African Jubilee

Mau Mau Resurgence and the Fight For Fertility in Kenya, 1986-2002

Terisa E. Turner and Leigh Brownhill
2001

Part One: Promised Land

We were cheated by the white man with a bible that we should not have things here on earth but we should wait for those things that were promised in heaven. So, the Africans were being tormented and harassed because they were to wait until the day came for us to go up and inherit the things that were prophesied, while the white man could stay here and enjoy the things of the world. Jomo [Kenyatta, c. 1946] went ahead and wanted to broaden the Africans' minds. He said that since we were told to wait for those things that were up there in heaven, and the white man was the one who went up into the sky in airplanes, why doesn't he go up there and inherit everything that is up there and leave the others for the Africans? (First Woman, Elizabeth wa Gatengwa,15 January 1997).

We [in Muungano wa Wanavijiji, Organization of Villagers] have followed what the Mau Mau were fighting for, because they were fighting for land, and we are also fighting for land. Because the reason we have so many slum dwellers in Nairobi, is lack of land. And if you ask the slum dwellers, you will find that their parents were Mau Mau fighters. Their people are the ones who were in the forest and yet they didn’t get land or anything. And they are the ones who are now spread all over. So we want everyone to be given land and to be given assurance of owning this land (First Woman, Sabina Wanjiku, 25 July 1998).	

There is a resurgence of struggle over land in Kenya. Fighters ‘who are now spread all over,’ have taken up the unfinished business of the Mau Mau which began 50 years ago in 1952. Land occupations in the new millennium are part of a new cycle of struggle by the dispossessed in response to the new enclosures of the commons by corporate ‘globalization from above.’
Kenya in 2002 is characterized by a politics of land which is as intense and conflict ridden now as it was fifty years ago when the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or Mau Mau, engaged British colonialists and African loyalist ‘Homeguards’ in battles over control of land. Land, in Kenya, is power. And though there has been an almost unceasing struggle over land throughout the twentieth century, this struggle has seen quiet times and periods of extreme upheaval. The armed struggle for independence in the 1950s is clearly one period of upheaval. We identify a new period of upheaval beginning around 1986 and intensifying into the year 2002. Why, after forty years of Kenyan independence, has there arisen a new Mau Mau and a new round of conflagration over land?

Sisule wrote of the 2001 Kenyan land conflicts that, 

There is a perennial joke that an average Kenyan abhors free, open space and would not hesitate to occupy such land even if it belongs to somebody else. Of course this is only true in the case of the land grabbing types, who sometimes disguise themselves as genuine private developers. Land is a vital resource for abode and production activities and its ownership is an emotive issue (Sisule, 8 October 2001).

It is necessary to distinguish between those commonly known in Kenya as ‘land grabbers,’ who are wealthy people aspiring to make commercial gain from the privatization of public land, and those we call ‘land occupiers,’ who are dispossessed people who assert land entitlements to public land and idle privately owned land.

While dramatizing the fact that struggle over land is a key issue in the 21st century, Sisule does not say why. Why now? The answer to this question is intimately tied up with the introduction of World Bank structural adjustment programs, beginning in 1980. Before outlining the types of land occupations occurring in Kenya today, and defining some of our key concepts, we examine, briefly, three aspects of structural adjustment programmes which bear upon the increase in conflicts over land. These are, first, the fast-tracking of election-focused ‘political pluralism,’ which has manifest itself in Kenya in a fully commodified form in which money and land titles are exchanged for votes; second, the privatization of state assets, which puts in place a justification for the corrupt allocation of urban and rural spaces; and third, the de-funding of health and education, which increases the need among the poor for access to land on which to subsist and earn an independent livelihood.

Since the government was forced to concede to multipartyism in 1991, some 400,000 Kenyans have been systematically attacked and displaced from their homes by state‑sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups perceived to support the political opposition. The role of known high‑ranking government officials, who remain unpunished, in instigating, inflaming, and financing this violence has been widely documented, not only by national and international human rights NGOs, but also by the government's own parliamentary select committee (which consisted of only ruling party members) (Human Rights Watch 2001).

Multiparty politics emerged in Kenya in the early 1990s as a result of two conflicting but interrelated phenomena. First, in the mid 1980s, transport workers attempted to form a union. They held several strikes which paralyzed regional trade for short periods. Autonomous action by transport workers meant that the state could not control the economy. The government banned unionization in the transportation sector. At the same time, the small scale farmers of coffee tore out their trees and planted food crops for local consumption. They did so because the prices on the world market had fallen and at the same time, state corruption in the allocation of coffee incomes enriched state managers and impoverished rural producers. With the drop in foreign exchange earnings from coffee sales, the state fell into a balance of payments crisis by the end of the 1980s. The World Bank was concerned about the fiscal crisis and conflated the growing resistance through economic disruption by transport workers and small farmers with the increasingly vociferous demands for multiparty democracy. The World Bank offered Moi an ultimatum in December 1991: repeal the section of the Constitution which made Kenya a single party state or lose financial assistance from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as from the ‘Paris Club’ of donors which took its cues from the Bretton Woods institutions. Within days, Moi capitulated. He was not so willing, however, to allow voters to decide the political future of the country on their own. In 2001,

Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons remained unable to return after being driven from their homes in state‑sponsored attacks since 1991 directed against members of ethnic groups perceived to support the political opposition. The authorities continued during the year to fail to provide adequate security to those who sought to return to their homes under assurances of safety, nor were land titles restored to those who were wrongfully deprived. Nor had the government held those responsible for the violence accountable. In 1999, a presidential Commission on the Ethnic Clashes wound up after eleven months of hearing evidence, including from Human Rights Watch, about the violence between 1991 and 1998. As of October 2000, the commission's findings had still not been released, though the completed report had been submitted to the president over a year before (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2001).

Behind the increasing competition for land in the public sphere was structural adjustment’s insistence on privatization, or as the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics and ex-World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, calls it, “briberization-privatization.” In Kenya in 1994, about 2.5 million hectares, or 20% to 25% of the most arable land, was owned by large scale farmers (Foeken and Tellegen 1994:3). On these large farms, hundreds of thousands of acres lay idle. Thousands of Kenyans live as agricultural labourers on these estates, or nearby in squatter communities on public land. Those Kenyans who own small farms or occupy communally owned land are situated, economically and socially, between the large land owners and the landless, who squat on rural land or make their livelihoods in urban slums. Squatters on public land in urban areas live in substandard accommodation, which they either build from scavenged cardboard and flattened tin cans or rent from landlords who have no legal title to the land. 

In 2001, slumdwellers defied landlords by asserting collective rights to housing plots. Nairobi’s Kibera slum houses more than 700,000 people (Otieno 4 December 2001). In an October 2001 public address, Kenya’s President Moi acknowledged the problem of landlords charging exorbitant rents for slum houses: “most of the semi‑permanent residential houses stand on State land and the landlords pay nothing to the Government, yet they are fleecing the tenants. These people own the land illegally and in fact they should be prosecuted. As of now we will not do that, but they have to ensure that they charge reasonable rents.” (Openda 1 November 2001). Within a month, urban villagers in Kibera acted on Moi’s delegitimization of fake slumlords who “should be prosecuted.” The slum dwellers “organised themselves into a tenants’ association, and vowed to halt rent payments until the Provincial Commissioner issued new guidelines” (Gaitho 20 November 2001).  Landlords refused to lower rents and called in police to disperse the tenants, who gathered daily for rallies and discussions. Ten days later, on 30 November, the Daily Nation reported that

Tenants of the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi began to flee their homes yesterday, amid claims of rampant looting and rape by police. ... A middle aged woman said she was forced to strip and was molested by policemen, but was not raped. Other tenants said they saw women being raped in some bars but the victims were not willing to speak of their ordeal (Thuku 30 November 2001).

Government Ministers proposed rent cuts to avert the spread of the rent strikes. Landlords offered a 20 per cent reduction. Tenants insisted on a 50 per cent cut (Otieno 4 December 2001). Three quarters of a million slum dwellers, through their tenants’ organization, decided autonomously the value of their accommodation. Auto-valuation of rents was combined with self-taxing. Many Kibera slum dwellers each paid ten shillings a month to Mungiki (Congress) and formed community defense posses against police attack.

Poor living conditions in the slums and in rural areas are accompanied by poor health and education. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Dr. David Gitari, holds the government responsible for the poverty and ill health resulting from the de-funding of schools and medical centres. Dr. Gitari decried the fact that child mortality rates had “increased from 62 per 1000 live births in 1988‑1993 to 74 children per 1000 live  births in 1998.” The mortality rate of children under five years of age had also shot up. “During the first two decades after independence [1963-1983], there was an improvement in the health status of the population with a marked decline in mortality and morbidity rates and increase in life expectancy, an achievement the Government has been unable to improve or sustain” (Oywa 8 October 2001). Despite grinding poverty and repression, millions of peasants produce food and hundreds of thousands of land-poor and landless people process and trade it in rural and urban areas of the country. The persistence of this subsistence political economy has ensured that most of the population is supplied with at least the bare necessities, which in turn allows them to struggle to increase their control over land and their own lives.

The struggle for land in this new period of upheaval in Kenya pits those who promote capitalist enterprise against those who reassert a subsistence political economy in concert with others worldwide engaged in popular ‘globalization from below.’ In Part One, we draw distinctions between two types of land redistribution programs and introduce seven types of land occupations which are differentiated from one another according to the relations between the land occupiers and the land owners. We then define the concepts we use to analyze the land occupation movement: commodification, subsistence, the male deal, gendered class alliances and the fight for fertility. 

In Part Two, we document ten cases of land occupation by land poor peasants and squatters. We assess the extent to which subsistence is furthered in the course of the occupations by considering the gendered class politics of two organizations involved in the occupations: Mungiki (Congress, literally, in Gikuyu, “we are the public”) and Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers). These organizations embody the resurgence of Mau Mau. In the face of land  privatization programmes sponsored by the World Bank, which tend to increase instead of alleviate landlessness, the urban-based Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) and the massive Mungiki (Congress) have arisen to address, among many other realities, the immediate needs of the impoverished for land.

Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) is an organization with approximately 10,000 members, all of whom are land-poor slumdwellers, or ‘urban villagers.’ The self-organized congregation is distinctive for its multi-ethnic membership, women’s prominence and militant non-violent direct action tactics in defense of urban villagers and market retailers’ land rights. Muungano members trace their political roots back to Mau Mau. They trace their current landlessness to Kenyatta’s betrayal of the Mau Mau objective of “land for all.” Muungano women assert that in the guerilla war against British land alienation, “women never surrendered” (First Woman, wa Thungu, 29 May 1996).

Mungiki (Congress) is a multi-class, mass organization that claims 4.5 million members. These are drawn from a cross-section of society, and include dispossessed hawkers as well as members of the Kenyan Parliament and armed forces. Mungiki members pay monthly dues of ten Kenya shillings [about 15 US cents] and have made significant progress towards establishing workers’ control over labour processes and resources, including public transport. Mungiki’s strength amongst hawkers and small retailers protects the subsistence political economy. We assess these two organizations’ capacities to re-assert and ‘re-invent the commons’ by considering their stands on female education and female genital mutilation.

We conclude this study of land occupation by assessing the gains and losses experienced by the parties to the conflict over entitlements to land. We locate the Kenyan land occupations within the movement of globalization from below which is coalescing in international resistance to corporate rule.

Land privatization verus redistribution

The World Bank and popular social movements advocate conflicting types of land redistribution. Both the privatizers and the redistributors claim that their type of ‘land reform’ will solve the problems of hunger, poverty and landlessness. In ‘popular redistributive land reform,’ land is re-allocated to all for the primary purpose of supporting life. In contrast, ‘World Bank sponsored corporate land privatization,’ seeks the commodification of land and its sale to individual capitalist farmers who have ‘purchasing power’ and seek to expand commercial exploitation.

The World Bank ‘land reforms’ enclose and release land to the market, thereby making it inaccessible to the poor. Judith Achieng’s critique of World Bank ‘land reforms’ in Kenya (9 December 2000) cites the alternatives posited by the global movement of landless people. In 2000, the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and the FoodFirst Information Action Network (FIAN) initiated a global campaign for agrarian reform:

The campaign was initiated in recognition of the human right to food, recognised under article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which stipulates that landless peasants and agricultural workers must gain access to those resources, mainly land, with which they can produce food. Under this article, land reform is spelled out as one of the most important means of realising the right to food (Achieng’ 9 December 2000).

Kenya’s land occupation movement carries on the popular redistributive land reforms that were begun by the Mau Mau, forestalled by Kenyatta’s Independence deal of ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ and taken up again by the children and grandchildren of Mau Mau in the contemporary resurgence. Table 1 below contrasts the distinctive characteristics of World Bank corporate ‘land privatization’ with the social movements’ redistribution of ‘land for all.’

Table #1: Difference between World Bank corporate ‘land reform’ and popular redistributive land reform
Features	World Bank corporate land privatization	Popular redistributive land reform	
Ownership	Privatization of communal land breaks down community-based resource management systems and accelerates land degradation. Facilitation of land markets induces mass sell-offs of land, increasing landlessness, land concentration and rural-urban migration.	The vast majority of the rural poor must be beneficiaries of land redistribution to avoid building new hierarchies of land poverty and land concentration.	
Titles	Ownership is concentrated in men’s hands, leading to conflicts with women and the destitution of women and children in case of divorce or the death of male land owners. Land is used as collateral for loans, leading in many cases to foreclosure and bank seizure of farms and property.	Women’s right to hold title deeds to land alleviates domestic disputes and the destitution of women and children. Collective title deeds, which forbid alienation and use of land as collateral, affirm security of tenure for occupants.	
Means of redistribution	Market-led redistribution offers credit to the landless to buy land from wealthy farmers. Rural elites maintain their power to distort and capture policies, subsidies and windfall profits.	The landless and land poor can escape heavy indebtedness through government expropriation of idle land, with or without compensation to land owners. The power of rural elites must be effectively broken by the reforms.	
Types of land	Often, wealthy land owners sell marginal, remote and ecologically fragile land to the land poor at exorbitant prices. This increases deforestation, desertification and soil erosion. Marginal and remote lands have poor soils and little market access. Parcels sold by landowners are often those which are in dispute, such as from indigenous peoples’ land claims, pitting the poor against the poor.	The land must be of good quality, rather than ecologically fragile, and it must be free of disputed claims by other poor people. Recognition of the benefits of indigenous uses of fragile ecosystems (rainforests, savannahs) is critical to conserving these areas. Support is required so that degraded or mined soils can be restored.	
Credit and debt	Credit is offered, but tied to the production of pesticide-reliant export cash crops. Heavy debts, high interest rates, along with poor soils and poor market access leads to repossession of land by banks.	More than land is needed: credit on reasonable terms, or preferably, collective savings (merry-go-rounds, sou-sou), infrastructure, support for ecologically sound technologies and access to markets.	
Type of production promoted	Advocates of chemical agriculture for export claim it will raise money for farmers to pay debts, but it leads to intensification of land degradation and ecological problems. Due to dependence on world market prices, producers have no control over the sale price of crops.	Small family farms must become the centrepiece of economic development. Family farms can resuscitate rural economies: small farmers sell their produce in rural markets and buy supplies from local merchants. Family farms boost urban economies as well. 	
Examples 	Central America: During the 1980s and 1990s, USAID promotion of non-traditional export crops which are reliant on pesticides and chemical fertilizers intensified land degradation and ecological problems and left poor farmers in risky enterprises with high failure rates. More land concentration and landlessness were results.	Brazil: The Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) has succeeded in winning titles for more than 250,000 families on over 15 million acres of land since 1985. Towns with MST settlements nearby are now better off economically than other towns. 	

Sources: First Woman 2001, based on Rosset, Peter, “Tides shift on agrarian reform: New movements show the way,” Third World Resurgence, No. 129/130, May/June, 2001, pp. 43-48.
Types of Land Occupation

Mau Mau was made a fighting force in the 1950s by peasants who were evicted from land and denied “access to compensatory land” (Youe 2001:190). Evictions and new enclosures occurred again between 1986 and 2002. It is within a context of forced eviction, increasing inequality in the distribution of resources and the growing negative impact of World Trade Organization corporate rule policies on the majority of people in Kenya that widespread land re-appropriations take on the character of a ‘Mau Mau resurgence.’ This study examines the gendered social anatomy of a renewed popular uprising. The land occupations which are prominent in the resurgence of struggle include the following seven types, which reflect different relationships of power between the ‘owner’ of the land and those who assert entitlements to it: 

I. British legal claims (occupiers with title deeds)

(1) reassertions of subsistence production on peasants’ own land, especially after the failure of commodity production (peasants destroy export crops and plant food, such as in Maragua).

(2) defense of peasants’ own land from incursion and attack by state-sponsored land grabs and clearances (Githima, Molo).

II. Customary claims

(3) assertion of occupational entitlements by communities dwelling within state-owned forests;

(4) assertion of ownership entitlements by labourers or community members to other state-owned land and experimental agricultural stations (Agricultural Development Corporation farms);

(5) outright re-appropriation, by resident labourers, of land owned by transnational corporations or private individuals (plantations, agribusinesses, large farms, ranches and estates such as Basil Criticos’); and

III. Moral claims

(6) assertion of ownership and control over the management of resources by tenants on state-operated settlement schemes (Mwea Irrigation Scheme);

(7) occupation and defense of urban market sites and ‘slum’ residence areas by traders and residents (Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto, Kamae);

Against the encroachment by land grabbers and agents of export-oriented trade (such as private sector agricultural extension workers) claimants in all seven relationships are defending and reasserting their rights to land and resources for their own collective survival.

The Fight for Fertility

Our framework for understanding the struggle for land identifies three parties to a ‘fight for fertility:’ 1) women and men, united against class antagonists; 2) local men who ‘sell out’ to foreign capitalists; and 3) foreign capitalists who profit from the exploitation of land and labour. We define ‘fertility’ broadly, as the capacity to produce - to produce children, to produce food and other crops and to produce cultural expressions and social networks. The fight for fertility in Kenya is a fight centred around the control of land and women’s agricultural labour. ‘Control’ over land and labour may constitute part of the social organization of ‘commodified’ political economies or of ‘subsistence’ political economies.

Commodification is the complex of social processes through which all aspects of life’s continuation, including production, exchange, consumption and the preservation of the natural world, which had previously taken place in communal subsistence-focused social arrangements, are restructured and given market value. Capitalists operating nationally and internationally directly contribute to the destruction of the subsistence realm as they construct commodified social relations. In the commodified political economy, life sustaining activities are supplanted by profiteering and speculation – the turning of money demand into more money demand (McMurtry 1999, 2002). Commodification is central to capitalist industrialization. It is inherently global and enforces an extreme division of labour. It also structures and inflames divisions amongst labourers, for instance through constructing difference as divisive. Bennholdt-Thompson and Mies (1999:20-21) note that within the commodified political economy, 

life is, so to speak, only a coincidental side-effect. It is typical of the capitalist industrial system that it declares everything that it wants to exploit free of charge to be part of nature, a natural resource. To this belongs the housework of women as well as the work of peasants in the Third World, but also the productivity of all of nature.

A commodified political economy is wholly and parasitically reliant on the subsistence political economy. Capitalism cannot exist without the exploitation of the free subsistence labour of housewives, peasants and indigenous people worldwide, who ‘produce’ people, food supplies and ‘nature’ and ‘consume’ the products of the capitalist market. Capital needs labour. But labour does not need capital. In this sense, labour is autonomous from capital (Dyer-Witheford 1999).

We characterize the subsistence political economy as autonomous from capital and the commodified political economy, or containing the potential for autonomy. The subsistence political economies which exist today in the interstices of capital’s rule, have in fact survived decades, and in many cases, centuries of attack and parasitism by the capitalist political economy. As we see it, the subsistence political economy is historically a life economy. It is focused on the production of life. It is the source of the culture of connectedness and community against the culture of capitalism which deifies possessive individualism and competition. Subsistence at its fullest includes not only food production for local consumption and regional trade, but a host of activities and sets of social networks whose main aim is to support and enhance human existence. Subsistence production, or what we alternatively refer to as the subsistence political economy, “includes all work that is expended in the creation, re-creation and maintenance of immediate life and which has no other purpose” (Bennholdt-Thompson and Mies, 1999:20). 

Parties to the fight for fertility struggle to create, maintain and defend either subsistence or commodification, depending on their class affiliations and aspirations. Capitalists commodify. Those dispossessed and exploited by capital, in contrast, can be divided into two groups: one which pursues the defense, maintenance and elaboration of subsistence and one which ‘buys into’ the capitalist deal by involving themselves in capitalist production and disciplining the labour of others, especially the unwaged labour of women, children, indigenous people and peasants. These three positions - 1) exploited people’s subsistence, 2) exploited people’s compromise with capital and 3) capitalists’ commodification - succinctly characterize the three standpoints in the fight for fertility that is expressed in the ten cases of land occupation reviewed in this study.

We now consider in more detail the three parties to the fight for fertility. First, women have a special stake in exercising control over their own fertility. They often act to maintain or regain control over their own fertility (labour, land, children, food) against the dictates of their husbands and fathers, against the state and its laws and against the plans and policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and corporate rule regime. Hence, when women rise up, they directly challenge international capital.

The first party to the fight for fertility, then, embraces women producers - in Kenya, mainly land poor farmers and small traders - who struggle to regain or maintain control over their own labour, access to land of their own and the elaboration of subsistence systems which support life (as opposed to capitalists’ profits). Men (husbands, young men) who have broken with their compromise with capital often join women in what we call a ‘gendered class alliance’ to resist capitalist enclosure. The gendered class alliance is formed through struggle when men abdicate their control over women’s labour and join women in seeking just and equitable redistribution of resources and power.

The second party to the fight for fertility includes local Kenyan men - husbands, chiefs, policemen, state officials, businessmen - who work on behalf of local and foreign capital to control ‘fertility’ for profit making purposes. These might be Kenyan capitalists or exploited Kenyans who compromise with capital, in what we call a ‘male deal’ (Dauda 1994, Turner and Oshare 1994). Male dealers typically negotiate relationships which benefit capital and themselves at the expense of the exploitation of women, most dispossessed men and the environment. Examples of male deals include the contracting of male heads of households to grow coffee, tea and other export crops for delivery to transnational corporations. Corporations and their stockholders reap most of the profit from the trade of such crops. While small land holding men in these deals may make minor earnings, women who actually produce the crops lose out on income and land for food and many other dimensions of control over fertility and life. Landless men have fewer opportunities to gain access to land as land becomes highly commodified. The environment is ravaged by the use of chemicals in the production process. Chiefs, police, businessmen and state officials all take part in the coffee and tea male deals in Kenya. When first the wives, and then most husbands broke this male deal in Maragua (detailed in Part Two), the entire chain of male dealers involved in the industry faced a loss of profits, including the foreign participants in the deal, such as coffee capitalists, investors, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

This brings us to the third party to the fight for fertility, that is, foreign capitalists and agents of capitalist development. Capitalists in banks, agriculture and industry are the critical international partners in the male deals. These international partners have taken up where colonialists left off in 1963, in that they use male deals to continue neo-colonial ‘indirect rule.’ International capitalists promote accumulation and sanction its violent enforcement in ex-colonies. United States business economics professor, Ronald Seavoy, wrote in 2000 that “Contrary to what most scholars teach, investments in armed forces are one of the most productive investments that governments of peasant nations can make. ... all police and soldiers ... must be prepared to enforce commercial policies on peasants with the maximum amount of violence if necessary (Seavoy 2000:113, emphasis added). In order to establish, extend and maintain capitalist production, international capitalists and national governments engage local men in male deals to discipline especially women’s labour into production for international markets and the benefit of foreign profit-makers.

Historically, colonialists and African male dealers buried or erased previous social rights and customs which gave women considerable power over land and their own sexualities. Wealthy African men and chiefs who testified before to the Native Land Tenure commission in 1929, for instance, kept secret certain Kikuyu customs such as the right of women to become ‘female husbands.’ Widows married other women in order to maintain ownership of their dead husband’s land. The ‘wife’ was encouraged to bear children, who inherited through the female husband and ‘father.’ One writer of the 1929 report noted that colonialists had difficulty in obtaining information about women’s land rights, “probably because it is a relic of mother-right which is a custom fast disappearing and which the natives no longer wish to admit as custom” (Kenya 1929:26 cited in MacKenzie 1990: 69). Another custom which reveals women’s wider spectrum of choices and powers in the pre-colonial period is that of mwendia ruhui. In this practice a widow took a male lover who was usually landless to provide labour in exchange for food and to father children to inherit the dead husband’s land. Commenting on informants’ reluctance to speak about the practice of mwendia ruhui, the 1929 report noted that “it is a practice which they wish to discontinue as soon as possible because it is a relic of matrilineal and matrilocal customs which have fallen into desuetude” (Kenya 1929:72 cited in MacKenzie 1990: 69).

The male deal in the 1929 Land Commission hearings involved British-appointed chiefs dismissing land distribution practices which were positive for both women and landless men. These male dealing chiefs reduced the numbers of people within their own communities who had legitimate customary claim to land. The chiefs in effect allowed the colonialists to alienate Africans’ land and to fix boundaries around ‘reserve’ land that Africans’ were allowed to occupy. In exchange, the chiefs accorded to themselves greater control over the allocation of land within these ‘reserves’ by burying women’s and landless men’s land rights during a time that was marked by an often violent transition from communal to individual land ownership, especially in the Kikuyu reserves. Colonialists obtained the chiefs’ tacit agreement to continuous European theft of land. By the early 1940s, landless women and men were organized to resist their dispossession by chiefs and European colonialists who faced the wrath of the armed Mau Mau uprising of 1952.

In summary, the fight for fertility is a conceptual tool which may be used to map out the social relations amongst the gendered and ethnicized class antagonists involved in the processes of commodification and resistance to it. Capitalists employ ‘male deals’ to accommodate men from the exploited class within a hierarchy of exploitation and profit extraction central to the process of commodification. Male dealers act as buffers between the exploited and capitalists, and as channels, passing the goods and services of the exploited up to capitalists. Dispossessed women, who shoulder the brunt of exploitation by producing both labour power and other commodities, are often first to resist (Turner and Benjamin 1995). In their resistance, dispossessed women break with men who are entangled in the male deal. These women sometimes gain the support of men who themselves break with the male deal and join women in gendered class alliances. We now turn to the specific character of the fight for fertility in ten cases of land occupation between 1986 and 2002.

Part Two: Land Occupations and the Fight For Fertility

In this part of the study, we examine ten land occupations which together illustrate many facets of the fight for fertility in Kenya in the new millennium. These cases are exemplary instances of the seven types of land occupation listed in Part One. Peasants’ and squatters’ defense of the land they occupy follows upon attempts by others to control the land or evict the occupants. We include four cases of the occupation and defense of urban market sites and slum villages, as this is the one type embracing the reality of city life. We examine six other cases which represent the other six types of land occupation. Each of these six cases takes place in a rural area. These rural cases involve peasants’ defense and reassertion of subsistence on their own land and squatters’ occupation of forests, experimental agricultural stations, private land and settlement schemes. The 1990s land grab politics motivate dispossessed peoples’ occupation and defense of land to which they have legal, customary and moral claims. Each of the ten cases is described by text and by a chart which assesses the gains and losses experienced by the three parties to the fight for fertility: women and men united in gendered class alliances; local Kenyan male dealers and foreign capitalists. This part of the study examines the social anatomy of the land occupations in terms of the changes in gendered class relations which characterize each.

1. Maragua: peasants reassert subsistence on their own land

In Maragua, in central Kenya, small land owning peasants have grown coffee for three decades. Though they own their own land, they are prevented by law from uprooting coffee trees. The milling and marketing of peasants’ coffee crops fell completely into the hands of undemocratic cooperative society officials, state marketing board managers and agents of multinational food and beverage corporations which purchased the beans. Farmers had no say in the price of their crop and were subjected to the vagaries of the global market and currency fluctuations. They were also subjected to a host of price and import policies imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, including the privatization of agricultural extension services. Such policies increase private investors’ profits by directly impoverishing coffee farmers. 

Since 1985, women small coffee farmers in Maragua (two to ten acre farms) have torn out coffee trees and replaced them with bananas and other vegetables. After a decade of falling prices, many of their husbands had expanded their coffee plots into women’s food plots in an effort to recoup income. Women in Maragua challenged their husbands, the state and the World Bank, which pushes export production because government revenue from exports is channeled directly into debt repayment and petroleum imports. The transformation in Maragua involved an integrated build up of social networks with other women farmers, with transporters and with market traders. Many local youth and most women’s husbands joined in replacing coffee with bananas and other locally tradeable crops. Maragua women took control over their labour, the crops that they produced and their family land. They began to rebuild a subsistence political economy which supported their own family’s welfare and the welfare of land poor women and men. All were engaged in local and regional transport as well as in wholesale and retail produce trade (Turner et al, 1997; Turner and Brownhill 2001).

2. Mwea: tenants assert control over state-operated settlement scheme

Mwea is a state-run rice irrigation scheme. The colonial government developed irrigation at Mwea detention camp in 1953 using captive labour “of the Mau Mau detainees made available after the declaration of state of emergency in October 1952 and the ensuing Mau Mau war” (Njihia 1984:1). Because they were left landless after the war, many of the detainees had no alternative to remaining in the detention camp. In 1961, the emergency was over and the state recast the Mwea detention camp as the Mwea Irrigation Scheme. Residents are classified as ‘tenants.’ The National Irrigation Board sells milling and marketing services and inputs to the farmers.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, tenants of the Mwea irrigation scheme mounted a struggle to force the government to issue title deeds to the residents, many of whom had lived in the scheme for over thirty years (Turner et al. 1997). Single and divorced women had already begun to cultivate land on the edges of the scheme, and to divert water, land and inputs in the scheme to the cultivation of tomatoes. Some young men and women in Mwea were also involved in the trade of rice on the parallel market, to avoid channeling the produce through the monopoly National Irrigation Board (NIB) marketing mechanism, which subtracted production costs from farmers’ pay packets. 

Many wives in Mwea struggled with their husbands over control over land and labour. Women’s efforts to control their own labour and to use some of the inputs at the scheme to grow subsistence crops contravened not only the husbands’ authority, but the government’s directives on the production of maximum rice yields. According to a 1984 study in Mwea, the farmers who delivered the highest yields of rice to the National Irrigation Board, were men “aged between 36 and 40 years, had previously been traders and had three wives" (Njihia, 1984:7). Such men were classified in the report as “good farmers” who could control large amounts of family labour producing rice, and prevent the diversion of inputs to wives’ production of tomatoes and other vegetables. The report characterized farmers as “bad farmers” those men who had some or all of the following characteristics: 

1. Misdirected motivation or lack of it. Some farmers preferred salaried employment. They would, therefore, leave their holdings temporarily unattended for short periods while engaging in such activities.

2. Poor motivation. Lazy. They do not follow instructions.

3. Social weaknesses. a) No proper family, mainly bachelors (young or old). Lack reliable labour and proper control of inputs and output. b) Unstable families. Farmer is swindled by wives or sons. c) Old and physically weak. Lack strength and managerial capacity. d) Physically and mentally sick.

4. Unfaithful to scheme management. They sell some of their produce in the black market. They might sell some of their inputs also (Njihia, 1984, p. 7).

Those men who "leave their holdings unattended," in reality leave their wives unattended. The women then irrigate their vegetables with water from rice paddies. Men who do not "control" their womenfolk, find that they divert their energies into vegetable production. Without question violence is often a method of control (Stamp 1989:66). The government encouraged this violence by rewarding “good farmers” who disciplined their wives’ labour most effectively. In the mid-1980s battered women frequently fled from their husbands who consequently became "bad farmers" with "no proper family." By 1998, women faced such violence at the hands of Mwea men, and poverty in the face of exploitation by the National Irrigation Board, that most young women refused to marry (Mwea men 23 July 1998). 

Finally, late in 1998, Mwea women and men together staged an uprising and took control of the scheme. Many women and young men had established illicit rice and vegetable production and trade, and used the newly constructed subsistence system as a basis for the solidarity necessary to take over the scheme altogether. While many Mwea residents stopped growing rice and plant tomatoes instead, others divert their rice to the parallel, or producer-controlled, market. Still others have tried to sell their rice to the National Irrigation Board. This state Board, however, can no longer on-sell all of the Mwea rice, even at the reduced rate of production after the farmers’ takeover of the scheme. The near-monopoly that Mwea farmers had had on the commercial domestic rice trade was broken in the late 1990s when corporations took advantage of World Bank ‘trade liberalization’ policies and flooded the Kenyan market with cheaper, dumped rice from Asia. In addition, the government has the Mwea Rice Mill slated for privatization, and is inviting international corporations to invest in commercial rice production. Investors encourage the return of the “good,” albeit violent, husband. They introduce genetically modified rice for export and experiment with new seed propagation methods.

The parallel markets which have developed in Mwea over the last decade provide a means through which women land occupiers advance their control over their own labour, both within and outside of marriage. Gendered class alliances strengthen young Mwea men’s access to land. These alliances have challenged all the rules of the scheme, including the disinheritance of sons. As farmers increasingly control their own production, they further expand their social networks to facilitate exchange through relations with secure public transporters and reliable market retailers. Environmental realities facing residents include polluted ground water and deforestation. The diversification of crop production in Mwea increases the soil’s fertility. Planting of fruit and nut trees promotes the reclamation of the physical environment and self-provisioning.

Four Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) land occupations 

In Kenya, the poor have no security where they live. In Nairobi, at least 65 percent of over three million people live in the slums, making most of them de facto squatters. The little rooms they rent or the shacks they have put up can be demolished any time, day or night, with everything they own either destroyed or stolen. The poor are considered "illegal" in their own country, that is, without rights, because they do not have a title deed. How can one expect peace and development in large African cities like Nairobi where hundreds of thousands of squatters live in daily fear, insecurity and uncertainty? (Land Caucus October 1999)

Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, has a population of close to four million. Approximately 55 percent of these inhabitants are forced to live in one of the 100 slums spread throughout the city. In these areas the state does not provide any physical or social services including water, sanitation, roads, electricity, health care centers or schools. The poor live in small, overcrowded shacks made of rusting tin and mud. More shocking than the squalid conditions  in which they live is the fact that they are crammed onto less than 1.5 percent of the land in Nairobi, and yet that land is not their own (Maryknoll August 2000).

According to the Mau Mau struggle, everybody was to own land, some piece of land to occupy. Now you can find some government officials with something to do with 100 plots in one city. And thousands of people have nowhere to call home. Now our future plan is to struggle with them until they agree that the land in Nairobi is ours, all, including them. So Muungano will not sleep, will fight, struggle for this land (First Woman, Livingstone Gichamo, 25 July 1998).

We the Muungano wa Wanavijiji [Organization of Villagers] want this: after we teach the people how to fight for their rights, and after repossessing our villages, we want everybody, meaning the poor people, to have better living conditions and development in that village. ... Like having good schools, and everything good so that our children could also develop and also [have] good health. Because the situation we are in now is awful. And that is why the grabbers get the chance to come and destroy our houses and grab the village. Because when they burn our houses, they just burn easily. But when we build permanent houses, they can’t burn easily (First Woman, Sabina Wanjiku 25 July 1998).

3. Muruoto: occupation and defense of urban market and residential site

The 3,000 residents and traders in the urban slum village of Muruoto were traders and suppliers of cooked food to the urban work force. A majority of those who prepare and sell processed food on the Nairobi streets and in small markets are women. They, on average, earn more than men in the prepared food trade (Spring 2000:333). Food retailers earn a decent living and link rural subsistence farmers to the urban food markets. On 25 May 1990, officers of the Nairobi City Council, in an effort to ‘clean up’ the city, attempted to demolish Muruoto. Police were called in but residents fought them off with stones. There ensued a three day, pitched battle between the police and the residents of Muruoto. Finally, the police and demolition crews retreated and the Muruoto people remained to occupy the land and defend their homes. A massive, well-organized general strike, with rallies and demonstrations, took place six weeks later, from 7 to 10 July 1990, spurred in part by the popular outcry against the attack on Muruoto. The strike was enforced by youth who stopped all transport into and out of Nairobi. They lit bonfires and put up barricades across major roads, and dropped stones onto passing transporters who defied the ‘general strike’ call. Soon, no drivers dared to be on the road. 

The occupants of Muruoto, some of whom were elderly Mau Mau women, were finally evicted in an unannounced raid in October 1990. Several people were killed when the demolition crews flattened homes while their owners slept inside. In the fight that broke out, at least one City Council guard was killed. The city offered no alternative location for the residents of Muruoto. A senior operative in the Nairobi City Council was widely believed to have been behind the demolition. It is rumoured that he illicitly acquired the title deed for the Muruoto land. After the final clearance in October 1990, the Muruoto land was allegedly sold by the operative for a hugely inflated price to the cooperative society of the City Council workers. After the purchase of the land, the corrupt cooperative society officials allocated further monies from the City Council workers’ pension fund to build an office block on the Muruoto land (First Woman, 17 November 2001).

4. Westlands: occupation and defense of urban market site

In 1992 a Nairobi businessman claimed ownership of Westlands market, the site of small kiosks run by several hundred retailers from the slums. Small retailers of cooked food and fresh produce supported their children with the money they earned in this well-situated market. Its choice location gave slum dwellers access to the high-end market at Westlands, where Europeans, Asians and wealthy Africans shopped. Many of the kiosks and stalls in Westlands were owned by men, who ran businesses ranging from shoe and electronics repairs to retail sales of produce and used clothing. 

The small traders’ kiosks are located outside of a shopping centre owned and operated mainly by Asian businesses. The Asians’ shops in Westlands stock many items which are imported from companies from abroad, such as Outspan and Ceres orchards in South Africa. Prices are higher in the shops than in the kiosks outside, with the result that many customers prefer to purchase produce in the kiosks. Transnational corporations must compete with these Kenyan ‘informal sector’ traders, including those dealing in subsistence goods, ‘appropriated’ items (such as cast off flowers from flower plantations) and the parallel market rice. Many store owners advocated the removal of the kiosks. The small traders defended their rights to occupy the market and the case went to court. The court heard the case for six years, and finally decided against the small retailers and in favour of the businessman. Immediately thereafter, in April 1998, a demolition crew arrived at Westland market and flattened it, without notice and without allowing retailers to retrieve their merchandise. Members of the Organization of Villagers protested the demolition. Police arrested ten. In solidarity, 65 other Organization of Villagers members demanded to be taken into custody as well. Forty of the arrested were women. The 75 protestors were remanded for one week and upon their release, they rebuilt Westlands market (First Woman 25 July 1998).

5. Soweto: occupation and defense of urban residential site

The Soweto slum community within Nairobi shares more than a name with the Soweto township in Johannesburg, South Africa. The two Sowetos have more in common than extreme poverty, poor living conditions and state harassment. Residents share a militancy characterized by students’ massive uprising against the apartheid regime in South Africa’s Soweto in 1976 and by residents’ determined resistance to landgrabbers and demolition crews in Kenya’s Soweto in 1996.

In December 1996, occupants of the Soweto slum village were attacked, and their homes burned by thugs suspected to have been hired by a businessman who claimed ownership of the land. A few days later, one of the 100 men mobilized to finish the demolition of Soweto was cornered by the residents. They beat him unconscious. Television cameras captured a woman and several men pouring kerosene on his body and burning him to death. Jane Wairimu Mwangi was arrested for pouring kerosene on him from her lamp before a man threw a match onto his body. Many other women and men were arrested and detained without charge in January 1997. (Those arrested included Marion Wairimu and her four month old baby, who was ill at the time) Residents then rebuilt their tin and timber houses, only to see them destroyed again a week later. “Armed police sealed off the Soweto slum village, Nairobi, as hired men pulled down the structures built on a plot reportedly owned by a city tycoon. ... Attempts by the villagers to resist eviction failed because of the police presence” (Nation Correspondent, 31 December 1996:3). After living on the land for more then 23 years, Soweto residents were forcibly removed (Nation Correspondent, 21 December 1996:5). 

One woman occupant whose home was destroyed stated that “‘We are ready to die here unless we are compensated and given an alternative plot by the person behind the constant evictions from this land!’ ... A now homeless mother said villagers feared moving to an alternative site that had been pointed out to them at Kayole as it too belonged to an individual. ‘I have nowhere to go to because the new site belongs to somebody else who will definitely evict us,’ she said” (Nation Correspondent, 31 December 1996:3). 

Women members of the lobby group Release Political Prisoners (RPP) helped organize protests against the mass arrests of Soweto people in January 1997. Release Political Prisoners’ members mobilized with the Organization of Villagers, Mungiki (Congress) and Soweto residents to demonstrate against the police over the arrests. A white South African man was among the demonstrators. He was questioned by police, who also confiscated his passport and threatened to arrest him. The demonstrators insisted they would not vacate the police station without him. Police released him. The Daily Nation reported that “Mr. Wegerif, an opponent of the now defunct apartheid system, ... said he was told he had no right to intervene on behalf of the villagers since he is a tourist. ‘I’m not a tourist. I am a human rights activist,’ he said, likening the Soweto situation to the apartheid system in South Africa” (Konchora 14 January 1997:4).

6. Kamae: occupation and defense of urban residential site

In May 1998, a chief claimed ownership of a plot of land in Kamae village, 10 kilometers outside Nairobi. Kamae is home to a community made up of small scale subsistence farmers and casual labourers on nearby coffee estates. Most households are female headed. Residents claim that the land, part of a farm owned by Jomo Kenyatta, was given to them by the late president. On May 5, 1998, a chief moved in with dozens of armed guards to occupy a portion of the village land. He claimed he was going to build a home for street children. Kamae villager, Salome Wacera Wainaina (44 years), confronted the chief and called to her neighbours to help. The villagers came to resist the chief’s occupation of the land. Police shot into the crowd, killing Wainaina and injuring a young man. Caroline Atieno, a secretary of Organization of Villagers, stated that 

In Muungano, I can say that the women are in the front line. ... for example, in Kamae village, where a woman was in the front line protesting about the land grabbing. We Muungano and the Release Political Prisoners [lobby group] did a demonstration and left the coffin at the Provincial Commissioner’s office. So the women were the people who are very active in protesting (First Woman, Caroline Atieno 25 July 1998). 

The protestors demanded the arrest of the chief and the policeman who murdered Wainaina. The policeman was merely transferred to another division.

7. State-owned forests: forest dwellers’ assertion of occupational entitlements

Dozens of rural squatter families have been residing by the roadside around Mt. Kenya after the government evicted them from Mt Kenya and Aberdare forests in 1989. They are among the thousands of squatters that the government claims will be settled on 170,000 acres of land to be excised from state forests in Central and Rift Valley Provinces. The excision plans have set in motion a conflict amongst the government, squatters, donors and environmentalists (Kago and Munene 20 November 2001). 

Wangari Maathai and environmental activists in the Green Belt movement and in other civic organizations oppose the privatization of the forest land. They claim the forests are not only being allocated to forest dwellers, who survive especially on bee-keeping and the collection of wild honey. Genuine forest dwellers are hunters and gatherers who are very capable of preserving and nurturing the forest and its many resources, including water catchment areas. However, the environmentalists claim that much of the land has already been allocated  to private developers who will destroy the ecosystem (Kago and Munene 20 November 2001). Joseph Sergon, lawyer for the Ogieks of Mau West, “differs with Green Belt Movement co‑ordinator Wangari Maathai's blanket condemnation of the degazettement notice. ‘It is ironic that Professor Maathai could condemn an action that was for their [the Ogiek’s] benefit while all along she has been supporting their cause’” (Riunge 21 November 2001). At the same time, the Ogieks of Mau East plan to sue the government over the planned excision of more than 35,000 hectares of their forest, due to the allocation of plots in the forest to “some outsiders” (Riunge 21 November 2001). It is important to distinguish between the forest dwellers’ use and preservation of the forest and the private developers’ exploitation and destruction of forests. 

The government claims that it is responding to the needs of the landless by allocating forest land to them. But evidence of corruption in the allocation of land to big businessmen has raised serious concerns about who is making the decisions, and how the allocations are being made.
As of December 2001, the forest dwellers were excluded from decision making, while politicians and big businessmen advanced their own interests in the forest privatization exercise. For example, in October 2001, a Cabinet Minister “hived off” 1,000 acres of clan land from the Kaptagat Forest, without the blessings of elders of the community. In protest, residents pulled down the fence he had erected, and nine of them were charged. When a local chief asked elders to curse the nine, the elders refused. Instead they asked the chief to call the Minister before their council within two weeks to explain to them why he had alienated land without their permission (Ngure 8 November 2001). Because the Minister is making decisions the forest excisions will lead to the commodification of the forest, and therefore to the exclusion of subsistence users and the eventual destruction of the ecosystem. 

8. Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) farm: assertion of ownership by community members

Another area of major concern is in the allocation of public agricultural land. For instance, landless people are known to have worked for their entire lifetimes on Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) farms in the Rift Valley for a pittance. Yet the wheeler dealing landed aristocracy use their political and financial might to get huge chunks of such land whenever it is allocated at the expense of the poor. At the peak of the rampant land grabbing, some shameless fellows were going for land used for vital purposes such as agricultural research, army barracks and national parks! (Sisule 8 October 2001)

In early 2000, Marakwet squatters occupied a 14,500‑acre Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) farm in Cherangany, Rift Valley Province. They claimed that the land was a white settlers’ estate during the colonial period and was made into an experimental agricultural station after independence. President Jomo Kenyatta had given the land to the Marakwet people. In early 2000, however, some 500 Marakwet were evicted from the farm by armed General Service Unit soldiers. A section of the farm had been allocated to a senior government official. In May 2000, the Daily Nation reported that 

armed Marakwet youths barred a surveyor and a chief from entering the ADC farm. The youths, who carried arrows, swords and machetes, confronted the deputy district surveyor, Mr Naphtali Kinoti, and Kaplamai chief Michael Arusei, who fled. The 400 youths surrounded the officer's vehicle and pushed it off the road, saying the two had been sent to parcel out the land to top government officials. ... The Parliamentary Anti‑Corruption Committee has named prominent personalities said to have been allocated land on the farm, formerly known as Duke of Manchester (Nation 21 May 2000).

9. Criticos’ farm: re-appropriation of private land by resident labourers

Basil Criticos, a Greek-born Kenyan Member of Parliament, owns at least 72,000 acres of land in Eastern Kenya. Some 47,000 acres of this land are in Taveta. The other 25,000 acres are in the Jipe area. In early 2000, Member of Parliament Stephen Ndicho called on squatters in Kenya to follow the example of those in Zimbabwe who had invaded white owned land. Squatters had long been occupying Criticos’ land. When several thousand acres of Criticos’ sisal crop were burned in April 2000, Criticos accused Ndicho of inciting squatters to invade his farm. The President fired Criticos from his ministerial post and charged him with incitement when Criticos publicly protested that another 8,000 acres of his Taveta farm had been occupied by squatters.  The squatters accused Criticos of setting fire to Lutimae Nursery School and 18 other houses in a fit of anger (Nation 21 May 2000). 

Squatters organized into the Taveta Welfare Society. They claim that the tracts of land in question were taken from the indigenous people by force during the colonial era and that the sale of the land to Criticos’ father was later sanctioned by President Jomo Kenyatta's government. The Daily Nation reported that workers on the sisal plantation blamed Criticos for the tension on the farm, “noting that they had all been allowed by him to farm on the plantation as a reward for electing him the local MP. Said Mr Mwala Kizembe, who has lived on the farm since 1952: ‘It was Criticos himself who told us we are free to farm for subsistence because we had elected him. But we were surprised when he turned around and accused us of being invaders.’ He challenged Mr Criticos to pick out people he claimed had come from as far afield as Kitui to his farm” (Kwena 16 May 2001). 

Criticos had used his land as collateral for huge loans and could not pay his debts. The bank has taken possession and seeks to force a sale. The squatters occupying the land are resisting the sale. Consequently, the bank’s “property rights” are unenforceable. The Kenya government appears ineffective in securing private property. The conflicting assertions of ownership and entitlement to Criticos’ land has negative repercussions for all commercial farmers and their financiers in Kenya.

The squatters have protested the sale of Criticos’ land. Ruth Lelewu, chairperson of the Taveta Welfare Society, issued a statement in May 2001, vowing to block politician Harun Mwau’s attempt to buy vast tracts of the farm. “The Taveta community is not taking things lying down and very soon Mr Mwau will regret not only buying the farm but having such a desire. This is a matter of life and death. Depriving thousands of people of their birth‑right is not something to play with,” the statement read (Mutonya 8 June 2001).

10. Githima: Peasant defense of land against clearances by means of state sponsored violence

There is clear evidence that the government was involved in provoking this ethnic violence for political  purposes and has taken no adequate steps to prevent it from spiraling out of control. So far, we estimate that the clashes have left at least 1,500 people dead and 300,000 displaced. (Human Rights Watch November 1993)

The Kenyan government instigated the violence after being forced to concede to a multiparty system, in order to punish and disenfranchise ethnic groups associated with the opposition, while rewarding its supporters with illegally obtained land. ... the government has obstructed efforts to return the displaced to their homes. The government is responsible for harassing the displaced and those who assist them, while allowing the perpetrators of the violence to enjoy complete impunity (Human Rights Watch June 1997). 

One woman told me, one of the clash victims, I remember her verbatim words when she was testifying of her experience, and said, well, she has been a Christian. But for a long time, she did not imagine miracles happening. But she did see a miracle happen. And what was very significant was that Bishop Ndingi was not praying in the normal way. Because when he arrived in Molo and saw what was happening, these were the words of his prayer: “God! I am calling you to come to Molo now! Because whatever is at Molo, it is only you that can handle it. Can you come now?” And that woman was saying, the warriors now were moving to the Church, the sanctuary where the people had gone to take refuge. And they could see they were going to be burnt. But the moment Ndingi prayed like that, they don’t know what held up those warriors who were not able to move. And the Molo people became wild and moved after them. And that is when many of the warriors were killed and actually the Molo people accepted that they have to fight back and they started to organize themselves (First Woman, 27 April 1997).

Githima is a village near Kerisoi in Molo South in the Rift Valley. Before independence Githima was a farm of about 1,300 acres owned by a white settler. After independence, the government purchased the settler’s farm. In the mid 1960s, about 300 families joined together in a land-buying cooperative to buy the farm from the government. The cooperative’s members subdivided the land into four acre plots and negotiated a purchase arrangement allowing the new residents to pay off their shares over time. 

On the evening of 22 April 1992, most of the village men stayed outside keeping watch, as nearby villages had been attacked in the days before and leaflets had been spread around Githima warning Kikuyu residents to vacate or face attack. The villagers could hear war cries renting the air from a village about five kilometers away. The children could not sleep, but were told to stay inside. Many women stayed in their kitchens, near the fires, with their kitchen knives on hand. 

By morning, more than 2,000 attackers reached Githima. Six or seven hundred women and men of Githima’s population of approximately 3,000 stayed to fight the attackers. The rest, including children and pregnant women, were escorted by men through the forest to Kerisoi, the nearest town. Men disguised themselves in women’s clothes, since it was clear that though women and children were being killed, men were especially targeted.

The residents fought the attackers all day long. Helicopters landed nearby to resupply the attackers with arrows. They killed many of the Githima people. By evening, the villagers retreated to the town of Kerisoi. Among those killed that day were Mau Mau women and men who refused to retreat from the attackers. Within two days, all of the buildings in Githima had been burnt to the ground, all of the animals stolen or killed, and all of the property destroyed including fields of crops and the cooperative society tractor.

Between 1992 and 2002, most Githima residents returned to the village and rebuilt their homes. A sense of insecurity remains, however, and some residents have sold their farms to Kalenjin buyers. 

Chart 1: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Maragua		
Type of occupation by entitlement: peasants reassert subsistence on their own land		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Women moved from a commodified to a subsistence political economy, in which production, exchange and consumption of their crops were more firmly under their own control. Women re-collectivized their own labour so that the labour process changed from individualized to collective, from husband-directed to collectively-directed. Maragua women contributed to building up social networks with other women, with transporters and market traders. Men have also benefitted from women’s takeover of the coffee fields. Their families have more control over production and trade. Wealth is more concentrated in the village, instead of in capital and abroad.	
Kenyan male dealers	Many husbands challenged their wives’ transformation of Maragua farming, and threatened to throw them out if they would not pick coffee. These men are under new pressures to re-commodify farming with new export crops such as French beans, genetically modified bananas and strawberries. Christian clergy shored up marriages while bankers advised men to put women’s names on bank accounts so that women would continue to pick coffee. Local bankers pressured coffee growers to continue with the crop in order to repay loans. The Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK) began to lose its monopoly grip on the Kenyan coffee market after Maragua and other communities rejected coffee. The Coffee Board lost a significant source of foreign exchange.	
Foreign capital	The World Bank persists in giving loans to the Kenyan government to improve the coffee industry, which is so negative for women, children and the environment, and, in the end, for men as well. The corporations buying coffee in Kenya lost control over the Maragua land and labour. Other agencies, such as the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri‑biotech Applications (ISAAA) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada), which promote the cultivation of bananas and other horticultural crops for export, have made inroads in Maragua since 1996. This incursion threatens to break solidarity between women and men producing in the subsistence realm. It threatens and to re-commodify production.	

Chart 2: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Mwea		
Type of occupation by entitlement: tenants assert control over state-operated settlement scheme		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Mwea women have built resistance against male violence and the exploitative production regime in which that violence took place. They did so by occupying land and reappropriating resources, especially water, which irrigates land by ‘free’ gravity-driven diversion from a major river. A gendered class alliance formed between these subsistence-focused women and young as well as old men, who were considered “bad farmers” because they did not force women to produce rice for the National Irrigation Board and because they diverted inputs to other purposes, such as vegetable cultivation.	
Kenyan male dealers	Men who continue to deliver rice to the National Irrigation Board (NIB) after the 1998 scheme takeover, do so against the interests of the women, men and children who have asserted ownership of Mwea land. The National Irrigation Board still controls some land and labour by virtue of the Board’s marketing of some Mwea rice.	
Rice capitalists, agro-business	Japanese funders withdrew from an irrigation improvement project in 1998 when tenants took over the scheme and police killed two protestors. Seed corporations may try to re-enforce the male deal by promoting the cultivation of genetically modified “miracle” rice. Agro-chemical corporations and foreign aid agencies have supported the continuation of prison-like conditions in the scheme. International agro-corporations have dumped cheap rice on the Kenyan market after World Bank structural adjustment policies stipulated that borders be opened to transnational corporations’ imports.	

Chart 3: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Muruoto		
Type of occupation by entitlement: occupation and defense of urban market and residential site		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Arising out of the actions to rebuild and defend Muruoto came the Organization of Villagers, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, whose membership has grown to include residents and small scale traders from 80 of Nairobi’s slum villages (First Woman 25 July 1998). Young men organized with elderly women to protect residents who occupied Muruoto between May and October 1990. Many youth mobilized the Saba Saba (Kiswahili = Seven Seven, or 7 July 1990) general strike. Social upheaval and economic disruption began the final challenge to Moi’s single party dictatorship. City workers were forced to buy more expensive lunch foods in ‘hoteli’ and supermarkets, where owners sold unprepared foods for two to three times the price that Muruoto prepared food retailers and hawkers charged. Murang’a and other food stuff producers lost their outlet.	
Kenyan male dealers	State actors succeeded in privatizing state land and set a corrupt and murderous precedent of violent eviction, killing and forced sale. But the resistance the state faced was to prove fatal to the constitutional sanction of the single party regime. The ruling party capitulated to multiparty electoral democracy in December 1991.	
Foreign capitalists	The World Bank continued to support the Moi regime despite corruption and violence. The government had shown that it was capable of privatizing state assets, and pandering to international corporations, such as Hilton Hotels, who wanted the city centre ‘cleaned up’ for tourists. Only when the state was not able to keep up with debt repayments did the World Bank and Paris Club of donors threaten to cut off aid. Social movements and pressure from foreign donors forced Moi to rescind the single-party provision in the constitution in December 1991. Muruoto’s demolition was a precursor to rural land clearances, which in turn were facilitated by World Bank pressure to privatize land for commercial production. 	

Chart 4: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Westlands		
Type of occupation by entitlement: occupation and defense of urban market site		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Westlands market women built on the strength of the organization which arose out of the Muruoto demolition, the Organization of Villagers. They rebuilt their kiosks and defended their subsistence livelihoods, along with those of their rural suppliers and the jua kali (informal sector) artisans operating in Westlands. The majority of those arrested at the protest against the demolition were women (40 of the 75). Men of Westlands market also involved themselves in rebuilding and defending their kiosks.  Many Westlands women and men joined the Organization of Villagers.	
Kenyan male dealers	The businessman who claimed ownership of the Westlands market site was supported by the courts and the police. He also hired dispossessed men to demolish the market kiosks and in so doing, set the poor against the poor.	
Foreign capitalists	With the demolition of Westlands market, the imported foodstuffs in the shopping centre were sold more quickly, generating profits for foreign suppliers, such as Ceres and Outspan of South Africa.	

Chart 5: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Soweto		
Type of occupation by entitlement: occupation and defense of urban residential site		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	The Soweto residents lost their homes and many lost their places of business. They lost their community networks when they were scattered in a mini-diaspora after the demolition. Many Soweto women and men, however, began to involve themselves in new communities of resistance, in Release Political Prisoners, Organization of Villagers and Mungiki (Congress).	
Kenyan male dealers	Politically well-connected businessmen are able to call on the considerable power of the police and courts to protect and legitimate their claim to land occupied by dispossessed people.	
Foreign capitalists	The World Bank and other institutions promote privatization policies which have the effect of eliminating the informal sector as a refuge for those refusing low-waged agricultural work. Privatization dispossesses those who offer competition to formal retail and service provision, much of which is controlled or supplied by foreign firms.	

Chart 6: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Kamae		
Type of occupation by entitlement: occupation and defense of urban residential site		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Salome Wacera Wainaina lost her life in the defense of Kamae land. Residents retained the land that the chief had tried to expropriate. After the confrontation, Kamae residents became involved in Organization of Villagers, to defend their own land and the threatened land of others. Most Kamae women maintain subsistence gardens. There is a high degree of collectivity among the women, who share food, agricultural labour, child and elder care and other resources.	
Kenyan men	The land-grabbing chief lost his bid to occupy some of the Kamae people’s land. The policeman was transferred, but was not fired nor charged with Salome’s death.	
Foreign capitalists	The privatization program of the World Bank fuels such conflicts.	

Chart 7: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in the state-owned forests		
Type of occupation by entitlement: forest dwellers’ assertion of occupational entitlements		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Forest dwellers who get titles will not benefit from secure access to resources. In a capitalist land market, the land around the forest dwellers’ holdings may be stripped of trees and developed as capitalist farms, housing projects, bio-prospecting zones, mining sites or eco-tourism areas. The forest dwellers will lose the benefits of the whole, intact forest.	
Kenyan male dealers	Private real estate developers, timber businessmen and plantation farmers who get title to forest land will not preserve and nurture the forest. Rather they will strip it of trees and make commercial use of the land and resources.	
Foreign capitalists	The World Bank encourages privatization and sale of public land as a means of the government raising money to pay to the international banks. Foreign investors’ profits also depend upon the commercial route to exploiting resources in Kenya. Development of commercial activities in the forest areas, such as bio-prospecting and eco-tourism, will quickly deplete the forest resources.	

Chart 8: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility on the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) farm		
Type of occupation by entitlement: assertion of ownership by community members		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	The ancestral claims to land are accompanied by some claimants’ interest in continuing or reviving subsistence production and trade.	
Kenyan male dealers	The prime real estate of the Agricultural Development Corporation farms is used as a political reward for loyal party members and as an enticement to foreign “aid” agencies interested in experiments on genetically modified foods and new chemical inputs.	
Foreign capitalists	The 14,500 acre experimental agricultural farm is an ideal site for the production of seed or luxury crops for export. The landlessness that would be created by the expropriation of the land from the Marakwet benefits export enterprises by creating a large pool of experienced farmers in need of waged employment. Foreign firms or local businessmen contracting to transnationals benefit from cheap, skilled agricultural labour pools.	

Chart 9: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility on Criticos’ farm		
Type of occupation by entitlement: squatters’ re-appropriation of private land		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	 Squatter women and men are defending their subsistence economy and their entitlements to their ancestral land. Women have gained organizational experience, with the Taveta Welfare Society, and have a developed social and physical infrastructure on the land. The organization stated that "The solution to the matter is for the government to buy the land and settle thousands of Taveta squatters. The community will not allow any other individual to buy the land"(Mutonya 8 June 2001).	
Kenyan male dealers	Harun Mwau and any other would-be buyers face obstacles to their attempts to purchase the Criticos land. Criticos himself has fled the country after promising land to constituents and failing to give it to them and after defaulting on his loan repayments.	
Foreign capitalists	When private property rights become unenforceable, foreign firms lose confidence in the capacity of the government of Kenya to facilitate profit making. The state’s credit rating deteriorates. Interest rates on loans increase. The British High Commissioner in Nairobi, Jeffrey James, warned in May 2000 that foreign investors were being scared off by the calls to take over white owned land. However, he stated that “British‑Kenyans who own land here have no reason to panic at all” (Daily Nation, 17 May 2000).	

Chart 10: Gains and losses in the Fight For Fertility in Githima		
Type of occupation by entitlement: peasants defense of their own land against violent state-sponsored clearances		
Parties to the Fight For Fertility	Actions, interests and social relations in the struggle for control over land and labour	
Women  and men in a gendered class alliance	Githima residents defended themselves to the extent possible and were successful in re-occupying their farms after they were destroyed. They have rebuilt a subsistence system. The production of export crops such as tea and pyrethrum has been impossible because of continuing insecurity and the loss of the cooperative’s property, including a tractor and credit facilities.	
Kenyan male dealers	Corrupt politicians who orchestrated the land clearances to punish opposition supporters and reward ruling party loyalists have succeeded in making small inroads into Githima by replacing a few Kikuyu small farmers with Kalenjin small farmers. But they have failed to realize their objective of clearing small farmers off the land in order to establish large scale plantations and estates.	
Foreign capitalists	In the process of encouraging the violent enforcement of cash crop production, the World Bank has contributed to land clearances which have decreased cash crop production and increased subsistence networks. Foreign capitalists, including Brooke Bond, have lost out in Githima.	

Analysis of Land Occupations

We turn now to a consideration of the social character of the land occupation movements examined above. We assess the extent to which the land occupations indicate a struggle between commodification on the one hand and the reassertion of subsistence on the other hand. We do so first by considering the types of land occupations reviewed and comparing the outcomes of each. Second, we assess the extent to which the three actors in the fight for fertility have made overall gains or losses in the course of this 15 year struggle over land. Finally, we link the Kenyan struggle to the global conflict between globalizers from above and globalizers from below.

In Part One, we differentiated seven different types of land occupations according to the relationship between the occupiers and the owners of the land. We can summarize by grouping the seven types of occupations into three categories: occupants who have 1) British legal claim (ie. title deeds); 2) customary claim or 3) moral claim to land. 

Those who have British legal claim to land have succeeded in maintaining their occupation of land and their reassertion of subsistence. Under the category of ‘British legal claim to land’ falls occupations involving peasant reassertions of subsistence on their own land, as in Maragua; and peasant defense of their own land from incursion by state sponsored land grabs, such as in Githima. We also include peasant defense of ‘slum’ communities by the people of Kamae, because residents there were granted their land by Jomo Kenyatta, but never received a title deed. In each of these cases, peasants have British legal entitlements to the land they occupy. Subsistence was already strong before residents were forced to defend their right to the land they occupied. In each of these three communities, residents successfully upheld their legal entitlements and defended their subsistence livelihoods. In Maragua, subsistence was significantly elaborated through the replacement of coffee production (supplied by foreign inputs, and channeled to global markets) with banana production (supplied by local trade using indigenous knowledge, and channeled to local markets to feed local workers). In Githima, the militance of the Mau Mau struggle, which had given residents the chance to own land in the Rift Valley in the first place, was revived to defend this hard-won land. Githima residents united and successfully thwarted the extra-judicial expropriation of their land. They reestablished subsistence production. Continued insecurity has made trade difficult. Insecurity and lack of trust between neighbours have led to a trickle of Githima residents selling their land and leaving. This exodus open a channel through which Githima land is alienated to ruling party supporters by judicial means, through sale of land on the market. Finally, in Kamae, residents uphold their legal claim to land by citing the authority of Jomo Kenyatta who allocated part of his many square miles of prime land to them. The loss of life in the defense of Kamae land strengthened the social movements of Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) and Mungiki (Congress).

Land occupiers citing customary claim have challenged the colonial era expropriation of their lands and the neo-colonial reaffirmation of the British enclosures. The occupants who claim customary rights hold fast to their entitlements and boldly defy ‘land grabbers’ who contravene indigenous tenure procedures. In three cases, the state-owned forests of the Ogieks, the state-owned Agricultural Development Corporation farmlands and the land ‘owned’ privately by Basil Criticos, occupiers reassert their customary right to the land and seek to reestablish subsistence with the security of recognized entitlements. Because the land is commercially valuable; occupants’ customary claims confront the market’s construction of land as a commodity and as alienable collateral. However, due to the continuing political saliency of customary social practices and rights, it is not easy for private developers to extinguish customary tenure claims without raising the specter of international campaigns in defense of the rights of indigenous people. At the time of writing (December 2001) most occupiers who claim customary rights to land sustain their occupancies.

Finally, land occupiers who assert moral claims to land, in the absence of legal or customary rights, have secured only ambiguous gains. In Muruoto and Soweto, occupiers have been evicted from urban market and residential sites. Despite losing their land, those evicted from Muruoto and Soweto have shifted their locations and advanced subsistence on new ground. Further, they have retained the moral high ground and have mobilized effectively into social movements such as Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) and Mungiki (Congress), for the defense of land for all, especially the poor. In Westlands, the market occupiers face constant pressure. Only in Mwea, the state-operated rice scheme, have occupiers retained their longstanding hold on land. In Mwea, subsistence has advanced in significant ways. Tenants have united in an attempt to establish legal rights to land over which they have claimed moral ownership. Mwea women’s insistence on growing and marketing tomatoes feeds into a regional reassertion of subsistence.

In terms of the fight for fertility, our analysis indicates a general strengthening of subsistence across the range of land occupations detailed. As land occupiers succeed in asserting their entitlements, they strengthen bonds with one another across religious, ethnic and gender lines and mount a growing challenge to male dealers in their midst. Further, there is growing resistance against foreign capital, as Kenya’s dispossessed defend rights to land, labour and resources which have for so long been exploited by foreign firms.

Peasant women and men have advanced subsistence in Maragua, Mwea, Kamae and Githima. In each of these cases, women have insisted on land for food production and men have joined them in asserting this right. Subsistence livelihoods have in turn sustained the defense of land against attack. In the course of defending their entitlements to land, women have cultivated their militancy against anyone who attempts to bar them from access to subsistence resources. Women have been central to stand-offs with police, raiders and demolition crews in Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto, Mwea, Kamae and Githima. In some cases women have engaged in armed defense. In addition, those making customary claims (forest dwellers and squatters on Agricultural Development Corporation farms and on Criticos’ land) have established or seek to reinvent subsistence livelihoods consistent with their own survival and the elaboration of their cultural heritage. In all of these diverse land battles, exploited women and men have formed gendered class alliances in defense of subsistence livelihoods against the expropriation and exploitation inherent in commodified production and exchange systems.

Male dealers in Kenya have been repeatedly identified, challenged, and delegitimized by the people they dispossess. Husbands in Maragua and Mwea were challenged by their wives, and most of them capitulated to the women’s demands when they realized that the subsistence alternative proposed by their wives was more lucrative and sustainable than the commodified economy into which they had been tied for some decades. Police, paramilitary troops and demolition crews have used “ultimate force” to implement commodified property relations in Mwea, Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto, Kamae, Githima and on the Agricultural Development Corporation farmlands. But the forces of repression were repelled in all cases. Though the police finally prevailed in Muruoto and Soweto, slumdwellers and hawkers throughout the city of Nairobi have lost much of their fear of the police. The poor have joined social movements to stand against state terror, and to delegitimize the ‘Homeguard’ work of dispossessing the poor and defending wealthy land grabbers.

Foreign capital, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and transnational corporations operating in Kenya have had their profits negatively impacted by the land occupation movement. They have had to reorient their approach to commodification in Maragua. This reorientation emphasizes French beans and genetically modified bananas as alternatives to coffee. In Mwea, foreign investors fled. Where squatters make customary claims to land entitlements, the entire system of private property is challenged. Foreign and locally based corporations face the possibility of claims by indigenous people for customary entitlements to land ‘owned’ by big export-oriented businesses. In fact, the more foreign capital advances the privatization project, the more desperate become those who are dispossessed and the more likely it is that they will make claims on the land of transnational corporations. More and more dispossessed people in Kenya, and worldwide denounce land grabbers and dispossessors. The project of commodification, therefore, spawns resistance. It spurs a profound integration of local and international movements for the resurgence of producer control over resources, creativity, knowledge, time,  trade and life itself.

The ten instances of land occupation reviewed above reveal the existence of an expanding and integrated series of dispossessed peoples’ actions against commodified uses of land. The occupations take on the character of ‘globalization from below.’ Many Kenyans have made international links with other activists struggling for land rights and against corporate globalization. The internet and international travel by activists have strengthened the campaign for land redistribution in Kenya in key ways. Each occupation or instance of land defense contributes to the willingness and capacity of others to follow suit. Reappropriations engender a ‘circulation of struggle.’ Most of the successful land occupations are characterized by alliances between dispossessed women and men which validate and champion a subsistence political economy.

Land poor Kenyans are engaged in an increasingly diverse set of actions aimed at regaining access to and control over land and resources for subsistence production and trade. This drive confronts the opposing process of commodification, which is promoted ever more ardently by the Kenyan state as it is subsumed within the World Trade Organization and its regime of corporate rule. The global scope of commodification and resistance introduces into Kenya’s social movements for subsistence the universality of ‘globalization from below,’ and the potential for practical links between struggles on an international scale. These links are already being made. Wangari Maathai has been a powerful advocate of environmental reclamation and defense through the Green Belt Movement which operates in a dozen African countries. The global Jubilee movement for debt repudiation has a branch in Nairobi. Some joined Mungiki (Congress) after international work experience in war-torn African countries. After witnessing massive hunger, dispossession and death, they returned to Kenya prepared to engage in action to prevent such disasters at home. The Organization of Villagers devised a project in 1997 to send members to South Africa to learn from urban villagers there how to rebuild slums and register communal land titles. Some land occupiers in Kenya drew inspiration from the Zimbabwe occupations which began January 2000. 

These aspects of the international character of Kenya’s land occupation movement demonstrate the ways in which people are organizing ‘from below.’ This self-organization of the multitude contrasts sharply with donor-funded aid programs which jet elites from one country to meetings with elites from other countries. Land occupations in Kenya manifest the direct appropriation by the dispossessed of the means of production, communication and transport for their own purposes. The first global congress of landless peoples’ movements took place in Honduras in July 2000. Representatives from 24 countries attended and established the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (Rosset 2001). It is only a matter of time before Kenya’s land occupiers join the international organization of the landless.

The ‘circulation of struggles’ in Kenya has reached an advanced stage. One instance of the reassertion or defense of subsistence facilitates other instances. In the case of Maragua, farmers who have reinvented subsistence production are supported by and linked to the dispossessed workers who defend urban slums and marketplaces in Nairobi. One direct link is through the sale of rural produce in urban areas. This type of trade is facilitated by the involvement of Mungiki (Congress) in the transport industry countrywide and by Mungiki’s control over several Nairobi city routes (East African Standard 18 November 2001). The diverse types of land occupations in urban and rural Kenya are connected by the transport and marketing of subsistence crops in locally controlled markets and hawking networks. Those involved in strengthening autonomous worker-controlled transport and marketing of subsistence goods are strengthening subsistence production. Mungiki and the Organization of Villagers are but two of the well-organized networks which support the elaboration of the re-emerging subsistence political economy. Each has been involved in land occupations, land defense and the building up of social and material infrastructure essential to the survival of new subsistence capacities.

Mungiki’s (Congress’) takeover of local transport routes builds on transport workers’ attempt to unionize the industry in the mid 1980s. The undertaking was banned outright. The new takeover also builds on the enforcement of the Saba Saba general strike of 1990, during which time youth enforced compliance by stopping traffic with burning barricades and by dropping stones from overpasses onto scabbing vehicles. The transport takeover means that Mungiki members can facilitate the movement of some people and goods (for instance women transporting foodstuffs to markets in the middle of the night) and deny transport to others. So far, Mungiki bus route occupations have led to lower fares and more security at bus stops and on public service vehicles. In this way, Mungiki builds on the socially transformational practice of auto-valuation, or the process by which producers and consumers negotiate a price that they find mutually acceptable. Auto-valuation is also being implemented by the rent-striking residents of Kibera (Thuku 29 November 2001).

To what extent can the subsistence advances made through land occupations be maintained and elaborated? To answer this question we consider the gendered class politics of Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) and Mungiki (Congress), the two organisations most deeply involved in the occupation and defense of land. The Organization of Villagers has taken part in four of the land occupations reviewed above: Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto and Kamae. It has been involved in other struggles mounted by slumdwellers and hawkers. Mungiki members have been directly involved in four of the land occupations and defenses reviewed above. These include Mungiki members’ support for the transport and marketing of subsistence foodstuffs throughout the country, but specifically in Maragua; their involvement in the defense of those evicted and brutalized in Soweto and Kamae and their recruitment in the violence-affected regions of Molo, including Githima. Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) and Mungiki (Congress) express the resurgence of Mau Mau in Kenya in the 21st century. Each organization has tremendous influence on the direction of change in Kenyan society. The question is, will the Mau Mau resurgence repeat the mistakes made by the Mau Mau of 50 years ago by settling for ‘land for some’ instead of ‘land for all’?

We consider two indicators of the levels of equality or hierarchy in relations between women and men in Mungiki and Muungano: the organizations’ positions on female education and female genital mutilation. In Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers), members support the education of girls and women (First Woman 25 July 1998). They are also against the practice of female genital mutilation (First Woman 12 July 1997). Women in many cultures which used to practice female genital mutilation, have a unique social power to symbolically take away or revoke life, through guturamira n’gania, or the curse of nakedness. Guturamira n’gania is the act of one or more women removing their clothing and exposing particularly their vaginas to people who have offended them. The message communicated in this way is: “This is where your life has come from. We now revoke your life.” One elderly Mau Mau woman member of Muungano wa Wanavijiji galvanized the country by her use of this “curse,” during a hunger strike at Freedom Corner in Nairobi in 1992. Through the act of exposing her ‘warrior marks,’ Ruth Wangari Wa Thungu succeeded in repelling police who were ready to shoot and kill political activists (First Woman 29 May 1996). Women’s control over their own fertility or power to give and revoke life is opposed by genital mutilation which acts to curb this power.

Members of Mungiki (Congress) hold a range of views on female education and mutilation. A Nairobi human rights activist with close Mungiki ties stated that some Mungiki men do not encourage the education of women: 

You know Mungiki is dominated by men and they think the woman should always remain under the husband, at home, working at women’s work, going to the shamba [farm], always under the control of the husband. But by educating the girl child, she becomes independent and equal and they are against that (First Woman 15 Aug 1998). 

But other Mungiki members have a more positive approach to girls’ education. They claim that in these “modern times” girls not only need to be educated, but they need to “excel” in their education (First Woman Mungiki Men 23 July 1998). 

Some Mungiki (Congress) advocate female genital mutilation while others oppose it. The press has stated repeatedly that Mungiki forcibly circumcise women. One Sunday Nation report stated that

On 21 June 1998, Presbyterian Church of East Africa vowed to fight the sect to the bitter end. Speaking in Nyeri, Kirimara Presbytery moderator Geoffrey Nyagah and the Rev Linus Kimani Mwangi called for the immediate arrest of its members. They said the sect leaders were recruiting jobless youth to use them in “heinous crimes, including forcibly circumcising women. Mungiki is primitive and retrogressive and the PCEA has vowed to fight it until Jesus returns.” They said the sect had instilled fear among women “who now fear venturing out of doors” (Weru 28 June 1998).

Mungiki (Congress) members deny that they forcibly circumcise women (Weru 28 June 1998; Kareithi 2 July 1998). They claim that such rumors are spread as a means of ‘scaring off’ women who might otherwise become members (First Woman Mungiki Men 23 July 1998). Mungiki member Mwangi Macharia stated that 

We don’t want to be committed to the initiation process itself. What we are committed to, and what we stand for, is the counseling and advising that used to be imparted on the young initiates as a cultural process of bringing them into young adulthood. That is what we are now trying to revive and use for the benefit of mankind (First Woman Mungiki Men 23 July 1998). 

The socialization into adulthood instils in initiates the positive value of maturity, responsibility and unity with members of the same age grade. Counselors also advise initiates on the proper conduct of relations between women and men as well as between one age grade and another (Robertson 1996). Mungiki member, Njoroge wa Kimunya, suggested that Mungiki sought not mutilation but the “maturity of the mind,” or the “circumcision of the mind.” This conceptualization is focused, as Macharia said, not on the ‘cut,’ but on the teachings and socialization which, in the past, was associated with it.

Our main focus as regards circumcision is a question of the ‘circumcision of the mind’ and the maturity of the mind, the growing up of the mind. And now, if you want to mark it with the physical process, we don’t have a problem with that. Because we even have very many people who are not circumcised and this now pertains to women. And they are all our daughters, they are all our wives, and we do not have a problem with that, provided their maturity can be exhibited and it can be shown. It would also look stupid to be physically circumcised and you are just an imbecile or a dunderhead in your mind. So this thing is a whole question of how do you carry yourself, how grown up are you, how do you meet the challenges of adulthood when they call upon you (First Woman Mungiki Men 23 July 1998).

These debates within Mungiki increasingly embrace the viewpoints of a multi-ethnic and indeed international membership. Further complexity was introduced to the debate when the national coordinator of Mungiki, Ndura Waruinge, and 600 Mungiki members converted to Islam in late 2000 (Nation correspondent 3 December 2000). Members claim to value the diverse means through which their members mark the passage from childhood to adulthood.

In sum,  Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) explicitly promotes education and land rights for women, while dismissing genital mutilation as a dangerous and outmoded rite, inimical to the new culture of resistance and survival. In the past, female genital mutilation tied together an entire system of community access to land. Widespread landlessness amongst men, then, poses a particular problem to this system, since much of the material reasoning behind genital mutilation disappears. Men’s dispossession does not immediately imply that women stop marrying, or stop circumcisions. But the imperative arises for women to engage in squatting and  land reappropriations in which they take control over land themselves. This, in turn, offers an opening through which relations between women and men around land, sexuality and production are being re-examined and solidarities built on new bases.

Muungano’s rejection of mutilation and support for women’s education contrasts with Mungiki’s ambiguity. In Mungiki, divergent views contend. Some members are for and some are against women’s education. Most Mungiki support genital mutilation, though they deny using force. Many Mungiki women, including women from communities who had practiced the rite in the past, are not circumcised. Mungiki women members are working for universal land rights against those men members who seek a continuation of the colonial practice of limiting land entitlements to men. Such a colonial dispensation forces women to be housewives in order to gain access to land. The extent to which male control over land leads to the establishment of new male deals remains to be seen. Exclusive male control over land after Mau Mau led directly to the incorporation of men and women into the international system of commodity production and export. To repeat this mistake would be to perpetuate the plague of landlessness amongst women and men.

Conclusion

In this study, we have argued that the struggle for land in Kenya between 1986 and 2002 is a fight between those who promote capitalist enterprise and those who reassert a subsistence political economy in concert with others worldwide engaged in popular ‘globalization from below.’ We have introduced analytical tools including the ‘fight for fertility,’ the ‘male deal’ and the ‘gendered class alliance’ to dissect the social anatomy of ten land occupations. Each of the ten cases exhibits distinctive ownership claims. However similarities in the basis of entitlement claims allow us to sort the ten cases into three categories according to which kind of ‘bundle of entitlements’ is most emphasized by insurgents: British legal, customary or moral.  (1) In Maragua, Githima and Kamae, occupants assert ‘British legal claims’ to the land. They hold title deeds, or, in the case of Kamae, Kenyatta granted them ownership of part of his own land. (2) Forest dwellers, squatters on Basil Criticos’ private farm and squatters on the state-owned Agricultural Development Corporation farm make ‘customary claims.’ They identify the contested land as indigenous land which had been illicitly expropriated during the colonial period. (3) In Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto and Mwea, occupants assert a ‘moral claim’ to land they have occupied for decades, in the absence of title deeds or claims of customary entitlement.

These categories of entitlements are fluid and contain considerable overlap. It might be argued, for instance, that those making ‘moral claims’ to land could in fact refer to aspects of customary law which enabled those who clear land and make it productive to become the land’s ‘owners.’ In the homesteading provisions in British law, ownership follows from productive use of un-utilized property. Yet the distinctions between British law, custom and morality in land occupiers’ claims to land are useful in assessing the outcomes of the on-going land wars.

Most successful are those occupations in which the dispossessed defend and elaborate ‘British legal claims’ to land. Ongoing conflict engages those who assert ‘customary claims’ to land. And with the exception of the tenant rice farmers of Mwea, those making ‘moral claims’ have been evicted and constitute a radicalized diaspora. Most of those who have lost their land have squatted elsewhere. They have joined either Mungiki (Congress) or Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) in self-defense as they organize to rebuild.

Kenya’s popular land occupations are located within the international movements of globalization from below and against corporate globalization from above. The rising defense of subsistence entitlements to land has been met by attempts by international agencies to enforce exploitation. The World Bank is emphasizing so-called ‘land reform’ which amounts to new enclosures for capitalist, export-oriented agricultural.

Land occupiers examined in this study reorient agricultural production towards food self-sufficiency and local marketability. This reorientation counters the conversion of the subsistence political economy to a capitalist political economy. The centrepiece of the conversion was the enforcement of coffee and tea contract farming after Independence in 1963. The commodification process was imposed by “the maximum amount of violence” to extinguish “the institutions and customary laws that sanction subsistence agriculture” (Seavoy 2000:1, 113). The essential characteristic of the era of global corporate rule is ‘commodification at the point of a gun.’ We have argued elsewhere that violent repression (disguised as ‘ethnic clashes’) is visited on the dispossessed who try to re-institute subsistence production, trade and consumption (Turner, Kaara and Brownhill 2001). Land occupiers are vulnerable to attack by the forces of repression from Kenya backed by the forces of commodification from abroad.

Against the genocidal insanity of corporate rule, Kenyan millenarians defend themselves by constructing a new society. Land occupiers remember other ways of being. They re-value earlier means of livelihood which were in harmony with nature and the larger society, rather than at odds with both. Some elements of a vision of the new society are the revival of women’s land rights, the practice of total land redistribution and the security of trade. The custom of the ‘female husband’ allowed widows to avoid destitution and retain their land rights by ‘marrying’ another woman, whose own children then inherited the female husband’s land (MacKenzie 1998:184). Another remembered practice that bears on the new land movement is the exercise by young men of the right to periodically institute a total land redistribution. This practice consisted of a social and environmental ‘audit,’ meant to level social inequalities, facilitate environmental sustainability and construct infrastructural projects. Those who cultivated on steep hillsides, for instance, addressed environmental degradation by securing less fragile land through the redistribution process. Women’s access to water and fuelwood were thereby ensured. Practices of social protection of the environment and of life are remembered by the Green Belt Movement’s Wangari Maathai:

There are some huge trees, wild figtrees, where I grew up, these huge figtrees were never cut, because they were used as religious sites by our people. ... When I was a child my mother would tell me do not collect any twigs even from those figtrees. That tree is never cut and even the dry twigs are never burned ... Everywhere where I had seem any of those huge trees there would be a spring ... So were these trees part of the catchment system, were these trees part of the water system, was it therefore a mistake to cut these huge trees and instead plant coffee trees and tea bushes? Did we perhaps dig our own graves by cutting the beautiful trees, which our ancestors had for some reason protected and made them untouchable so that they would not be destroyed? (WINGS May 1991).

The millenarian vision of a new society centralizes freedom for subsistence production and trade, both local and long distance. The vision guarantees the means for women traders to travel long distances in the middle of the night, in order to reach markets with fresh produce by 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning (First Woman, Mungiki women 24 July 1998). Women traders’ safety was ensured in pre-colonial times by “compacts” between ethnic groups “not to molest the womenfolk of either party.” Consequently, even during times of armed conflict, women carried out trade “without interference or danger” (Thomson 1885:308; Macdonald 1897:110, cited in MacKenzie 1998:47). Mungiki’s takeover of transport is a major step towards facilitating and protecting subsistence trade. In addition to ensuring “the smooth running of the matatu [minibus public transport] business” Mungiki national coordinator Ibrahim Ndura Waruinge said in December 2001 that “Mungiki now has a wider plan to re‑settle the landless and displaced people especially those in the Rift Valley following the 1992 tribal clashes, establish businesses like hawking in major towns and spearhead civic education seminars ahead of the next year’s general election” (Standard Correspondent 4 December 2001).

Kenyan land occupiers are working to realize their vision of a new ‘subsistence’ or life-centred society. The new social relations that land occupiers are living and defending are an East African expression of what Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies call a global “re-invention of the commons,” characterized by the championing of subsistence, which is:

freedom, happiness, self-determination within the limits of necessity - not in some other world but here; furthermore persistence, stamina, willingness to resist, the view from below, a world of plenty. The concept
 of self-provisioning is, in our opinion, far too limiting because it refers only to the economical dimension. ‘Subsistence’ encompasses concepts like ‘moral economy,’ a new way of life in all its dimensions: economy, culture, society, politics, language etcetera, dimensions which can no longer be separated from each other (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999: 19). 

The women involved in land occupations - farmers, tenants, squatters, hawkers and forest dwellers - fight to control land, the production process and the fruits of their own labour. As these women and the men in alliance with them make gains in the fight for fertility, they vastly expand and re-invent a subsistence society. Kenya’s Mau Mau resurgence is charting out an alternative, redistributive land reform process, which is linked to the larger processes of resistance to corporate rule and the building of globalization from below.

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