Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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exercises used by missionary and government teachers remain difficult to ascertain, mapping proved an indispensable tool in the emerging colonial economy.
In classrooms, in courtrooms, and before colonial land commissions, Africans practiced their cartographic skills and produced maps to defend their landholdings and household economies. The most explicit training ground for local mapmaking skills came from colonial courts. In her study of mapping in Mozambique, Heidi Gengenbach noted that “of all types of colonisers’ maps, cadastral maps impinged most directly and disruptively on the lives of Africans.”96 Land cases called upon claimants to draw instrumental pictorial representations of their farms and surrounding environments. Native tribunals in western Kenya were constantly congested with land cases that often dated back over generations and included multiple overlapping claims.
Court cases were replete with competing maps that used increasingly sophisticated methods of representation. Symbols and legends guided the court’s readings of these maps. When “trespassers” entered the farmland of recently deceased Jeremiah Nabifwo, his sons created a detailed map of their father’s landholdings to present to the court.97 A “key” guided the court through mazes of dotted lines, shaded spaces, and interlocking properties (fig. i.1). Nabifwo’s sons worked to prove the violation of their father’s lands by visualizing the rivers, borders, and tenant farms that defined the limits and terms of access to his property.
FIGURE I.1. Sketch map of Jeremiah Nabifwo’s property. 19 January 1959, KPA, WD/4/5.
In other cases, claimants sketched detailed histories into the landscape. In the case of M. Mbango s/o Linyonyi, a map offered multiple decades of information, tracing lines of ownership, use, court appeals, and competing claims (fig. I.2). In such maps, individual claims overlapped, intersected, and at times competed with larger claims to clan lands. These cases became increasingly complex by the late colonial period as plaintiffs moved in and out of the district, complicating land claims that often privileged use and mapped accuracy over genealogy and custom.98 These land maps revealed the increasing sophistication, complexity, and careful attention to pictorial detail of cartographic representation in western Kenya.
This mapmaking was never, however, a simple translation of the world of experience into the world on paper, as argued by Sean Hawkins. Hawkins drew too sharp a distinction between literal maps and cognitive mappings, seeing cartographic practices as a “text” that imposed new forms of historical consciousness.99 The transnational literature on territoriality is often inclined to contrast a notion of precolonial spatial fluidity and multiplicity with colonial mapped fixity, indeed mirroring the literature on ethnic identity.
FIGURE I.2. Sketch map of M. Mbango s/o Linyonyi’s property. 16 June 1956, KNA, PC/NZA/3/15/68.
As cartographic literacy gained prominence, new mapping techniques grafted onto older environmental and social negotiations on the ground. Claimants in western Kenya continually demanded that maps of landholdings be substantiated through reference to older measures of land tenure and asked for the intervention of elders “who know very much about our grand-grand fathers boundaries.”100 Courts often required “proofs” of boundaries in the physical landscape and expert testimony alongside pictorial representations. Maps produced for the courts were taken out to the disputed areas, where lines on the page were matched to physical realities. In the case of Musa Mamai versus Jonathan Wepukhulu over land in Kolani, Chief Barasa called for observers from the surrounding population to witness the new boundary demarcation. At the site of the conflict, Mamai and Wepukhulu both agreed for the “boundary to run as drawn on the . . . map.”101 In other cases, maps were “drawn” on the floor of the court itself.102 Maps produced for these colonial land courts never provided the final word on landownership; rather, local communities debated, negotiated, and redrew these maps. While colonial mapping affixed land to the page as never before, these practices grafted on top of older environmental and social negotiations on the ground and encouraged the production of new cartographic metaphors and symbols.
The cases of Jeremiah Nabifwo, M. Mbango, Musa Mamai v. Jonathan Wepukhulu, and others illuminated a much larger trend. Mastering mapping skills was proving increasingly indispensible to local competitions over scarce resources. Chiefs and district officials often remarked on the quality of maps in their judgments. Further, these maps became part of a permanent record, an archival patrimony that was frequently called up in later land disputes. While geographic literacy served “symbolic, cognitive and pedagogic” roles, mapmaking itself became an instrumental resource for the reproduction of class, wealth, and power in the moral economy of western Kenya.103
But the importance and uses of mapping went far beyond this instrumental function. Mapping also proved a critical tool for ethnic patriots, particularly for those ethnic patriots whose constituents were also cosmopolitan and plural. Maps could provide the engines to transform their “social energy into social work.”104 Local cartographic practices, both on an intimate and on a patriotic scale, allowed for the development of what contemporary geographers term countermapping. Also called ethnocartography, countermapping refers to community-based mapping projects, particularly in postcolonial and indigenous land cases, used to “resist the power of the state.”105 As contemporary legal systems, both local and international, consider carefully drawn maps obligatory and often paramount evidence in questions of land rights, countermapping provided the means to make the land claims of indigenous peoples “legible” and legally viable.106 In recent years, technological advances such as geographic information systems and the Global Positioning System have democratized the tools of mapping and aided these countermapping campaigns. While these new technologies have added to the “excitement” around such projects, countermapping also relies heavily on a much wider range of lower-tech and lower-cost techniques, such as sketch mapping and scale model constructions.107 Countermapping offered the power, or at least potential, to transform individual land into property and communal land into territory. In this way, countermapping served both a counterhegemonic purpose—mapping against the state—and a generative purpose, capable of mapping new states of political imaginations.
The social work of countermapping has a much longer history than assumed in the literature on indigenous rights and community based activism. If defined as an essentially counterhegemonic practice, then countermapping preceded cartography, as local communities used spatial strategies to resist state-builders of all kinds. In a recent study, James Scott has demonstrated how “hill peoples” in central Asia used spatial strategies to escape state builders, taking refuge in remote hills that served as spaces not only of resistance but also of “cultural refusal.”108 “Statelessness,” in this conception, should not be understood as disorganization or as a lack of social structures but as a strategy and an art form. Spatial analysis has opened new avenues for the study of social formations characterized by heterarchy, systems of organization exemplified by overlaps, multiplicity, and divergent yet coexistent patterns of relations, power, and authority.109 Whether in parallel or in contest with hierarchal systems, heterarchy provided a strategy of “(horizontal) social complexification,” and a means of evading or checking centralizing political forces.110 While the kindom of Buganda used spatial organization to order power and discipline their subjects, this same spatial ordering also allowed members of the court to allocate measures of accountability: through the complex spatial organization of different forms of religious and political leadership, citizens of Buganda “made their rulers accountable not by centralizing power but by keeping things complicated.”111 Alternative sites of authority also provided overlapping mappings of power and strategies of resistance, as in healing sites and the territorial spirits of the Great Lakes region.112 Absent the cartographic tools of mapping, states and local actors alike used spatial strategies to organize and contest power,