Hostname: page-component-669899f699-swprf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T10:14:01.831Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Kenyan Agrarian Debate: A Reappraisal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Stephen Orvis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Kenya has served as a model of rural development, to be praised and lambasted, for three decades. As early as 1964 Clayton hailed it as an “agrarian revolution” (1964). As recently as 1989, Lofchie argued that it is an “agricultural ‘success story’” that has dramatically raised the real incomes of smallholder farmers while achieving one of the highest agricultural growth rates on the continent (1989, 15). Equally common are those condemning it as the archetypical example of capitalist development, impoverishing the rural poor to provide benefits to a small and internationally dependent bourgeoisie. Neither perspective is completely accurate; both need to be re-examined in light of Kenya's recent political unrest and shift to a multi-party political system. If a more open political system is sustained, rural political demands can only be understood and predicted if we understand the effects of Kenya's development model on the bulk of the population: Kenya's peasants.

The Kenyan agrarian debate has produced an unusually rich literature on the effects of capitalist development on an African peasantry. At its heart is the question of whether the emergence of a rural market economy preserves a relatively homogeneous peasantry or dissolves it into landed and landless classes. This article reappraises and contributes to the debate by arguing that directly examining the historical process of social transformation brought about by capitalist development, rather than deducing the process from cross-sectional data, suggests a single, uniform explanation of seemingly conflicting empirical material.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , December 1993 , pp. 23 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

The author would like to acknowledge the support of a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Training Grant for funding the original research for this article, and Hamilton College for funding follow-up research. Numerous Kenyan officials, university faculty and farmers provided invaluable information on which this article is based.

References

Anderson, D. and Throup, D.. 1989. “The Agrarian Economy of Central Province, Kenya, 1918 to 1939.” In The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-war Depression, edited by Brown, I., 8–23. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bevan, D., Collier, P., and Gunning, J. W.. 1989. Peasants and Governments: An Economic Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Bigsten, A. 1980. Regional Inequality and Development: A Case Study of Kenya. Farnborough, England: Gower.Google Scholar
Carlsen, J. 1980. Economic and Social Transformation in Rural Kenya. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Central Bureau of Statistics.Google Scholar
Central Bureau of Statistics. 1977. Integrated Rural Survey: 1974-75, 1. Nairobi: Government of Kenya.Google Scholar
Central Bureau of Statistics. 1988. Economic Survey. Nairobi: Government of Kenya.Google Scholar
Chege, M. 1987. “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Central Kenya.” In The Political Economy of Kenya, edited by Schatzberg, M. G.. New York: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
Clayton, E. 1964. Agrarian Development in Peasant Economies: Some Lessons from Kenya. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, D. W. and Odhiambo, E. S. A.. 1989. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Collier, P., and Lal, D.. 1984. “Why Poor People Get Rich: Kenya 1960-1979.” World Development 12/10:1007–1018.Google Scholar
Collier, P.. 1986. Labour and Poverty in Kenya 1900-1980. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Cowen, M. P. 1976. Capital and Peasant Households [Miscellaneous Paper 91]. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.Google Scholar
Cowen, M. P. 1979. “Capital and Household Production: The Case of Wattle in Kenya's Central Province 1903-1964.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Cowen, M. P. 1981. “The Agrarian Problem.” Review of African Political Economy 20:57–73.Google Scholar
Cowen, M. P., and Kinyanjui, K.,. 1977. Some Problems of Capital and Class in Kenya [Occasional Paper 26]. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies.Google Scholar
de Wilde, J. C. 1967. Experiences with Agricultural Development in Tropical Africa, Volume II, The Case Studies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.Google Scholar
Geist, J. 1981. “Coastal Agrarian Underdevelopment and Regional Imbalance in Kenya.” Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Berkeley.Google Scholar
Gwyer, G. 1972. Labour in Small Scale Agriculture: An Analysis of the 1970/71 Farm Enterprise Cost Survey Labour and Wage Data. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.Google Scholar
Haugerud, A. 1984. “Household Dynamics and Rural Political Economy among Embu Fanners in the Kenya Highlands.” Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Hazlewood, A. 1989. Education, Work, and Pay in East Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, D. 1984. The Impending Crisis in Kenya: The Case for Land Reform. Brookfield, VT: Gower Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Kenya, Republic of. 1969. A Report on Economic Studies of Farming in Nyanza District, 1963. Nairobi: Ministry of Economic Planning and Development.Google Scholar
Kitching, G. 1980. Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite-bourgeoisie. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kitching, G. 1985. “Suggestions for a Fresh Start on an Exhausted Debate.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 19/1:1–174.Google Scholar
Kosgei, S. J. 1981. “Commodity Production, Tea and Social Change in Kericho, Kenya, 1895-1963.” Ph. D. Diss., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Leys, C. 1971. “Politics in Kenya: The Development of Peasant Society.” British Journal of Political Science 1/3:307–37.Google Scholar
Leys, C. 1974. Underdevelopment in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Livingstone, I. 1986. Rural Development, Employment and Incomes in Kenya. Brookfield: VT Gower.Google Scholar
Livingstone, I. 1991. “A Reassessment of Kenya's Rural and Urban Informal Sector.” World Development 19/6, 651–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lofchie, M. F. 1989. The Policy Factor: Agricultural Performance in Kenya and Tanzania. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, F. 1991. “Political Economy of the Environment, Gender, and Resistance under Colonialism: Murang'a District, Kenya, 1910-1950.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25/2:226–56.Google Scholar
Moody, T. 1976. Population Pressure and Agricultural Productivity in Nyanza, Kenya [IDR Project Papers, Rural Employment]. Copenhagen: Centre for Development Research.Google Scholar
Mwaniki, N. 1988. “Land Tenure Reform and Agricultural Change in Mbeere, Kenya: Implications for Food Availability and Rural Development.” Paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.Google Scholar
Njonjo, A. 1977. “The Africanization of the ‘White Highlands’: A Study in Agrarian Class Struggles in Kenya, 1950-1974.” Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University.Google Scholar
Njonjo, A. 1981. “The Kenya Peasantry: A Re-assessment.” Review of African Political Economy 20: 27–40.Google Scholar
Oboler, R. S. 1985. Women, Power and Economic Change: The Nandi of Kenya. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Orvis, S. W. 1989. “The Political Economy of Agriculture in Kisii, Kenya: Social Reproduction and Household Response to Development Policy.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Parkin, D. J. 1972. Palms, Wine and Witnesses: Public Spirit and Private Gain in an African Farming Community. London.Google Scholar
Paterson, D. 1980. Coping with Land Scarcity: The Pattern of Household Adaptations in one Luhya Community [Working Paper 360]. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies.Google Scholar