3 Agriculture in Kenya: Large- Versus Small-Scale Farming

3 Agriculture in Kenya: Large- versus Small-Scale Farming Large-scale farming and structural change Before we embark on a chronological account of the changes and developments in Kenya's agriculture it would be helpful to look at the structural changes brought about by the setting up of large scale agricultural estates by European settlers. The history of development or lack of development in the rural areas of Kenya has been largely determined by the imposition of this type of farm ing on the country. Did the kind of agriculture brought by the settlers lead to development? The following sections will show that after forty difficult years it brought about prosperity within the European-settled areas, but that it was directly responsible for (a) holding back agricultural development in other areas, (b) the poli tical explosion in the 1950s, (c) creating the 'peasant capitalist' from the late 1950s and finally (d) the gross underdevelopment in the areas of the nomadic pastoralists. First let us examine the reasons why this large-scale farming was able to succeed. Up to the mid-1950s the settlers' success was un doubtedly at the expense of the African farmers. A large proportion of the land and labour force, capital, administration, communi cations and marketing were directed by the colonial authorities with a favourable bias towards the settler section of production. The mechanics of this channeling of resources will be discussed in other chapters. Initially and up to the mid-1950s the settler and peasant pro ducers were in competition for the above resources. It was essen tially a competition between a few large estates and very many small peasant plots to see which could produce the most cheaply. In principle the 'winner' would price the 'loser' out of the market. The first fifty years of colonial rule in Kenya was a period in which the new settlers struggled to dominate the peasantry politically in order to derive the greatest benefit from the country's resources. The settlers used the idea of racial superiority to justify their posi- R. M. A. van Zwanenberg et al., An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800–1970 © R. M. A. van Zwanenberg with Anne King 1975 34 An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800-1970 tion of economic and political dominance. The consequences of this policy and the reactions of Kenyan farmers will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter. The effects of settler agriculture on African traditions of land tenure and use will be examined now. 1. Land regulations The first land regulation in Kenya which permitted Europeans to be issued with a twenty-one year, renewable land certificate was passed in 1897. Five years later in 1902 the first Crown Lands Ordi nance allowed the Colonial authority to issue settlers with ninety nine year leases on land which had been designated as Crown Land; in 1915 the length of such leases was extended to 999 years. The area which came to be known as the White Highlands had no legal demarcation until 1939 but in practice land in this area could not be purchased by non-Europeans. The Imperial authorities pro vided the settlers with constant verbal assurances of this. The restriction of the indigenous peoples to 'Reserves' was not made law until 1926. Until then, African rights under Kenya's colo nial law were defined by occupation, cultivation and grazing, so that only when land was left unused did it become Crown Land. The demarcation of 'Native Reserves' was strongly recommended in 1909 but little was done except in the Maasai areas. The land, to use the legal jargon of the time, was 'reserved for the use of the native tribes in the Crown' - the people of Kenya were tenants of the English Crown. By 1939 all land in Kenya could be categorised as follows: i. Native Reserves, where particular tribes has exclusive rights; u. The Highlands, protected and controlled by the Highlands Board for the exclusive use of Europeans; iii. The Northern Frontier and Turkana district. The 1939 statute was intended to be final. Within each area, land was supposed to be divided according to the tenurial customs of the group to which it had been allocated. Europeans could practise their system of freeholds and leaseholds, while the Africans could continue in their traditional ways. Yet the marking out of distinct regions for Europeans and Africans undermined the foundation of the old systems in Kenya. This process has been well expressed by Dr Allan : One of the first effects of the division of Africa among the Euro pean administering and colonising powers was to solidify the population-land patterns which had previously been, to a con- Agriculture in Kenya 35 siderable extent, fluid. When a community increased until the numbers on the land it occupied exceeded the critical level for the system of land use, sections hived off and settled elsewhere, or the land area was increased by occupation of unclaimed tracts, or by peaceful agreement ... or by aggressive expansion. Natural checks, warfare, and customs limiting fertility, probably restricted the general rate of population increase to a relatively low level and as communities waxed and waned there was a continuous rough and ready adjustment between population and land. The peace of the suzerain powers disrupted this mechanism of adjust ment.* 2. Effects of the regulations Despite the important implications of the Reserve boundaries, people continued to base their land use and tenurial practices on the old pattern, that is, until their land area became too small for their needs. It should be noted that land shortage can have different meanings to different people. In the sense used here, short supply means that an individual or clan became conscious that land was not available for expansion as it had been previously. The Reserve boundaries stopped all migratory movement which had occurred in pre-colonial Kenya and set up some new ones. For instance, the Kikuyu were halted in their southward movement, and because some of the earliest land alienation occurred on land to which they considered they had a right, they rapidly became fearful of the 'ahoi'. The ahoi are people with traditional rights of occupation of land according to relationships of friendship rather than blood ties. The Kabete Kikuyu wanted to throw out their ahoi tenants once it was realised that land was in short supply, thus applying the tra ditional 'redemption' practices to the new situation. The southern section of the Kikuyu were the first of the agricultural peoples to experience in an acute form the impact of land alienation and of Reserve boundaries. Consequently, by 1914, the pressure for removal of the ahoi, the introduction of land sale and purchase for cash meant that the old system of land tenure came under direct attack from within traditional society. The southern Kikuyu were the first of many groups of people to feel the effects of population growth and shortage of land. The old method of opening up new areas for cultivation had been stopped. In some parts of Kenya it was declared illegal to cut down forest or to move across a so-called tribal boundary. The amount of popu lation growth varied widely from group to group but the common * W. Allan, Th11 African Husbandman, p. 335. 36 An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800-1970 solution to the pressures of land shortage was to farm the existing tracts more intensively. The period of crop and land rotation be came shorter, plots were divided into smaller and smaller fragments in an attempt to adhere to the traditions. As a result conflict over rights intensified. This in turn led to the institutionalisation of the concept of clan land. In the past the clan system of cultivation rights had been a flexible one whereby land claims had been regu lated by kinship ties and unused land could be taken over. But once the harsh realities of boundary restrictions were experienced, com petition for land rights petrified tradition. Young men could no longer set out as pioneers to farm new acres and there was strife within families over inheritance. The fact that a man's two sons by different wives each had claim on part of his mother's land and then a claim on some of both women's land via the father further complicated matters. Under these conditions of pressure the principle of redeemability of land came to be used very frequently but in a distorted way. It was used to displace those who were cultivating land they had cleared for themselves and those who had purchased their plots with goats. In Central Province some farmers had been trying to obtain title deeds to land from the 1920s and there had been attempts at consolidation since the 1930s. In order to consolidate adjacent plots had first to be redeemed. A large tract of land thus formed could then be sold for cash. All over Kenya throughout the colonial period there emerged a consciousness of the need to prevent the encroachment of the white man. Awareness of the importance of an individual's particular piece of land was more intense than ever before. As one Mtiva, summing up the situation in 1935 for the Logoli, who had begun to feel the cramp of land shortage by that time, explained : Long ago there were no clan lands in the sense of a continuous territory marked off by a boundary from the territories of neigh bouring clans. Each clan consisted of a number of amadala (vil lages occupied by one lineage or 'house') with their respective cultivation strips near them.

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