2 - Land Reform in Kenya: The History of an Idea

Summary

The history of land reform is as long as the history of the world, extending back into medieval, ancient and biblical times. (Tuma 1965: 3)

The Kenyan political story over the past century has been one of a rapid march from the creation of the conquest state, to its high noon of settler ascendancy during the interwar years, to the deep colonial crisis precipitating the Mau Mau war between 1952 and 1956. This was followed by the brief period of mass nationalisms between 1957 and independence in 1963, which was succeeded by a contested statehood whose future continues to be uncertain. (Atieno-Odhiambo 2002: 225)

Introduction: The long arc

Land issues have been the cause of both simmering discontent and violent conflict throughout Kenya's colonial and post-colonial history (Ogot 1976; Okoth-Ogendo 1975). They remain a ‘key fault line’ in modern Kenya (Hornsby 2013: 787). Historians of Kenya and commentators on her politics continue to find patrimonialism, ethnic favouritism and corruption at play, nowhere more so than in the politics of land. Kenya's problems with land defy easy description: they remain complex and multi-faceted and include massive and worsening inequalities in access to land, a propensity to land grabbing and continuing conflicts over who is and who is not entitled to occupy land. Efforts to address these problems have since before independence been erratic at best. This chapter is an attempt to study present-day efforts at land reform in the long arc of Kenya's land history since independence.

This chapter seeks to place modern-day debates in the context of Kenya's long history of land reform. My aim is to historicise them. There are two reasons why I think this is an important task. First, it is in part my response to what I perceive to be the existing patchy knowledge of the historical context within which we are debating contemporary land reform. A concrete illustration of this is the common occurrence of lawyers and others such as activists and journalists citing key reports of commissions of inquiry by name but rarely elaborating on their content.