By the nineteenth century many of the communities northeast of Lake Victoria lived as agriculturalists in defined territorial settlements, despite constant pressures from expanding agriculturalist neighbors and continuing cultural and economic trade with surrounding pastoralists. However, the nineteenth century brought with it a time of political and environmental upheaval in eastern Africa, what Gideon Were termed the “age of confrontation.”82 Population growth and continued migrations in the first half of the century caused almost constant warring. Although on the periphery of long-distance trading emanating from the coast, by the late nineteenth century Swahili traders were regular visitors to the area and stories of the infamous slave trader Sudi of Pangani circulated widely, though actual slave trading in the region seems to have been limited.83 From 1890 the Nyanza basin suffered a series of droughts and diseases that decimated much of eastern Africa.84 The devastating rinderpest outbreak that caused widespread stock loss, as well as a smallpox epidemic in the 1890s, compounded by the arrival of colonial conquest, undermined traditional practices of land and bush management that had kept disease at bay.85 These factors forced communities to push into the bush in search of new lands, thus unleashing the threat of trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, spread by tsetse flies across the region.86 By the end of the century the political and territorial sovereignty of the communities northeast of Lake Victoria was under threat—from expanding neighbors, from disease and drought, and from the arrival of imperial surveyors.
BEATING THE BOUNDS: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHIES
From the earliest explorations of Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Thomson, and Frederick Jackson, explorers, administrators, and missionaries wrote widely of the rich diversity and warm hospitality they encountered northeast of Lake Victoria.87 These first European visitors universally commented on the plentiful food production, the variety of languages, the diversity of cultures, and the “confusion” of political structures among the African inhabitants they called Kavirondo. Early explorers described the Kavirondo as “industrious” and the “most moral of all tribes.”88
Morality and gender relations seemed to preoccupy these early European visitors to the lake region. They marveled at the Kavirondo men and women working in the fields together in complete nudity. Comparing the naked Kavirondo women to the covered “ladies of Lamu,” Sir Charles Eliot mused, “In Africa, female respectability is in inverse ratio to the quantity of clothes worn, and the beauties of Kavirondo, who imitate the costume of Eve, are said to be as virtuous as she was when there was no man but Adam in the world.”89 As attested to in postcards and photographic collections, the “naked Kavirondo” became an alluring tourist attraction in these early years of imperial travel in eastern Africa (fig. 1.6).90 Images of naked women standing in fields, pulling a hippo across the shore or sunbathing on rocks became collectibles for travelers from coastal traders to Theodore Roosevelt.91 Early explorations and imperial travels pictured “Kavirondo” as an untouched landscape, remote and unknown, filled with culturally exotic and morally “naked” people.
The term Kavirondo first appeared to administrators as a distant mapped space on E. G. Ravenstein’s maps near the end of the 1870s.92 In 1884, Joseph Thomson noted with surprise that “Kavirondo does not at all occupy the place which has been assigned to it on the map.”93 Bewildered by the sheer “number of very distinct tribes,” the term Kavirondo was applied to both the Nilotic and Bantu communities of the lake region, though it progressively came to more specifically denote “all those natives speaking Bantu dialects west of Busoga and north of Kavirondo Bay.”94
Bringing this confusion under colonial control required the remapping of local geographies. In 1890 the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC, or IBEA) signed treaties with “Sultan Mumiya” of “Upper Kavirondo,” with the nabongo, or king, of the Wanga, and with the Bukusu clan head “Majanja, Sultan of the Kitosh.”95 In signing these treaties, these two leaders ostensibly “ceded to the said Company all his sovereign rights and rights of government over all his Territories, Countries, Peoples and Subjects.” Ravenstein’s map for the IBEAC visualized the area of Kavirondo as an important thoroughfare in the economic trading path between the coast and the large kingdoms of the Uganda Protectorate, centering on the town of Mumias. Nabongo Mumia provided the British with a base for trade running between the coast and Uganda and ample supplies of food and manpower for their journeys (fig. 1.7). The space northeast of Lake Victoria, however, remained barely surveyed. Early maps traced complex webs of escarpments and rivers amid whole sections of undifferentiated landmass. Treaties and other informal arrangements led to the incorporation of the region as the Eastern Province of the Buganda Protectorate in 1894.96 Misreading the political landscape of this region, colonial officials pictured its communities as “unsettled,” with no recognizable systems of political structure aside from the Wanga kingdom. In 1895 it became C. W. Hobley’s task to “gradually establish an administration over the various sections of the turbulent collection of tribes, collectively known to the coast people as the Kavirondo.”97
FIGURE 1.6. Mombasa postcard, postmarked 1899.
FIGURE 1.7. IBEAC map of East Africa, 1891–92, by E. G. Ravenstein. Lugard, “Travels from the East Coast.”
For Hobley, this reconnaissance work was one of both topographical surveyance and ethnographical investigation (fig. 1.8). The ethnonyms identified by Hobley curved and contorted amid a mess of complex topographical features, aiming to organize space in ethnic terms. The crowded “Isukha” branched out from and over rivers and forests; the “Marama” curved and fitted into a pocket of empty space; the “Ketosh,” the name known to Hobley for the Bukusu clans, stretched and expanded across vast territories in the north. In this early map, the territory of these ethnonyms remained amorphous and undefined either by geographic markers or internal boundaries. In his 1896 report on Kavirondo District, Hobley noted, “The fact of the county being split up into so many sub-tribes without any really powerful Chiefs has induced a more complicated situation than would otherwise be the case.”98 As Sean Hawkins has argued, the failure to read topographical features that functioned as “mnemonic devices” in local cognitive mappings led the British to believe these communities had no “inscribed past” and no geographic system of social organization.99
FIGURE 1.8. C. W. Hobley, map of Kavirondo, 1898. Hobley, “Kavirondo.”
More than mere lines on a page, colonial mapping practices worked to transform previously relational geographies of exchange and community into top-down, scientific, and measurable demarcations. Local geographical concepts proved difficult to translate, as they were relational and relative rather than constant abstract points of reference.100 The fixed compass points of north, south, east, and west had no corresponding terms in any of the local languages. The term masaba for most communities translated as north but referred specifically to Mount Masaba, known by colonial officials as Mount Elgon, the northern frontier of this region.101 In the Trans