Cartography and the Political Imagination by Julie MacArthur (review)

Readers who are not "map-minded" should not be put off by the title and cover illustration of this book. Although map-making in Western Kenya is central to Julie MacArthur's argument—and she also includes a very useful overview of the field of historical cartography in Arica—Cartography is really a fascinating and important study of how the Luyia successfully "imagined" and then created a single ethnic constituency, which, by the 1948 census, was already one of the largest and most solid in Kenya and has remained so ever since.

Cartography draws on the already rich literature on ethnogenesis, from Peel and Ranger to John Lonsdale, Derek Peterson, and Gabrielle Lynch and takes it further in a case study that challenges much of the conventional wisdom about how ethnic identities are made. The creation of Luyia out of a wide range of disparate communities seemed to break the rules. There were no founding ancestors—still less an agreed history of migration and settlement—to build on. There was no common language—even the ethnonym itself was previously unknown, and no core of "custom" to be asserted as originary; even features as fundamental as circumcision and age organization were varied and sometimes absent. There was no overarching political structure—a political identity based on the claims of early colonial Wanga "imperialism" was ruled out, as was one based on Bukusu resistance to colonial rule. Such fragmentation and diversity might have led to chaos and division, but Luyia identity was built out of negotiated difference in which dissent was not merely possible but also fruitful: Luyia became quintessentially a community of productive argument. What the communities that agreed to become Luyia had in common was a shared history of accommodation and interaction with others and the imagination to see where that might lead. It could evoke a sense of common territory, defined by flexible boundaries. Anyone who lived within these boundaries—and some who lived beyond—could be Luyia. Ethnicity was first mapped out and then filled in demographically; hence the importance of both cartography and numbers.

"Map-consciousness" arose quite suddenly in the early 1930s when white miners descended on Kakamega in search of gold. They pegged and registered claims and surrounded these new spaces with legal boundaries inscribed on maps. Clearly, maps and the jurisdictional boundaries they illustrated carried weight with colonial officialdom. Could maps also be used to legitimate and defend community space against the state? Local organic intellectuals in search of a project decided to find out, and in so doing they created a cartographic frame for belonging and identity. Mapping became for the Luyia what histories of property-owning were for the Kikuyu.

The frame of ethnicity is wide enough for MacArthur to include discussion of social change and response in the Luyia communities, weaving different strands together to show how they each informed the ethnic project. The work of ethnicity was both a response to change and a way of managing it collectively. Her work also suggests some wider comparisons, since Luyia communities experienced some of the same strains and conflicts as other, better known, regions of Kenya. In an important sense, Cartography puts western Kenya on the colonial map. The chapters covering the "moral crisis" of land and gender from the 1930s onward and the difficulties of moving the project beyond conflicts between "loyalism and dissent" in the volatile postwar political landscape are especially noteworthy in these respects. The need to maintain gender discipline in different communities threatened to fracture the ethnic consensus, as did the cultural and political radicalism of Dini ya Msambwa (on which MacArthur has interesting things to say); and the emergence of "national" politics challenged the territorial focus and raised questions about the limits of local patriotism. Yet Luyia politicians were secure enough to support the Kenya African Union as a national vehicle, and also to espouse women's suffrage—for demography was...