Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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later used in illicit trade and movements of rebellion. Others, particularly in the north and east, found refuge in the hills and mountains that provided geographic protection from the reaches of the state. While these movements built on and created networks of clan associations, they also produced new sites of conflict, as different communities responded to colonial impositions and incentives in diverse ways.145 Border clashes in the early years of colonial rule continually disrupted the work of colonial surveyors and often arose strategically to pressure colonial officials, who often only addressed the complete demarcation of locational boundaries as a result of these local “boundary riots.”146 The construction of colonial boundaries was a messy affair, continually interrupted and confused by the activism of local communities.
Local activists also used previous geographic knowledge and their early lessons in cartography to subvert the work of colonial surveyors, through subterfuge, trickery, and outright manipulation. Africans destroyed cairns, moved beacons, and uprooted pillars to move the colonial boundaries set by surveyors. Often the same men who carried and placed the boundary beacons for the British during the day were suspected of, or boasted of, removing them by night.147 In one example, Wanga chief Murunga was said to have warned the Bukusu that the British wanted to cut them off from land in the northern area of Kamakoiya. Murunga advised the local population to take the beacon and move it, using the British officers’ lack of mastery over pronunciation of river names to trick them into accepting the new boundary.148 The arrival of new European settlers in the Trans Nzoia lands north of the Kamakoiya River after 1912, however, would again push this boundary back and constrict the northern expanses of the district.149 The environment, too, revolted against the symbols of boundary demarcation as grasses and shrubs overgrew beacons and hid boundaries from view.150 These countermapping strategies became so pervasive that in 1911, British officials proclaimed harsh penalties for the “destroying or moving or diminishing the utility of any Land Marks fixed by public authority.”151 Colonial officials suggested the use of increasingly permanent markers such as “iron posts sunk in cement” and cairns alongside survey pegs within African farmlands that more starkly mapped the landscape.152 However, the symbols of surveyors continued to prove susceptible to the countermappings of African activists.
Colonial surveyors thus encountered what Raymond Craib has termed the “fugitive landscapes”: territories characterized by multiple and overlapping geographic systems that were not landscapes at all but “places created and recreated through the prisms of memory, practical wisdom, use and collective decision making rather than the lens of instrumentation.”153 This confrontation between competing geographic imaginations of place and space would not result in a total victory for imperial cartography. Hungry for novel technologies and adept at adapting them to their own purposes, Africans found in mapping just such an instrumental tool to make claims to new landscapes of power and resources. By World War I, the number of locations had expanded to eighteen, mostly as a result of protests and the disaggregation of recognized ethnic communities, though more than half the lands and diverse communities of North Kavirondo remained under Wanga rule. These boundaries did not succeed in imposing a “master narrative” of authority and exclusionary rights.154 The lines drawn by Hobley and Archer, while fugitive and continually contested, did, however, provide a new cartographic grammar for future debates over governance and the territorial horizons of ethnic communities.
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IN THE making and unmaking of competing territorialities in western Kenya, early settlers built autonomous clan structures within niche environments and mapped larger networks of interaction, exchanging goods, services, people, and ideas across this uneven terrain. While the fixed and rigid maps of colonial geographers imposed new fields of conflict and debate onto the diverse communities of North Kavirondo, they also introduced new ways of “writing the world,” new tools for competing over local resources, and new strategies for resisting imperial impositions. Local activists combined these early lessons in cartography with local geographic knowledge and spatial strategies to countermap the hegemonic project of imperial geography. In an ironic twist, it was perhaps Hobley’s first map—with its curving, overlapping, and expanding ethnonyms—that most directly reflected the heterarchy and shifting geographic relations of communities in western Kenya. As colonial officials worked to consolidate their rule, the need for more clearly demarcated lands and more hierarchical forms of political authority prompted local political activists to rework and reimagine their traditions of geographic and political community. The grounds of authority and community in western Kenya, it seemed, would remain “slippery,” and defiant to the recognition of “kings.”
2
Land, Gold, and Commissioning the “Tribe”
IN HIS ethnographic study of the “Bantu of Kavirondo,” conducted in the 1930s, Günter Wagner illustrated how the naming of a child often derived from a recent “conspicuous event,” such as an epidemic, drought, or famine.1 It was just such a conspicuous event that gave birth to a new community in western Kenya: the Kakamega gold rush. Prospectors first panned gold in the streams of Kakamega in March 1931. Within a few months, more than two hundred Europeans flooded the most densely populated and closely cultivated southeastern locations of North Kavirondo in search of gold.2 With the discovery of gold, British parliamentarians took exception to the most fundamental doctrines of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, passed only a few months earlier. The ordinance had fixed and legally enshrined land in the Native Reserves “for the use and benefit of the native tribes of the Colony forever.” Before breaking for Christmas in 1931, Parliament rushed through an amendment allowing for indefinite land appropriation by the state in the reserves. The amending of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance raised serious questions among British officials, African subjects, and international commentators regarding colonial trusteeship, African rights, and landownership within the colony.
The Kakamega gold rush intervened into the history of North Kavirondo at a time of intense local debates over land tenure, political authority, and kinship. By the 1920s early sporadic acts of resistance against British-imposed chiefs and newly cut boundaries transformed into an all-out political campaign. While local activists redrew the limits of authority and community through campaigns of civil disobedience and cross-border activism, locational leaders forwarded themselves as the rightful defenders of customary practice and the political sovereignty of their constituents. The discovery of gold, however, threatened these diverse local moral economies and prompted African thinkers to reimagine the meaning of territory and belonging. As farmers countermapped the incursions of miners into their lands, political leaders from the district stood before the Kenya Land Commission of 1932 and appropriated the colonial map to lay claim to an enlarged political community. In front of this commission, representatives from North Kavirondo subordinated divergent historical accounts, suppressed internal competition over land, and invested in a patriotic mapping of territorial identity to gain leverage over white miners, British bureaucrats, and encroaching European farmers.
A moment of territorial crisis, the Kakamega gold rush marked a dramatic transition in the formulation of local political thought in North Kavirondo. While the deconstructive cartographic work and defense of local moral economies in the 1920s reflected the plural and dissenting traditions of political community in western Kenya, the gold rush provided a common threat that gave energy to new geographic imaginings and prompted ethnic entrepreneurs across western Kenya to adopt the colonial map and declare themselves “a tribe.”
THE ANTI-WANGA CAMPAIGN AND THE LIMITS OF “DECENTRALIZED DESPOTISM”
The gold rush surfaced at a high point of political debate and communal reorganization in North Kavirondo. The creation of administrative locations imposed new geographies of power and community (see chapter 1). In the early years of colonial rule, political life organized around these locational lines as local communities sought to define new terms of kinship and map new political communities.
For much of the interwar period, campaigns against colonially imposed, predominantly Wanga chiefs preoccupied locational politics. The practice of “decentralized despotism” in North Kavirondo relied heavily on the extension