In their chapter on land in a landmark text entitled Public Law and Social Change in Kenya published in 1970, Yash Ghai and Patrick McAuslan wrote: ‘No part of the law of Kenya has raised stronger emotions over the years than the law relating to land and its administration, and none is of more importance at present’. This remains true today as Kenya marks the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of 2010 Constitution. In this book, Ambreena Manji explores our seemingly intractable land problems, including inequitable concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy, a propensity for land grabbing, unresolved historical land injustices and landlessness. She seeks to develop a theoretical framework for our discussions of land which, to adapt Upendra Baxi, himself adapting Ronald Dworkin, takes justice seriously.

Manji argues that land reform's tenacity as a key idea in Kenyan history is beyond doubt. Nonetheless, land reform can mean many things. Manji shows that land reform has in fact been reduced to land law reform. This has excluded critical debates. It has prevented us from thinking about more radical possibilities. It has foreclosed discussions of redistributive politics. Drawing on constitutional and land law, and on history, literary theory and political science, Manji calls our attention to the dangers of such a limited debate about land reform and argues that we must attend to insurgent knowledge and ideas of change. She uses the term ‘land archive’ to describe the accretion of land knowledge by formal and informal means. She shows that authoritative, official archives combine with legal folk memory to record the many land wrongs of the colonial and post-independence periods. The official archive of the land mischiefs committed by the state, politicians and the elite has been made available in a series of official reports. But beyond this, Kenyans have not been shy to develop a peoples’ truth on land, creating what Grace Musila describes as alternative ‘epistemic registers’.

Manji shows that demands for constitutional change and land reform have become intricately connected in Kenya and draws attention to some of the dangers inherent in this. She takes land as an exemplar of Kenya's constitutional optimism and argues that we have focused too much on how to achieve institutional change in relation to the management and administration of land.