Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
it the sole domain of the African cultural brokers who wrote patriotic histories. Tim Parsons has recently shown the “diverse ways of being” for the Kikuyu in colonial Kenya by refocusing attention away from the “inventors,” who constructed the illusion of consensus toward the ordinary “people who crossed ethnic boundaries.”35 As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argued in their oft-quoted but often misunderstood essay, an emphasis on identity, in its equally problematic “hard” and “soft” conceptions, can often mask the more complex, multiple, and mobile processes of identification.36
Second, the focus on the singularizing political imaginations of these “inventors” has obscured or at least sidelined other forms of imagination, and in particular geographic imaginations, that helped make these political imaginations viable or attractive in the first place. While such “inventions” were subject to constant revision by multiple actors, they were not open to just any interpretation. The material and symbolic base available for such imaginations conditioned and constrained the projects of ethnic “inventors.” As will be seen throughout this study, regional processes of exchange and interdependence created what Paul Richards has called a “common grammar” of social experience, despite differences in language, culture, or political organization.37 Across Africa, these “common grammars” emerged from common geographic visions and provided a mechanism for rationalizing plurality and managing dissent within ongoing projects of ethnogenesis.
ETHNIC PATRIOTISM: BETWEEN NATIVISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
“Ethnic patriotism” provided a particular currency in the moral economy of colonial eastern Africa: “ethnic” because of the particular colonial investment in the language of tribe and “patriotic” because of the in-turn investment by African political thinkers in the construction of a patria, a fatherland with countrymen to feel kinship among and a territory to defend.38 In the comparative politics of patriotism in eastern Africa, ethnicity offered a historically contingent and politically viable form of community building.39
Despite presenting one of the clearest cases of ethnic “invention,” where the terms of a Luyia ethnic identity literally did not exist before the 1930s, the history of ethnic imagining among the Luyia has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to the pioneering and voluminous scholarship on ethnicity coming out of Kenya.40 Newly “Luyia” historians began writing partisan histories as early as the 1940s, in line with patriotic history-writing projects taking place across Africa in the late colonial era.41 After the impressive body of work by Gideon Were, however, the historical and cultural production emerging from western Kenya tended to take as its subject the so-called subtribal ethnonationalisms.42 While scholars in various fields have traveled to western Kenya for their case studies of socioeconomic, educational, and religious change, the majority of these texts focus on specific communities that fall under the Luyia banner, neglecting the complex tensions and negotiations of difference among the constituent groups who came to form and at times refuse this corporate body.43
The most common explanation for the Luyia identity has fallen along constructivist lines, picturing the “Luyia” as a creation, either of colonial officials or of local political thinkers, “former students of Makerere College on analogy of BaGanda.”44 Yet the framework of the “invention of tradition” fails to account for how these actors fashioned an ethnic project without a common stock of historical myths and without a founding father from whom to imagine a patria. Unlike the more maximal cultural projects of the Luo Union, the Kikuyu Central Association, and the Haya Union farther afield, or even the more federalist projects of the Mijikenda and the Kalenjin, the “invention” of Luyia ethnic architects was not of a unified traditional past but rather of a corporate present and an interdependent future. While ethnogenesis among the Luyia seems to provide a challenge to scholars of “invention,” which perhaps explains their omission from this historiography, the large body of scholarly work on ethnicity signals the particular value and competitive nature of ethnic patriotism in colonial Kenya.
Luyia ethnic patriots emerged out of a particular set of discourses and social experiences within the colonial world. Take for example the life and political work of Ephraim A. Andere. Born in 1920 in Namasoli, North Kavirondo, Andere had a typical, if fairly elite, education at the Alliance High School before distinguishing himself as a writer and political thinker at Makerere College in Uganda.45 Upon his return to the district, in 1940, he gained a reputation as a respected schoolmaster at the prestigious Nyang’ori Primary School and later at Maseno School. But Andere’s real achievements were in the realm of ethnic patriotism. As general secretary of the Abaluyia Welfare Association, Andere worked toward the federation of smaller locational and clan associations under a Luyia umbrella. In 1948 he spearheaded the campaign that would put the Luyia name atop the first national census in Kenya. Throughout the 1940s he worked tirelessly with the Luyia Language Committee, whose goal it was to create one Luyia language out of the multiple and stubbornly diverse dialects in the region. Throughout Kenya, language committees proved a common tool for ethnic patriots and a training ground for burgeoning political leaders. In 1947 all three nominations for the Legislative Council from western Kenya—Philip Ingutia, Paul Mboya, and B. A. Ohanga—played significant roles in their respective Luyia and Luo language committees.46 The Kalenjin Language Committee similarly included future politicians Daniel arap Moi and Taita arap Towett.47 While a Luyia language failed to materialize, for Andere this linguistic endeavor went hand in hand with his political and demographic work.
Andere’s name would be become most closely associated with the formulation of Luyia customary law in the 1950s. The project was ambitious and fraught. The overwhelming variety of customary practices among the constituent communities of the Luyia stumped early administrators, clogged local courts, and led to endless parochial conflicts among neighbors. For Andere, consolidating customary law seemed a natural extension of his earlier patriotic work. As secretary of the Luyia Customary Law Panel, from 1951 to 1954, Andere deliberately worked to bring in a diversity of panelists to avoid the appearance of favoritism or domination by particular communities that had doomed the Luyia language project.48 He further petitioned for representatives to come not from elders and chiefly authorities but from young politicians, teachers, and ethnic patriots like himself. Together, these young technocrats set out to define a common set of principles usable in various fields of local governance, political organization, language, and moral discipline. In multiple customary law publications, Andere ordered and tabulated the plurality of Luyia customary practices into a seemingly singular, coherent document.49 These publications are, however, quite amusing to read, riddled as they are with complicated tables, competing terminologies, sections on “local variations,” and recurrent qualifications. In Andere’s masterful hands, plural and dissenting cultural practice became the defining rather than defeating feature of Luyia “customs,” allowing for a variety of readings and open to constant revision. The creation of Luyia customary law was a technocratic feat and a victory for Andere.
Ethnic patriots did not work in isolation; they were members of complex social networks that clustered around religious denominations, schooling, government positions, and experiences of urbanism and international schooling. Andere served as longtime committee member on Muluhya, a magazine published by Luyia students at Makerere, alongside fellow ethnic patriots W. B. Akatsa and J. D. Otiende, among others. It would be fellow nominee Otiende who would recommend Andere for nomination to the Legislative Council in 1948.50 Ahead of the first national election, in 1957, the local council chose Andere to tour the district and collect testimony with the Coutts Commission alongside important politicians W. W. W. Awori and Pascal Nabwana.51 On panels, committees, and district councils, Andere worked alongside nearly every current and future political figure from western Kenya and made the work of ethnic patriotism into a profession.
Ethnic patriotism did not altogether offer a social identity as such. Rather, ethnic patriotism offered a self-conscious form of work, an occupation taken up in the context of a specific colonial context. While Luyia ethnic patriots shared similar biographies, and clusters did emerge, they also diverged and came from a variety of denominational and local filiations. Some, like Paul Agoi, moved in and out of these registers. After over a decade working in the native administration