LITMIR.BIZ

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I opted to allow informants to choose the language of the interview, and if necessary interpreters would be chosen in consultation with the informant. Many chose to speak in English, allowing them, as one elder put it, to control the “terms of their translation,” though debates on appropriate terms and translations were common. And yet, as explored in chapter 4, the choice of language may also reflect deeper concerns of the interviewees around political and intellectual positioning.

      I was often amusingly reminded of my own position as a single, white, female, and specifically Canadian, researcher. When meeting with former rebels of the Dini ya Msambwa movement in Kimilili, I was asked why “white Canadian women always want to know about Dini ya Msambwa”—referring of course to the pioneering work of Audrey Wipper on the movement in the 1970s.¹²⁴ Msambwa followers had crafted very formal, if not always strict, gender discipline practices. My position as both an honored guest and as a woman caused some dissention among the group as to where I should sit: in outdoor meetings and formal gatherings, men and honored guests would be given the often-limited chairs while women customarily sat on the ground. A compromise of sorts was reached when a “chair” of animal skins was constructed on the ground for me to sit on—the “invention of tradition” in action. I was acutely aware in this context that the women in the group would not be able to add their voices freely, adding strategic silences, though not absences, that were only partially overcome with further, more intimate and informal interviews.

      In another case, a prominent Bukusu businessman accompanied me to an interview with a well-respected elder on Bukusu customs, Mzee Mombasa as he was known to friends.¹²⁵ Mzee Mombasa made repeated pronouncements that outsiders, and more specifically women, could not bear witness or be privy to the sacred inner workings of Bukusu customs. And yet the interview proceeded as usual, with my Bukusu interlocutor repeating my questions verbatim and Mzee Mombasa responding in my presence, though officially acknowledging only my male companion.

      Perhaps the most impinging but also revealing context for this project was the political. The majority of the interviews took place during the 2007 electoral campaigns in Kenya and their direct aftermath in 2008. This heightened political context inevitably shaped the oral histories collected. Informants continually related and compared their life histories to the contemporary social and political issues being debated in the campaigns.¹²⁶ At times, the elections would directly intervene into the interview process: several interviews with important former trade unionist and independence leader Arthur Aggrey Ochwada had to be suspended and postponed when a fleet of black SUVs appeared on the horizon, indicating that Ochwada’s close friend and political confidante, current vice president Moody Awori, had traveled home to seek his counsel.¹²⁷ Among the Dini ya Msambwa former rebels and family members of former leader Elijah Masinde, election time always proved frenetic as local politicians vied to sit on Masinde’s stool in the Msambwa shrine—a sign of prophetic approval.¹²⁸ The atmosphere at these interviews was palpably charged, as former rebels and extended family members sought to position themselves as the guardians of this history and its political import for contemporary electoral contests. In this setting, the past refused to stay past: the pasts expressed were restless, mobile, and irrepressibly present.

      These life histories are not left to tell an unmediated narrative. Rather, I treat these testimonies as social texts that, when read with and against documentary archives, provide important contexts, heated points of debate, multiple and often fragmented meanings, and critical historical interventions. Further, they helped me map a kind of intellectual and social network throughout western Kenya and beyond. Like the past itself, these interviews rarely stayed put: stories, and even actual interviews, crossed borders and traveled to urban centers. Daily I would travel by local bus, bicycle, and foot up to six or seven hours with my research aide, Henry Kissinger Adera (yes, his father was a great admirer of Kissinger). Henry provided a crucial service, not only as my point of access to many of the interviewees but also as an interlocutor and impressively diplomatic negotiator. As a Luo, and son of an important elder on the Luo Council of Elders, Henry stood somewhat outside of the political histories and tensions of the Western Province. Many interviewees encouraged him to join politics, saying he could win even in the Western Province. His introductions and interventions proved indispensible, as did his company as a fellow traveler through unpredictable terrains. This study owes much not only to these formal interviews but also to the debates about politics and competing versions of history discussed with Henry and with a wide array of fellow passengers on long matatu bus rides across the country and on the backs of boda boda bicycles throughout western Kenya.

      CHAPTER BREAKDOWN: A ROAD MAP

      The imbrication of so many manifestations of geographic imaginations of community required this study to traverse a wide intellectual terrain. While following a chronological and thematic logic, each chapter builds on different kinds of geographic work, investigating the multiple meanings and uses of mapping: as activity, as metaphor, as colonial science, and as patriotic idea. Each chapter tracks episodes of geographic encounter that when read together comprise the intellectual architecture of the construction of and contestations over the making of the Luyia identity in colonial Kenya.

      In Chapter 1 the diverse communities of western Kenya find their varied geographic imaginations confronted and eventually transformed by the power of the map. The ecologically rich and topographically diverse terrain of western Kenya taught its African settlers lessons in agronomy, social organization, and political authority. Using linguistic analysis, oral sources, and recorded narratives of migration and settlement, this chapter first reconstructs the evolving forms of identification and geographic practices that existed up to the late nineteenth century. These precolonial geographies of interpenetration, of itinerant territorialities, and of regional exchange were neither lost nor completely displaced by the arrival of colonial cartography; rather, local inhabitants reworked their spatial conceptions and geographic practices to countermap the tools of surveyors and contest imperial geographies. Some, like the Wanga, invested early in imperial cartography, providing men, supplies, and local, though self-promoting, knowledge to the British as they “beat the bounds” of these new boundaries. Others negotiated and subverted the work of imperial cartographers, pushing through colonial boundaries, sabotaging the symbols of surveyors, and drawing their own maps alongside older practices of space. In this encounter between different geographic imaginations, mapping became both the tool of territorial acquisition and the means of its subversion.

      Chapter 2 traces the transformation of mapping from a novel tool in local competitions over resources, power, and patronage into a tool of patriotic imagination. In the early decades of colonial rule, internal struggles over chiefly authority and local definitions of lineage and land rights fractured along clan and administrative lines. Local political actors reformulated kinship and invented ancestors to defend their diverse practices of land tenure and political authority from colonial hierarchies and bureaucratization. Boundaries became flashpoints in these contestations, and cartography became an instrument of political action.

      Into this picture of competitive mapping, the discovery of gold in North Kavirondo threatened African land rights on an ever-larger scale. Conflicts over land and mineral rights encouraged local political thinkers to begin thinking of an enlarged ethnic polity in western Kenya as a means of defense against colonial interventions into their lands and competition with their African neighbors. Before the Kenya Land Commission of 1932, representatives from North Kavirondo consolidated their diverse practices of land tenure, suppressed recent internal fragmentations over political authority and kinship measures, and transformed local practices of mapping into a means of imagination. Before they had a name, these representatives declared themselves the spokesmen of a “tribe,” and the map provided the concrete evidence of their political existence.

      While chapter 2 reveals the impetus for this patriotic investment in the map, in chapter 3 this investment pays dividends, informing innovations in the patriotic work of ethnogenesis and history writing. Having

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