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Land, Gold, and Commissioning the “Tribe”

IN HIS ethnographic study of the “Bantu of Kavirondo,” conducted in the 1930s, Günter Wagner illustrated how the naming of a child often derived from a recent “conspicuous event,” such as an epidemic, drought, or famine.¹ It was just such a conspicuous event that gave birth to a new community in western Kenya: the Kakamega gold rush. Prospectors first panned gold in the streams of Kakamega in March 1931. Within a few months, more than two hundred Europeans flooded the most densely populated and closely cultivated southeastern locations of North Kavirondo in search of gold.² With the discovery of gold, British parliamentarians took exception to the most fundamental doctrines of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, passed only a few months earlier. The ordinance had fixed and legally enshrined land in the Native Reserves “for the use and benefit of the native tribes of the Colony forever.” Before breaking for Christmas in 1931, Parliament rushed through an amendment allowing for indefinite land appropriation by the state in the reserves. The amending of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance raised serious questions among British officials, African subjects, and international commentators regarding colonial trusteeship, African rights, and landownership within the colony.

The Kakamega gold rush intervened into the history of North Kavirondo at a time of intense local debates over land tenure, political authority, and kinship. By the 1920s early sporadic acts of resistance against British-imposed chiefs and newly cut boundaries transformed into an all-out political campaign. While local activists redrew the limits of authority and community through campaigns of civil disobedience and cross-border activism, locational leaders forwarded themselves as the rightful defenders of customary practice and the political sovereignty of their constituents. The discovery of gold, however, threatened these diverse local moral economies and prompted African thinkers to reimagine the meaning of territory and belonging. As farmers countermapped the incursions of miners into their lands, political leaders from the district stood before the Kenya Land Commission of 1932 and appropriated the colonial map to lay claim to an enlarged political community. In front of this commission, representatives from North Kavirondo subordinated divergent historical accounts, suppressed internal competition over land, and invested in a patriotic mapping of territorial identity to gain leverage over white miners, British bureaucrats, and encroaching European farmers.

A moment of territorial crisis, the Kakamega gold rush marked a dramatic transition in the formulation of local political thought in North Kavirondo. While the deconstructive cartographic work and defense of local moral economies in the 1920s reflected the plural and dissenting traditions of political community in western Kenya, the gold rush provided a common threat that gave energy to new geographic imaginings and prompted ethnic entrepreneurs across western Kenya to adopt the colonial map and declare themselves “a tribe.”

THE ANTI-WANGA CAMPAIGN AND THE LIMITS OF “DECENTRALIZED DESPOTISM”

The gold rush surfaced at a high point of political debate and communal reorganization in North Kavirondo. The creation of administrative locations imposed new geographies of power and community (see chapter 1). In the early years of colonial rule, political life organized around these locational lines as local communities sought to define new terms of kinship and map new political communities.

For much of the interwar period, campaigns against colonially imposed, predominantly Wanga chiefs preoccupied locational politics. The practice of “decentralized despotism” in North Kavirondo relied heavily on the extension of Wanga chiefs over vast territories of non-Wanga subjects.³ 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 of the committee into a platform for performing diverse traditions of land tenure and political authority. Locational representatives arranged evidence of migrations, cultural practices, and land laws to promote divergent accounts of history and tradition against homogenizing colonial policies, “foreign” forms of political authority, and competing neighbors.

FIGURE 2.1. Map of population densities in North Kavirondo. “Report of Committee on Native Land Tenure in the North Kavirondo Reserve,” October 1930, CMS, G3X A5/25.

Colonial commissions such as the NLTC called on African “speakers” and “witnesses” to take part in a particular form of performative political theater. As Lonsdale argued in the case of the Kikuyu, representatives within these dramas told stories of their past as much to create “a knowledgeable audience” as to convince colonial officials.¹⁹ In the face of colonial expropriation, Kikuyu narratives of tradition, migration, and great leaders served as proof of their civility and their coherence as a political community. In western Kenya, Osaak Olumwullah similarly argued that the Banyore before the committee maintained the “façades of community and consensus . . . erected at front-stage level but at the same time dismantled through commentaries made backstage.”²⁰ Yet despite the attempts of locational leaders to construct this façade of political coherence, in the theater of the NLTC the audience talked back.

The North Kavirondo NLTC was a public spectacle, with daily audiences numbering in the hundreds. Throughout the proceedings, testimony had to be suspended to allow for lengthy debates over lineages, migratory routes, and land rights. Authorial notes by an unknown hand qualified the transcript with audience interjections, asides, and corrections. In one such case, this authorial hand recorded the “admission” that several groups representing themselves as landowners in North Kitosh were actually recent settlers from Uganda. These moments of interruption revealed the discursive nature of political thought in North Kavirondo. Just as Lonsdale argued for the inherent skepticism of the Kikuyu people in the face of prophets, the proceedings of the NLTC revealed the skepticism of North Kavirondo’s inhabitants toward those who claimed centralized authority.²¹ Audience members refused to be silent witnesses to this drama, actively interjecting their voices into the cultural production of authority and tradition.

For the diverse representatives before the NLTC, the “common stock of stories” available to Kikuyu spokesmen did not exist. None claimed a common founding father, common migratory path, or common set of prophetic figures from which all communities in the district sprang. Their stories, instead, fractured purposefully to defend the autonomy and autochthony of their particular communities. Fault lines appeared in their diverse accounts of clan histories, migration, and land tenure practices.

Locational representatives produced histories that drew together the congeries of clans within their specific territories. Representatives told clan histories through codified lists of clan names, clan heads, and clan settlements. When Chief Sudi rose to provide an authoritative account of Bukusu clans, “considerable confusion and dissension” erupted among audience members. The committee adjourned the meeting so that a “correct list” of clans could be compiled. Bukusu headman Dominiko Sianju returned with an impressive table in hand, an extensive list of the names of clans and their current heads from across the Bukusu locations. Representatives actively reformulated ancestry and kinship networks through the secretarial conceit of the list to defend novel political communities built in and around colonial boundaries. In the Kisa location, multiple narratives of founding fathers and important lineages coexisted. Lala, representative for Kisa, had to be replaced when audience members charged him with erasing one of the founding father’s sons from his official list. For Lala, erasing this “son” put his own clan in more direct line of descent from the founding father. Representatives argued that this tabulated “common ancestry” provided evidence of the community’s “natural boundary.”²² However, what is clear from the ethnographic work of Wagner, representations before the NLTC, and the historical texts of patriotic historians J. D. Otiende, Gideon Were, and John Osogo, is that accounts of founding fathers and lists of clan names were in constant flux, responding to contemporary conditions and the complicated arithmetic of kinship. For local representatives, the process of tabulating kinship through list making provided a central grounds for the political work of aligning constituents and enclosing dissent.

In reality, these clan histories were quite shallow. Although the committee concluded that “almost every tribe has a history of migration,” most representatives avoided or denied these histories entirely.²³ Conducting his research at the same time, Wagner also noted the “meagreness of traditions” of migration.²⁴ Many representatives claimed to have “no tradition of migration.” Often representatives traced their clan histories only to the moment of arrival in their present settlements. While contemporaneous anthropological sources cast these communities as “people on the move,” representatives pictured their constituents as thoroughly settled, undisputed owners of their lands as witnessed at the arrival of colonial rule.²⁵ Embodied in the figure of C. W. Hobley, whose primary task was to bring spatial order to this disarray of decentralized agriculturalists, colonial conquest and imperial mapping emerged as the most prominent “common stock” of stories told to defend a history of political autonomy from Hobley’s Wanga allies. Representatives told uncluttered histories, geographically pitching the birth of their people as a discrete corporate body within the grounds of their current administrative units, sewing different threads of clan movements together within the location. These shallow traditions of migration suppressed diverse linguistic origins and naturalized western Kenya as a rightful, autochthonous homeland. Locational representatives and audience members produced and reproduced histories of migration and settlement before this committee to build recognizable, bounded “tribes” for the benefit of colonial commissioners.²⁶

These local histories also served to reinforce divergent claims to landownership. Two schools of thought emerged in the testimony for the defense of land acquisition: the right of force and the right of first cultivation. While Chief Mulama argued in his opening address that “the first man to come into this country acquired his rights by strength,” most claimed land rights through the civilizing of previously unoccupied and untilled land. All locational representatives firmly stated that there was no tradition of selling or buying land. Differences in land practices reflected the environmental diversity and political decentralization of the local land economy (see chapter 1). Before this commission, this diversity was turned to political strategy. Most representatives placed landownership firmly under the control of clan heads. Only Wanga representatives spoke of a differentiated system whereby the nabongo owned the “soil” of the corporate territory, the clan controlled its own boundaries, and individual heads of families owned their homesteads. Many representatives, whose constituents were in the throes of anti-Wanga campaigns, defended their historic autonomy through repeated references to never having paid tribute to any “king” or foreign patron. Very few clans claimed to practice any formalized system of boundary demarcation beyond the use of physical landmarks, such as stones, trees, and furrows. Locational representatives promoted divergent traditions of land tenure to secure their own position as the rightful guardians and arbitrators of their community’s customs.

Testimony before the committee provided a window into the fragmented, argumentative, and discursive nature of political thought in North Kavirondo. Apparent from this testimony was a strong skepticism toward centralized authority. Even among the highly centralized Wanga, audience interruptions forced Chief Mulama to adjust his list of Wanga clans at several points. While the anti-Wanga campaigns prompted political thinkers to voice dissenting versions of history to offer proof of their right to particular tracts of land and of their traditions of political autonomy, their evidence before the NLTC reflected more the heterarchy and overlapping nature of traditional practices and long-running arguments over authority in western Kenya. Representatives continually disagreed on the land rights of women, customs involving inheritance and the distribution of land among clan members. While these practices often overlapped or intersected across different locations, representatives remained intent on accentuating the cultural and often linguistic nuances of their particular cultural traditions.

Despite this plural and dissenting picture of land tenure in North Kavirondo, the NLTC recommended the codification of native land tenure practices into a stratified legal land register to include “the name of the tribe, the name of the clan, the name of the clan head, descriptions of external boundaries, the name of contiguous clans, and the number of families with holdings.”²⁷ The codification of previously negotiated processes involving strangers or tenant rights effectively placed land tenure outside the immediate control of the clan. With no title deed, dependents and smaller clans were reliant on benevolent landlords for use of their land. In response, smaller clans in North Kavirondo began demanding an “oath” from the government to secure their land. Land conflicts between locations subsequently called up evidence given before the committee as proof. The testimony given before such commissions were thus self-consciously understood not solely as opportunities to debate competing versions of land traditions but moreover as strategic tools in the documentation of evidence for future conflicts over land rights.

The LNC warned the district commissioner that the failure to implement the findings of such enquiries would mean that “further enquiries would only be met by lying answers.”²⁸ The years 1930 and 1931 were a time of heightened politicking over land and authority. The depression of 1929 further exacerbated land conflict in North Kavirondo, collapsing local export prices and throwing both labor and cash cropping into crisis. A severe locust infestation ravaged North Kavirondo in 1931, causing food shortages and crop destruction: many locations lost up to 60 percent of their maize and wimbi (brown millet) crops.²⁹ And it was at this point that the discovery of gold would interject dramatically thrust these local contests onto the national stage.

THE KAKAMEGA GOLD RUSH

The discovery of gold forever altered the landscape of land and political thought in western Kenya. With gold in their eyes, “colonial officialdom” swiftly reduced the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, guaranteeing the inalienable land rights of Africans in the reserves “for-ever,” to a “scrap of paper” (fig. 2.2).³⁰ This dramatic reversal of colonial trusteeship prompted local political thinkers in western Kenya to refocus their defense of diverse cultural practices and defend territory beyond the limits of the location.

Mr. L. A. Johnson, a farmer in Kenya and frustrated gold seeker from ventures in Tanganyika and the Klondike of Canada in the 1890s, first panned gold in the streams of Kakamega in March 1931.³¹ Prospectors soon discovered alluvial gold in the rivers of the Isukha, Idakho, Bunyore, and Tiriki locations. The gold rush in Kakamega was part of a larger regional story of gold mining in the lake areas of eastern Africa in the 1930s, particularly in the Lupa region of Tanganyika and throughout Nyanza Province.³² The gold rush came at a time when the depression and the sudden drop in prices for agricultural exports exposed the weakness of the settler economy. Gold-mining ventures represented a new frontier and a new avenue for economic survival, if not gain, for European settlers. In 1930, Europeans in Nyanza Province numbered 1,106. By 1932 this number had more than doubled, reaching 2,282 floating and largely unchecked European miners flooding the most densely populated southeastern locations of the North Kavirondo, counting four hundred Africans per square mile (see fig. 2.1). Expectations were high, with many speculating the region’s gold deposits to be a “bigger thing than Johannesburg.”³³

By the end of 1931 the administration had issued four hundred permits to European prospectors, originally sold for one pound each. Mining claims grew from 309 in 1930 to 1,074 in 1931 and continued to skyrocket until reaching a peak of 23,158 registered claims in 1934.³⁴ After 1934 gold mining shifted from predominantly independent alluvial mining to reef mining, undertaken by large companies such as Rosterman Gold Mines Ltd., Tanganyika Concessions Ltd., the Eldoret Mining Syndicate, and the Kentan Gold Areas Ltd. At its peak, mining employed 14,943 Africans, with the peak of locally sourced employment around seven thousand.³⁵ Numbers employed in the mining sector steadily declined after 1935. By 1936 the European population decreased by more than five hundred as the small miners and alluvial workers departed, these sources of gold having been depleted in just under five years. The large companies also began a steady decline in the subsequent years as no ore body of sufficient quantity was ever discovered. As an economic and industrial project, the gold rush was all but finished by the mid-1940s.

The gold rush sparked a major war of words across the colony, in the British press, and in both houses of Parliament. The loudest outrage focused on the amending of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance of 1930.³⁶ This document, translated and circulated among African communities throughout the colony, was not just colonial legalese from a distant metropole but rather represented a central doctrine guaranteeing African land rights in the reserves: the “native Magna Carta.”³⁷ The amendment, rushed through Parliament in 1931, allowed for the reversal of the ordinance’s key principles. Most important, the colonial state could now compensate for land alienation in cash, obviating the pledge to provide equivalent replacement land for the reserve. Lord Passfield, former secretary of state for the colonies and instrumental figure in imposing the Native Lands Trust Ordinance on a resistant pro-settler Kenyan government, charged the British government with a “breach of faith”: monetary compensation for land loss could never be equivalent or just as “the areas set aside for the Reserves were not set aside for individuals nor for families nor even for the present generation, but for the tribes. If you gave every individual proper full compensation you would still have broken faith with the tribe.”³⁸ The issue of compensation brought into sharp focus the conflict between notions of individual and group forms of ownership. The integrity of “tribal lands” was the very foundation of the colonial concept of Native Reserves. The amendment of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance gave miners free rein in the reserves, stripping the local population of the land rights and safeguards bestowed on them by the ordinance.

A large body of scholarship on the history of mining in Africa has explored the arrival of mining companies and subsequent shifts in modes of production and labor practices.³⁹ As argued in the well-documented cases of southern Africa, labor migrancy and compound life led to new forms of male identity and shifts in familial structures through links back to the countryside. However, these studies say little about the effects of mining projects in densely populated areas and their effects on changing land strategies, and on African social life and political thought.

Until recently, the Kakamega gold rush figured only tangentially in studies of the industrial or high political developments surrounding this short-lived El Dorado.⁴⁰ While Priscilla Shilaro’s recent study represents the first comprehensive account of British policymaking and industrial developments, it unfortunately misses an opportunity for a rich local history.⁴¹ Projecting back an ethnic unity in North Kavirondo allowed these authors to make definitive statements on the “Luyia indigenous economy” before this political community had even been named and to neglect the more nuanced and long-lasting social and intellectual effects of the gold rush.⁴² The most dramatic impacts of the gold rush came not from its industrial implications but rather manifested in its interjection into the longer history of political thought and territorial imaginings of community in western Kenya.

Initial responses to the gold rush exposed the weakness of districtwide African organizations. The colonial government bypassed the LNC and the local land board where mining was concerned, in open defiance of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance: in the words of Chief Native Commissioner Armigel V. de Wade, it would be “a farce” to consult these advisory bodies; since “it is pretty sure that they are going to disagree if they are consulted, why consult them?”⁴³ The first petition against gold mining penned by the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association (KTWA) was easily dismissed by the Colonial Office, who pointed out that the signatories were not from the affected area, being a Luo-dominated organization, and were therefore unqualified to speak for others in the province.⁴⁴ Later politicians from adjoining locations in North Kavirondo would receive the same dismissive treatment. For the colonial government, the question of gold extraction was one of individual land rights and compensation. Districtwide organization as yet had little currency with the government or among local communities.

FIGURE 2.2. Gold rush cartoon. Evening Standard, 9 February 1933.

The gold rush led to a new wave of mapping in the district, both more intimate and more intrusive. The first “evil” of the gold rush according to the district commissioner was that of “blind pegging.”⁴⁵ The process of pegging included the staking out of pieces of land with wooden pegs to enclose the space where prospectors would examine reefs for their gold-bearing potential. Pegged-off areas, usually measuring around six hundred by three hundred feet, dotted the landscape as miners furiously competed to stake their claims. Miners also used pegs and beacons to surround trenches and prospecting pits that further ripped into the land. In the words of the Kakamega district officer, “Daily, hills and ridges are being so covered, and all this is right among the natives’ bomas and shambas.”⁴⁶

As already illustrated, pegging was a common technology of acquisition and alienation in colonial mapping and often implied more than the mere plotting of territory. Colonial surveyors, railways, and mission stations all used pegs to delineate excisable spaces.⁴⁷ In 1924, FAM missionaries complained to the commissioner of lands of the countermapping strategies used by local inhabitants to contest the appropriation of their lands: the pegs FAM used to demarcate their missions stations were “easily . . . lifted out of the ground and carried off by natives.”⁴⁸ In 1927, the chief native commissioner ordered that the survey pegs used to carve out the limits of the Native Reserves should be reinforced with stone cairns erected in contiguity with each peg on the reserve side of the boundary. Not only would cairns provide a more “conspicuous” and permanent boundary, they would also “lessen the risk of displacement of the peg.”⁴⁹ These tools of land surveyors were often the target of sabotage and spatial reorganization (see chapter 1). Pegs, in their impermanent and movable form, were particularly susceptible to territorial strategies of resistance.

On the eve of the gold rush, the district had already witnessed a shift from indirect colonial influence to a more interventionist agricultural policy.⁵⁰ State compulsion had dramatically increased the land under cultivation through clearing bush lands and included extensive trenching to prevent soil erosion. For many African farmers, mining trenches symbolized the physical cutting off of landholdings and thus further provoked fears of land alienation. Prospectors dug trenches up to forty feet deep along prospective reefs, with only “a few shillings” paid in compensation to the local populations affected.⁵¹ Lord Lugard described the region as “over-run by Europeans digging enormous pits and trenches all over the place, among the villages and in the cultivation, and pegging out the whole countryside as an earnest of future operations.”⁵² The haphazard, extensive, and “blind” manner in which individual European miners pegged off claims and dug trenches became the main focus of early resistance.

COUNTERMAPPING THE MINERS: UPROOTING PEGS AND DEBATING MORALITY

In its earliest forms, resistance to mining reflected the threat posed not only to individual land rights but also to moral communities. Concerns over pegging and the moral corruption of local communities manifested in countermapping resistance strategies and gendered discourses of corruption and civility.