turner & brownhill - african jubilee (2013)

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African Jubilee: Mau Mau

Resurgence and the Fight forFertility in Kenya, 19862002Terisa E. Turner & Leigh S. BrownhillPublished online: 24 Feb 2011.

To cite this article:Terisa E. Turner & Leigh S. Brownhill (2001) African Jubilee: Mau MauResurgence and the Fight for Fertility in Kenya, 19862002, Canadian Journal of DevelopmentStudies/Revue canadienne d'tudes du dveloppement, 22:4, 1037-1088

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gfr ica n yubilee: M a u M a u Resurgence and theFight for Fertility in Kenya, 1986 2002Terisa E Turner

Leigh 8 BrownhillABSTRACT

This study examines a key moment in the 'yg h t or fertility in post-colonial Kenya: thelarge-scale reappropriation of land by landless people across Kimya in the new millennium.This rebirth of the 1950s Mau M au armed struggle for land and freedom is pursuedthrough the 4.5 million-strong Congress-Mungiki i n Kikuyu - and the Organization ofVillagers-Muungano wa Wanavijiji. It is a struggle between subsistence and commodi-fication, which is conceptualized as afi gh t for control over fertility. Fertility is understoodas the capacity to produce people, food, cultural expressions, social networks, and natur-al and built space. The fight for control over fertility is a three way struggle amongsti ) women producers and their male allies who seek to defend and revive subsistence,ii ) Kenyan male dealers who seek to control women's labour and other productionresources within commodified capitalist relations, and iii) international capitalists andtheir governmental brokers. The study examines ten cases of land occupation and assess-es the gains and losses to each of the three sets of actors in the fight for fertility. It con-cludes th at women subsistence producers and their allies in gendered class alliances havegained much ground and that the Kenyan land occupations are part of the movement orglobalization from below to rebuild the civil commons alternative to corporate rule.

Cette h d e examine un moment cle de la lutte pour la fertiitk duns le h y a ostcolonial :au nouveau m i l h i r e , la reprise depossession massive du sol par les gens sans terre, d traverstout lepays. Cette lutte armke des Mau Mau, pour la terre et la libertk , qui renait desannkes 50, est menke sous l'kgide du Congres (M ungiki chez les Kikuyus) comptant deplus de 4,5 millions de membres et de I Organ isation des villageois (Mu ung ano waWanavijiji). I1 s'agit d'une lutte de la subsistance contre la marchandisation, et qui senom me la lutte pour le contrble de la fertilitk -fe rti lit i tt an t dkfinie comme la capacidde produire non seulement des &treshumains, mais aussi de la nourriture, des biens

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Terisa E Turner and Leigh S Brownhill

culturels, des rkseaux sociaux e t des espaces naturels et construits. Cette lut te se manifesteentre trois groupes d acteurs, a savoir, I les femmesproductrices de biens t leurs alliis mas-culins qui cherchenta dtifendre leur subsistance et a la rktablir,2 l s a fournisseurs marculins~khyens qui cherchent contrbler le travail des femrnes ainsi que les autres ressources de pro-duction dans l s rapports capitalistes de marchandisation, e t 3 l s capitalistes internationauxet leurs courtiers gouvernementaux. Cet article ait l tt ude de dix cas d occupation des ter-res et kvalue ce que chacun des trois groupes d acteurs ont gagnk ou perdu, dans la luttepour la fertilitk. L article conclut qu en fait, les femmes productrices de biens de subsis-tance e t leurs al lib dans alliances de classe et de sexe ont gagn i beaucoup de terrain,et que les occupations des terres kknyennes font bien partie du rnouvement de globalisa-tion de la base qui vise h reconstruire la com mu ne civile c om me alternative d la supri-rnatie des corporations.

I. PROMISED LAND

We were cheated by the white ma n with a bible tha t we should n ot have things hereon eart h but we should wait for those things that were promised in heaven. So, theAfricans were being tormented and harassed because they were to wait until theday came for us to go u p a nd inherit t he things that w ere prophesied, while thewhite m an could stay here a nd enjoy the thing s of the world. Jo m o [Kenyatta, c.19461 went ahead an d wanted t o broaden th e Africans minds. He said that sincewe were told to wait for those things that were up there in heaven, and the whiteman was the one who went u p in to the sky in airplanes, why doesn t he go up thereand in herit everything that is up there and leave the others for the Africans? FIRSTWOMA N, lizabeth Wanjiru, 15 January 1997).We [in Muungano wa Wanavijiji,Organ ization of Villagers] have followed whatthe M au M au were fighting for, because they were fighting for land, and we arealso fighting for land. Because the reason we have so many slum dwellers inNairobi, is lack of land. And if you ask the slum dwellers, you will find t hat theirparents were Mau Mau fighters. Their people are the one s who were in the forestand yet they didn t get land or anything. And they are the ones who are now spreadall over. So we want everyone to be given land an d to be given assurance of ow n-ing this land F IRST WOMAN,Wanjiku, 5 July 1998 ).

1 FIRST WOMAN is the sho rt nam e for the East a nd S outhern African Women s OralHistory an d Indigenou s Knowledge Network, established in 19 89 . It is a small international n et-work of researchers and life history providers who have been collecting Mau M au women s o ralhistories in East Africa since 1990. In the 19 90 s and early 2OOOs, F IRST WOMAN S actionresearch coincided with th e beginning of a new cycle of struggle constituted by the Mau Mauresurgence. It has interviewed me mbe rs of social mov eme nts and com mun ities involved in landoccupa tions detailed in th is study. Citation s of FIRST WOMAN refer to interviews condu cted bymembers of the network It thanks the Canadian Social Science and Humanities ResearchCouncil and the Canadian International Development Research Centre for their financial support.



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There is a resurgence of struggle over land in Kenya. Fighters who are nowspread all over:' have taken up the unfinished business of the Mau Mau whichbegan 50 years ago in 1952. Land occupations in the new millennium are partof a new cycle of struggle by the dispossessed in response to the new enclo-sures of the civil commons by corporate globalization from above.

Kenya in 2002 is characterized by a politics of land which is as intense andconflict ridden now as it was fifty years ago when the Kenya Land and FreedomArmy, or Mau Mau, engaged British colonialists and African loyalistHomeguards in battles over control of land. Land, in Kenya, is power. Andthough there has been an almost unceasing struggle over land throughout thetwentieth century, this struggle has seen quiet times and periods of extremeupheaval. The armed struggle for independence in the 1950s is clearly oneperiod of upheaval. We identify a new period of upheaval beginning around1986 and intensifying into the year 2002. Why, after forty years of Kenyanindependence, has there arisen a new Mau Mau and a new round of confla-gration 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 nothesitate to occupy such land even if it belongs to som ebody else. Of course this isonly true in the case of the land grabbing types, who sometimes disguise them-selves as genuine private developers. Land is a vital resource for abode and pro-duction activities and its ownership is an emotive issue (Sisule,8 October 2001) .

It is necessary to distinguish between those commonly known in Kenya as landgrabbers:' who are wealthy people aspiring to make commercial gain from the pri-vatization of public land, and those we call land occupiers, who are dispossessedpeople 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 zlstcentury, Sisule does not say why. Why now? The answer to this question is inti-mately tied up with the introduction of World Bank structural adjustmentprograms, beginning in 1980.Before outlining the types of land occupationsoccurring in Kenya today, and defining some of our key concepts, we exam-ine, briefly, three aspects of structural adjustment programmes which bearupon the increase in conflicts over land. These are, first, the fast-tracking ofelection-focused political pluralism:' which has manifest itself in Kenya in afully commodified form in which money and land titles2 are exchanged for

2. [Tlhe sale of forest land is a big source of patronage for K NU [the ruling party]I and Plotsof land [are] sold cheaply to party favorites and promptly resold, with the profits split between theofficials and the [K NU party's] campaignf u n d AfiicaConjdential 14 September 2001 , p. 2 .



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votes; second, the privatization of state assets, which puts in place a justifica-tion 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 foraccess to land on which to subsist and earn an independent livelihood.

Since the government was forced to concede to multipartyism in 1991, some400,000 Kenyans have been systematically attacked and displaced from theirhom es by state-sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups perceived to supp ortthe political opp osition. The role of know n high-ranking governmen t officials,wh o remain unpunished, in instigating, inflaming, an d financing this violence hasbeen widely documented, not only by national and international human rightsNGOs, but also by the government s own p arliamentary select committee [whichconsisted of only ruling party m embers]. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2001

Multiparty politics emerged in Kenya in the early 1990s as a result of twoconflicting but interrelated phenomena. First, in the mid 1980s, transportworkers attempted to form a union. They held several strikes which paralyzedregional trade for short periods. Autonomous action by transport workersmeant that the state could not control the economy. The government bannedunionization in the transportation sector. At the same time, the small scalefarmers of coffee tore out their trees and planted food crops for local con-sumption. They did so because the prices on the world market had fallen andat the same time, state corruption in the allocation of coffee incomes enrichedstate managers and impoverished rural producers. With the drop in foreignexchange earnings from coffee sales, the state fell into a balance of paymentscrisis by the end of the 1980s. The World Bank was concerned about the fiscalcrisis and conflated the growing resistance through economic disruption bytransport workers and small farmers with the increasingly vociferous demandsfor multiparty democracy. The World Bank offered Moi an ultimatum inDecember 1991: repeal the section of the Constitution which made Kenya asingle party state or lose financial assistance from the World Bank andInternational Monetary Fund IMF), as well as from the Paris Club of donorswhich took its cues from the Bretton Woods institutions. Within days, Moicapitulated. He was not so willing, however, to allow voters to decide the polit-ical future of the country on their own. In 2001

Hu ndre ds of thousands of internally displaced persons remained unable to retu rnafter being driven from the ir hom es in sta te-spon sored attacks since 99 directedagainst mem bers of ethnic groups perceived to su ppo rt th e political opposition.The authorities continued durin g the year to fail to provide adequ ate security tothose who soug ht to re turn to their hom es un der assurances of safety, nor wereland titles restored to those wh o were wrongfully deprived. N or had the gov ernm ent


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held those responsible for the violence accountable. In 1999, a presidentialCommission on the Ethnic Clashes wound up after eleven months of hearing evi-dence, including from Human Rights Watch, about the violence between 1991and1998.As of October2000, the commission s findings had still not been released,though the completed report had been submitted to the president over a yearbefore. (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2001Behind the increasing competition for land in the public sphere was struc-

tural adjustment's insistence on privatization, or as the 2001 winner of theNobel Prize for Economics and ex-World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, callsit, briberization-privatization (Pallast 2001). In Kenya in 1994, about 2.5 mil-lion hectares, or 20% to 25% of the most arable land, was owned by large scalefarmers (Foeken and Tellegen 1994, p. 3 . On these large farms, hundreds ofthousands of acres lay idle. Thousands of Kenyans live as agricultural labour-ers on these estates, or nearby in squatter communities on public land. ThoseKenyans who own small farms or occupy communally owned land are situat-ed, economically and socially, between the large land owners and the landless,who squat on rural land or make their livelihoods in urban slums. Squatterson public land in urban areas live in substandard accommodation, which theyeither build from scavenged cardboard and flattened tin cans or rent fromlandlords who have no legal title to the land.In 2001, slumdwellers defied landlords by asserting collective rights tohousing plots. Nairobi's Kibera slum houses more than 700,000 people(Otieno 2001). In an October 2001 public address, Kenya's President Moiacknowledged the problem of landlords charging exorbitant rents for slumhouses:

most of the semi-permanent residential houses stand on State land and the land-lords pay nothing to the Government,yet they are fleecing the tenants. These peo-ple own the land illegally and in fact they should be prosecuted. As of now wewinot do that, but they have to ensure that they charge reasonable rents. (Openda2001Within a month, urban villagers in Kibera acted on Moi's delegitimization

of fake slumlords who should be prosecuted. The slum dwellers organisedthemselves into a tenants' association, and vowed to halt rent payments untilthe Provincial Commissioner issued new guidelines (Gaitho 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 November2001, the aily Nation reported that

Tenants of the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi began to flee their homes yester-day, amid claims of rampant looting and rape by police. A middle aged womansaid she was forced to strip and was molested by policemen, but was not raped.



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Other tenants said they saw w omen being raped in some bars but the victims werenot willing to speak of their ordeal Thuku 2001).

Government Ministers proposed rent cuts to avert the spread of the rentstrikes. Landlords offered a20 per cent reduction. Tenants insisted on a 5 percent cut (Otieno 2001 .Three quarters of a million slum dwellers, throughtheir tenants' organization, decided autonomously the value of their accom-modation. Auto-valuation of rents was combined with self-taxing. ManyKibera 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 bypoor health and education. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya,Dr. David Gitari, holds the government responsible for the poverty and llhealth resulting from the de-funding of schools and medical centres. Dr. Gitaridecried the fact that child mortality rates had increased from 62 er 1000 ivebirths in 1988 1993 o 7 children per 1000 ive births in 1998. The mortal-ity rate of children under five years of age had also shot up.

During the first two decades after independence [1963-19831, there was animprovement in the health status of the population with a marked decline in mor-tality and morbidity rates and increase in life expectancy, an achievement theGovernment has been unable to improve or sustain. Oywa 2001)

Despite grinding poverty and repression, millions of peasants produce foodand hundreds of thousands of land-poor and landless people process and tradeit in rural and urban areas of the country. The persistence of this subsistencepolitical economy has ensured that most of the population is supplied with atleast the bare necessities, which in turn allows them to struggle to increase theircontrol over land and their own lives.

The struggle for land in this new period of upheaval in Kenya pits those whopromote capitalist enterprise against those who reassert a subsistence politicaleconomy in concert with others worldwide engaged in popular globalizationfrom below In Part One, we draw distinctions between two types of land redis-tribution programs and introduce seven types of land occupations which aredifferentiated from one another according to the relations between the landoccupiers and the land owners. We then define the concepts we use to analyzethe 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 peas-ants and squatters. We assess the extent to which subsistence is furthered in thecourse of the occupations by considering the gendered class politics of two



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organizations involved in the occupations: Mungiki (Congress, literally, inGikuyu, we are the public )3 and Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization ofvillager^ ^. These organizations embody the resurgence of Mau Mau. In theface of land privatization programmes sponsored by the World Bank, whichtend to increase instead of alleviate landlessness, the urban-based Muunganowa Wanavijiji and the massive Mungiki have arisen to address, among manyother realities, the immediate needs of the impoverished for land.

Muungano wa Wanavijiji is an organization with approximately lo,ooomembers, all of whom are land-poor slumdwellers, or urban villagers. Theself-organized congregation is distinctive for its multi-ethnic membership,women's prominence and militant non-violent direct action tactics in defenseof urban villagers and market retailers' land rights. Muungano members tracetheir political roots back to Mau Mau. They trace their current landlessness toKenyatta's betrayal of the Mau Mau objective of land for all. Muunganowomen assert that in the guerilla war against British land alienation in the1950s, women never surrendered FIRST WOMAN, wa Thungu, 29 May1996).Mungiki is a multi-class, mass organization that claims 4.5 million mem-bers. These are drawn from a cross-section of society, and include dispossessedhawkers as well as members of the Kenyan Parliament and armed forces.Mungiki members pay monthly dues of 1 KSh (about ~ ~ $ 0 . 1 5 )nd havemade significant progress towards establishing workers' control over labourprocesses and resources, including public transport. Mungiki's strengthamongst hawkers and small retailers protects the subsistence political econo-my. We assess these two organizations' capacities to reassert and reinvent thecommons by considering their stands on female education and female geni-tal mutilation.

We conclude this study of land occupation by assessing the gains and lossesexperienced by the parties to the conflict over entitlements to land. We locatethe Kenyan land occupations within the movement of globalization frombelow which is coalescing in international resistance to corporate rule.

3. During the Emergency in the early 1950s n Kenya's central province, groups of menwould knock on your front door in the dead o f night. When the m an o f the house asked, 'Whois it?' -'It is us,' would come the reply, and everyone immediately understood that a Mau Mauunit was at the door. Today, some people argue that the name Mungiki taken by a controversialsect whose m embers are mostly from the Gikuyu community, is derived from the words muin-gi ki we are the public , or, not to put too fine a point on it, it is us. (Githongo 2000).4. Som e translate the Kiswahili Muungano w a Wanavijiji as Slumdwellers Federation.



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Table 1 Difference between World Bank corporate Land reform and popularredistributive land reform

OwnershipFeatures

Privatization of communal land breaks down The vast m ajority of th e ru ral poor must becommunity-based resource management systems beneficiar ies of land red istr ibu tion t o avoidand accelerates land degradation. Facilitatio n build ing new hierarchies of land poverty andof land markets induces mass sell-offs of land, kind concentration.increasing landlessness, land concentration andrural-urban migration.

World Bank corporate land privat ization Popular redistributive Land reform

Tit'es

Typesof land

Ownersh ip is concentra ted i n men's hands, Women's right to hold tit le deeds to land alleviateslead ing to con flicts w ith women and the domestic disputes and the destitution of womendestitution of women and chi ldre n in case of and children. CoUective ti tle deeds, which forbiddivorce or the death of male land owners. Land alienation and use of land as collatera l, affirmis used as colla teral o r loans, leading i n many security of tenure for occupants.cases to foreclosure and bank seizure of farmsand property.Meansof redis-tribution

Creditand debt

Market-led redistrib ution offers credit to the The landless and land poor can escape he a ylandless to buy land from wealthy farmers. Rural indebtedness through government expropriatione r i maintain their power to distort and capture of idle land, wi th or w ithou t compensation topolicies, subsidies and windfa ll profits. land owners. The power of rural eli tes must beeffectively broken by the reforms.

Type ofpmdudionpromoted

Examples

Often, wealthy land ownersseU marginal, remoteand ecologically fragile Land to the land poorat exorbitant prices. This increases deforestation,dese rtification and so il erosion. Marginal andremote lands have poor soils and li tt le marketaccess. Parcels sold by landowners are oftenthose wh ich are in dispute, such as fromindigenous peoples' land claims, pit ting the pooragainst the poor.

The land must be of good quality, rather thanecologically fragile, and t must be free ofdisputed claims by other poor people.Recognition of the benefits of indigenous usesof fragile ecosystems (rainforests, savannahs)is critica l t o conserving these areas. Supportis required so that degraded or mined soilscan be restored.

Credit is offered, but tied to the production More than land is needed: credit on reasonableof pestic ide -rel ian t export cash crops. Heavy terms, or preferably, collective savings (merry-debts, h igh interest rates, along wit h poor go-rounds, sou-sou), infrastructure, supportso ils and po or market access lead s t o for ecologically sound technologiesand accessrepossession of land by banks. t o markets.Advocates o f chem ical agriculture for expo rt Small family firms must become the centrepiececlaim tw ll raise money for farmen to pay debts, of economic development. Family farms canbut t eads to intensification of land degradation resuscitate rural economies: sma ll farmers se lland ecological problems. Due to dependence on the ir produce in rural markets and buy suppliesworld market prices, producers have no con trol hom local merchants. Family farms boost urbanover the sale price of crops. economies as well.Central America: During the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil The Landless Workers' Movement (MST)US ID promotion of non-traditional export crops has succeeded i n winning tit les for more thanwhich are relian t on pesticides and chemical 250,000 families on over 15 million acres offer tiliz ers intensifi ed land degradation and land since 1985. Towns wi th MST settlementsecological problems and le ft poor farmers i n nearby are now better off economically thanrisky enterprises wi th high failu re rates. More other towns.land concentsation and landlessness were results.Sources: First Woman 2001, based on Rosset, P Tides shift on agrarian reform: New movements showthe way, hird World Resurgence, No. 129/130, May/June, 2001, p. 43-48.



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gfrican Jubilee

A. LAND PRIVATIZATION VERUS REDISTRIBUTIONThe World Bank and popular social movements advocate conflicting types ofland redistribution. Both the privatizers and the redistributors claim that theirtype of land reform will solve the problems of hunger, poverty and landless-ness. In popular redistributive land reform:' land is reallocated to all for theprimary purpose of supporting life. In contrast, World Bank sponsored cor-porate land privatization:' promotes the commodification of land and its saleto individual capitalist farmers who have purchasing power and seek toexpand commercial exploitation.

The World Bank land reforms enclose and release land to the market,thereby making it inaccessible to the poor. Judith Achieng's (2000) critique ofWorld Bank land reforms in Kenya cites the alternatives posited by the globalmovement of landless people. In 2000, the international peasant movement,La Via Carnpesina, and the FoodFirst Information Action Network F IAN ) ~initiated a global campaign for agrarian reform:The campaign was initiated in recognition of the human right to foo d, recognisedunder article of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and CulturalRights, which stipulates that landless peasants and agricultural workers must gainaccess to those resources, mainly land, with which they can produce food. Underthis article, land reform is spelled out as one of the most important means of real-ising the right to food (Achieng 2000 .

Kenya's land occupation movement carries on the popular redistributiveland reforms that were begun by the Mau Mau, forestalled by Kenyatta'sIndependence deal of willing seller, willing buyer and taken up again by thechildren and grandchildren of Mau Mau in the contemporary resurgence.Table contrasts the distinctive characteristics of World Bank corporate landprivatization with the social movements' redistribution of land for all.B TYPES OF LAND OCCUPATIONMau Mau w s made a fighting force in the 1950s by peasants who were evict-ed from land and denied access to compensatory l and (Youe 2001, p. 190).Evictions and new enclosures occurred again between 1986 and 2002. It iswithin a context of forced eviction, increasing inequality in the distribution ofresources and the growing negative impact of World Trade Organization cor-porate rule policies on the majority of people in Kenya that widespread landreappropriations take on the character of a Mau Mau resurgence. This study

5. Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform can be contacted through La Via Carnpesinawww.viacampesina.org and FoodFirst Information Action Network, www.fian.org.



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examines the gendered social anatomy of a renewed popular uprising. The landoccupations which are prominent in the resurgence of struggle include the fol-lowing seven types: which reflect different relationships of power between theowner of the land and those who assert entitlements to it:I . ritish legal claims (occupiers with title deeds)

1 reassertions of subsistence production on peasants' own land, espe-cially after the failure of commodity production (peasants destroyexport 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).11. Customary claims

3. assertion of occupational entitlements by communities dwelling with-in state-owned forests;4. assertion of ownership entitlements by labourers or community mem-bers to other state-owned land and experimental agricultural stations(Agricultural Development Corporation [ADC] farms);

5 outright reappropriation, by resident labourers, of land owned bytransnational corporations or private individuals (plantations, agribusi-nesses, large farms, ranches and estates such sBasil Criticos'); and

111. Moral claims6 assertion of ownership and control over the management of resources

by tenants on state-operated settlement schemes (Mwea IrrigationScheme);7. occupation and defense of urban market sites and slum residenceareas by traders and residents (Muruoto, Westlands, Soweto, Kamae).

Against the encroachment by land grabbers and agents of export-orientedtrade (such as private sector agricultural extension workers) claimants in allseven relationships are defending and reasserting their rights to land andresources for their own collective survival.C . T H E F I G H T F O R F E RT IL IT YOur framework for understanding the struggle for land identifies three partiesto a fight for fertility: (l) women and men, united against class antagonists;(2) local men who sell out to foreign capitalists; and (3) foreign capitalists

6. Other types exist such as land occupations by pastoralists but these f ll outside of thescope of this study.



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who profit from the exploitation of land and labour. We definefertility broad-ly, as the capacity to produce o produce children, to produce food and othercrops and to produce cultural expressions and social networks. The fight forfertility in Kenya is a fight centred around the control of land and women sagricultural labour. ontrol over land and labour may constitute part of thesocial organization of commodified political economies or of subsistence polit-ical economies.

Commodification is the complex of social processes through which allaspects of life s continuation, including production, exchange, consumptionand the preservation of the natural world, which had previously taken place incommunal subsistence-focused social arrangements, are restructured and givenmarket value. Capitalists operating nationally and internationally directly con-tribute to the destruction of the subsistence realm as they construct com-modified social relations. In the commodified political economy, life sustainingactivities are supplanted by profiteering and speculation he turning of moneydemand into more money demand (McMurtry 1999,2002). Commodification iscentral to capitalist industrialization. It is inherently global and enforcesan extremedivision of labour. It also structures and inflames divisions amongst labourers,for instance through constructing difference s divisive. Bennholdt-Thompsonand Mies (1999) note that within the commodified political economy,

life is, s o to speak, only a coincidental side-effect. It is typical of the capitalist indus-trial system that it declares everything that it wants to exploit free of charge to bepart of nature, a natural resource. To this belongs the housework of wom en as wellas the work of peasants in the Third World, but also the productivity of all ofnature. p. 20-21A commodified political economy is wholly and parasitically reliant on the

subsistence political economy. Capitalism cannot exist without the exploita-tion of the free subsistence labour of housewives, peasants and indigenouspeople worldwide, who produce people, food supplies and nature and consumethe products of the capitalist market. Capital needs labour. But labour does notneed capital. In this sense, labour is autonomous from capital (Dyer-Witheford1999).We characterize the subsistence political economy as autonomous fromcapital and the commodified political economy, or containing the potential forautonomy. The subsistence political economies which exist today in the inter-stices of capital s rule, have in fact survived decades, and in many cases, cen-turies 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 onthe production of life. It is the source of the culture of connectedness and



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community against the culture of capitalism which deifies possessive individ-ualism and competition. Subsistence at its fullest includes not only food pro-duction for local consumption and regional trade, but a host of activities andsets of social networks whose main aim is to support and enhance human exis-tence. Subsistence production, or what we alternatively refer to as the subsis-tence political economy, includes all work that is expended in the creation,recreation and maintenance of immediate life and which has no other pur-pose (Bennholdt-Thompson and Mies 1999, p. 20).

Parties to the fight for fertility struggle to create, maintain and defend eithersubsistence or commodification,depending on their class affiliations and aspi-rations. 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 cap-italist deal by involving themselves in capitalist production and discipliningthe labour of others, especially the unwaged labour of women, children,indigenous people and peasants. These three positions 1) exploited people'ssubsistence, (2) exploited people's compromise with capital and 3) capitalists'commodification succinctly characterize the three standpoints in the fightfor fertility that are expressed in the ten cases of land occupation reviewed inthis 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, againstthe state and its laws and against the plans and policies of the World Bank,International Monetary Fund and corporate rule regime. Hence, when womenrise up, they directly challenge international capital.

The first party to the fight for fertility, then, embraces women producersin Kenya, mainly land poor farmers and small traders who struggle to regainor maintain control over their own labour, access to land of their own and theelaboration of subsistence systems which support life (as opposed to capital-ists' profits). Men (husbands, young men) who have broken with their com-promise with capital often join women in what we call a gendered class allianceto resist capitalist enclosure. The gendered class alliance is formed throughstruggle when men abdicate their control over women's labour and joinwomen in seeking just and equitable redistribution of resources and power.

The second party to the fight for fertility includes local Kenyan men hus-bands, chiefs, policemen, state officials, businessmen who work on behalf oflocal and foreign capital to control fertility for profit making purposes. These



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might be Kenyan capitalists or exploited Kenyans who compromise with cap-ital, in what we call aUmaledeal (Dauda 1994, Turner and Oshare1994).Maledealers typically negotiate relationships which benefit capital and themselvesat the expense of the exploitation of women, most dispossessed men and theen~ironment.~xamples of male deals include the contracting of male headsof households to grow coffee, tea and other export crops for delivery totransnational corporations.8 Corporations and their stockholders reap most ofthe profit from the trade of such crops. While small land holding men in thesedeals may make minor earnings, women who actually produce the crops loseout on income and land for food and many other dimensions of control overfertility and life. Landless men have fewer opportunities to gain access to land asland becomes highly commodified. The environment is ravaged by the use ofchemicals in the production process. Chiefs, police, businessmen and state offi-cials all take part in the coffee and tea male deals inKenya. When first the wives,and then most husbands broke this male deal in Maragua (detailed in Part

7. In a 1991speech in San Francisco, Wangari Maathai characterized male dealers as thosewho supervise the syphoning off of Africa's wealth: The headq uarters may be very far fromus, but there are tentacles that co me t hat mak e it very, very difficult for people to break t he cycleof poverty. And as long as we do n ot recognize these tentacles an d if we do n ot recognize thebody of these tentacles, we will con tinue to move in this vicious circle, which is unfortunatelybeing supervised by the very people wh o should be protec ting their people and w ho should betelling the bodies of the tentacles that 'Now, it's about time you stop sucking my people dry.'That takes a lot of courage, not only for the people who are providing the leadership and wh oare supervising tha t syph oning, but also [for] the people like you people here [in San Francisco],for whom the syphoning is being done. (WINGS,ay 1991)8. Two further illustrations of the male deal an d its workings against the interests of wo men ,most men, the environment and the local economy, are provided in the case of salt manufac-turers in M alindi an d Tana River and the case of Tiomin in Kwale. In th e first case, the cou rt hasordered 6,500 people in Malindi and Tana River to stop encroaching on 3,835hectares ofland tha t they have lived on since 1875.Th e land has been allocated to two salt man ufacturingcompanies, Kem u Salt Packers an d Suleiman Enterprise. Residents have challenged the alloca-tion of the p rime land by Comm issioner of Lands, Sammy Mwaita (Nation Correspondent,20November 2001).Mwaita, the owners of the salt manufacturing firms an d the judge who decid-ed in the capitalists' favour would be classified as the male dealers in this case. Immediatelyafter the c ourt case, violence broke o ut i n the Tana River area, duri ng which 120 house wereburned and 14people shot dead. The victims plan to sue the government for failing to takeresponsibility (Mango, December 2001). In the second case, farmers in Kwale are beingforced off of their ancestral land in favour of a mining corporation. T iom in is a Canadian cor-poration which, with the involvement of a Kenyan Cabinet minister, is expropriating land fr omresidents of Kwale to establish a titanium mining industry Nation Reporter, 15November2001).The Kwale farmers' struggle for subsistence and against commodification has gainedintern ational sup port and is, in this sense, a critical link in Kenya's involvement in globaliza-tion fro m below (Drillbits Tailings, 28 February 2001).The Cabinet Minister is the maledealer. Tiomin ow ners and stockholders are Canadian an d other foreign capitalists.



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1050 Terisa . Tur ner and Leigh 5 Brownhill

Two), the entire chain of male dealers involved in the industry faced a loss ofprofits, including the foreign participants in the deal, such as coffee capitalists,investors, the World Bank and the IMF.

This brings us to the third party to the fight for fertility, that is, foreign cap-italists and agents of capitalist development. Capitalists in banks, agricultureand industry are the critical international partners in the male deals. Theseinternational partners have taken up where colonialists left off in 1963, in thatthey use male deals to continue neo-colonial indirect rule. International cap-italists promote accumulation and sanction its violent enforcement in ex-colonies. United States business economics professor, Ronald Seavoy (~ooo) ,wrote that

Contrary to what m ost scholars teach, investments in armed forces are one of themost productive investments that governm ents of peasant nations can make [ ]all police and soldiers [ ] must be prepared to enforce commercial policies on peas-ants with the maximum amount of violence i necessary Seavoy 2000, p. 113emphasis added)

In order to establish, extend and maintain capitalist production, interna-tional capitalists and national governments engage local men in male deals todiscipline especially women's labour into production for international marketsand the benefit of foreign profit-makers.

Historically, colonialists and African male dealers buried or erased previoussocial rights and customs which gave women considerable power over land andtheir own sexualities. Wealthy African men and chiefs who testified before theNative Land Tenure commission in 1929, for instance, kept secret certainKikuyu customs such as the right of women to become female husbands.''Widows married other women in order to maintain ownership of their deadhusband's land. The wife was encouraged to bear children, who inheritedthrough the female husband and father. One writer of the 1929 report notedthat colonialists had difficulty in obtaining information about women's landrights, probably because it is a relic of mother-right which is a custom fastdisappearing and which the natives no longer wish to admit as custom (Kenya1929, p. 26 [cited in MacKenzie 1990, p 691). Another custom which revealswomen's wider spectrum of choices and powers in the precolonial period isthat of mwendia ruhui n this practice a widow took a male lover who was usu-ally landless to provide labour in exchange for food and to father children toinherit the dead husband's land. Commenting on informants' reluctance tospeak about the practice of rnwendia ruhui the report noted that it is a prac-tice which they wish to discontinue as soon as possible because it is a relic of



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matrilineal and matrilocal customs which have fallen into desuetude (op cit.p. 69).The male deal in the 1929 Land Commission hearings involved British-appointed chiefs dismissing land distribution practices which were positive forboth women and landless men. These male dealing chiefs reduced the num-bers of people within their own communities who had legitimate customaryclaim to land. The chiefs in effect allowed the colonialists to alienate Africans'land and to ix boundaries around reserve land that Africans' were allowed tooccupy. In exchange, the chiefs accorded to themselves greater control over theallocation of land within these reserves by burying women's and landless men'sland rights during a time that was marked by an often violent transition fromcommunal to individual land ownership, especially in the Kikuyu reserves.Colonialists obtained the chiefs' tacit agreement to continuous European theftof land. By the early 1940%andless women and men were organized to resisttheir dispossession by chiefs and European colonialists who faced the wrath ofthe armed Mau Mau uprising of 1952.

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

11 LAND OCCUPATIONSAND THE FIGHT FOR FERTILITY

In this part, we examine ten land occupations which, together, illustrate manyfacets of the fight for fertility in Kenya in the new millennium. These cases areexemplary of the seven types of land occupation listed in Part I. Peasants' andsquatters' defense of the land they occupy follows upon attempts by others to con-trol the land or evict the occupants. We include four cases of the occupation and



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defense of urban market sites and slum villages, as this is the one type embrac-ing the reality of city life. We examine six other cases which represent the othersix 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 ontheir own land and squatters occupation of forests, experimental agriculturalstations, private land and settlement schemes. The 1990s land grab politicsmotivated dispossessed peoples occupation and defense of land to which theyhave legal, customary and moral claims. Each of the ten cases is described bytext and by a chart which assesses the gains and losses experienced by the threeparties to the fight for fertility: women and men united in gendered classalliances; local Kenyan male dealers; and foreign capitalists. This part of thestudy examines the social anatomy of the land occupations in terms of thechanges in gendered class relations which characterize each.A MARAGUA: PEASANTS REASSERT SUBSISTENCE ON THEIR OWN LANDIn Maragua, in central Kenya, small land owning peasants have grown coffeefor three decades. Though they own their own land, they are prevented by lawfrom uprooting coffee trees. The milling and marketing of peasants coffeecrops fell completely into the hands of undemocratic cooperative society offi-cials, state marketing board managers and agents of multinational food andbeverage corporations which purchased the beans. Farmers had no say in theprice of their crop and were subjected to the vagaries of the global market andcurrency fluctuations. They were also subjected to a host of price and importpolicies imposed by the World Bank and IMF, ncluding the privatization ofagricultural extension services. Such policies increase private investors profitsby directly impoverishing coffee farmers.

Since 1985 women small coffee farmers in Maragua (2-10 acre farms) havetorn out coffee trees and replaced them with bananas and other vegetables.After a decade of falling prices, many of their husbands had expanded theircoffee plots into women s food plots in an effort to recoup income. Women inMaragua challenged their husbands, the state and the World Bank, whichpushes export production because government revenue from exports is chan-neled directly into debt repayment and petroleum imports. The transforma-tion in Maragua involved an integrated build up of social networks with otherwomen farmers, with transporters and with market traders. Many local youthand most women s husbands joined in replacing coffee with bananas and otherlocally tradeable crops. Maragua women took control over their labour, thecrops that they produced and their family land. They began to rebuild a sub-sistence political economy which supported their own family s welfare and the



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welfare of land poor women and men. ll were engaged in local and regionaltransport s well s in wholesale and retail produce trade (Turner t al 1997;Turner and Brownhill 2001 .

1 Gains and Losses in the fight for fertility in MaragwType of occupation by entitlement:Peasants reassert subsistence on their own bnd

Actions interests and social nla tions i n the struggle for control over land and labourPatties to the fight for krtiliY

IWomen and men ina gendered class allianceWomen moved from a commodi-fied t o a subsistence politic aleconomy, i n which production,exchange and consumption oftheir crops were more firmly un-der their own control. Women re-collectivized their own labour sothat the labour process changedfrom individualized t o collective,from husband-directed to collec-tively-directed. Maragua womencontributed to building up socialnetworks wi th other women, wit htransporters and market traders.Men have also benefitted fromwomen s takeover o f th e co ffeefields. Their families have morecontrol over production andtrade. Wealth is more concentrat-ed in the village, instead of i ncap ital and abroad.

Kenyan male dealersMany husbands challenged theirwives tra nsform ation of Mara-gua farming, and threatened t othrow them out i f they wouldnot pick coffee. These men areunder new pressures t o re-commodify farming with newexport crops such as Frenchbeans, genetically modified ba-nanas and strawberries. Chris-tian clergy shored up marriageswhile bankers advised men t opu t women s names on bank ac-counts so that women wouldcontinue to pick coffee. Localbankers pressured coffee grow-ers to continue with the crop i norder t o repay loans. The CoffeeBoard of Kenya (CBK) began tolose its monopoly grip on theKenyan coffee market after Ma-ragua and other communitiesrejected coffee. The CoffeeBoard lost a significant sourceof foreign exchange.

ForeigncapitalThe World Bank persists i n giv-in g loans to th e Kenyan govern-ment to improve the coffeeindustry, which is so negativefor women, childre n and th e en-vironment, and, i n th e end, formen as well. The corporationsbuying coffee i n Kenya lostcontrol over the Maragua landand labour. Other agencies, suchas the International Service forthe Acquisition of Agri-biotechApplications W)nd the In -ternational Development ResearchCentre (IDRC, Canada), which pro-mote the cultivation of bananasand other horticultural crops forexport, have made inroads in Ma-ragua since 1996. This incursionthreatens to break solidarity be-tween women and men producingi n th e subsistence realm.

B MWEA: TENANTS ASSERT CONTROL OVER STATE-OPERATEDSETTLEMENT SCHEME

Mwea is a state-run rice irrigation scheme. The colonial government devel-oped irrigation at Mwea detention camp in 1953 using captive labour of theMau Mau detainees made available after the declaration of state of emergencyin October 1952 and the ensuing Mau Mau war (Njihia 1984, p. 1). Becausethey were left landless after the war, many of the detainees had no alternative



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to remaining in the detention camp. In 1961, the emergency was over and thestate recast the Mwea detention camp as the Mwea Irrigation Scheme.Residents are classified as tenants. The National Irrigation Board (NIB) ellsmilling and marketing services and inputs to the farmers.

Throughout the 1980s and lggos, tenants of the Mwea irrigation schememounted 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 e t al.1997). Single and divorced women had already begun to cultivate land on theedges of the scheme, and to divert water, land and inputs in the scheme to thecultivation of tomatoes. Some young men and women in Mwea were alsoinvolved in the trade of rice on the parallel market, to avoid channeling theproduce through the monopoly NIB marketing mechanism, which subtractedproduction costs from farmers' pay packets.

Many wives in Mwea struggled with their husbands over control over landand labour. Women's efforts to control their own labour and to use some ofthe inputs at the scheme to grow subsistence crops contravened not only thehusbands' authority, but the government's directives on the production ofmaximum rice yields. According to a 1984 study in Mwea, the farmers whodelivered the highest yields of rice to the NIB,were men aged between 36 and4 years, had previously been traders and had three wives (Njihia 1984, p. 7).Such men were classified in the report as good farmers who could controllarge amounts of family labour producing rice, and prevent the diversion ofinputs to wives' production of tomatoes and other vegetables. The report char-acterized as bad farmers those men who had some or all of the followingcharacteristics:

1. Misdirected m otivation or lack of it. Some farmers preferred salaried employ-ment. They would, therefore, leave their holdings temporarily unattended forsho rt periods while engaging in such activities.2 Poor m otivation. Lazy. They d o n ot follow instructions.3 Social weaknesses. a) N o prope r family, mainly bachelors young o r ol d). Lackreliable labour and proper control of inputs and output. b) Unstable families.Farmer is swindled by wives or sons. c) O ld a nd physically weak. Lack strength a ndmanagerial capacity. d ) Physically an d men tally sick.4 Unfaithful to scheme managem ent. They sell some of their produce in the blackmarket. They might sell som e of their inp uts also Njihia 1984 p. 7).

Those men who leave their holdings unattended:' in reality leave theirwives unattended. The women then irrigate their vegetables with water fromrice paddies. Men who do not control their womenfolk, find that they diverttheir energies into vegetable production. Without question violence is often amethod of control (Stamp 1989, p. 66). The government encouraged this vio-



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lence by rewarding good farmers who disciplined their wives' labour mosteffectively. In the mid-1980s battered women frequently fled from their hus-bands who consequently became bad farmers with no proper family. By1998, women faced such violence at the hands of Mwea men, and poverty inthe face of exploitation by the National Irrigation Board, that most youngwomen refused to marry (Mwea men 23 July 1998).

Finally, late in 1998, Mwea women and men together staged an uprising andtook control of the scheme. Many women and young men had established illic-it rice and vegetable production and trade, and used the newly constructedsubsistence system as a basis for the solidarity necessary to take over thescheme altogether. While many Mwea residents stopped growing rice andplant tomatoes instead, others divert their rice to the parallel, or producer-con-trolled, market. Still others have tried to sell their rice to the National IrrigationBoard. 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 thescheme. The near-monopoly that Mwea farmers had had on the commercialdomestic rice trade9 was broken in the late 1990s when corporations tookadvantage of World Bank trade liberalization policies and flooded the Kenyanmarket with cheaper, dumped rice from Asia. In addition, the government hasthe Mwea Rice Mill slated for privatization, and is inviting international cor-porations to invest in commercial rice production. Investors encourage thereturn of the good:' albeit violent, husband. They introduce genetically mod-ified rice for export and experiment with new seed propagation methods.

The parallel markets which have developed in Mwea over the last decadeprovide a means through which women land occupiers advance their controlover their own labour, both within and outside of marriage. Gendered classalliances strengthen young Mwea men's access to land. These alliances havechallenged all the rules of the scheme, including the disinheritance of sons. Asfarmers increasingly control their own production, they further expand theirsocial networks to facilitate exchange through relations with secure publictransporters and reliable market retailers. Environmental realities facing resi-dents include polluted ground water and deforestation. The diversification ofcrop production in Mwea increases the soil's fertility. Planting of fruit and nut treespromotes the reclamation of the physical environment and self-provisioning.

9. Mwea supplied nearly 80 of Kenya's domestic rice consum ption. The government-owned National Irrigation Board milled and delivered it throughout Kenya. The parallel marketrequires an alternative transport system which is ru by people willing to carry out illicit trade inwhat is a crucial staple food supply. One Mwea woman ran a fleet of m t tus (minibus publictransport) in the mid 1990s.



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1056 TerisaE Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill. . . . .

2. Gains and losses i n the fight for fe rtility In M m a IType of occupation by entitlement:Tenants assert controlover state-operated settlement schemeActions interests and social relations i n .e struggle for contm l over and labour

Parties to th fight for fertflity: .omen and men ina gendered class alliance

Mwea women have built resist-ance against male violence andthe exploitative production re-gime i n which that violencetook place. They did so by occu-pying land and reappropriatingresources, especially water,which irr igates land by freegravity-driven diversion from amajor river. gendered classalliance formed between thesesubsistence-focused womenand young as well as old men,who were considered badfarmers because they did notforce women to produce rice forthe National Irrigation Boardand because they divertedinputs to other purposes, suchas vegetable cultivation.

Kenyan male dealenMen who continue to deliverrice to the National IrrigationBoard (NIB) after the 1998scheme takeover, do so againstthe interests of th e women,men and children who haveasserted ownership of Mwealand. The National IrrigationBoard still controls some landand labour by virtue of theBoard's marketing of some Mwearice.

Rice capitalistsand agrobusinessJapanese funden withdrew froman irrigation improvement pro-ject in 1998 when tenants tookover the scheme and policekilled two protestors. Seed cor-porations may try to re-enforcethe male deal by promoting thecultivation of genetically modi-fied miracle rice. Agm-chemicalcorporations and foreign aidagencies have supported thecontinuation of prison-like con-ditions in the scheme. Interna-tional agrocorporations havedumped cheap rice on the Kenyanmarket after World Bank struc-tural adjustment policies stipu-lated that borders be opened totransnational corporations' im-ports.

Four Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Organization of Villagers) land occupationsIn Kenya, th e po or h ave n o secu rity where th ey live. In Nairobi, at least 6 percentof over three million people live in t he slums, making m ost of th em de facto squat-ters. Th e little rooms they rent or th e shacks they h ve put up can be demolished anytime, day or night, with everything they o wn either destroyed or stolen. The poo rare considered illegal in their own country, tha t is, with out rights, because theydo not have a title deed. How can one expect peace and development in largeAfrican cities like Nairobi where h un dre ds of thou sand s o f squa tters live in dailyfear, insecurity and uncertainty? (Land C aucus O ctober 1999Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, has a population of close to four million.Approximately percent of these inhabitants are forced to live in one of the100 slums spread through out the city. In these areas the state does no t provide anyphysical or social services includ ing water, sanitatio n, roads, electricity, health carecenters o r schools. The p oor live in small, overcrowded shacks mad e of rusting tinan d mu d. More shocking than the squalid cond itions in which they live is the factthat they are crammed o nt o less than 1.5 percent of the land i n Nairobi, and yetthat land is not their ow n (Maryknoll August 2000 .



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According to the Mau Mau struggle, everybody was to own land, some piece ofland to occupy. Now you can find some government officials with something todo with 100plots in o ne city. And thousan ds of people have nowhere to call home.Now our future plan is to struggle with them until they agree that the land inNairobi is ours, all including the m. So Muu nga no will not sleep, will fight, strug-gle for this lan d FIRST WOMAN, Gichamo, 25 July 1998 .We the uungano wa Wanavijiji want this: after we teach the people how to fightfor their rights, an d after repossessing ou r villages, we wan t everybody, mea ningthe poo r people, to have better living condition s an d development in tha t village.[ ] Like having good schools, an d everything good s o that o ur children could alsodevelop an d also [have] good health. Because the situ ation we are in now is awful.And th at is why the grabbers get the chance to com e and destroy our houses an dgrab the village. Because when they burn our houses, they just burn easily. Butwhen we build permanent houses, they can't burn easily FIRST WOMAN,Wanjiku 25 July 1998 .

C MURUOTO: OCCUPATION A N D DEFEN SE OF URBA N MARKETA N D RESIDENTIAL SITE

The 3, 0 0 0 residents and traders in the urban slum village of Mu ruoto weretraders and suppliers of cooked food to the u rban work force. A majority ofthose who p repare and sell processed food o n the Nairobi streets and in smallmarkets are women. They, on average, earn more than men in the preparedfood trade (Spring 20 00 , p. 333). Food retailers earn a decent living and linkrural subsistence farmers to th e u rban food markets. O n 25 May 1 99 0, offi-cers of the Nairobi City Council, in an effort to clean up the city, attemptedto demolish Muruoto. Police were called in bu t residents fought the m off withstones. There ensued a three day, pitched battle between the police and the res-idents of M uruoto. Finally, the police and demolition crews retreated and th eM uruoto people remained to occupy the land a nd defend their homes. A mas-sive, well-organized general strike, with rallies and dem onstrations, took placesix weeks late r (7-10 July 19 90 ), spurred in part by the popular ou tcry againstthe attack on Muruoto. The strike was enforced by youth who stopped alltransport into and out of Nairobi. They lit bonfires and put up barricadesacross major roads, and dropped stones on to passing transporters who defiedthe general strike call. Soon , no drivers dared to be on the road.The occupants of M uruoto, some of whom were elderly Mau M au wom en,were finally evicted in an u nan nou nced raid in O ctober 19 90 . Several peoplewere killed when the demolition crews flattened homes while their ownersslept inside. In the fight that broke out, at least one C ity Council guard waskilled. The city offered no alternative location for the residents of M uruoto. Asenior opera tive in th e N airobi City Council was widely believed to have been



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1058 Terisa . Turner and Leigh S. 9rownhill

behind the demolition. It is rum oured that he illicitly acquired the title deedfor the M uruoto land. After the final clearance in October 1990,he Muruotoland was allegedly sold by the operative for a hugely inflated price to the coop-erative society of the City Council workers. After the purchase of the land, thecorrup t cooperative society officials allocated furthe r monies from the CityCouncil workers pension fund to build an office block o n the Mu ruoto landFIRSTWOMAN 7 November 2001 .

3. Gains and Losses in the fight for fertility i n Muruotoof occupation by entitlement:Occupation A z e f e n s e of urban market and residentiaL site

Actions in and s oda1 e l a t i o ns n he rtruOgle or cont ro l over land and tabourRrties to the flght for fcrtilily

IWomen and men i na gendered class allianceArising out of the actions torebuild and defend Muruotocame the Organization ofVillagers, Muungano waWanavijiji, whose membershiphas grown t o include residentsand small scale traders from 80of Nairobi's slum villages (F irstWoman 25 July 1998). Youngmen organized with elderlywomen to p rotec t residents whooccupied Muruoto between Mayand October 1990. Many youthmobilized the Saba Saba(Kiswahili = Seven Seven, or 7July 1990) general strike. Socialupheaval and economicdisrupt ion began the f inalchallenge t o Moi's single partydictatorship. City workers wereforced t o buy more expensivelunch foods in 'hoteli' andsupermarkets, where ownerssold unprepared foods for twoto three t imes the price thatMuruoto prepared food retailersand hawkers charged. Murang'aand other food stuff producerslost their outlet.

Kenyan male dealersState actors succeeded i nprivatizing state land and set acorrupt and murderousprecedent of violent eviction,killing and forced sale. But theresistance the state faced wast o p rov e f a t a l t o t heconstitutional sanction of thesingle party regime. The rulingparty capitulated to multipartye lec tora l democracy i nDecember 1991.

The World Bank continued tosupport the Moi regime despitecorruption and violence. Thegovernment had shown that itwas capable of privatizing stateassets, and pandering toint erna tiona l corporations, suchas Hilton Hotels, who wantedthe city centre 'cleaned up' fortourists. Only when the statewas n ot able t o keep up withdebt repayments did the WorldBank and Paris Club of donorsthreaten to cut off aid. Socialmovements and pressure fromforeign donors forced Moi torescind the single-partyprovis ion i n the const i tut ion i nDecember 1991. Muruoto'sdemolition was a precursor t orural land clearances, which i nturn were facilitated by WorldBank pressure t o privatize landfor commercial production.



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D WESTLANDS: OCCUPATION AND DEFENSE OF URBAN M RKET SITEIn 1992 a Nairobi businessman claimed ownership of Westlands market, thesite of small kiosks run by several hundred retailers from the slums. Smallretailers of cooked food and fresh produce supported their children with themoney they earned in this well-situated market. Its choice location gave slumdwellers access to the high-end market at Westlands, where Europeans, Asiansand wealthy Africans shopped. Many of the kiosks and stalls in Westlands wereowned by men, who ran businesses ranging from shoe and electronics repairsto retail sales of produce and used clothing.

The small traders' kiosks are located outside of a shopping centre owned andoperated mainly by Asian businesses. The Asians' shops in Westlands stock manyitems which are imported from companies from abroad, such as Outspan andCeres orchards in South Africa. Prices are higher in the shops than in the kiosksoutside, with the result that many customers prefer to purchase produce in thekiosks. Transnational corporations must compete with these Kenyan informalsector traders, including those dealing in subsistence goods, appropriated items(suchascast off flowers from flower plantations) and the parallel market rice. Manystore owners advocated the removal of the kiosks.10 The small traders defendedtheir rights to occupy the market and the case went to court. The court heardthe case for six years, and finally decided against the small retailers and infavour of the businessman. Immediately thereafter, in April 1998, a demolitioncrew arrived at Westland market and flattened it, without notice and withoutallowing retailers to retrieve their merchandise. Members of the Organizationofvillagers protested the demolition. Police arrested ten. In solidarity,65 otheruungano wa Wanavijijimembers demanded to be taken into custody as well.Forty of the arrested were women. The 7 protestors were remanded for oneweek and upon their release, they rebuilt Westlands market (FIRST WOMAN,25 July 1998).

lo. During the Christmas season in 1996,retailers reported low sales, but hawkers appeared to do a roaring business, selling mostly toys, garments and second hand items. [ retail]traders appealed to the Mayor to check the influx of hawkers 'who are severely undercutting usWe pay lots of tax but our business is not protected,' Mr. Shah said. (Waihenya and KatanaDecember 1996).And: Hawkers have invaded every corner of the city o the extent ofblocking entrances to rent-paying, rate-paying and tax-paying shops. The all too common bat-tles between the city askaris [guards] and the hawkers have failed to solve this problem (Shah30 October 1996).



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1060 Terisa E Turne r and Leigh 6 rownhill. . .

4. Gains and losses in the fight for fe rti lity in WestlandsType of occupation entitlement:Occupation and defense or urban market siteActions interests and social nh ti o ns in the struggle for control ov r Land and Labour

Rrtles to the fight for fertility:Women and men ina gendered class alliance- . .

Westlands market women built onthe strength of the organizationwhich arose out of the Muruotodemolition, the Organization ofVillagers. They rebuilt their kioskand defended their subsistencelivelihoods, along with those oftheir lunlsuppliers and the jua hliinformal sector) artisans operatingin Westlands. The majority of thoseanested at the protest against thedemolition were women 40 of the75). Men of Westlands market alsoinvolved themselves i n rebuildingand defending their kiosks. ManyWestlands women and men joinedthe Organization of Villagen

Kenyan male dealers Foreign capitalThe businessman who claimedownership of the Westlands marketsite was supported by the courtsand the police. He also hireddispossessed men to demolish themarket kio sk and in so doing, setthe poor againstthe poor.

With the demolition of Westlandsmarket, the imported foo dst uk inthe shopping centre were sold morequickly, generating profits forforeign suppliers, such as Ceres andOutspan of South Africa.

E SOWETO OCCUPATION AND DEFENSE OF URB N RESIDENTIAL SITEThe Soweto slum community within Nairobi shares more than a name withthe Soweto township in Johannesburg, South Africa. The two Sowetos havemore in common than extreme poverty, poor living conditions and stateharassment. Residents share a militancy characterized by students massiveuprising against the apartheid regime in South Africa s Soweto in 976 and byresidents determined resistance to landgrabbers and demolition crews inKenya s Soweto in 1996In December 1996 occupants of the Soweto slum village were attacked, andtheir homes burned by thugs suspected to have been hired by a businessman



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who claimed ownership of the land. A few days later, one of the 100 menmobilized to finish the demolition of Soweto was cornered by the residents.They beat him unconscious. Television cameras captured a woman and sever-al men pouring kerosene on his body and burning him to death. Jane WairimuMwangi was arrested for pouring kerosene on him from her lamp before a manthrew a match onto his body. Many other women and men were arrested anddetained without charge in January 1997 (Those arrested included MarionWairimu and her four month old baby, who was ill at the time) Residents thenrebuilt their tin and timber houses, only to see them destroyed again a weeklater.

Armed police sealed off the Soweto slum village, Nairobi, as hired men pulleddown the structures built on a plot reportedly owned by a city tycoon. [ IAttempts by t he villagers to resist eviction failed because of th e police presence(Nation Correspondent,31December 1996,p. 3)After living on the land for more then 3 years, Soweto residents were

forcibly removed (Ibid., p. 5 . One woman occupant whose home wasdestroyed stated that

We are ready to d ie here unless we are com pensated and given an alternative plotby the person behind the con stant evictions from this land [ ] A no w homelessmother said villagers feared moving to an alternative site that had been pointedou t to them at Kayole as it too belonged to an individual. [ ] I have nowhere togo to because the new site belongs to somebody else who will definitely evict us.(ibid., p. 3).

Women members of the lobby group Release Political Prisoners (RPP)helped organize protests against the mass arrests of Soweto people in January1997 Release Political Prisoners' members mobilized with the Organization ofVillagers, ungikiand Soweto residents to demonstrate against the police over

11. A year later in December 1997, and just a few weeks before the General Election,President Moi invited women's groups from Nairobi to State House for a reception. He allocat-ed ten acres of land in Kayole to som e 130 women's groups in Nairobi, including the SowetoNational Choir. The ten acres was divided between the group s into tiny .075acre plots. "We u lu-lated an d danced tha t ou r dream had become a reality. Almost immediately, the PC [ProvincialCom missioner] set everything in motion," stated Mary Ayoti, a leader of the Soweto NationalChoir (Mwangi 8 October 2001).Ayoti said that within n o time, they got allotmen t letters an dmap s showing where their plots were. They later paid the prem iums. Each grou p paid a servicefee of Sh30,ooo.But the women never received title deeds. By November 2001, the land wasbeing claimed by som eone else. Former N airobi Provincial Com missioner Joseph Kaguthi saidthat h e was "sure that som e corru pt people colluding with so me City Hall officials had takenover the land an d sold it." The mon ey too , he said, "may have gone int o the pockets of a fewindividuals leaving the w omen with a double loss" (Mwangi 8 October 2001 .



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I 5. Gains and Losses in the fight for fert ili ty in SowetoT pe of occupation by entitlement:~ccupadon nd defense of urban residential siteActions interests and social relations i n the struggle for control over land and labour

m to h emt for htltityI I' Women and men ina gendered class alliance PnFn foreign cap ital

The Soweto residents lost theirhomes and many lost theirplaces of business. They losttheir community networks whenthey were scattered i n a m ini-diaspora after the demolition.Many Soweto women and men,however, began to involvethemselves i n new communitieso f resistance, i n Release Poli-tical Prisoners, Organization ofVillagers and Mungiki (Congress).

Politically well-connected busi-nessmen are able t o ca ll on th econsiderable power of thepolice and courts to prote ct andlegitimate their claim to landoccupied by dispossessed people.

The World Bank and otherinstitutions promote privatiz-ation policies which have theeffect o f eliminating the informalsector as a refuge for thoserefusing low-waged agriculturalwork. Privatization dispossessesthose who offer competition toformal retai l and s e ~ c emvision,much of which is controlled orsupplied by foreign firms.

the arrests. A white South African man was among the demonstrators. He wasquestioned by police, who also confiscated his passport and threatened toarrest him. The demonstrators insisted they would not vacate the police sta-tion withou t him . Police released him. The aily ation reported thatMr.W eg er if , a n o p p o n e n t o f h e n o w def unc t ap ar th e id system, ...s a id h e w a s t o l dh e h a dno r i g h t t o n te rv en e o n b e h a l f o f h e v il la g er s s in ce h e s a t o u ri s t . I'm n o ta tou r i s t . m a h u m a n r i gh ts activ is t, h e said , l i ke n in g the Soweto s i tua t i on tothe ap ar the id sys tem in S o u th A f r ica . ( K o n ch o r a 14 anuary 1997 . 4)

F KAMAE: OCCUPATION AN D DEFENSE OF URBAN RESIDENTIAL SITEIn May 1998, a chief claimed ownership of a plot of land in Kamae village,1 kilometers outside Nairobi. Kamae is home to a community made up ofsmall scale subsistence farmers an d casual labourers on nearby coffee estates.Most households are female headed. Residents claim that the land, part of afarm ow ned by Jom o Kenyatta, was given to them by the late president. OnMay 5,199 8, a chief moved in with dozens of armed guards to occupy a por-tion of the village land. He claimed he was going to bu ild a home for streetchildren. Kamae villager, Salome Wacera Wainaina 44years , confronted thechief and called to her neighbours to help. The villagers came to resist the



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chief s occupation of the land. Police shot into the crowd, killing Wainaina andinjuring a young man. Atieno, a secretary of Organization of Villagers, statedthat

n M u u n g a n o , I ca n say t h a t t h e w o m e n a r e in t h e f r o n t l in e . for example, inKa m a e v il lage , wher e a w om an was in h e f r o n t i n e p r o t e s t i n ga b o u t t h e a n d grab-b ing . We M uu ng an o an d the Release Po l i t i ca l Pr isoners [ lobby g roup ] did ademons t ra t ion an d e f t the co f f i n a t the Prov in c ia l Commiss ioner s o ff ice. So thew o m e n w e re t h e p e o ple w h o a re ve r y a c ti ve in p r o t e s t i n g (FIRST WOMAN,Atieno, 5 Ju ly 1998 .

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

6. Gains and Losses in the fight for ferti lity in Kamaeof occupation by entitlement:0ccup;Eand defense of urban reddentla1 site

Actions int rrsts and soda1 relations in the struggle for contml over land and labour

Women and men ina gendered dassalliance Kenyan male dealersSalome Wacera Wainaina losther life i n he defense of Kamaeland. Residents retained theland that the chief had tr ied t oexpropriate. After the confron-tation, Kamae residents becameinvolved i n Organizat ion o fVillagers, to defend their ownland and the threatened l and ofothers. Most Kamae womenmaintain subsistence gardens.There is a high degree of collec-ti vi ty among th e women, whoshare food, a gricultu ral labour,child and elder care and otherresources.

The land-grabbing chief lo st hisbid to occupy some of theKamae people s Land. The police -man was transferred, bu t wasnot fired nor charged withSalome s death.

The privatization program of theWorld Bank fuels such conflicts.



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G STATE-OWNED FORESTS: FOREST DWELLERS ASSERTION OFOCCUPATIONAL ENTITLEMENTS

Dozens of rural squatter families have been residing by the roadside aroundMt. Kenya after the government evicted them from Mt Kenya and Aberdareforests in 1989. They are among the thousands of squatters that the govern-ment claims will be settled on 170,000 acres of land to be excised from stateforests in Central and Rift Valley Provinces. The excision plans have set inmotion a conflict amongst the government, squatters, indigenous people,donors and environmentalists (Kago and Munene 20 November 2001).Wangari Maathai and environmental activists in the Green Belt movementand in other civic organizations oppose the privatization of the forest land.They claim the forests are not only being allocated to indigenous forestdwellers, who survive especially on bee-keeping and the collection of wildhoney. Indigenous forest dwellers are hunters and gatherers who are very capa-ble of preserving and nurturing the forest and its many resources, includingwater catchment areas. However, the environmentalistsclaim that much of theland has already been allocated to private developers who will destroy theecosystem (Kago and Munene 20 November 2001 . Joseph Sergon, lawyer for

the indigenous Ogieks of Mau West,differs with Green Belt Movement co-ordinator Wangari Maathai's blanket con-demnation of the degazettement notice. It is ironic that Professor Maathai couldcondem n an action that was for their [the Ogiek's] benefit while all along she hasbeen supporting their cause. (Riunge 21 November 2001

At the same time, the Ogieks of Mau East plan to sue the government overthe planned excision of more than 35,000 hectares of their forest, due to theallocation of plots in the forest to some outsiders (Riunge 21 November2001). It is important to distinguish between the forest dwellers' use andpreservation of the forest and the private developers' exploitation and destruc-tion of forests.The government claims that it is responding to the needs of the landless byallocating forest land to them. But evidence of corruption in the allocation ofland to big businessmen has raised serious concerns about who is making thedecisions, and how the allocations are being made.As of December 2001, the forest dwellers were excluded from decision mak-ing, while politicians and big businessmen advanced their own interests in theforest privatization exercise. For example, in October 2001, a Cabinet Ministerhived off 1 000 acres of clan land from the Kaptagat Forest, without theblessings of elders of the community. In protest, residents pulled down thefence he had erected, and nine of them were charged. When a local chief asked



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elders to curse the nine, the elders refused. Instead they asked the chief to callthe Minister before their council within two weeks to explain to them why hehad alienated land without their permission (Ngure November 2001).Because the Minister is making decisions the forest excisions will lead to thecommodification of the forest, and therefore to the exclusion of subsistenceusers and the eventual destruction of the ecosystem.

7. Gains and losses in the fight for fertil ity i n the state-owned forestsT pe of occupation by entitlement:Forest dweie rs assertion of occupational entitlements

Actions, interests and social nlat ions i n the struggle for control over land and labourPatties to the ight for fed[ity:

Women and men ina gen *Cd hssattiance Kenyan male dealeaForest dwellers who get titleswill not benefit from secureaccess t o resources. I n acapita-list land market, theland around the forest dwellers'holdings may be stripped oftrees and developed as capita-li st farms, housin g projects,bio-prospecting zones, miningsites or ecotourism areas. Theforest dwelleaw ll ose the benefitsof the whole, intact forest

Private real estate developers,timb er businessmen and planta-tion farmers who get tit le toforest land will not preserveand nurture the forest. Ratherthey wil l str ip i t of trees andmake commercial use of theland and resources.

The World Bank encouragesprivatization and sale of publicland as a means of the govern-ment raising money to pay tothe in tern atio nal banks. Foreigninvestors' profits also dependupon the commercial route toexp loi ting resources i n Kenya.Development of commercialactivit ies i n th e forest areas,such as logging, bioprospectingand ecotourism, will quicklydeplete the forest resources.

H. AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ADC) FARM:ASSERTION OF OWNERSHIP BY COMMUNITY MEMBERSA n o t h e r a rea o f m a j o r c o nc e r n s in h e a l lo c a t io n o f p u b l i c a g r i cu l tu r a l a n d . Fo rins tance , landless peop le are k n o w n t o have wor ked fo r the i r en t i r e li f e t imes o nAg r i cu l t u r a l D e ve lo p m e n t C o r p o r a t i o n ADC ) f a r m s n t h e ift Val ley fo r a pittance. Yet the wheeler de al ing land ed ar is tocracy use the i r p o l i t i ca l a nd f inancia lm i g h t t o g et h u g e c h u n

turner & brownhill - african jubilee (2013)

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