Horace Njuguna Gisemba
15 May 2008
analysis
Since the outbreak of post-election violence in the Rift Valley, there have been numerous reports in the local dailies claiming that the root cause of this conflict is 'the land question'. Without exception, these reports fail to inform or educate us precisely because of their misrepresentation of history. Horace Njuguna Gisemba seeks to rectify this.
Given the scale and the urgency of the current crisis and its repeated association with the so-called 'land question' it is time for a complete unpacking of the history behind colonial and post-colonial settlement in the White Highlands. Only then will we determine with certainty whether land is at the centre of the ongoing systematic evictions in the Rift Valley.
The first argument that is normally presented is that the North Rift region (Uasin Gishu, Trans Nzoia, Nandi and West Pokot Districts) exclusively constitutes the ancestral land of the supra-ethnic group we have come to term 'the Kalenjin', i.e. the Nandi, Keiyo, Pokot, Tugen, Marakwet and Kipsigis. A quick etymology of geographical names in the North Rift region such as Uasin Gishu, Eldoret, Sirikwa, and Kipkaren confirms that the Maasai long lived in and named these places. Indeed, it is the Maasai who were displaced from these lands by the colonialists and therefore, any question of restitution to ancestral owners - if at all it can be achieved - must of necessity be resolved with the full inclusion of the Maasai.
In the early 1900s colonial settlement in Central Kenya displaced many Gikuyu families. In their search for productive agricultural land, many of these families gradually moved west through Kijabe and into the Rift Valley. At the same time, white settlers moving into the Rift Valley aggressively recruited Gikuyu farmhands from Central Kenya who became their tenants at will. Between 1904 and 1920, 70,000 Gikuyus had migrated to the Rift Valley. By the end of the 1930s that community had grown to more than 150,000, many of whom were second and third generation Rift Valley Gikuyus. As the tension between these increasingly successful squatter farmers and their white landlords heightened the white settlers in some districts decided to do away with squatters altogether. In 1941 the first Government re-settlement scheme for Africans was established in Olenguruone north of Nakuru and it absorbed many of the Gikuyu squatters who were being driven out by their white landlords. But the larger majority of the Gikuyu, numbering over 100,000, were forcefully repatriated to Central Kenya between 1946 and 1952. This cyclical pattern of Gikuyu removals from Central Kenya, then settlement in the Rift Valley, followed by forceful evictions and painful repatriation back to Central Kenya, should be the subject of real concern. For each time they have occurred (1952, 1991/92, 1997 and 2007/2008) these returns have generated bitterness and inflamed the Gikuyu in Central Kenya. As a barrage of Kenyan historians agree (David Throup, Tabitha Kanogo, David Anderson, Frank Furedi, Rosberg & Nottingham) these reactions ignited the 1952 Mau Mau Uprising, and in 2008 they have been the reason for the vicious revenge attacks of the past two weeks.
The eviction of the Gikuyu from Olenguruone in the late 1940s and early 1950s made room for a new government-initiated settlement of Africans in the White Highlands. This 1955 settlement was conceived for the purposes of benefiting loyal African farmhands. Given that this re-settlement was taking place at the height of the Mau Mau uprising, the colonial authorities were quick to exclude the Gikuyu people from this scheme. The question of loyalty was to determine another pattern of settlement in the run-up to Independence and soon thereafter - some departing white farmers chose to gift their parcels to trusted farmhands. This is the history behind the ownership of farms running to hundreds and even thousands of acres by some people of Teso origin in Trans Nzoia District.
The third wave of African settlement in the White Highlands was the Million Acre Scheme which begun in 1963. On the eve of Independence the departing colonisers negotiated a scheme by which white settlers were bought out of their farms by the in-coming Kenya government. The money for this purchase was made available as a loan by the British government, hence the acrimonious dispute that pitted Jomo Kenyatta on the one hand and Bildad Kaggia and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga on the other. The argument of the latter nationalists was that there was no justification for a people to buy that which had been forcefully wrenched from them. The vehicle that the independent Kenya government used to facilitate the acquisition and subsequent distribution of these lands was the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT). SFT was a separate legal entity whose trustees were government ministers. It is important to note that the SFT exists to this day and the records of all their transactions from 1963 to date, including those allocations that were made in the Moi era, are available for perusal at the Ministry of Lands.
Through the 1960s and 1970s the SFT would, through the local dailies and village barazas, advertise and invite applications for allocation of land in recently created settlement schemes. These schemes were constituted from the farms that the SFT had acquired from the white farmers. The conscious process of designing these schemes involved several steps. First was the amalgamation of parcels and sub-division by use of aerial surveys into economically viable units, including the provision of access roads. This was followed by conversion of the land registration system from the complex Registration of Titles Act (RTA) to the simpler Registered Land Act (RLA) which was borrowed from Australia. Along with that, the government made loans available not only for the purchase of land, but also for the acquisition of livestock, farm inputs and other developments. These loans, which were part of a revolving fund, were administered by the SFT.
As individuals responded to the advertisements and applied for allocation of land, grassroots leadership and enterprise were ultimately critical to the ways in which communities organised to make the best of the emergent SFT opportunities. For instance, it was the power of what John Lonsdale defines as positive ethnicity that saw the Maragoli community congregate to purchase SFT land in Lugari District which, though it lies in Western Province, was part of the White Highlands. Matunda Scheme, which straddles Rift Valley and Western Province, attracted the Abanyore people. Likewise the close-knit Abagusii people drew each other into significant purchase of the Sinyerere Settlement Scheme in Trans Nzoia District. There was no political patronage in this manner of settlement. Rather, it was solely the desire for productive land that drove these traditionally agricultural communities to participate in these schemes.
It is worth noting that even in the 1980s, under former President Moi's regime, the SFT continued to acquire land. In Kipkabus, Uasin Gishu District, SFT took over a large parcel from East African Tanning Extract Co. Ltd (EATEC), a Lonrho subsidiary. Through sponsored economic mobility and political patronage it was allocated to members of the Kalenjin community.
Because of the publicity surrounding it, the fourth pattern of resettlement in the Rift Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s overshadows all of the above. Perhaps on account of the elaborate organisational infrastructure attending to it and the entrepreneurial genius required to enable its proper realisation, references to this pattern of resettlement invariably carry grave misrepresentations. The venture capitalists who conceived this scheme saw an opportunity in the mobilisation of low income earners for the purchase of large-scale white-owned farms. They therefore set up public companies and in some instances cooperative societies. These became the vehicles through which they raised capital from the masses and then acquired farms that were being offered for sale on a willing buyer-willing seller basis. Examples of this abound, and records of the companies and their transactions should be readily available from the advocates who oversaw these processes. In Kitale, the Abagusii acquired a parcel that they renamed North Kisii while the Maragoli mobilised to purchase what was later to be known as Bidii Farm. Another group from the same community bought Vihiga Farm in Soy Divison. In Uasin Gishu, a group of Kalenjins set up Kapkures Farm Ltd and bought land in Moiben Division. Others bought land in Lessos through Barkeiwo Farm Ltd while Kaplogoi Estates Ltd and Sessia Farm Ltd made good of other opportunities within the district. The populous Gikuyu formed several land-buying companies, the most famous of which were Gema (Gikuyu, Embu Meru Association), Ngwataniro, and Nyakinyua and all of which bought land in the Rift Valley as well as in Central Province.
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