3 - Making Mischief: Land in Modern Kenya

Summary

What we have been examining is the rapid emergence of a patrimonial state on the legal foundations of the constitutionalist state, some transformations secured through the manipulation, trivialisation, and disregard of the law. (Shivji 1991: 106)

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore how a number of official reports have over the years since independence recorded the multi-faceted land problems that Kenya has experienced and made recommendations for reform. The many land mischiefs that have characterised the land domain have been comprehensively recorded by these reports. This meant that land reform – when it came onto the political agenda from 2000 and began to seem achievable – was able to draw on a dense archive of official reports documenting the many land wrongs to be righted. I argue here that Kenya possesses a powerful but neglected ‘land archive’. This archive records what citizens have labelled ‘Kenya's land grabbing mania’ (Klopp 2000: 7). It is made up of a series of official reports published by commissions of inquiry, each charged with different mandates but which have contributed cumulatively to a land archive which has been built up over many years. Because it is scattered and fractured, it is rarely brought together in one place by our analyses. Indeed, the reports are often cited in isolation rather than treated as comprehensively recording in their entirety the many problems associated with land since independence and the demands for change in this domain. But these reports explain a great deal about Kenyans’ estrangement from the state.

The aim of the present chapter is to correct this and to show that official reports, read together, provide critical insights into the longue durée of land reform demands in Kenya. Only by a comprehensive reading of these reports, side by side and with an acute sense of their history and inter-relation can we hope to find insights into the task of land reform and its ambitions through time. We can also, by reference to this official archive, assess the limits of what has been achieved by land reform to date. In this chapter, I show how a series of reports, not all of which are exclusively concerned with land matters, constitute a detailed and nuanced archive of land mischiefs and of concrete recommendations for legislative and constitutional change.