Strategic Submission as Resistance? Nabongo Mumia in the struggle for Post-Colonial Kenya's Histories

Abstract

This article pursues the debate on the role that various regional leaders in late pre- to colonial Kenya played in their people’s responses to colonialism and its agents, and the contests for moral historical spaces that have continued to be played out in intellectual and public discourse. Focusing on Nabongo Mumia, the political and cultural figure of the Wanga people in western Kenya, the article examines the fluidity between collaboration and resistance as processes that have been presented mistakenly as dialectical oppositions. Situating my argument within the counter-revisionist trajectory, I demonstrate that the earlier presentation of Nabongo Mumia – and indeed a few other leaders – as a ‘collaborator’ largely simplifies the dilemmas that many a leader were confronted with in the wake of colonial violence, and is used in the current political setup to rationalise deliberate forms of exclusion from central political structures in the country. I further show that for regional leaders in colonial Kenya, strategic submission guided by a variety of legitimate considerations, was often misread as ‘collaboration’, a line that was picked up by earlier Africanist inclined scholars whose nationalistic impulses drove them to a search for ‘heroes’, often guided by the matrices of ‘resistance