Conquest and pacification expeditions from 1894 to 1908, numbering fifty separate military operations as catalogued in John Lonsdale’s authoritative account, helped fill in Hobley’s map and establish internal boundaries around his curving ethnonyms.104 The hierarchical Wanga kingdom provided the British with a ready army of Wanga and Maasai troops mobilized not only against their Bantu neighbors but also in battles against the Sudanese mutiny of 1897 and Luo and Nandi uprisings.105 Other communities in the region reacted to colonial incursions with varying degrees of interest, trade, alliance, and resistance. Many viewed the British as pawns of Wanga territorial ambitions.106 The construction of colonial sovereignty required a great deal of violence and the use of what Christopher Vaughan has called a “hybrid regulatory order,” an ambiguous and not always controlled devolution of power and the means of violence to local chiefs, particularly in border regions.107 The most protracted resistance came from the Bukusu, whose battles at Lumboka and Chetambe’s Fort received vivid portrayals in both Hobley’s writings and local oral narratives.108 Lonsdale pointed to the relative geographic isolation of the Bukusu population, in the northernmost extent of the region around Mount Elgon, as key to their protracted resistance to outsiders.109 As in precolonial conflicts, the slopes and caves around Mount Elgon provided safe haven for those escaping the grasp of would-be state builders.110 After winning the final major battle against the Bukusu, in 1895, “Hobley had no more to fear from the Luyia. He had been greatly aided in their pacification by their historic disunity.”111 This “historic disunity,” however, can in actuality be understood as a strategy, an alternative way of thinking and practicing geographic and social relations, and a means of resistance that while failing to prevent colonial conquest persisted in dogging colonial rule.
Christian missionaries arrived by similar paths as explorers and colonial surveyors from earlier positions in Uganda and on the coast at the end of the nineteenth century. Tales of Bishop James Hannington’s visit, in 1885, and Mumia’s warning to him not to travel to Buganda, where he died soon after, have taken on legendary status. The North Kavirondo District was unique in the region for the sheer number of missionary groups that gained footholds, numbering as many as ten by the 1920s. The American Quakers with Friends African Mission (FAM) were the first to establish themselves, in 1902. In quick succession the Catholic Mill Hill Missionaries, the Church of God (originally known as the South African Compounds and Interior Mission), and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) all founded missions in these early years. Colonial officials hoped mission influence would help bring the “most independent and unruly” Bantu communities under colonial control.112 Missionaries made deals with local elders and competed for land claims to secure territorial “spheres of influence” as first laid out in the 1885 Treaty of Berlin.113 These negotiations for evangelizing rights in particular areas added yet another layer of mapping onto the multiple colonial processes of territorial demarcation. However, unlike the territories of colonial administration, religious spaces were not always contiguous. Mission grounds and Christian villages crossed, jumped, and intersected different community spaces, creating hybrid sites of cultural contact and imposition, refuge, and exchange. This more dispersed spatial organization would have distinct consequences for later political and social movements.
Colonial conquest brought with it a flurry of mapping projects, from the railway that arrived at Kisumu in 1901 to the carving out of roads, trading posts, and administrative sites. The administrative mapping of the Uganda Protectorate created internal boundaries and delimited top-down spaces of administration and authority that could now be imposed and altered by British bureaucrats, even at great distances (fig. 1.9). In 1902 a decision from the Foreign Office in London to dramatically redraw the eastern boundary of the Uganda Protectorate prompted a more concerted mapping of colonial boundaries in eastern Africa. With the boundaries of the Uganda Protectorate already mapped, British officials in London could, by the stroke of a pen, transfer a large portion of the Central Province and all of the Eastern Province of the Uganda Protectorate to the East Africa Protectorate, renamed the Kenya Colony in 1920.
FIGURE 1.9. Map of the Uganda Protectorate, 1902. Johnston, “Uganda Protectorate, Ruwenzori.”
The motivations behind this transfer remain difficult to assess.114 The arrival of the railway at Kisumu, in 1901, provided at least one factor in the reorientation of the province, aiming to maintain the whole railway from the coast under one authority (fig. 1.10). As the arrival of the railway and road surveys demonstrated, Kavirondo was increasingly being positioned on the map not as a midpoint on the way to Uganda but as a terminus of trade and administration emanating from the coast. Further, the concurrent arrival of white settlers in the highlands prompted calls for land and labor within the boundaries of the East Africa Protectorate. Nyanza Province, formed out of this enlarged western frontier, effectively placed one of the most agriculturally productive and densely populated areas in the region at the disposal of this rapidly developing settler colony.
FIGURE 1.10. Map of road making and surveying in British East Africa. G. Smith, “Road-Making.”
Negotiations over the drawing of this new boundary revealed the competing knowledge systems involved in the colonial mapping projects. While some argued for the use of the “scientific” determinants of topographical features as “natural” boundaries, others argued ethnographic considerations should be paramount.115 The director of surveys, Raymond Alan, later laid out the “scientific” argument against Sir Frederick Jackson’s preference for foothills that often corresponded to the environmental ridges of clan boundaries: “As a surveyor, I prefer watersheds as the latter are definite and ascertainable and the former [foothills] cannot be determined by anyone and are, therefore, purely artificial.”116 Conflicts over the meaning and placement of boundaries often pitted imperial geographers against the “men on the ground” responsible for local governance.
At the turn of the century, Sir Harry Johnston, special commissioner of the Uganda Protectorate, and many other men on the ground favored the gradual amalgamation of the two protectorates and thus petitioned for a boundary that would entail the least disturbance possible to ethnolinguistic groupings. A flurry of correspondence in 1901 argued for the “well-known boundaries” that had been secured through barazas, meetings with African elders and clan leaders.117 For reasons obscured in the historical record, in 1902 the Foreign Office backed the “natural frontier” proposed by Sir Clement Hill in London, despite protests from the men on the ground that this new frontier “did not readily coincide with tribal boundaries.”118 Although the scientific arguments for “natural” boundaries prevailed, even these features remained disputed. In his later economic study of the region, Hugh Fearn argued that there was greater territorial logic in using the Nandi escarpment as the new boundary, placing the Bantu tribes in Uganda and the Luo in Kenya.119 Imperial debates over the logic of boundaries highlighted the conflicts and contradictions of colonial rule in eastern Africa.
It again fell to C. W. Hobley to demarcate the new boundary of the North Kavirondo District. In theory, this new district would contain all the Bantu tribes northeast of Lake Victoria, bordered by Uganda to the west, the Luo to the south, and the Kalenjin and Maasai in the Rift Valley to the east and north. In reality, the “Hobley line” ran through Lake Victoria, along the Sio River in the south, and jaggedly over Mount Elgon in the north, effectively dislocating the