Sacred Spaces, Political Authority, and the Dynamics of Tradition in Mijikenda History

Sacred Spaces, Political Authority, and the Dynamics of Tradition in Mijikenda History A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts David P. Bresnahan June 2010 © 2010 David P. Bresnahan. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Sacred Spaces, Political Authority, and the Dynamics of Tradition in Mijikenda History by DAVID P. BRESNAHAN has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Nicholas M. Creary Assistant Professor of History Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT BRESNAHAN, DAVID P., M.A., June 2010, History Sacred Spaces, Political Authority, and the Dynamics of Tradition in Mijikenda History (156 pp.) Director of Thesis: Nicholas M. Creary This thesis explores the social, political, and symbolic roles of the Mijikenda kayas in the Coast Province of Kenya. The kayas, which exist today as sacred grove forests, are the original homesteads of the Mijikenda and the organizational units from which the symbolic authority and esoteric knowledge of the Mijikenda elders are derived. As a result, I conceptualize kayas as the physical space of the forests, but also complex networks of political, metaphysical, and symbolic power. While the kaya forests and their associated institutions have often been framed as cultural relics, I use this lens to illustrate how the position of the kayas in Mijikenda life has influenced broader social and political developments. Three main themes are developed: the first theme addresses how the kayas were used in different capacities to create space from the encroachment of colonial rule. Second, this thesis examines how Mijikenda elders used the symbolic role of the kayas and kaya institutions to reaffirm their special knowledge and privileged place within their own communities and within political movements. Finally, the third theme of this thesis explores the shifting image of the kayas in relation to colonialism, politics, and conservation. 4 These themes work to examine the variability in the strength and significance of narratives on the kayas in colonial discourses, Mijikenda communities, and in contemporary conservation. This exhibits tensions as well as continuities in the invocation of Mijikenda traditions up to the present day. The kayas, far from being solely historical relics, continue to influence social and political discourses of coastal Kenya. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Nicholas M. Creary Assistant Professor of History 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The process of researching and writing this thesis was supported by many individuals. This thesis could not have been completed without the help and advice of my advisor Nicholas Creary who saw this project develop from my nascent interests in coastal East Africa and environmental history to this finished product. I would also like to thank Patrick Barr-Melej for serving on my thesis committee and Diane Ciekawy for serving on my committee and sharing her expertise on the Mijikenda as well as several dissertations and unpublished material which were invaluable to my writing. I am grateful for the help of Cornell Mataka for facilitating contacts in Kenya and being a great friend during my stay. I am also indebted to the elders and various individuals involved in environmental and cultural conservation programs in the Coast Province who graciously spoke with me about my interests in the kayas. Additionally, I am thankful for the financial support of the Department of History and African Studies Program at Ohio University. I would also like to thank my family—Dave, Debbie, Sara, Emily, and Conor Bresnahan who were constantly supportive of my learning and research and Dave Bresnahan and Sarah Grove for carefully reading drafts of this thesis at different stages. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1: Digo Islam and the Negotiation of Religion and Authority ............................ 34 Chapter 2: Imagining the Kayas: Customary Authority in Mijikenda and Colonial Discourse........................................................................................................................... 65 Chapter 3: Narrating the Kaya in Politics, Conservation, and Public Memory .............. 113 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 143 References ....................................................................................................................... 148 7 INTRODUCTION The Mijikenda are nine closely related groups who speak mutually understandable Sabaki Bantu languages and share similar cultural traditions. They occupy parts of the coastal belt and hinterland regions of Kenya, most living on lands in between the Tana River in the central part of Kenya’s coast, and the northern sections of Tanzania’s border with Kenya. According to oral traditions, kayas are the original homesteads of the Mijikenda following their resettlement from their northern homeland of Singwaya— believed to be in contemporary Southern Somalia—in the sixteenth-century. The most established version of these accounts in both academic and popular histories comes from historian Thomas Spear’s collection of Mijikenda oral traditions which narrate the migrations of the nine Mijikenda ethnic groups—the Chonyi, Digo, Duruma, Giriama, Jibana, Kambe, Kauma, Rabai, and Ribe—and constructs a historical description of the diminishing significance of the kayas from the nineteenth-century onwards.1 Today the kayas are considered sacred grove forests. The Singwaya narrative of Mijikenda origins and history has been disputed by several scholars, but it is still the most widely accepted account.2 Because most explanations of Mijikenda social and environmental history recount the kayas as uninhabited or “relic” spaces from the 1850s onwards, the various arenas in which 1 Thomas Spear, The Kaya Complex: A History of the Mijikenda Peoples of the Kenya Coast to 1900 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978) and Spear, Traditions of Origin and their Interpretation: The Mijikenda of Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies Papers in International Studies Africa Series No. 42, 1982). 2 Critiques of the Singwaya origins narrative include: Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); R.F. Morton, “New Evidence regarding the Shungwaya Myth of Miji Kenda Origins,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 4 (1977): 628-643; Thomas Hinnebusch, “The Shungwaya Hypothesis: A Linguistic Reappraisal,” in East African Cultural History, ed. J.T. Gallagher (Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1976). 8 Mijikenda traditions were invoked in the twentieth-century have been neglected. While debates about Mijikenda origins have been central to the formation of a body of historiography on the ethnic group, there is, I believe, a gap in academic knowledge which prevents scholars from more fully viewing the ways which Mijikenda institutions, spaces, and traditions were used and transformed by the British administration and the Mijikenda in colonial and later in post-colonial Kenya. Departing from historiographies on Mijikenda history which frame the kayas as “cultural museums” and unchanged relics of the Mijikenda past abandoned for human use in the mid-nineteenth-century,3 this thesis will explore variability in the strength and significance of narratives on the kayas in colonial discourses, Mijikenda communities, and among conservation organizations. While sacred grove forests are “often treated as the remains of primeval forests, ethnographic curiosities, and cultural relics of a pre- colonial past,” more recent scholarship has raised questions about the “symbolic,” “socio- political,” and “power laden” aspects of these unoccupied sacred landscapes.4 By critically examining the invocation of Mijikenda traditions, symbols, and institutions in the twentieth-century history of the Kenya coast, the kayas can contribute to our 3 Both Spear and Cynthia Brantley’s histories of the Mijikenda use this framing to explain the social role of the kayas after the sweeping changes of the nineteenth-century in Mijikenda society. While I largely accept the temporality of Mijikenda migration from the kayas, this thesis will explore how the symbols, authority, and physical space of the kayas were invoked in more recent discourses, thus positioning them as dynamic landscapes, traditions, and concepts. See Spear, the Kaya Complex, especially pp. 45-46 for an example of the most accepted narrative on the histories of the kayas post-1850. 4 Michael Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru, “Introduction,” in African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change, ed. Sheridan and Nyamweru (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 7. For studies on the Mijikenda David Parkin’s work on sacredness and symbolism in Giriama society illustrates some of these dynamics. See Parkin, Sacred Void: Spatial images of work

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