Up until 1948, the Luyia remained a broadly unfamiliar ethnonym. Yet, in that year, the Luyia appeared on Kenya's first official census with more than half a million constituents. The question driving Julie MacArthur's Cartography and the Political Imagination is how a group that ‘defied ethnic categorization and crossed environmental, linguistic, and colonial boundaries’ first formed, and then remained intact (4). Her answer to this question is, at once, conventional and distinctive: the Luyia drew on both ‘nativism’ and ‘cosmopolitan pluralism’ for their ethnic projects grounded in territoriality (6).
The Africanist historiography includes a substantial number of ethnic histories. Within this literature, the focus on Kenya is particularly robust. Yet MacArthur has written the first recent history of western Kenya's corporate Luyia ethnic group, and she has done so with deftness and great originality. This book shows how identity was imagined and reworked at different historical moments. MacArthur reveals how ethnic patriots succeeded in transforming a diverse set of peoples into a recognized group, and how ethnic leaders attempted to create communal boundaries. In so doing, they continually encountered dissent, which was, MacArthur argues, central to these processes and indeed generative of them. In foregrounding the competing visions of ethnic identity and the persistent challenges to communal cohesion, this work puts forth a new paradigm for the politics of identity in modern Africa.
MacArthur frames her work broadly through the theory of moral ethnicity first advanced by John Lonsdale. Even so, her approach remains novel, making use of the spatial turn in history and the humanities. The study centers on the geographic visions of the communities of western Kenya to examine the making of the Luyia. Such a focus requires MacArthur to draw on a wide range of evidence — some quite conventional, some less so — but she interprets each piece of evidence innovatively through a territorial lens. The book makes use of the maps hand-drawn by Luyia ethnic patriots alongside the maps of ‘high-modernist imperial planners’ (17). The study draws on linguistic evidence, missionary papers, colonial court records, and oral histories conducted primarily with the Council of Luyia Elders.
Cartographic responses to the complex physical and ethnic geography structure the entirety of the book. Given the emphasis on dissent, ‘countermapping’ is of particular importance (20). Luyia activists sabotaged the mapmaking of early colonial surveyors, and Luyia farmers uprooted boundary pegs of European miners claiming land during the Kakamega gold rush. In 1932, in front of the Kenya Land Commission, Luyia leaders appropriated and amended the colonial map to construct a larger political community. Indeed, the Luyia name and Luyia identity became increasingly popular during this period. Even so, ethnogenesis required continual work, and Luyia peoples deployed countermapping not simply as a counterhegemonic tool against the colonial state, but also in their disagreements with one another. The Luyia Language Committee ultimately failed to create a standardized language. Linguistic differences — particularly with geographic vocabulary, which was often relational and variable based on location — proved impossible to reconcile. The chapter on decolonization illustrates how mapping simultaneously engendered debate within the emerging nation and among the Luyia as well. One of the greatest strengths of the study, in fact, is that it balances such disparate scales concurrently: local, regional, national, and global. Yet, one occasionally feels that the book offers too few insights into the less self-consciously political work done by non-elite women and men, which must have been essential to these processes of ethnogenesis.
The study extends cartography beyond literal mapmaking to include cognitive mapping, but at times MacArthur stretches the metaphor to its limit. Such an approach, however, allows for this work to explore a wider set of questions. This book is about the Luyia, but it is also about colonial Africa more broadly, and MacArthur touches on an impressive range of historical topics, including mining, labor, gender, religion, and sport. Africanist readers will find some familiar topics, as the chapters substantiate and interrogate previous scholarship on expanding ethnic imaginations after colonial intervention, and on moral panics over mobile women. Chapter Six focuses on the Dini ya Msambwa movement, revealing how the Luyia navigated the polarized landscape of the Mau Mau Emergency. Here, MacArthur questions the accepted, but too discrete, colonial and scholarly categories which dichotomize loyalists and militants. While Cartography and the Political Imagination does not suggest a new periodization for twentieth century African history and remains largely within a colonial timeframe, this work makes significant contributions to some of the most studied questions in the Kenyan colonial historiography.
The afterword gestures to the wider implications of the study, emphasizing the various alternative political imaginations in existence during African decolonization. MacArthur concludes that such plurality might offer a way forward in the creation of ‘peaceful, multiethnic nationalisms’ (231). That such a conclusion might be too optimistic and that the Luyia's nativist cosmopolitanism might be somewhat unique is, perhaps, unimportant. The broader insight of this work is that African communities have engaged in identity production in a range of complex ways that scholars have yet to fully explore and understand. This is a smart, engaging study which challenges and contributes to our understanding of key questions in African history.
