Visualizing Imperial Landscapes: Frontiers of Imagination in the Mapping of Eastern Africa

The construction of imperial landscapes offers historians an opportunity to scrutinize the life and lives on the borderlands of eastern Africa in the early 20th century. While much recent literature has focused on the haphazard and often hybrid manner through which the borders of eastern Africa were drawn and governed, less attention has been given to the contingent and complex ways in which borderlands had to be continually imagined, negotiated, and recreated. While set in the wider context of colonial mapping in eastern Africa, I look specifically at the mapping of the Kenya-Somali frontier, particularly through the rich photographic collection of the colonial official in charge of demarcating Kenya’s northern frontier, Sir Geoffrey Archer. Archer, an amateur surveyor, avid hunter, and observant photographer, documented his cartographic surveys of the region through multiple media – photographs, maps, diaries – which provide a unique lens through which to explore the role of visual culture in the creation and contestations over colonial frontiers and larger competing conceptions of territoriality, mobility, and sovereignty. While many of the photographs demonstrate colonial practices of domination and projection of ecological mastery, they also reveal the dependency on and agency of African intermediaries - porters, askaris, guides - on the margins, both literal and pictorial, of these cartographic missions. Seemingly marginal spaces, like that of the shifting Kenya-Somali frontier, became critical sites of knowledge production, contestation, and appropriation in both directions, and left traces on the landscape and on the body politic that continue to shape and inform the political imaginary of this “imperial” frontier today.