The land issue was the pillar of Kenyan resistance against colonialism
How do nations truly break free from colonial chains? What happens when a population, stripped of its land and dignity, decides to fight back against an empire? And what enduring legacies are left when freedom is finally won, but the wounds of the past refuse to heal? These questions lie at the heart of Kenya’s struggle for independence.
Kenya was a prime example of a settler colony, a territory where the colonizing power actively encouraged its own citizens to emigrate, establishing permanent communities. The indigenous communities were forcefully removed from their land. Their cultures, and languages were obliterated.
In Africa’s settler colonies – Kenya, South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Algeria – the struggle against apartheid, institutional racism, imperialism, dispossession, and corresponding inequities was violent, protracted, and witnessed mass atrocities.
Dismissed by some as a “barbaric tribal outfit” and celebrated by others as a liberation movement, the Mau Mau uprising epitomized a desperate groundswell of resistance.
From 1952 to 1960, the British Kenya Colony became a battleground between the colonizers and the natives. This was the Mau Mau uprising, a conflict that pitted the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), more commonly known as the Mau Mau, against the might of the British Empire.
It was an underground movement that waged a bush war of liberation against the British settlers in Kenya. Some critics dismissed Mau Mau as a barbaric tribal outfit, while others characterized it as a nationalistic liberation movement, Later, in the 1970s, the name of the movement gave life to the term ‘to mau-mau’ which meant ‘to intimidate someone, such as an official, through hostile confrontation or threats’ and reflected the historical British version of the Mau Mau’s actions – a version that did not acknowledge the grievances of the Kikuyu or the atrocities committed against them.
At the heart of the KLFA’s ranks were the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu communities, as well as Kamba and Maasai, driven by land alienation and systemic oppression. They faced the British Army, bolstered by the local Kenya Regiment, a force comprised of British colonists and local auxiliary militia – the home guards.
The Mau Mau, operating from the dense forests of the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya, employed guerrilla tactics, and intermittently struck against colonial infrastructure. The British painted them as barbaric, which further exacerbated the conflict and obscured the underlying issues of land ownership, political representation, and cultural identity.
The liberation war in Kenya was so intense that a state of emergency was declared in 1952. The Mau Mau uprising epitomized a groundswell of resistance against imperialism, racism, and feudalism. It was also a response to discriminatory labor laws, and abrogation of basic liberties.
The tide began to turn in the autumn of 1956. On October 21, in the Aberdare forests, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the Mau Mau, was captured. For the British, it marked the effective end of their military campaign.
Although pockets of resistance continued, the flame of the uprising began to fade, leaving behind a legacy of struggle that would ultimately pave the way for Kenya’s independence gained in 1963. However, the post-independence era was significantly shaped by collaboration with the colonial power, and much of the institutional framework inherited from the colonial state continued to influence governance.
It is actually the land issue that was central to Kenyans’ resistance against colonialism. Agrarian and pastoralist communities agitated for the return of colonially grabbed land across Kenya, especially in areas that were then called white highlands – the fertile central and Rift Valley regions predominantly inhabited by Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Meru and Maasai communities. Severely affected by land grabs were the Maasai, a pastoralist community, which was robbed of swaths of land by the British settlers.
Through devious land agreements, Maasai leaders were duped into giving away their heritage. The settlers grabbed Maasai land in the Rift Valley. These infamous agreements included the 1904 agreement under which the British forced the Maasai from their large tracts of grazing land in the Rift Valley into two reserves. Reserves were marginalized areas for natives. So detrimental was this agreement that it reduced Maasai land by 60%-70%.
In 1911, the British coerced the Maasai, on the pain of gun violence, to surrender more land for settlement and ranches in Laikipia (a county which has been hosting British troops since 1963). As a result, the Maasai were forcefully moved to a derelict reserve further south.
In 1923, these land grabs were legalized through the Colonial Land Ordinance – a legislation that fundamentally changed land ownership during British colonial rule in Kenya from communal landholding to individual titles. This alien form of land ownership further facilitated encroachment on Maasai communal land and postcolonial land grabs by the political elite.
The liberation war was waged specifically against racially charged economic policies that advanced inequalities, poverty, and exploitation. This revolt galvanized native workers affected by degrading labor conditions. The colonial state racially excluded these workers and the peasantry.
Denied basic amenities, the reserves, inhabited by the indigenous people, epitomized state neglect. Agricultural extension services were not available to native farmers since all resources were channeled to European settlers. The setting up of ranches or conservancies disregarded indigenous land rights and excluded indigenous communities from land and resources under the pretext of conservation.
This style of land dispossession seems still to persist in Kenya, and there has been no attempt to remedy these historical injustices. A government commission of inquiry popularly known as Ndung’u Land Commission (after the name of its chair, Paul Ndungu) was established in 2003 to investigate illegal/irregular allocation of land virtually throughout Kenya’s postcolonial period. However, successive governments ignored the far-reaching recommendations of the commission.
Colonial legacy?
The issue of land injustices appears to have been further compounded by successive postcolonial governments through notable land acquisitions. The actions of Kenya’s political elite in accumulating land, sometimes without adequate public oversight, have been identified as contributing factors to extensive landlessness across the country.
This uneven distribution of development and national resources has posed consistent challenges to national planning and implementation by postcolonial governments. These governments tended to prioritize urban areas, particularly the capital city, Nairobi, often resulting in disparities in progress compared to rural areas. Within urban settings, significant portions of the population reside in informal settlements, frequently lacking sufficient basic facilities such as housing, sanitation, and infrastructure, indicating areas of sustained underdevelopment.
Development programs have, at times, shown limited consideration for diversity, leading to concerns about individuals facing exclusion based on ethnicity, religion, region, gender, and class. The introduction of devolved power, resources, and decision-making to the periphery, effective in 2013, was specifically designed to address these deeply rooted political and economic disparities.
The land redistribution program initiated at Kenya’s independence, aimed at restoring land to its original communities, evolved in ways that facilitated significant land acquisition by the first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and his close associates.
The process involved the deployment of state resources and specific legal interpretations. The historical and ongoing issues surrounding land distribution are frequently cited as factors in the cyclical interethnic tensions prevalent in Kenya’s multiparty politics. Some of the Kikuyu peasants displaced from their ancestral central region were resettled in the Rift Valley and Coastal regions which attracted hostility from the host communities.
Since Mau Mau fought for reclamation of land and freedom, the outfit was banned since the colonial period and was only unbanned as recently as 2003. It took so long to be unbanned even after independence because its ideology of egalitarianism was at variance with the Eurocentric and avaricious ideology pursued by the dominant postcolonial elite.
Although sometimes erroneously depicted in historical narratives as a leader of the Mau Mau, Kenyatta evidently viewed the movement as a significant challenge to his administration’s broader economic and resource strategies.
Thus, the place of Mau Mau in Kenya’s historiography is mixed. Whereas some acknowledge its unrivalled contribution in the attainment of independence, others, like the colonialists before, have dismissed Mau Mau as tribal guerilla fighters wrongly given pride of place at the expense of other liberation struggles across the country because of ethnic bigotry and supremacy within Kenya’s postcolonial state edifice.