Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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picture of land tenure in North Kavirondo, the NLTC recommended the codification of native land tenure practices into a stratified legal land register to include “the name of the tribe, the name of the clan, the name of the clan head, descriptions of external boundaries, the name of contiguous clans, and the number of families with holdings.”27 The codification of previously negotiated processes involving strangers or tenant rights effectively placed land tenure outside the immediate control of the clan. With no title deed, dependents and smaller clans were reliant on benevolent landlords for use of their land. In response, smaller clans in North Kavirondo began demanding an “oath” from the government to secure their land. Land conflicts between locations subsequently called up evidence given before the committee as proof. The testimony given before such commissions were thus self-consciously understood not solely as opportunities to debate competing versions of land traditions but moreover as strategic tools in the documentation of evidence for future conflicts over land rights.
The LNC warned the district commissioner that the failure to implement the findings of such enquiries would mean that “further enquiries would only be met by lying answers.”28 The years 1930 and 1931 were a time of heightened politicking over land and authority. The depression of 1929 further exacerbated land conflict in North Kavirondo, collapsing local export prices and throwing both labor and cash cropping into crisis. A severe locust infestation ravaged North Kavirondo in 1931, causing food shortages and crop destruction: many locations lost up to 60 percent of their maize and wimbi (brown millet) crops.29 And it was at this point that the discovery of gold would interject dramatically thrust these local contests onto the national stage.
THE KAKAMEGA GOLD RUSH
The discovery of gold forever altered the landscape of land and political thought in western Kenya. With gold in their eyes, “colonial officialdom” swiftly reduced the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, guaranteeing the inalienable land rights of Africans in the reserves “for-ever,” to a “scrap of paper” (fig. 2.2).30 This dramatic reversal of colonial trusteeship prompted local political thinkers in western Kenya to refocus their defense of diverse cultural practices and defend territory beyond the limits of the location.
Mr. L. A. Johnson, a farmer in Kenya and frustrated gold seeker from ventures in Tanganyika and the Klondike of Canada in the 1890s, first panned gold in the streams of Kakamega in March 1931.31 Prospectors soon discovered alluvial gold in the rivers of the Isukha, Idakho, Bunyore, and Tiriki locations. The gold rush in Kakamega was part of a larger regional story of gold mining in the lake areas of eastern Africa in the 1930s, particularly in the Lupa region of Tanganyika and throughout Nyanza Province.32 The gold rush came at a time when the depression and the sudden drop in prices for agricultural exports exposed the weakness of the settler economy. Gold-mining ventures represented a new frontier and a new avenue for economic survival, if not gain, for European settlers. In 1930, Europeans in Nyanza Province numbered 1,106. By 1932 this number had more than doubled, reaching 2,282 floating and largely unchecked European miners flooding the most densely populated southeastern locations of the North Kavirondo, counting four hundred Africans per square mile (see fig. 2.1). Expectations were high, with many speculating the region’s gold deposits to be a “bigger thing than Johannesburg.”33
By the end of 1931 the administration had issued four hundred permits to European prospectors, originally sold for one pound each. Mining claims grew from 309 in 1930 to 1,074 in 1931 and continued to skyrocket until reaching a peak of 23,158 registered claims in 1934.34 After 1934 gold mining shifted from predominantly independent alluvial mining to reef mining, undertaken by large companies such as Rosterman Gold Mines Ltd., Tanganyika Concessions Ltd., the Eldoret Mining Syndicate, and the Kentan Gold Areas Ltd. At its peak, mining employed 14,943 Africans, with the peak of locally sourced employment around seven thousand.35 Numbers employed in the mining sector steadily declined after 1935. By 1936 the European population decreased by more than five hundred as the small miners and alluvial workers departed, these sources of gold having been depleted in just under five years. The large companies also began a steady decline in the subsequent years as no ore body of sufficient quantity was ever discovered. As an economic and industrial project, the gold rush was all but finished by the mid-1940s.
The gold rush sparked a major war of words across the colony, in the British press, and in both houses of Parliament. The loudest outrage focused on the amending of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance of 1930.36 This document, translated and circulated among African communities throughout the colony, was not just colonial legalese from a distant metropole but rather represented a central doctrine guaranteeing African land rights in the reserves: the “native Magna Carta.”37 The amendment, rushed through Parliament in 1931, allowed for the reversal of the ordinance’s key principles. Most important, the colonial state could now compensate for land alienation in cash, obviating the pledge to provide equivalent replacement land for the reserve. Lord Passfield, former secretary of state for the colonies and instrumental figure in imposing the Native Lands Trust Ordinance on a resistant pro-settler Kenyan government, charged the British government with a “breach of faith”: monetary compensation for land loss could never be equivalent or just as “the areas set aside for the Reserves were not set aside for individuals nor for families nor even for the present generation, but for the tribes. If you gave every individual proper full compensation you would still have broken faith with the tribe.”38 The issue of compensation brought into sharp focus the conflict between notions of individual and group forms of ownership. The integrity of “tribal lands” was the very foundation of the colonial concept of Native Reserves. The amendment of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance gave miners free rein in the reserves, stripping the local population of the land rights and safeguards bestowed on them by the ordinance.
A large body of scholarship on the history of mining in Africa has explored the arrival of mining companies and subsequent shifts in modes of production and labor practices.39 As argued in the well-documented cases of southern Africa, labor migrancy and compound life led to new forms of male identity and shifts in familial structures through links back to the countryside. However, these studies say little about the effects of mining projects in densely populated areas and their effects on changing land strategies, and on African social life and political thought.
Until recently, the Kakamega gold rush figured only tangentially in studies of the industrial or high political developments surrounding this short-lived El Dorado.40 While Priscilla Shilaro’s recent study represents the first comprehensive account of British policymaking and industrial developments, it unfortunately misses an opportunity for a rich local history.41 Projecting back an ethnic unity in North Kavirondo allowed these authors to make definitive statements on the “Luyia indigenous economy” before this political community had even been named and to neglect the more nuanced and long-lasting social and intellectual effects of the gold rush.42 The most dramatic impacts of the gold rush came not from its industrial implications but rather manifested in its interjection into the longer history of political thought and territorial imaginings of community in western Kenya.
Initial responses to the gold rush exposed the weakness of districtwide African organizations. The colonial government bypassed the LNC and the local land board where mining was concerned, in open defiance of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance: in the words of Chief Native Commissioner Armigel V. de Wade, it would be “a farce” to consult these advisory bodies; since “it is pretty sure that they are going to disagree if they are consulted, why consult them?”43 The first petition against gold mining penned by the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association (KTWA) was easily dismissed by the Colonial Office, who pointed out that the signatories were not from the affected area, being a Luo-dominated organization, and were therefore unqualified to speak for others in the province.44 Later politicians from adjoining locations in North Kavirondo would receive the same dismissive treatment. For the colonial government, the question of gold extraction was one of individual land rights and compensation. Districtwide organization as yet had little currency with the government or among local communities.