Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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in the southern regions around the lake, joined by an influx of Kalenjin- and Maa-speaking settlers further north at the turn of the millennium. Scholars have dated the current settlements to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.15 Though still a point of heated debate, most historians concur that Bantu settlements existed before the arrival of the Nilotic Luo from the Sudanese north in the late fifteenth century.16 Luo migrations dislocated these Bantu settlements, creating two distinct northern and southern blocks of Bantu communities around Lake Victoria: the Bantu communities of the north and the Gusii, or Kisii, of the south.
FIGURE 1.2. Southern view from Mount Elgon. Photo by author, March 2007.
FIGURE 1.3. Photos of North Kavirondo. Wagner, Bantu of North Kavirondo, vol. 1, plate 1.
Those Bantu populations pushed north by the arrival of Luo settlers settled into the ecologically diverse and productive region northeast of the lake extending up to Mount Elgon. The sixteenth century marked an explosion of new settlements and population growth that put pressures on cultivation, cattle, and land. The arrival of the Nilotic Teso in the mid-seventeenth century marked another important shift, as Teso-Bukusu/Bagisu wars over the next few centuries created a wedge between these two communities around Mount Elgon.17 Bantu and Luo settlers continued to arrive well into the eighteenth century, penetrating the outline of this region from multiple routes and settling into productive agricultural and fishing niches around the lake.
This linear narrative of migration and settlement in the region, however, belies the urgent and contentious argumentation at stake in the telling of these histories. Narratives of how and when particular groups arrived in the region have been recast to fit partisan projects of ethnic imagining throughout the colonial and postcolonial era. Bethwell Ogot’s pioneering text History of the Southern Luo, for example, was the product of ongoing partisan history projects among Luo intellectuals.18 Ogot’s dual volume Luo Historical Texts created an “archival patrimony” that obscured the intellectual work of other Luo historians.19 While early partisan historians such as Shadrack Malo and Samuel Ayany “consciously and unconsciously suppressed the signs and substance of discoordination and contention” to achieve a harmonized Luo past, Ogot went a step further, offering “the careful and patient reader a view of a people, a nation, Canaan, constructed out of critical tensions and conflicts over land, political domination, and domestic insecurity.”20 Luo historians drew their constituents in line through direct descent from their fifteenth-century founding ancestor, Ramogi. Across the various projects of ethnic imagining in Kenya, patriotic historians wrote of unified and purposeful migrations to subsume divergent claims, to draw their partisans in patrilineal descent to a mythic founding father, and to promote the past as a model for contemporary threats to their moral communities.21
Further north, Gideon Were produced a similar archival reference entitled Western Kenya Historical Texts, cataloguing the oral clan histories of Bantu and Kalenjin settlers.22 In his history of these migrations, Were drew a sharp distinction between the largely settled and agriculturalist Bantu communities and their pastoralist neighbors, who, in the nineteenth century, were “still busy expanding northwards into their present territories.”23 In this way, Were glossed over the multiple and complex migrational routes of Bantu agriculturalists to lay claim to a longer history of settlement. However, unlike Ogot, Were was harder pressed to create an overarching historical narrative out of the stubbornly diverse clan histories of these Bantu settlers, with no “Ramogi” common ancestor or common linguistic grounding. While Ogot could provide a unifying thrust to Luo migrations, Were was continually obliged to acknowledge the diverse origins of his subjects. At stake in these partisan histories were urgent concerns over land rights, community membership, and the future moral discipline of the history teller’s audience. Indeed, many of these early patriotic histories have been, unintended or not, transformed into evidence in contemporary land disputes and familial conflicts over custom.24
In the texts of Were and others, the diversity of the communities in this lake region refused to be aligned. The multitude of migratory routes visualized in their maps reflected the diverse linguistic and historical backgrounds of these new settlers (figs. 1.4, 1.5). Clan histories of these migrations varied over time and space and reflected the variety of social organizations and political objectives of their tellers. Under pressure from overcrowding, disease, warfare, and would-be state builders, migrations often followed localized and uncoordinated clan lines that gave birth to new community formations. Many Bantu clans told of their historic origin in Egypt (“Misri” among Bantu speakers), then traveling down through Bunyoro and Buganda, providing a mythic point of origin and hinting at a stated or royal past.25 Others emphasized their diverse migratory origins traveling through carefully recalled landmarks and difficult terrains to defend their cultural distinctiveness and political sovereignty. These “narrative maps” sketched a history of complex spatial relations, movements, and important sites such as forts and shrines along a migratory journey that strategically culminated in the construction of a regional homeland in their current settlements.26
The histories of these migrations and settlements, whether Bantu, Kalenjin, Luo, or Maasai, must be understood not as the forward march of coherent ethnic groups but rather as complex histories of social interaction and multiple movements over centuries. These small-scale migrations led to fluid regional patterns of interaction and integration across ethnolinguistic divides: as Were argued, “The Abaluyia owe their origin to the interaction of many diverse cultural and linguistic groups stretching back to over one thousand years.”27 Individual clans in the southern areas of Buhayo, Kisa, Marama, and Tiriki self-consciously trace their lineages to mixed Bantu, Kalenjin, Luo, and Maasai origins.28 The clans of the Tachoni claimed their roots among both the early Uasin Gishu settlers and the later arrivals of Bantu clans passing around Mount Elgon.29 In the space northeast of Lake Victoria, clans of various linguistic backgrounds formed strategic alliances through intermarriage and absorption, making every clan multiethnic from their very arrival. As Luyia historian John Osogo put it, “The history of our people has been at the local level, the story of the interaction of the clans.”30 The residue of this regional culture of exchange persisted in the systems of trade that developed, in shared linguistic features, and in the assimilation of cultural practices.
FIGURE 1.4. Migrational map by Günter Wagner. Bantu of North Kavirondo, 1:23.
FIGURE 1.5. Migrational map by Gideon Were. Western Kenya Historical Texts, back cover.
The uneven and varied environment encouraged niche settlements and the development of specialized agronomic practices according to environmental capabilities and regional patterns of exchange. In the south, rich soils and compact valleys proved ideal for the intensive cultivation of major crops such as sorghum, sweet potatoes, beans, and bananas. In the more expansive plains of the north, a mix of cultivation and cattle ranching provided a middle ground of trade and political interaction between agriculturalists and pastoralists. A small body of research on precolonial trade networks in western Kenya suggests the influence of interethnic interaction on the making of precolonial communities.31 Markets developed early in the eighteenth century to facilitate trade across economic specializations. In the 1930s German anthropologist Günter Wagner recorded a lengthy history of precolonial markets from a Logoli elder: “The people of many different tribes assembled there . . . and in those years everybody who wished to obtain anything he liked could go to that market.”32 Northern Bantu settlers