When did the Luyia (or any other group) become a tribe?

Abstract

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.