Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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of ethnic patriotism as a viable form of work. He became the president of the North Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association, where he protested local land policies and called on the people of North Kavirondo to name themselves. Before the Kenya Land Commission in 1932, Agoi revealed the growing sense of territorial nationalism within this project when he pronounced that the “proper boundary of the Black man is Mombasa.”52 In 1940, Agoi capitalized the colonial administration’s attempt to coopt young ethnic patriots and became chief of the Maragoli. While progressive and well remembered for his visit to Kenyan troops serving in the Middle East in 1943, as chief, Agoi embarked on a different kind of politicking.53 He began turning inward and fashioning himself along the lines of an invented royal tradition using symbolic elements from the Logoli past. He wore a special robe of leopard skins and took the title of Owuluyali (His Highness). In response to the institution of the Locational Council, whose nominations rested outside his control, Agoi formed his own advisory council, the Bulindi bwo Woluyali.54 Soon fellow ethnic patriots Lumadede Kisala and Solomon Adagala became suspicious of Agoi’s dynastic ambitions. They charged Agoi with undemocratic behavior and forced his early retirement in 1950.
Agoi’s miscalculations reflected a fairly unique quality and tension within the Luyia version of ethnic patriotism; Luyia leaders who made such parochial calls to past reservoirs of power soon found themselves out of step. While inventions of tradition and “tribal fantasies” were crucial components of the work of ethnic patriots across eastern Africa, Luyia ethnic patriots were also, from a very early stage, cosmopolitan patriots.55 The tension between nativism, characterized by autochthonous claims to pure ancestry and rooted geographies, and cosmopolitanism, defined by cultural mixing and mobility, has marked modern African politics of identity. Some have argued that both were colonial imports.56 Yet, both have much longer histories and wide currency in African thought. If we take Kwame Anthony Appiah’s central principles of cosmopolitanism—pluralism, revisionism or “fallibilism,” and an obligation to strangers—then the Luyia have always been cosmopolitans.57 Across Kenya, eastern Africa, and out into an international diaspora, to be Luyia is to say mulembe.58 As explored in chapter 1, for centuries this term greeted visitors and strangers alike by asking where they had been, where they were going, and entreating them to come and go in peace.59 The formal call and response reflected the mutual obligation contained within such greetings.60 What Appiah hints at, but never fully develops, is this long history of cosmopolitanism—of plurality, of mobility, of multilingualism, and of multiple identities—among African communities. This left Appiah open to criticisms that his “cosmopolitanism” was Eurocentric and available only to the privileged few.61 And yet it was in the confrontation between these local, historically rich cosmopolitanisms and colonial “modernity” that many of these communities became nativist, rather than the other way around; and the two were not mutually exclusive.
Nativist discourses of immutable, bounded tribes provided a certain capital within the colonial economy. Older cosmopolitanisms survived, however, and were mobilized within anticolonial politics and ethnic patriotisms alike, aiming not so much at eliminating differences as at recognizing and navigating through them.62 Cosmopolitanism, in Appiah’s view, was precisely about this kind of conversation without the necessity of consensus: “Even people who share a moral vocabulary have plenty to fight about”—a sentiment echoed in many Luyia proverbs.63 So while Andere and others took up the ethnic work of linguistic consolidation and the codification of customary law, their culturalist projects revealed not the suppression of difference but rather their insistent pluralism. The direction of this work—the ability of ethnic patriots to navigate the tensions between nativism and cosmopolitanism and to subsume their constituents under patriotic discourses—was never entirely new, nor did it remain in their hands alone.
These ethnic patriots shared another common feature: they were all men. As Lonsdale has noted, “Patriotic history tends to be masculine history.”64 While “patriotic” men formed the intellectual core of much of this work, they often called upon women to carry the weight of their inventive projects, to comport themselves as the bearers of children, of morality, and of their community’s cultural values. African women, by their biology and social energies, reproduced the moral communities these men sought to fashion. As scholars of the “invention of tradition” took the “inventors” of ethnic communities at their word, African women often disappeared in their studies of ethnic identity: as Leroy Vail put it, “Ethnicity’s appeal was strongest for men, then, and the Tswana proverb to the effect that ‘women have no tribe’ had a real—if unintended—element of truth in it.”65 Though some impressive studies have looked at African women’s agency in subverting male authority, in carving out new spaces of work and morality, and in crafting nationalist agendas, these studies often placed women as a category apart from the study of ethnic imaginings.66 Writing on this problem among Marakwet women in colonial Kenya, Henrietta Moore argued that “in such a situation, women are invisible, sunk, contained within the ‘naturalised’ domain of the dominant ideology.”67 The reactive fallback notion of “the invisible woman” within ethnic studies has allowed for uncritical approaches to this subject.68 African women often disappeared in histories of ethnic imagining precisely because “patriotic” men sought to subsume them.
Ethnic identity for Luyia women was not so much “invisible” or even “subsumed” as it was transformable. While culturalist projects like the Luo Union and the Haya Union sought to rein in the moral conduct and reproductive capabilities of their women, Luyia entrepreneurs shied from these cultural politics and instead integrated “Luyia” women strategically into their demographic projects through a progressive discourse of universal suffrage and ethnic diversity. In theory, intermarriage among Luyia groups required women to follow their husband’s customs and raise their children within the patrilineal culture. As Charles Ambler noted for the nineteenth century, patrilineal absorption allowed women to move between groups with ease, without requiring the special initiations often demanded of foreign men.69 However, with a private wink and a nod, wives and mothers transmitted many aspects of their former cultural identities to their children in language and custom.70 That women could carry ideas, customs, languages, and networks throughout the territorial space of the Luyia underpinned the processes of interpenetration and intermarriage that defined the very plural nature of the late colonial Luyia discourse. Perus’s dilemma before the census enumerator dramatized the tensions that existed for women in the production of ethnic communities.
For such women, cosmopolitan ethnic patriotism was then, in many ways, second nature. While Luyia political thinkers remained more concerned with electoral projects and census numbers than with any culturalist agenda, they still engaged in a gendered discourse of morality, movement, and home. The tension between a gendered nativist politics and a progressive cosmopolitanism proved a critical, if challenging, feature of Luyia ethnic patriotism. This cosmopolitan ethnic patriotism also proved potentially dangerous: patriotic competitors would decry such cosmopolitanisms as rootless, ungrounded, so much so that being “cosmopolitan” became an insult often hurled in their direction.71 As will be seen throughout this story, the limited and often failed cultural projects of Luyia entrepreneurs in language, gender discipline, customary law, and history writing prompted a more minimalist approach to the formulation of political community and revealed the attenuated character of this ethnic project.
Despite the recent historiographical emphasis on fluctuation, negotiation, and cultural production in the imagining of ethnicity, these models continue to rely on a teleological insistence on ethnic invention, enforced consensus, and exclusion. Gabrielle Lynch’s recent work on the Kalenjin, whose composite communities, like those of the Luyia, came to be recognized by this appellation only in the 1940s, has argued that this ethnic alliance succeeded through the consolidation of lineage-based myths of origin and an “emotive (and inherently exclusive) narrative of territorial association.”72 What is still missing is a way to understand the plurality and dissent not only at the borders but also within these patriotic discourses and the multiple and overlapping localities in which they evolved.73 While the Luyia were not unique in this process, they were perhaps uniquely self-conscious.