Cartography and the Political Imagination - Julie MacArthur New African Histories

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it was those African communities most invested in the reengineering of colonial boundaries ahead of independence that would engage in this competitive mapmaking. In countless memorandums and political tracts, Luyia organizations demanded their own territory by redrawing colonial boundaries, shoring up demographic numbers, and telling cartographic histories of lost sovereignty. Chapter 7, more than any chapter preceding it, turns to a more thorough examination of the literal, pictorial maps drawn by ethnic patriots to visualize their histories of community, sovereignty, and belonging and to contest spatial, territorial, and political relations on the eve of independence. Within these debates, the geographic imaginations explored through this study proved to be the most constant and most affecting doctrines of the Luyia ethnic identity. While often frustrated, such alternative political imaginations found in the map a way of visualizing their claims. For both nationalists who sought to maintain colonial boundaries and dissenters seeking alternative political futures, the map became the fetish of postcolonial belonging.

      . . .

      In tracing the contested genealogy of cartographic political imagination in western Kenya one constant emerged: where land divided, territory united. Where the mapping of land enabled competitive claims to resources and locality, the mapping of territory enabled the imagining of a patriotic idea. Internal dynamism characterized the Luyia ethnic project and fostered an almost defiant history of cosmopolitan patriotism, federal belonging, and rooted pluralism. And yet, this is not to say the Luyia were entirely unique. As dramatized in Perus’s dilemma before the 2009 Kenya census, the question for many Kenyans, and indeed Africans more broadly, was not so much one of identity but of the multiple and overlapping sites of identification; not so much of ethnicity but of the creative and unfinished process of ethnogenesis.135 And while ethnogenesis provided the language, geographic work often provided the practice.

      1

      The Geographies of Western Kenya

      Slippery ground does not recognize kings.

      —Abaluyia proverb1

      FROM THE shores of Lake Victoria to the foothills of Mount Elgon, the landscape of what would become western Kenya undulates with immense ecological and topographical variety, from gentle hills and flat-bottomed valleys to deeply gorged rivers fringed with lush tropical rainforests. For centuries, African settlers moving through this area greeted each other with the term “Mulembe.” In its many variations, “Mulembe” asked visitors where they had been, where they were going, and entreated them to come and go in peace.2 A Luganda-English dictionary defined the term as “may he bring you in peace to your community.”3 Community members struck the murembe tree, with its brilliant red flowers, to undo taboos or to consecrate peace between warring communities.4 Despite its wide use across eastern Africa, Luyia elders in western Kenya claimed the term as central to their formulations of community, migration, and home: anywhere they traveled, “to be Muluyia was to say ‘Mulembe.’”5

      The environmental diversity northeast of Lake Victoria invited a host of African settlers to cultivate the land and graze their cattle. Diverse migratory routes and relatively recent patterns of settlement created a linguistically and culturally mixed region: in the words of the doyen of Kenyan history, Bethwell Ogot, “lying in an ancient migration corridor, the traditional history of the district is one of the most confused and complex in the whole of East Africa.”6 This traditional history was a continual source of contention and argumentation, complicated by regional networks of trade and cultural exchange across complementary ecological zones. Migrating communities practiced a particular form of itinerant territoriality, a portable ideology of territorial control and belonging that linked networks of clans to particular tracts of land. African communities settled into niche environments and developed a diverse range of small-scale and defensive clan structures characterized by multiple and overlapping systems of authority. The precolonial space of the lake region represented a dynamic area of expanding frontiers, heterarchical social formations, and ethnic interdependence.7

      Colonial conquest enclosed these frontiers and mapped new lines of exchange, community, and power. First circumnavigated by Henry Morton Stanley in 1875, the lake region was known to early traders, explorers, and colonial administrators as the Nyanza basin and its people as Kavirondo.8 Colonial conquest brought all the imperial instruments of state fixity—map, census, and tax—to bear on these diverse and decentralized African communities. Colonial geographers enlisted local inhabitants as amateur surveyors, guides, and porters to track rivers and navigate forests, to set out survey beacons, and to “beat the bounds” of their newly demarcated boundaries. The new maps introduced by imperial cartographers at the turn of the century imposed a top-down geographic vision that overwrote local conceptions of space and fixed named African communities to particular mapped territories. However, Africans around and across these newly mapped boundaries turned their spatial strategies to resistance, sabotaging the work of colonial surveyors, adopting new cartographic practices and symbols, and purposefully mistranslating their own geographic conceptions to countermap colonial geographies. The construction of colonial boundaries fostered new geographic imaginations of labor, obligation, and resistance and precipitated the remapping of authority, moral community, and competing territorialities in the making of western Kenya.

      ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY: MAPPING PRECOLONIAL COMMUNITIES

      As John Iliffe argued in his seminal text Africans, the history of the African continent and its peoples must be understood against the backdrop of a diverse and difficult environment.9 In his study of the Taita in Kenya, Bill Bravman put the point succinctly: “Geography is not exactly destiny . . . but it has powerfully influenced the history of the people who live there.”10 In the Great Lakes region, the ability to control and profit from this rough and potentially rich environment provided the primary source of tension for precolonial societies.11 This geographic space, however, was more than just a backdrop against which diverse African political systems, social relations, and material cultures evolved: this space, both physical and cognitive, was dynamic and ever changing, inspiring and constraining the geographic imaginations of these communities over time.

      Northeast of one of eastern Africa’s Great Lakes, named Lake Victoria in the nineteenth century by British explorer John Hanning Speke, lies a land of immense ecological and topographical variety. Created by a faulting in the geological crust, two main reliefs dominate the topography: the fertile lake plateau composed of a broad belt of granite soils studded by massive granite boulders and the drier highlands that flank the region to the north and east, where cool, moist air nurtures healthy volcanic soils. Altitudes range from 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) along the shores of the lake to over 7,050 feet (2,150 meters) on the slopes of Mount Elgon.

      FIGURE 1.1. Topographical map of Kenya and magnification of western Kenya. World Resources Institute, Natural Benefits in Kenya.

      This geomorphology has been described as “pockets”: although predominantly grassland savanna, bordered by equatorial forest to the north and tropical rainforest to the east, a series of interlocking ridges, hills, and valleys alternate to create an undulant plain. Two distinct seasons keep the region fairly regularly well watered: the dry season, from mid-December to mid-February, and the rainy season, from March to December, with annual rainfall between 61.7 and 76.3 inches.12 A tilt in the African Plateau allows water to flow through numerous rivers and streams from northeast to southwest and drain into the lake. This varied relief created a great diversity of agro-ecological zones with niche economic and settlement potentials.13

      This distinct and varied terrain formed a migratory corridor in eastern Africa that invited a long history of human settlement.14 In the “classical age” of African settlement in the Great Lakes region, from 1000 BCE to 400 CE, new developments in ironwork and crop production encouraged more intensive agricultural practices and the development of more settled and complex social and political systems. Early evidence of scattered settlements of southern

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