Mau and 1950s Kenya.134 Neither does it assume that simple comparison or jockeying for position between Mau Mau and western Kenya’s own rebellion, in the form of Dini ya Msambwa, is enough. Rather, it argues that the myopic study of Mau Mau and anticolonial dissent more broadly solely from the perspective of central Kenya has left a great deal of the story out, not only of Mau Mau itself but also of the larger context of social change in eastern Africa at the time. In the 1950s, Luyia political thinkers marshaled a theory of ethnic pluralism and mapped a moral geography of belonging to navigate the Emergency era politics of loyalism and dissent.
As decolonization neared, the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission of 1962 witnessed the ascendency of the map in debates over the terms of sovereignty and alternative models of political community. While many recent studies of African history have made an admirable and long overdue move away from the colonial/postcolonial periodization, the end point of this study, in chapter 7, comes in the 1960s precisely because of the self-conscious remapping of community that occurred during decolonization and that was subsequently suppressed, though not erased, in postcolonial discourses. During the Kenya Regional Boundaries Commission,