Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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in the district, both more intimate and more intrusive. The first “evil” of the gold rush according to the district commissioner was that of “blind pegging.”45 The process of pegging included the staking out of pieces of land with wooden pegs to enclose the space where prospectors would examine reefs for their gold-bearing potential. Pegged-off areas, usually measuring around six hundred by three hundred feet, dotted the landscape as miners furiously competed to stake their claims. Miners also used pegs and beacons to surround trenches and prospecting pits that further ripped into the land. In the words of the Kakamega district officer, “Daily, hills and ridges are being so covered, and all this is right among the natives’ bomas and shambas.”46
As already illustrated, pegging was a common technology of acquisition and alienation in colonial mapping and often implied more than the mere plotting of territory. Colonial surveyors, railways, and mission stations all used pegs to delineate excisable spaces.47 In 1924, FAM missionaries complained to the commissioner of lands of the countermapping strategies used by local inhabitants to contest the appropriation of their lands: the pegs FAM used to demarcate their missions stations were “easily . . . lifted out of the ground and carried off by natives.”48 In 1927, the chief native commissioner ordered that the survey pegs used to carve out the limits of the Native Reserves should be reinforced with stone cairns erected in contiguity with each peg on the reserve side of the boundary. Not only would cairns provide a more “conspicuous” and permanent boundary, they would also “lessen the risk of displacement of the peg.”49 These tools of land surveyors were often the target of sabotage and spatial reorganization (see chapter 1). Pegs, in their impermanent and movable form, were particularly susceptible to territorial strategies of resistance.
On the eve of the gold rush, the district had already witnessed a shift from indirect colonial influence to a more interventionist agricultural policy.50 State compulsion had dramatically increased the land under cultivation through clearing bush lands and included extensive trenching to prevent soil erosion. For many African farmers, mining trenches symbolized the physical cutting off of landholdings and thus further provoked fears of land alienation. Prospectors dug trenches up to forty feet deep along prospective reefs, with only “a few shillings” paid in compensation to the local populations affected.51 Lord Lugard described the region as “over-run by Europeans digging enormous pits and trenches all over the place, among the villages and in the cultivation, and pegging out the whole countryside as an earnest of future operations.”52 The haphazard, extensive, and “blind” manner in which individual European miners pegged off claims and dug trenches became the main focus of early resistance.
COUNTERMAPPING THE MINERS: UPROOTING PEGS AND DEBATING MORALITY
In its earliest forms, resistance to mining reflected the threat posed not only to individual land rights but also to moral communities. Concerns over pegging and the moral corruption of local communities manifested in countermapping resistance strategies and gendered discourses of corruption and civility.
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