One glaring exception existed alongside this depiction of decentralized political life. The Wanga crafted the most hierarchical political culture in the region, having a royal family and a king, the nabongo, who ruled over Wanga clans. Much has been written on the Wanga royal family and the power struggles between different clans over leadership.55 The Wanga kingdom functioned somewhere between the large and powerful lake kingdoms further west and the more horizontally organized communities of the east.56 Simon Kenyanchui better described the Wanga political structure as “a confederation of co-equal clandoms.”57 Later political accounts would map the extent of the Wanga kingdom from Lake Victoria to Lake Naivasha, but little evidence supports this expansive claim and the numerous clans described above jealously guarded their autonomy against claims of rule or tribute by Wanga kings.58 In the nineteenth century, Wanga monarchs used Maasai mercenaries to extend their range of tribute and territorial rule, prompting these independent communities to seek refuge in their protective environments and buttress their own political structures against these monarchical state builders.
The first Europeans to arrive in the region were greeted by the recently ascended Nabongo Mumia, who quickly offered the new arrivals hospitality and aid. For many colonial administrators and later historians, the Wanga kingdom provided a recognizable political structure ideally suited to their ends and interests. Colonial administrators saw in the Wanga kingdom a hierarchical system of authority that could be usefully extended over the decentralized communities of the area. Later local politicians saw in the Wanga’s monarchical history a useful narrative of precolonial political sovereignty and organization. By the end of his study, Were became preoccupied with the hypothetical future of the Wanga kingdom had the British not interrupted its consolidation and expansion.59 The centralization of the Wanga kingdom, however, has not only been overstated by colonial officials and partisan historians but has also overshadowed the complex political interplay and almost defiant tradition of decentralization among the majority of western Kenya’s inhabitants.
Relations among these diverse but interdependent communities were not “of coercion and control but of separate but linked, overlapping yet competing spheres of authority.”60 Heterarchy allowed for multiple religious, political, and economic sites of power and identification to exist in parallel. Each clan maintained autonomous control of their own political affairs and yet depended on wider networks for economic, spiritual, and social exchange. Within and outside the reach of the Wanga kingdom, heterarchy also provided a measure of accountability, as it did within the kingdom of Buganda, further west.61 Among the Wanga, clans organized themselves in circular spatial patterns around the royal family, at once buttressing and constraining the power of the king. Succession was not determined necessarily by descent but rather by a council of clan elders who considered multiple factors.62 Strategic intermarriages and political negotiations with the various clans of the Wanga ruling elite allowed non-Wanga clans to maintain a great deal of autonomy and protection.63
Outside the reach of Wanga tribute, clans used horizontal and complex systems of social organization, strategic alliances, and spatial encampment. The term oluhia, from which later cultural entrepreneurs would find a name for their imagined community in the 1930s, reflected this heterarchy and the primacy of place in the social formations of the region. Sometimes translated as clan or clansmen, oluhia in many of the languages in the region referred to the “fire-place on a meadow,” where the heads of associations of clans would meet.64 The oluhia served as a sort of assembly site for initiation rituals, for political negotiations, and for the burial of clan heads: it was a “microcosm . . . the place of practical everyday life.”65 This term embodied the horizontal coming together of representatives from different clans in one symbolic and physical space, reflecting the close relationship between place, belonging, and communal identity among these diverse communities.
Despite these multiple sites of identification, land and the practices of territoriality played crucial roles in the spatial organization of belonging. For Osogo, limited tribal structures represented loose linguistic and cultural affinities, while clans performed their most important function as “owners and bequeathers of property,” or, more accurately, land use.66 Land tenure practices varied greatly across the region, producing “different systems from a common background.”67 A common term for the clan and clan territory, olugongo, literally translated in many linguistic traditions to “a ridge.”68 Within each olugongo, the clan leadership determined how to allot land to each family and how to absorb and manage the land claims of “strangers.” Although clan heads were responsible for negotiating internal boundary demarcations, the limits of their olugongo were “known by their natural boundaries.”69 Uncultivated virgin bush land, oluangeraka, or “what is beyond” among the Logoli, allowed clan lands to expand and contract in response to seasonal environmental changes, demographic pressures, and interclan disputes.70 This practice facilitated crop rotation and the strategic fallowing of lands to avoid the overuse of any one area of cultivation. The edzinzalo, a common term for uninhabited mile-wide buffer zones, similarly provided an important precolonial territorial strategy for managing conflict over land and resources. During war times, these buffer zones provided fields of contest and a space for the meeting of warring factions; however, “in times of peace, grazing [was] communal.”71 Wagner noted that these buffer zones acted as political frontiers, as clans did not enforce the “subjugation of neighbouring” groups but rather enacted a strategy of “political integration through territorial continuity of clan.”72 The terms and practices of land tenure in the nineteenth century reflected the processes of segmentation—of fission and fusion—that characterized social formations on still-expanding frontiers.73
Niche settlement patterns translated directly into distinct practices of territoriality. Among the Banyore, the hills they inhabited became central to their “situational identity.”74 The Bunyore hills, from whose geographic characteristics clans found their names, represented not only the place where their forefathers first settled but also a protective barrier that defined friends from foes. In the other direction, place-names taken from clan names or important individuals also told stories of migrations and interethnic exchange.75 Terms for lineage often overlapped with a sense of geographic enclosure. The terms enyumba, eshiribwa, and indzu all could be translated as both lineage and the physical enclosure of the clan or gateway of a homestead.76 In Marama, minor clans who had only recently joined the larger network were referred to as emikuru, veranda poles that propped up the household structure of the larger clans.77 As Christopher Gray has argued, the mistranslation of these terms into simply “land,” “clan,” or positions of authority by later colonial administrators would elide “the whole complex series of obligations and duties owed to lineage heads by their dependents, and as such . . . the relations of production for these societies.”78 This linguistic variety revealed the intimate connection between community formations and the territory they inhabited.
Despite the multiplicity of precolonial social relations, the practice of territoriality was central to the functioning of these communities. This was not the “aterritorial kinship ideology” Gray found practiced in Gabon.79 Aterritorial practices did provide social entities with the flexibility to account for complex trade and exchange patterns as well as pressures on the land, whether from the environment or warfare. However, African communities in this region practiced a form territoriality that developed out of their complex migrations and niche environmental settlements. As introduced at the outset of this chapter, the greeting term mulembe carried within it this itinerant territoriality that linked who one was with where one came from and where one was going. Addressing the territoriality of these clans, Wagner lamented that “the extent of the geographical ‘horizon’ of the various sub-tribes in pre-European days