Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur

The Wanga royal family had worked with British surveyors to divide the territory of western Kenya and claim a monarchical authority that extended far beyond any traditional systems of rule. Wanga power in the colonial era rested on the transformation of inflated monarchical traditions into administrative authority. With little local legitimacy, the rule of these Wanga chiefs was often heavy-handed and taxing. This “despotism,” however, had its limits. Political authority was a continually contested aspect of colonial life. As John Lonsdale argued, the imposition of this administrative system “had not so much created previously non-existent political units, as translated the actual or pretended genealogical relationships between clans into that very power nexus from which secession and migration had been the traditional refuge.”⁴ While local communities continued to mobilize precolonial strategies of resistance, the new geography of power imposed by colonial rule also created new contexts for dissent and imagination.

      As early as 1909 local communities voiced their opposition to the “foreign rule” of Wanga chiefs in terms of political sovereignty: “They pointed out that every tribe had its own Chief and that they wanted theirs; in other words it was Utsotso for Watsotso. This was not a petition but a declaration of rights.”⁵ Previously autonomous and porous clans forged alliances within their locations to contest Wanga power on the grounds of historical autonomy and cultural difference. Into the 1920s the sporadic protests against Wanga chiefs transformed into a widespread anti-Wanga movement. Although these campaigns centered on Wanga chiefs, they were symptomatic of a much larger movement against any chiefs or authorities deemed foreign by local constituents.

      Anti-Wanga activists and dissenters against newly appointed chiefs used multiple strategies to defend claims to autonomy and authority. Political protest ranged from uncoordinated, largely reactive confrontations to large-scale mobilizations of civil disobedience. Bukusu farmers defied labor summons from the infamous Wanga chief Murunga, refused to pay taxes, and illegally crossed into the Trans Nzoia and Uganda, territorial strategies they had used against imperial surveyors in previous decades.⁶ In Idakho protesters against the rule of the Isukha chief Milimu mounted a campaign of “boycott and civil disobedience.”⁷ Idakho farmers divided by the interlocational boundary tracing the Yala River led infiltration campaigns, flooding Chief Milimu’s northern stronghold. Farmers across the district engaged in cross-boundary cultivation and hut burnings to renegotiate colonial boundaries. While these campaigns fitted within longer local histories of competition over scarce resources and patronage, they represented much more than parochial conflicts over power and particular tracts of land: they were a form of argument, countermapping colonial attempts to define the limits of political communities.

      Anti-Wanga campaigns prompted local political thinkers to reframe divergent accounts of the past and mobilize kinship networks along the borders of the location. Petitioners wrote genealogies and migratory histories that contested colonial boundaries. The borders of the Marama location fused together forty-two clans of diverse origins under a name of foreign origin and the rule of Wanga chief Mulama, brother to Mumia.⁸ Mulama’s public pronouncement that certain clans in North Marama were truly of Wanga origin prompted the diverse, autonomous clan heads of the location to invent a mythical common ancestor, Mulafu, in defense of a broadened kinship network.⁹ In Isukha, despite ample evidence indicating their communal name translated as “forward” or “in front,” locational leaders, too, claimed the name came from a founding ancestor to defend their historical right to a chieftaincy against Idakho protestors.¹⁰ Local communities circulated myths of common ancestors to foster new kinship ideologies, to renegotiate locational authority, and to get their names on the map.

      While some reimagined traditional reservoirs of protest, others used new social forces brought with colonialism to contest colonial structures of rule. Conversion to a rival mission provided one means for local activists to distinguish themselves and argue for a social identity separate from that of the ruling chief. This competitive conversion added a religious topography to these movements, as rival missions provided support, both physical and moral, to their converts against chiefs. In Idakho, Protestants held their own barazas in open confrontation with the Catholic chief Milimu’s official local meetings. FAM converts among the Logoli and the Bukusu spoke loudly against the moral abuses of “foreign” chiefs, mobilizing traditional elders to present an alternative model of political and moral authority.¹¹

      Contests also emerged within the same missions, as a new generation of young mission-educated workers and politicians challenged chiefly authority. In 1928, CMS converts working as railway employees in Nairobi brought charges of polygamy against Chief Mulama.¹² The Church found Mulama guilty and promptly ordered his excommunication. Conflict in Marama between different clans and mission adherents came to a head over CMS festivities held on ancestral lands and led to a pitched two-day battle and the deaths of two participants.¹³ In the 1920s, Mulama worked to buttress his chiefly power with political work, serving on the recently minted Local Native Council (LNC) and chairing the North Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association (NKTWA), the first political organization based exclusively in North Kavirondo.¹⁴ By the late 1920s, however, the leadership of the NKTWA had shifted away from chiefly personalities toward a “younger generation of semi-educated young men” who wore badges in the fashion of self-help proclaiming “forward with the work of our hands.”¹⁵ And while the administration blamed these “upstart” Christian converts for the political instability in the district, on the ground campaigns against unpopular chiefs were much more diffuse and broadly mobilized.

      Though the colonial administration resisted bowing to these local movements for self-representation, by the late 1920s the limits of “decentralized despotism” became impossible to ignore. The Wanga had outlived their political usefulness. In 1926, Samia activists successfully deposed their Wanga chief, Kadima, on charges of corruption. In 1930, Wanga chief Were of the Waholo location was among the first “to bow gracefully to the storm and to retire.”¹⁶ Facing mounting conflict in Marama, the administration finally suspended Mulama from his post in 1935. Elders in North Marama promptly evicted Mulama from his land, sparking an unending battle over his property rights in the location. The retirement of Chief Murunga from the Bukusu locations in 1936 bookended the dramatic demise of Wanga domination in the region.

      Geographies of power and communal obligation were at the heart of many of these campaigns, and colonial administrators responded by parceling out land given to the Wanga in early imperial surveys. By 1931 the number of locations in North Kavirondo had increased from eight to twenty-five (fig. 2.1). In the interwar period, these newly won borders took on new significance. Low, popular political campaigns against foreign chiefs traced the borders of the location and prompted local political actors to infuse these territorial limits with new ideas of kinship. As Bill Bravman noted, in the Taita hills political communities under colonial rule refashioned “social identity to shape thought and action in contexts where lineage and neighbourhood-based ideologies were losing salience, or never had much purchase.”¹⁷ Activists clogged local land courts and produced competing maps that revealed the scarce resources at stake in these more overtly political campaigns. The anti-Wanga campaigns revealed the limits of “decentralized despotism” in the face of plural political traditions and the imaginative geographic work of local activists in countermapping new terms of kinship, new lines of community, and new strategies of dissent.

      PERFORMING TRADITION: THE CODIFICATION OF NATIVE LAND TENURE

      In 1930 the colonial administration responded to these mobilizations of competing and inventive traditions by launching the North Kavirondo Native Land Tenure Committee (NLTC) to establish a legal framework for land and customary law.¹⁸ Over seventeen nonconsecutive days between July and October 1930, the committee heard testimony on questions of land acquisition, landownership, boundary demarcation, stranger or tenant rights, the selling of land, grazing rights, and the position of women. Those called to testify as experts on local customs represented the locational administrative elite, chiefs, and headmen, many of whom were concurrently fending off campaigns against their authority. The administration hoped this committee would put to rest many of the anti-Wanga campaigns and border conflicts plaguing the district. However, locational leaders turned the work