Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto

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СКАЧАТЬ of patriarchal control and argued that Africans who were separated “from family, clan and tribal authority as well as from social codes of behavior, discipline, custom and perhaps religion[,] which originally guided their thoughts and actions,” were operating dangerously outside of customary and colonial legal systems.²³ Providing an easy alternative to dealing with the real structural problems of racial inequality, “detribalization” discourse helped squelch concerns about the squalid, precarious conditions of life and work that characterized urban African environments.

      Luo people were deeply troubled not merely by the material hardships of migrant life, but also by the upending of sociocultural life and the absence of community. The twinned questions of how to survive in an urban setting and what it meant to be Luo outside of Western Kenya were answered through intellectual projects and politico-cultural organizations. These intellectual works and political labors built on shared linguistic capacities, cultural affinities, geographic origins, and economic needs that were much deeper and more complex than the blunt colonial category “tribe.”

      Intellectual projects undertaken by Luo from the mid-1930s onward were shaped by a confluence of internal forces and external influences. Luo identity—taking in concerns ranging from religious conversion to gendered social morality to civic virtue—was contested by a number of historical actors throughout East Africa’s urban centers. In the cities, under the disciplinary gaze of colonial authorities and in the comparative view of black Kenyans from other ethnic groups, “Luo men knew themselves to be under examination,” Derek Peterson writes. “They conceived of East Africa’s urban environment as a competitive theatre in which men and women alike were obliged to behave with credible decorum.”²⁴ Exclusive of these external influences, Luo struggled with how to reconcile notions of cultural comportment rooted in Nyanza with the demands of life in an environment that was constantly in flux. Luo intellectuals developed historical projects that addressed where the Luo had come from and where they were going; what had made “Luoness” over time.²⁵

      The text cited at the beginning of this section, Paul Mboya’s Luo: Kitgi gi tembegi (Luo: Customs and traditions), effectively constituted a vernacular textbook for Luo identity and provided the foundation for future intellectual projects. Through a series of topical chapters—for example, “Law about War,” “Matters on Marriage,” “A Polygamous Man and His Home”—the text charts the cultural responsibilities and acceptable limits of “Luoness” with encyclopedic authority. Written at the apex of the colonial era, the book endeavors to answer many of the pressing sociocultural questions of the day through reflections on the preservation of the Luo past and to offer a set of principles by which every proper Luo speaker should abide.

      Luo-language newspapers, most notably Ramogi, were another discursive space in which the intellectual project came to terms with urban life and its implicit demands to define and perform proper cultural comportment in circumstances that were very different from those of “home.” The newspaper’s editors, writers, and readers engaged in debates that aimed to define the responsibilities and limits attached to “Luoness.” Some articles and letters called for Luo to invest in Western Kenya. Others debated the “immoral” lifestyle and habits of those living outside of Western Kenya. Articles often spoke of the need for greater social restraint and discipline in order to maintain Luo respectability in gendered ways. For example, a 1948 editorial labeled independent Luo women in towns as “prostitutes” and argued, “They should be watched by the Luo Union and any relative found allowing these girls to be prostitutes should be punished.”²⁶

      While Ramogi often reinforced patriarchal notions of Luo identity, African women occasionally wrote forceful critiques of male attitudes. Connecting debates about the immorality of town life with the social responsibilities of rural familial ties, one woman admonished Luo migrant laborers, who, she explained, “cannot do without women and begin keeping prostitutes with the results that all the money they earn is spent on them and perpetual drinking, where as their wives and children are suffering in the reserves without any help or information through correspondence.”²⁷ Overall, the newspaper provided a central arena in which migrant Luo connected and communicated with one another. As a Luo-speaking writer living in Ethiopia poignantly declared in a 1947 editorial, “Ramogi is the only connection I have with my people.”²⁸ It served also to stimulate “belonging” to a shared Luo lineage. Indeed, authors frequently signed their articles with an emphatic phrase: “An Nyakwar Ramogi,” or “I am a descendant of Ramogi.”²⁹

      More materially, urban ethnic associations, in the Luo case the Luo Union, were formed in the 1930s to counter the alienating effects of urban life and to foster social and economic ties between the city and “home.”³⁰ These associations, which would ultimately give rise to political organizations built around ethnic lines, were endorsed by the colonial authorities, who saw them as “the best answer to the detribalizing influences of town life,” perhaps because they relieved colonial authorities of having to improve the conditions of urban life for their African subjects.³¹

      The Luo Union had its roots in earlier clan societies that provided social welfare benefits for Luo-speaking migrants from particular locations in Western Kenya. As many Luo speakers believed that a person’s soul could not rest until his or her body was buried at “home” (dala), that is, the place in Western Kenya where the person was born and where his or her placenta (biero) was subsequently buried, these early organizations functioned in part as burial cooperatives.³² As one elderly Luo man recalled, clan associations often raised large amounts of money to ship the bodies of Luo-speaking workers from as far as Ethiopia, Uganda, and coastal Tanganyika to Western Kenya.³³ Further, these associations were instrumental in raising funds for development projects in the rural areas, especially in the realm of education.

      Acting as a parent organization to the multiple clan societies, from the moment of its inception the Luo Union fostered educational opportunities for Luo-speaking youth, promoted economic and cultural investment in Western Kenya, and set about creating a new history written in the vernacular that codified the mythical shared past of the Luo-speaking community.³⁴ As colonial officials correctly understood, a central part of the Luo Union’s work was “to examine and to choose the new customs which should be followed and bad ones which should be suppressed.”³⁵ The organization’s own 1945 constitution had the more expansive goals of promoting “mutual understanding and unity” among all Luo speakers while also shaping the cultural obligations of a growing ethnic constituency.³⁶ The promotion of “unity” was the principal aim of various constitutions, mission statements, and other documents produced by the Luo Union in the 1940s and 1950s, signifying both the organization’s sociopolitical impetus and the fact that “Luo” was a contested and disparate identity. Under the banner “Riwruok e teko” (Unity is strength), Luo Union officials attempted to corral a diverse and increasingly diasporic linguistic community under a single ethnic banner.

      The leadership of the Luo Union—mission-educated elites like Paul Mboya, Walter Odede, Oginga Odinga, and Achieng Oneko—also served in important intermediary positions. For instance, Mboya was a colonial chief in South Nyanza, Odinga taught at the illustrious Church Missionary Society (CMS) school at Maseno, and Oneko was a municipal councillor in Nairobi.³⁷ These positions imbued them with status, savvy, and experience in negotiating the colonial bureaucracy and earned them respect from colonial authorities and Africans alike. As the colonial era wore on, they were able to use their knowledge and influence to grow the scope and scale of the organization. For instance, in the mid-1940s, Odinga started the Luo Thrift and Trading Company (LUTATCO), a highly successful sister organization that promoted migrants’ reinvestment in Nyanza and aimed to promote, in Odinga’s words, “unity, common purpose and achievement” among the Luo-speaking community throughout Eastern Africa.³⁸ Ultimately, the union leadership mobilized its political capital to become significant players in anticolonial politics and in the first independent government.

      By the early 1950s, the Luo Union had thousands СКАЧАТЬ