Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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to imagine new ethnic polities. However, for the communities of western Kenya, no single vernacular language ever united their disparate speakers; no common narratives or mythic founding father bound their members within historical lineages; and no set of cultural practices defined their community membership. Lacking these traditional, or at least recognizable, reservoirs of ethnic politics, Luyia political thinkers instead mapped new limits of authority, moral accountability, and political community along territorial lines: they worked to territorialize custom and institutionalize plurality; they mobilized a civic language of territorial nationalism to rationalize their differences; they imagined a territory of cosmopolitan people bound not by common lineage or past myths but by a common geographic imagination. While narratives of ethnogenesis among the Luyia claim no common founding father or point of origin, they insist on a geographic identity. This geographic space, defined by the regional networks and exchanges made necessary by environmental interdependence and the multiplicity of communities, provided the most constant source of inspiration and mobilization for the creative re-imaginings of the Luyia community.
While framed, and continually frustrated, in the colonial terms of the ethnos, the creation of a plural and civic-minded Luyia identity proved impressively durable, and flexible enough to allow Luyia partisans to defend against encroaching European settlers and African neighbors, to productively navigate the politics of loyalism and dissent during the Mau Mau rebellion, and to foster a vibrant and fiercely plural political culture. Understanding this dynamic, confounding, and diverse political project requires a reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, prompts an investigation into the geographic imaginations of African communities, and provides a challenge to contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.
LINES OF ARGUMENT: IMAGINED POLITICAL COMMUNITIES
This book advances three lines of argument based on three intertwined concepts that while abstract and multiple in their meanings have material and situated implications and reflect the high stakes and changing political economies of African political imagination. The first follows the argument of “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s now famous phrasing, of understanding national and ethnic identities as thoroughly historical and intrinsically creative processes.20 Such imagined communities formed on the basis of multiple impetuses: national, religious, linguistic, ideological, and genealogical. Yet while ethnos provided the language for much of this imagination in colonial Africa, what was imaginable had historically contingent limits. To address the constraints and possibilities of these imaginings, the second line of argument seeks to unpack the emergence of a particular form of ethnic patriotism that demonstrates the complex interplay of nativism and cosmopolitan pluralism within African political thought. Finally, I argue that these seemingly contradictory claims were made possible by the mobilization of geographic imaginations capable of articulating and at times enforcing the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. At its analytical core, this study argues for a social history of cartographic political imaginations.
In colonial Africa, the European belief that all Africans belonged to timeless, bounded, primordial “tribes” meant ethnicity was the only framework recognized by imperial surveyors, missionaries, and colonial officials, and in turn became the dominant language of African culture and politics. But this does not mean that African imaginations of tribe, and later nation, were merely “derivative discourses” trapped in European constructs and ideologies.21 While most contemporary historians shy away from the term, due to its imperial roots and primordial implications, tribe has rarely represented a problem for self-description within African patriotic discourses. Indeed the idiom of “tribe” has proven incredibly resilient despite the vilification of its twin head, “tribalism.” While I hesitate to endorse a wholesale rehabilitation of the term, the language of tribe continues to hold great relevance and currency in the everyday political imaginings of self and society in Africa.
Until the late 1970s, these two analytical thrusts—one viewing tribes as primordial communities bound by blood kinship relations and the other viewing tribes as instrumental political identities, circumstantial and open to manipulation—governed both colonial and academic understandings of ethnic identity.22 Both these theories understood ethnic identity as a fact and their tenets continue to dictate popular representations of Africa, as witnessed in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenya elections. However, both failed to account for the continuing salience and changing meanings of ethnicity in contemporary African societies.
In the 1980s a new cohort of African scholars questioned the “fact” of ethnic identity and championed a new theoretical model that still dominates today. In Leroy Vail’s seminal edited volume The Creation of Tribalism, contributing scholars theorized the “invention of tradition” through the codification of customary law, the standardization of African languages, and the effects of migrancy on the construction of new lines of community under colonial rule. As John Iliffe argued, “Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.”23 For these constructivists, ethnicity was not a fixed condition but rather a modern expression of historical processes, socially constructed by colonial officials, European missionaries, and African political thinkers.
Postcolonial studies have largely endorsed these instrumentalist and constructivist approaches, picturing ethnicity as an industry, as a crisis of citizenship, and as a “shadow theatre” of historical production.24 A new thrust seems to be reinvigorating primordialist arguments and debates around whether colonial regimes did, in fact, invent ethnic and racial hierarchies or rather simply added a new language for racial or ethnic thinking.25 In global and transnational studies of ethnogenesis, there exists a growing trend toward examining the “entanglements” of ethnicity, the interrelationships of ethnicity, race, nationalism, class, gender, and sexuality.26 In colonial contexts, these studies examine ethnogenesis both as a strategy of subaltern resistance and as a means of exercising and consolidating dominance.27 Despite Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger’s warning that the “story of ethnic difference in Africa threatens to overwhelm the larger debate about postcolonial identity politics,” recent studies continue to emphasize instrumental political manipulation, lineage-based myth making, and the colonial legacies of the dichotomy between customary and civic models of belonging.28
Fixated as the constructivists have been on the colonial moment, what they still fail to account for are the very real attachments to and emotive potential of ethnic identification witnessed in modern Africa. As John Lonsdale has argued, “Ethnicity can scarcely be invented, or warmly shared, in a historical void.”29 The limits of “invention” soon became apparent even to its founding thinkers.30
More recent scholarship on ethnicity in Africa has heeded Lonsdale’s call to interrogate the moral debates and imaginative processes marshaled by African communities in the making of ethnic identities. In his groundbreaking work on Kikuyu society and the moral economy of the Mau Mau rebellion, Lonsdale redirected scholarly attention toward the internal moral debates of ethnic polities.31 He argued that “moral ethnicity” was primarily a culture of personal and civic accountability: “To debate civic virtue was to define ethnic identity.”32 Ethnicity thus represented a moral and political arena in which African communities debated and continually reimagined notions of belonging and citizenship, social obligation and civic responsibility, and moral authority and political leadership. In doing so, Lonsdale opened up the timeline of ethnic invention and created a language that allowed scholars to interrogate ethnicity as a creative moral project: in the words of Thomas Spear, to shift scholarly focus to “the dynamics of traditions, customs and ethnicities; on the contradictions of colonial rule; on shifting resource endowments and access; on how African and European intellectuals reinterpreted traditions in the colonial and postcolonial context; and on why others believed them.”33
While the “invention of tradition” school of thought and the more thorough accounting of “moral ethnicities” continue to offer important frameworks, both suffer from two interrelated shortcomings. First, scholarship in this vein too often takes the “inventors” of political communities at their word, elevating their versions of constructed community at the expense of the multiple, dissenting, and competing forms of community developed within and outside the linguistic and territorial confines