Land and Conflict in Kenya’s Rift Valley: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

Conflict in Kenya’s Rift Valley has been common from the early colonial period to the present. Such conflict, while frequent across Kenya, has tended to be concentrated in the Rift Valley Province. In this region, more than other parts of the country, colonial land policies created a default mode of land relations that marginalized local African communities and their modes of production by restricting their access to the most important resource in these processes—land. While emphasizing exclusion, this colonial mode generated contradictions in the economic, political, and social spheres that in turn bred conflict and bloody encounters over land between the government and the local communities, as well as between communities. This process has persisted into the postcolonial times, sometimes aided by the independent government that has presided over a troubled land reform program since 1963. Following the decolonization of the former White Highlands in the 1960s, the agriculturally productive parts of Kenya’s Rift Valley has remained a terrain for contesting land rights, ethnic identity, and accessibility to national politics. Land has occupied a central place in this area so much so that it has remained the most “politicized” region in Kenya, as attested to by cycles of political violence that have mired the province every election cycle since the late 1980s, and particularly following the bungled 2007 general elections.