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Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers

of spatial imagery and African understandings of sociocultural as well as physical geography. This matter crosses over a variety of historiographical lines, and much of the introduction serves admirably to situate the study and its methodology relative to cartographic history, spatial history, and African history in general. The book follows this introduction with three chapters arranged in roughly chronological order, which MacArthur uses to introduce ideas that will help to explain the developing cartographic discourses central to the articulation of Luyia identity. The first chapter introduces the geography of western and west-central Kenya, while also raising ideas of space, place, and social networking that obtained there into the early years of British colonial rule. The critical discussion of early interactions between African knowledge and that of European travellers and colonialists here is especially noteworthy for unpacking the content of the colonial map in light of their need for African knowledge and challenges from African counter-mapping. The second chapter troubles the classic narrative of constructed tribalization in Kenya, showing how particular conditions and challenges connected to land, movement, and community in the 1920s and early 1930s led to the emergence of a decidedly modern political community that would eventually adopt and expand the Luyia ethnonym. In the third chapter, we see how that community mobilized the cartographic signs and spatial logic of colonialists and Africans alike to carve out physical and conceptual spaces for such Luyia communities in the difficult 1930s and early 1940s. In chapters four through six, MacArthur fractures the narrative into three thematic lines, also in a rough chronological order: one on language and demography in the 1930s and 1940s, one on gender and the limits of pluralism in the 1940s, and one on politics through the lens of the anticolonial risings of the 1950s. In each, the author embeds the spatial element at the heart of the adaptation of Luyia identity, whether mapping out an ethnolinguistic constituency, bounding the moral territory of Luyia custom, or creating conceptual and physical spaces that would allow Luyia communities and individuals to avoid the treacherous, charged political ground of the 1950s. The ongoing co-evolution of society and space, although far less focused on maps and more on other imagined geographies is clear in the narrative, but this flexibility may trouble readers who have a less expansive view of what cartography comprises. The seventh chapter, on Luyia self-definition in the context of postcolonial Kenya, uses the Regional Boundaries Commission of 1962 as a vehicle to tie all of these developments together. Here, MacArthur returns to focus on graphic cartography and its use as a tool for local communities and political leaders to contest the claims of other communities to sovereignty over communal lands and political power within the nation. These maps exposed a conceptual battleground between old colonial understandings of ethnic bounding and the new Luyia one, imbuing mapped representations of territory with a power that could, at the same time, diminish the power and authority of other mapped realities. Just as importantly, the other geographies inhabited and reinforced this cartographic one, with notions of language, shared heritage, custom, and political unity that provided the Luyia idea with cohesion amidst all of its evident diversity. This carries forth into a brief but thought-provoking afterword where MacArthur meditates on the power of the map and its seeming ‘triumph’ (229) as the authoritative image of the postcolonial nation-state, but notes that the Luyia case shows that other autochthonous visions of diverse and plural communities are possible. In these processes of invention and adaptation, then, the printed or drawn maps of various actors thus formed only one category of spatial knowledge. Boundaries were social and cultural as well as physical, each requiring articulation and projection to attain acceptance among those who embraced the Luyia ethnonym and beyond. Rather than suggesting that colonial tribalization and mapping immobilized boundaries, ideas of belonging, and social orders, MacArthur shows how these all remained negotiable and flexible through the colonial and postcolonial eras. The result is an integrated social, cultural, and political history of the creation of an African ‘imagined community’ through a variety of mappings, with African agency and initiative at the centre of the discourse. The importance of such a shift is hard to overstate, because it represents a powerful challenge to historians of colonial cartography, as well as social and cultural historians who study broader questions of identity and ethnicity. Professor MacArthur has made a major intervention in the emerging literature on spatiality and African history that researchers must engage, both as a set of questions and as one model for future studies.