Travelling up from the mouth of Sio River at Lake Victoria, carving across the summit of Mount Elgon, and finally weaving its way north to Mount Zulia on the boundary of South Sudan, the Kenya-Uganda border established in 1902 typifies a colonial border that cuts across a historic migratory corridor and cultural frontier. While rivers, valleys, lakes, and mountains feature prominently in precolonial African cognitive landscapes, they very rarely represented the territorial limits of authority or belonging. More often, communities lived in and around such ecological resources, differentiated by livelihoods, settlement patterns, and external contacts while maintaining fluid and productive relations. The communities settled astride Mount Elgon, predominantly the Bagisu of eastern Uganda and the Bukusu of western Kenya, exemplify the persistence of political relations, economic exchange, and cultural filiation that defy colonial borders.
In History, Identity and the Bukusu-Bagisu Relations, Peter Wafula Wekesa argues against state-centred approaches to ethnic histories and instead chronicles the evolving political, social, economic relations among the Bagisu and the Bukusu. Chapter One establishes the geographic space around Mount Masaba (later Elgon) that shaped mobility, community formation, and regional relations into the deep past. Wekesa traces a collective identity through shared folktales, myths of a common founding father — Bamasaaba — and a common material and ecological foundation. In Chapter Two, Wekesa turns to the shifting political relations, complex movements, and patterns of cultural exchange that began to see differentiation between the Bagisu and the Bukusu prior to the arrival of colonialism. Wekesa traces the evolution of a cultural frontier through “rhythms of encounter and social interaction [that] acted as membranes for the exchange of goods, information and cultural ideas” (49).
In Chapter Three, Wekesa examines the impact of colonial incursions in the late nineteenth century, the arrival of new traders and missionaries, and the imposition of a boundary separating the Bagisu and Bukusu between the Uganda Protectorate and the emerging Kenya Colony. On either side of the boundary, British colonial officials subjected the Bagisu and the Bukusu to “devices of discipline and command” by external communities — the Baganda and the Wanga, respectively (77). Despite common experiences ridding themselves of these “foreign” indirect rulers and cross-border missionary work, labor movements, and trade, Wekesa argues the new border effectively erased precolonial fluidity and encouraged competitive ethnic and territorial affiliations in the first three decades of colonial rule. Chapter Four turns to postwar revitalization and the contributions of transborder political and cultural movement to the process of decolonization. In the 1940s, Dini ya Msambwa represented a religious and anticolonial movement that while grounded in Bukusu and Bagisu traditions embraced pan-Africanist ideals, created transethnic networks, and produced transborder “citizenships” (109). Into the 1950s, crackdowns on cross-border movements and the development of divergent political challenges to colonialism in Uganda and Kenya refocused political activism inward and reinforced local, territorial arenas of political imagination and contestation.
Independence in Uganda (1962) and Kenya (1963) reinforced the resilience of colonial borders and brought new interstate economic and political dynamics. In Chapter Five, Wekesa argues that deep historical ties and cultural fluidity among the Bagisu and the Bukusu mitigated against major conflicts across the border, even as successive postcolonial regimes in both countries used the border to stoke fears around migrant laborers and political opposition collusion. Annual cultural activities around male circumcision, marriages, and ceremonies demonstrated the permeability of the border in everyday life. Intricate exchanges of goods saw mainly agricultural products such as beans, ground nuts, bananas, rice and charcoal trade across the border for Kenyan manufactured and industrial items including cooking fats, wheat flour, petroleum, maize, and sugar. Coffee and cotton moved in both directions, taking advantage of jurisdictional shopping and shifting economic realities. While the postcolonial period witnessed increased border securitization, especially under the rule of Idi Amin, who closed the border in 1976, formal attempts at regional integration continued and informal cross-border trade thrived, blurring the line between legal and illegal activities, as epitomized in the trading center of Chepkube, known locally as Soko ya Magendo or the “smuggling market” (150).
Chapter Six brings this borderland history up to the present, culminating in the 1997 treaty reestablishing the defunct East African Community and focusing on monetary flows, immigration, infrastructure, and services. The borderland took center stage as Presidents Obote and Moi held joint meetings aimed at reinvigorating regional trade and relations. Yet, as in earlier decades, the conflicts sparked by the 1982 coup attempt in Kenya and Museveni’s guerrilla campaign in Uganda once again saw the border become a site of political refuge and militarization in both directions. In the late 1980s, underground dissident political movements were believed to thrive within the border communities, who provided conduits of information and organizational networks for various anti-government groups. The threat of regional war created a refugee crisis into the 1990s. Throughout, however, Wekesa points to the strong social bonds and financial supports between the Bagisu and Bukusu caught between these two states, symbolized in the Insu ya Masaaba, a cultural institution aimed at bringing together the descendants of Bamasaaba. While Uganda and Kenya continued to teeter between conflict and integration, in 1994 elders from both communities met at historical sites on either side of the border to foster cultural cooperation, strengthen institutional ties, and call on their respective governments to reopen the border.
Tracing histories that cross colonial and state borders produces distinct challenges: imbalanced archival records, patchy access to oral informants, and uneven historical developments. This study reflects these imbalances in its greater access to and use of Kenyan sources and oral interviews. Little mention is made of how the threat of encroaching white settlers and higher demands for migrant labor on the Bukusu in colonial Kenya impacted Bagisu-Bukusu political movements and relations. Wekesa’s encyclopedic knowledge of the historical and ethnographic literature on both sides of the border as well as his attempt to show how “the locality is internationalised and the international localised” demonstrate both the ties that bind the Bagisu and Bukusu and the forces that threaten to sever them (184). This ambitious approach, however, at times risks obscuring the territorial strategies, political imaginations, and gendered experiences of everyday borderlanders. Overall, Wekesa makes a strong case for the need to decenter colonial turned postcolonial nation-states and refocus attention on the vibrant border communities that demonstrate “invisible” continuities of political, economic, and social “geographies from below” that persist and even flourish under the “visible” borders of nation-states (179).
