Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
Locational representatives arranged evidence of migrations, cultural practices, and land laws to promote divergent accounts of history and tradition against homogenizing colonial policies, “foreign” forms of political authority, and competing neighbors.
FIGURE 2.1. Map of population densities in North Kavirondo. “Report of Committee on Native Land Tenure in the North Kavirondo Reserve,” October 1930, CMS, G3X A5/25.
Colonial commissions such as the NLTC called on African “speakers” and “witnesses” to take part in a particular form of performative political theater. As Lonsdale argued in the case of the Kikuyu, representatives within these dramas told stories of their past as much to create “a knowledgeable audience” as to convince colonial officials.19 In the face of colonial expropriation, Kikuyu narratives of tradition, migration, and great leaders served as proof of their civility and their coherence as a political community. In western Kenya, Osaak Olumwullah similarly argued that the Banyore before the committee maintained the “façades of community and consensus . . . erected at front-stage level but at the same time dismantled through commentaries made backstage.”20 Yet despite the attempts of locational leaders to construct this façade of political coherence, in the theater of the NLTC the audience talked back.
The North Kavirondo NLTC was a public spectacle, with daily audiences numbering in the hundreds. Throughout the proceedings, testimony had to be suspended to allow for lengthy debates over lineages, migratory routes, and land rights. Authorial notes by an unknown hand qualified the transcript with audience interjections, asides, and corrections. In one such case, this authorial hand recorded the “admission” that several groups representing themselves as landowners in North Kitosh were actually recent settlers from Uganda. These moments of interruption revealed the discursive nature of political thought in North Kavirondo. Just as Lonsdale argued for the inherent skepticism of the Kikuyu people in the face of prophets, the proceedings of the NLTC revealed the skepticism of North Kavirondo’s inhabitants toward those who claimed centralized authority.21 Audience members refused to be silent witnesses to this drama, actively interjecting their voices into the cultural production of authority and tradition.
For the diverse representatives before the NLTC, the “common stock of stories” available to Kikuyu spokesmen did not exist. None claimed a common founding father, common migratory path, or common set of prophetic figures from which all communities in the district sprang. Their stories, instead, fractured purposefully to defend the autonomy and autochthony of their particular communities. Fault lines appeared in their diverse accounts of clan histories, migration, and land tenure practices.
Locational representatives produced histories that drew together the congeries of clans within their specific territories. Representatives told clan histories through codified lists of clan names, clan heads, and clan settlements. When Chief Sudi rose to provide an authoritative account of Bukusu clans, “considerable confusion and dissension” erupted among audience members. The committee adjourned the meeting so that a “correct list” of clans could be compiled. Bukusu headman Dominiko Sianju returned with an impressive table in hand, an extensive list of the names of clans and their current heads from across the Bukusu locations. Representatives actively reformulated ancestry and kinship networks through the secretarial conceit of the list to defend novel political communities built in and around colonial boundaries. In the Kisa location, multiple narratives of founding fathers and important lineages coexisted. Lala, representative for Kisa, had to be replaced when audience members charged him with erasing one of the founding father’s sons from his official list. For Lala, erasing this “son” put his own clan in more direct line of descent from the founding father. Representatives argued that this tabulated “common ancestry” provided evidence of the community’s “natural boundary.”22 However, what is clear from the ethnographic work of Wagner, representations before the NLTC, and the historical texts of patriotic historians J. D. Otiende, Gideon Were, and John Osogo, is that accounts of founding fathers and lists of clan names were in constant flux, responding to contemporary conditions and the complicated arithmetic of kinship. For local representatives, the process of tabulating kinship through list making provided a central grounds for the political work of aligning constituents and enclosing dissent.
In reality, these clan histories were quite shallow. Although the committee concluded that “almost every tribe has a history of migration,” most representatives avoided or denied these histories entirely.23 Conducting his research at the same time, Wagner also noted the “meagreness of traditions” of migration.24 Many representatives claimed to have “no tradition of migration.” Often representatives traced their clan histories only to the moment of arrival in their present settlements. While contemporaneous anthropological sources cast these communities as “people on the move,” representatives pictured their constituents as thoroughly settled, undisputed owners of their lands as witnessed at the arrival of colonial rule.25 Embodied in the figure of C. W. Hobley, whose primary task was to bring spatial order to this disarray of decentralized agriculturalists, colonial conquest and imperial mapping emerged as the most prominent “common stock” of stories told to defend a history of political autonomy from Hobley’s Wanga allies. Representatives told uncluttered histories, geographically pitching the birth of their people as a discrete corporate body within the grounds of their current administrative units, sewing different threads of clan movements together within the location. These shallow traditions of migration suppressed diverse linguistic origins and naturalized western Kenya as a rightful, autochthonous homeland. Locational representatives and audience members produced and reproduced histories of migration and settlement before this committee to build recognizable, bounded “tribes” for the benefit of colonial commissioners.26
These local histories also served to reinforce divergent claims to landownership. Two schools of thought emerged in the testimony for the defense of land acquisition: the right of force and the right of first cultivation. While Chief Mulama argued in his opening address that “the first man to come into this country acquired his rights by strength,” most claimed land rights through the civilizing of previously unoccupied and untilled land. All locational representatives firmly stated that there was no tradition of selling or buying land. Differences in land practices reflected the environmental diversity and political decentralization of the local land economy (see chapter 1). Before this commission, this diversity was turned to political strategy. Most representatives placed landownership firmly under the control of clan heads. Only Wanga representatives spoke of a differentiated system whereby the nabongo owned the “soil” of the corporate territory, the clan controlled its own boundaries, and individual heads of families owned their homesteads. Many representatives, whose constituents were in the throes of anti-Wanga campaigns, defended their historic autonomy through repeated references to never having paid tribute to any “king” or foreign patron. Very few clans claimed to practice any formalized system of boundary demarcation beyond the use of physical landmarks, such as stones, trees, and furrows. Locational representatives promoted divergent traditions of land tenure to secure their own position as the rightful guardians and arbitrators of their community’s customs.
Testimony before the committee provided a window into the fragmented, argumentative, and discursive nature of political thought in North Kavirondo. Apparent from this testimony was a strong skepticism toward centralized authority. Even among the highly centralized Wanga, audience interruptions forced Chief Mulama to adjust his list of Wanga clans at several points. While the anti-Wanga campaigns prompted political thinkers to voice dissenting versions of history to offer proof of their right to particular tracts of land and of their traditions of political autonomy, their evidence before the NLTC reflected more the heterarchy and overlapping nature of traditional practices and long-running arguments over authority in western Kenya. Representatives continually disagreed on the land rights of women, customs involving inheritance and the distribution of land among clan members. While these practices often overlapped or intersected across different locations, representatives remained intent on accentuating the cultural and often linguistic nuances of their particular cultural traditions.
Despite