The SoclaL and Economlc Impacts of Land Reformt

A Kenyan Case Study

Martin Walsh

School of African and Asian Studies

University of Sussex

paper presented to the East Afrtcan Seminar Serles,

Afrlcan Studles Centre, University of Cambrldge

9 November L993

The Soclal and Economlc Imoacts of Land Reform:

A Kenvan Case Studv

Martin Walsh

Introduction

The social and economic impacts of land reform. I must begin by

confessing a dreadful bias. Like many researchers working in anotlrer

culture, I've often found myself swapping anecdotes with informants,

eomparing the practices I'm being told about with what I know about

analogous or related practices back home. Working in different rural

communities in East Africa, one of the commonest stories that I telt -

and one that almost never fails to produce surprise and amazement - is

that in my corner of northern Europe the vast majority of people

neither cultivate nor have ready access to land on wtrich to do so,

unless they grow cabbages in a back garden or rent an allotment. I

sssally skip over the further embarrassing fact that most of my

neighbours invest more energy in cultivating garden flowers and

ornamental plants, but turn instead to discuss the prevalence of wage

labour as a means of making a living. For dramatic effect I illustrate

this story with the example of my own family: none of my known

ancestors has ever owned a farm, and most of them have never even

owned their own homes or the plots on which they were built. ,With A-

level history as no more than a feint memory, I'm at a loss to explain

this state of affairs except in pop Marxist terms and with reference to

my conviction that somewhere along the line from communal ownership to

working for others we must have been cheated.

Land is still the primary means of production for most households in

rural Kenya - much as it is in other East African countries. In the

area I'm going to be talking about today all but a few households in the

Iarger market centres are engaged in agriculture, while farming is

described as the main occupation of just under two thirds of the heads

of these households - not to mention the activities of their spouses

and/or other household members. Land tenure is also a very emotive

issue, especially in a country where, as we are constantly being

reminded, the demand for land far exceeds its supply. The process of

land reform, initiated by the British colonial government four decades

ago and still to be completed in many agricultural areas, has raised the

emotional and inded economic stakes even further. On one, no doubt

simplified, interpretation the Swynnerton Plan of i.954 was intended to

produce the same kind of transformation in Kenyan agriculture as that

which led to the land.lessness of my own ancestors. Under these

circumstances it should not b€ surprising that the question of land

reform raises strong opinions all rsund, in those who have been subject

to it as well as those who have made it the subject of their research.

The Argument

Value judgements like mine frequently cloud debate over land reform

and its impacts, while description and prescription are often confused.

As a result the discussion and evaluation of impacts tends to be in

terms of sharp dichotomies, where one side of the equation is clearly

favoured over the other according to the wider agienda or prejudices of

a particular protagonist. Before reform is sharply contrasted with

after. The consequences are either wholly good or wholJy bad, black

or white, one thing or the other. Land reform does not lead to the

capitalisation of agricultural production. Land reform stimulates wider

economic activity and the generation of wealth. Land reform encourages

land conservation. Land reform produces social inequity. Land reform

intensifies women's subordination to men. Land reform should be

implemented under certain circumstances. Land reform should not be

implemented under any circumstances. And so the list goes on.

Life is, of course, never so simple. If we examine the application

of these arguments to a particular case, clarity of explanation tends to

dissolve in the fuzz of interpretation. I can suggest a number of

re.rsons for this. The difficulty of measuring impacts is only part ofthe problem. It is even more difficult to distinguish impacts fromhistorical coincidence, or to separate ultimate from proximal causes. If

there is a general lesson to be learned, it is surely that the impact ofinterventions like land reform is contingent upon the particular

circumstances of each case. Much as we'd like to think otherwise theoutcomes are not at a[ easy to predict, and there are alwaysunintended and accidental consequences waiting to surprise us.

The Mbeere Study

I'11 confine most of my observations to one particular case - Mbeere- and draw comparative material largely from studies of neighbouring

areas. Mbeere, which is about the size of an English county, lies onthe lower south-east slopes of Mount Kenya, stretching down from Embu- and what was once the edge of the forest - to the relatively dry bush

country and winding course of the Tana River. The higher land in the

north-west is suitable for coffee cultivation, while the lower zones are

classed as semi-arid and are not dominated by any cash crop, though

cotton is grown in some areas. The principal subsistence crops aremaize and bulrush millet. Administratively Mbeere forms the lower part

of Embu District in Kenya's Eastern Province. The Mbere people, who

number less than L00,000, speak a Bantu language closely related to

that of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They also share

m€rny features of culture and sociaf practice with the Kikuyu and other

related peoples of central Kenya, including the Embu, Meru and Kamba.

I'm currently working with an economist, Diana Hunt, on a study of

soclo-economic change in Mbeere over the past twenty years and its

imprications for policy and planning in the future. This summer we

completed more than a year's work in Mbeere, having used a number of

different methods of data collection. The most intensive data, including

daily records of income, expenditure and time-use, have been drawnfrom thirty plus case study households in two different parts of

Mbeere: most of these are the same or related to households which

Diana first studied in the early 1970s and provided material for a

number of earlier publications. In addition to collecting information on

a more informal basis, we've also conducted a number of larger scale

surveys, including a random sample of 232 households throughout

Mbeere designed, in part, to test the representativeness of the case

study results. I hasten to add that we are still in the thick of

processing this data, and that we expect an analysis of the impacts of

land reform to comprise just one part of a much rarider study.

Land Reform ln Mbeere

Mbeere was declared a land adjudication area in L97O, though it had

been known for some years that this would happen. The early stages

of the process have already been described in some detail by David

Brokensha and Jack Glazier (1973) and I won't repeat what they have

said here. Perhaps the most striking fact about the adjudication

process in Mbeere is the extraordinary length of time wtrich it has

taken. While many allocations of land had been regiistered by the mid*

1970s, title deeds have yet to be issued in a large number of areas.

Only 2LZ of the households in our sample with adjudicated land were in

possession of all of their title deeds, and a massive 76? had no titles at

aII, up to 86-903 in the lower zones. In two-thirds of these cases ttris

was because the deeds had not been released: while just under a

quarter of those without all their [tles gave high cost and lack of

money as their reason for not collecting them. The delay in releasi.ng

titles is generally attributed to the fact that there are still large

numbers of disputes wilch have to be decided by the minister

concerned, though whether this reflects an unusiually high ineidence of

difficult disputes or simply bureaucratlc inerLia is difficult to say. I

suspect the latter, if only because titles are often released in other

parts of Kenya when political favours are due or required and the

president is on hand to issue them.

The length of time which adjudication has taken in Mbeere makes it

difficult to talk unequivocally about a before and an after. In some

respects we are still in between. The situation becomes even more

complicated when we consider that Mbere's neighbours have and are

following different time scales. In upper Embu land tenure reform was

completed in the early 1960s. In Thara]<a, to the north of Mbeere, the

adjudieation process has only recently begun. This affects a lot of

Mbeere living in Ishiara and other places near the district boundary

who have claims to land on both sides of the Thuci river. More

€tener^lly the mismatch in time scales means that it has been possible

for some people to look, quite literally, uphill and see what is coming to

them in the future, and for others to look downhill and see

opportunities that they may no longer have at home.

Economlc Impacts

Capttalisation of Agrtcultural Production

What, then, have been the economic impacts of land reform in

Mbeere to date? Our provisional answer to this question comes in a

number of not-quite interlocking parts. The first of tlrese echoes the

conclusions reached by Angelique Haugerud in her research on the

consequences of land tenure reform uphill of Mbeere, in upper Embu.

Haugerud measures these conseguences against her reading of the

economic goals of the Swlmnerton Plan. "Land consolidation and

registration were", she writes, "intended to encourage the emergence of

a class of commercial farmers who would gradually buy out the smaller

subsistence-oriented production units of 'uneconomic' sizg. Cultivators

made landless by this process were to be a source of labour for the

larger commercial farms and later for a growing industrial sector"

(L983: 66). She concludes that nottring of the kind has happened, but

that land reform in Embu has been more important in institutionalising

rural inequalities associated with nonfarm income and access to state

resources.

While it would be premature to say that land reform in Mbeere has

institutionatised anything, it is certainly the case that extensive

commercialisation of agricultural production consolidated into large farms

has not occurred. The vast majority of land holdings remain small and

in many cases fragmented - the dispersal of holdings being a funsEion

of the need to minimise risk and maximise returns in a varied and often

unpredictable environment. At present landlessness seems to be less a

permanent condition than a function of an individual's position in the

developmental cyde of the wider domestic group. The land control

boards act to check the subdivision and sale of parcels of land below a

Iocally determined "€onomic" size. And, as in upper Embu, informal

rights of access and the borrowing and lending of land among

neighbours and kin persist as important features of smallholder

production.

It must be said that this conclusion runs counter to that reached

by Nyaga Mwaniki in his L986 Ph.D thesis on the effects of land tenure

reform in Mbere, in which he argues along more classic "differentiation

among the peasantry" lines. My initial impression is that Mwaniki's

thesis is coloured by a bias like mine and influences stemming fromuThe Kenya Peasant Debate", as it was called in a 198L issue of the

Review of African Political Economy. This does not mean to say that

there are no large commercial farms in Mbeere: there are, but

thinking of one large flower growing operation and a big mango estate -

these are the exception rather than the rule, and they do not owe their

existence to land reform. While outsiders, esp€ially Kikuyu, did take

advantage of the adjudication process to acquire land in some parts of

Mbeere, their presence as farmers is much less significant than their

role as entrepreneurs in the growing market centres. Meanwhile, local

Mbeere who have accumulated land as a direst conseguence of the

adjudication process and their successful manipulation of it tend to

leave much of it undeveloped, treating it not as a means of agricultural

production but as a relatively safe investment and a means of acquiring

credit to be invested in nonfarm enterprises.

Tttltng and the Land Market

More r€ent proponents of land reform have placed less emphasis

upon the capitalisation of agriculture as such than the development of

an active land market and the access to credit for financial investments

(and not just agricultural investments) which this provides. A growing

number of researchers has questioned this neo-classical perspetive.

As Parker Shipton writes in a recent paper on mortgaging among the

Luo of western Kenya: "What is becoming clear is that farm credit is

not the answer to rural poverty and that land titles are not the key to

farm credit" (L992: 38L).

As we have sen, title deeds are still a comparatively rare

commodity in Mbeere, and the number of people who have taken out

Ioans on the basis of them is quite small. Nonetheless a land market

has developed. LLt of the households in our random sample had sold

land since adjudication, while L7e" had bought land (this last is a

provisional figure wfrich might come down). Relatively few land

transactions took place before adjudication, most of them in the lower,

drier zone - one possible explanation for this being that land was more

freely available and lineage control more relaxed there than in the

higher zones. Other data, also provisional, suggest that the number of

transactions has built up gradually since adjudication but is now past

its peak - though we don't have a long enough time series to be sure

of this.

While it is evident that the individualisation of tenure has made it

much easier to buy and sell land than in the past, it is important to

note the variety of motives which lie behind these transactions. Many

of these relate directly to the conseguences of adjudication for

individual households - for example sale of a piece of land adjudicated

to a household but which is too far from their home, sale of land to pay

the costs of a land dispute, purchase of land to make up for 6 srnall

allocation, or purchase of land for allocation to sons who were not born

at the Ume of adjudication. From this point of view we might expect a

large number of transactions in the early years after adjudication. At

the same time only a small proportion of purchases can be classed

unequivocally as speculaUve investments.

The Development and Coneervadon of Land

Rather less emphasis is given in the literature to the possible

indirect economic gains from land reform. One of the assumptions of

the Swynnerton Plan was that the introduction of private land

ownership would lead to more economic use of available land and foster

various practices designed to prevent its degradation by what rdere

seen to be poor husbandry and cropping practices, leading, most of all,

to soil erosion and the exhaustion of fertility. Indeed through much of

the colonial period and with varying degrees of success the extension

services vigorously promoted a range of conservation measures intended

to fulfil this purpose.

Research in the past decade, in Kenya as well as elsewhere, has

questioned many of the assumptions wfrich were made by the colonial

extension services and carried over into the post-independence period.

This revision of received opinion has even filtered up into The_ggllqBank Economic Review. In a recent paper Shem Migot-Adholla and

others have argued forcefully that indigenous land tenure systems in

sub-Saharan Africa do not impose constraints upon productivity as

measured by data on the incidence of land improvements and yields.

Working in Machakos District in Kenya, Mary Tiffen and her team have

reached similar conclusions. The title of their forthcoming book, More

People, Less Erosion, reflects its central argument that populaEon

pressure may lead to the evolution of appropriate local responses and

effective conservation measures without the need for them to be

externally imposed. And because land tenure in Machakos had already

evolved to a status akin to freehold, the later registration of title was

not a prior condition for agricultural development.

At the same time we should be wary of adopting a naive

Rousseauesque view of "traditional" land care and conservation. There

are also well documented historical examples of people who have

unintentisnally destroyed their own environment and source of

livelihood, rather than conserving it.

What about the situation in Mbeere?

In our large survey we asked respondents whether or not they had

made any developments on their land as a result of adjudication, and, if

they had, what these developments were. Of 2L3 respondents with

adjudicated land, 688, just over two-thirds, replied in the affirmative

(though only 53? of female-headed households did). Most of the

development was in ecological zone 4 and its boundary with zone 3,

areas of medium potential (zone 3 is the highest and zone 5 the lowest

and most arid in Mbere) . The most common developments cited were

tree planting (8L2, especially timber species in the upper zones) and

the construction of terraces or bunds (572, more in the lower zones).

Rather fewer respondents reported fencing (252 using modern or

unspecified materials, L3? using thorn bush and plants), planting grass

to prevent soil erosion (L4Z) and the construction of permanent

buildings (9?). A variety of other developments, including the planting

of fodder grass and the installation of water pipes and storage, were

mentioned by even fewer households.

It would be wrong to assume that these developments are

undertaken solely with future eonomic returns and land conservation in

view. Tree planting and fence construction are effective ways of

bolstering claims to land and fending off possible counter claims, and

many householders began to plant trees and build fences as soon as the

adjudication process began. It may also be noted that before

adjudication there were restrictions upon the freedom of individuals to

do either of these things, so it may well be that the decline of lineage

authority consequent upon adjudication - about which I'11 say more later- gave people an economic opportunity which they had already been

waiting for. The post-adjudication boom in tree planting and terracing

and bunding has also coincided with relevant campaigns by the

extension services and local NGOs, one of which has recently been

running a food for work pro€tramme, the work in question being

terracing, paid in food tokens by the metre.

StiU, and for whatever reasons, land reform in Mbeere has

accelerated the introduction of new land conservation pracUces and

other economic developments, arnong, it seems, all classes of farmers

(though with a tendency for households headed by men, and especially

more educated men, to improve their land more). This does not mean,

however, that the same developments will necessarily take place

elsewhere: in a situation, for example, where lineage authority, again

for whatever reasons, remains strong. Otherwise, ds the work by

Tiffen and others suggests, land development and conservation can take

place in the complete absence of land reform, as well as I would

suggest - in the absence of the individualisation of tenure which she

and her team found to have evolved in Machakos. Earlier Mbeere

practices have, for example, been extensively documented by Bernard

Riley and David Brokensha in their two volume study of rural ecology

and ethnobotany (1988).

Wider Linkages

Quite apart from the possible long term benefits for conservation

and agricultural production it can be argued that these developments on

the land create new and strengthen existing linkages in the local and

regional economy, linkages which in turn hefp to generate further

wealth. Labour has to be found to dig terraces. The construction

industry is stimulated by new demand for materials in fencing and

house building. Money has to be found to pay for them, and so on.

Anyone who has tried to trace secondary impacts such as these will

know that it is easy to get your linkages in a twist and difficult to

demonstrate the direction of causality. At the same time such knock-on

effects can be presumed, if not rsadily discerned, in the Mbeere case.

There is, however, one difficulty wlrich I can't see an easy way out of.

The resources in terms of labour and capital invested in land

conservation and development have to come from somewhere. If they

L0

have not come stralght from outside Mbeere - for example from the cash

paid by outsiders for land - then there must have been some internal

reallocation of resources in order to pay for the developments. And if

these resources were not reallocated from previously unproductive uses,

then it seems to me difficult to argue that wealth has been created.

You donrt get sometNng from nothing. However, I'm quite happy to

leave this as an open question. Otherwise my earlier argument still

applies. If such linkages can be demonstrated for Mbeere, this is no

reason to assume that they are a necessary outcome of land reform.

Social Impacts

Land Reform as a Jural Intervention

So far I have discussed land reform solely in terms of its economic

impacts. However, just as the Swynnerton Plan had its political

objectives, land reform continues to have other consequences wlrich

might be loosely grouped under the heading of social impacts. I don't

want to suggest that these bear any necessary relation to the original

objectives of the PIan: in some ways quite the opposite. I'm more

interested in the consequences of land reform as a jural intervention.

Given that I've probably spoken for too long already, I'11 confine this

Iast part of my discussion to two main issues: the changing nature of

Mbeere lineages and the position of individuals and their households

within them, and the impacts of land reform upon gender relations.

Llneages and Indlvlduals

In his book Land and the Uses of Tradition amonq the Mbeere

(L985), Jack Glazier argues that one of the consequences of land reform

has been to activate and strengthen relations between kin as a means of

acquiring land and in response to the claim procedures established

during the process of land adjudication. Glazier describes the pre-

adjudication pattern of shifting cultivation (and pastoralism) as follows:

L 1

"Until the period of land reform beginning in Mbere in the 1960s, land

for herding or cultivation was not a scarce resource. ... Population did

not press on a limited territory but rather expanded freely into

previously unsettled land or into areas reclaimed from fallow. Small

family groups could clear wilderness, claiming the newly culUvated land

as their own, unfettered by extra-familial kinship bonds. Genealogical

reckoning played little role in defining and limiting access to land,

whieh was a free, uncontested resource" (L985: L93).

Mbeere patrilineagies are highly lrcalised, and have been over the

past two decades of our study. If Glaqier's description were eorrect, I

would expect the very opposite, the dispersal of lineage members which

can be observed in various East African communities in which

neighbourhood rather than descent is the primary organising principle.

The following abbreviated tristory of a lineage in the Kiritiri area and

two of the disputes which have affected it suggests an alternative

account.

Members of the lineage trace descent from an ancestor called Nderi,

who was the first person to clear the land where they still live and

farm. They have not always lived there though. When Nderi's son and

successor died his family and all. the other lineage members moved to a

neighbouring area. This was sometime in the nineteenth century.

They lived and farmed there until after the death in L954 of

Ngicheng'e, Nderi's great-grandson and also head of the Iineage.

FoJlowing his death the land they were living on was claimed by another

lineage - from another clan - who said that they had cleared the land

before lending it to the Nderi lineage. The case was heard by elders

from both clans and the land awarded back to its original owners. In

L958 Ngicheng'e's eldest son and the new head of the lineage, Kagundu,

led the lineage members back to live on their own ancestral land.

During the process of adjudication Kagundu, as the senior member

of the lineage, made the most important decisions about the allocation of

Iand to other lineage members. Whereas some other lineages gave land

to all of their male members, regardless of age or genealogical position,

L2

Kagundu only gave plots of an acre or so each to adult males,

including his classificatory youn€Ier brothers and his own sons. This

distribution left one of Kagundu's classificatory brothers, his father's

younger brotherrs son, Nicholas, very unhappy. Nicholas received just

L.25 acres of land, as did his elder full brother. His complaint was

that he had been treated like one of Kagundu's sons whereas he should

have been treated on a par with Kagundu himself. In L977 he initiated

a claim for 17.6 acres of lineage land comprising 5 plots which had been

adjudicated to his own classificatory youn€Jer brothers and a plot

belonging to one of Kagundu's sons. The logic behind claiming these

particular plots was that their possession would give Nicholas a single

large field stretching from his homestead to the nearby main road, and

the possibiUty of developing lucrative roadside plots. According to

Nicholas he won his case in the d.istrict court and is only waitingl now

for the title deed to be issued. According to Kagundu the matter is

far from decided, and in L992 he was able to get a decision before the

locat chief stopping Nicholas from evicting his kinsmen from the land.

There are many different astrrects of these cases wlrich I could

comment upon, but I'll just deal with some of the main points. Unless

the lineage history is completely corrupt, there is clear evidence for a

significant degree of lineage solidarity before the process of land reform

began, and which is replicated in the histories of other local lineages.

From this point of view the main impact of land adjudication has been to

loosen lineage solidarity, because of the opportunities which the

adjudication process itself provided for individual accumulation as well

as the aecess it opened up to courts of appeal other than the lineage

and the clan. In their different ways both Kagundu and Nicholas have

acted out of self interest. Kagundu took advantage of his position as

lineage head to allocate the major share of lineage land to his own

farnily - at the time of adjudication he had more adult sons than anyone

else. Nicholas, meanwhile, has used tris greater wealth and connections

(he's a reasonably successful businessman and politician) to challenge

the authority of the lineage - in which context it's interesting to note

that he has not made any claims on behalf of tris own full brother: this

is not a case of lineage fission along classic segmentary lines.

13

Nicholas has no desperate need for the land he has claimed from hiskinsmen. As the secretary and principal shareholder of a wider clanorganisation he is in the prrcess of acquiring hundreds of acres of landin different parts of Mbeere. The creation of clan committees andorganisations like this during the process of adjudication, and as ameans of claiming large tracts of land which are not claimed byindividual lineages, is the one certain way in which tradition has beeninvented as a result of land reform.

Impacts Upon Gender RelaUons

Finally, let us turn to gender relations. rt may not have escapednotice that land ownerstrip appears to have been the sole prerogative ofmen in the case which I've just discussed. Jean Davison, who has

studied land tenure and gender relations among the Kikuyu as well as

the Bukusu of western Kenya, argues that land reform has almost

invariably led to the further marginalisation of women and intensified

their subordination to men. According to Davison the Swlmnerton Plan

and its subsequent implementation have undermined women's "relative

economic stability" in three main ways. First, by privileging men's

individual ownership of land over the usufruct rights of women formerlyguaranteed by the lineage. Second, by therefore giving men, as tiile

deed holders, privileged access to credit. And third, by fostering the

capitalisation of agriculture, hence the production of cash crops, and

thereby marginalising women's labour as food producers. As a result

women are reduced to a state of dependency upon men.

For reasons already outlined, the second and ttrird of Davison'spoints do not apply raell f6 the Mbeere case: access to credit, even for

men with Utle deeds, remains minimal; while the capitalisation of

agriculture has not taken place in the way which she suggests - and

where it has this could rarely be attributed to the effects of land

reform. The first point, that men's individual ownership of land has

been privileged over women's usufruct rights carries greater force.

L4

Whether this can be attributed to land reform or interpreted as a

reflection of pre-existing gender relations is, however, a moot point.

Looking further afield, for example, to coastal Swatri]i communities

where women already had substantial rights - of ownership and not just

usufruct - in land and houses, it is noticeable that these rights were

often confirmed at adjudication, and many more women than in

neighbouring communities with dissimilar property and gender relations

received title to land. From this point of view land reform is a jural

intervention whose social interpretation and content is not necessarily

predetermined, but a function of particular local circumstances (which,

it must be said, include the fact that many of the offieials concerned in

the implementation of adjudication will be men, including men from

outside communities with different preconceptions about land and gender

relations).

With this caution in mind, I would argue that the situation ln

Mbeere is closest to that described by Fiona Mackenzie in her analysis

of gender and tenure relations in Murang'a district (1986; L989). In

some imtrrortant respects the introduction of freehold land tenure has

given women the option of challenging male domination through the

purchase of land for themselves. One of the widows in our case study

sample scraped and saved to buy her own land as soon as she realised

that it would otherwise be claimed by her in-laws at adjudication - since

then she has also successfully fought off, though at comparatively great

expense - the attempts of various male neighbours to claim the land

from her. At the same time the persistence of traditional attitudes and

inheritance practices has continued to frustrate women to the extent

that they are often less secure than they might have been in the past.

This point is forcefully made by Mackenzie and can be applied to many

more of the cases in our sample.

Condusion

The conclusion that I draw from this discussion is to emphaslse 16s

historical contingrency and difficulty of predicting the outcome of policy

L5

interventions in the real world. It's silly to assume that we ean predict

the future, though this is a common feature of development planning

and research which is designed (as most research funding now

requires) to feed into policy formulations and plans. Of course we

can't g"ive up making plans, but must surely be more flexible in our

attitude towards them and the outcomes that we might expect. In the

case of land reform there are no dear cut answers. Let me give a last

example.

One of the questions we asked in our survey of 232 households was

what in their opinion were the main effects of land reform in Mbeere

(and not just the effects upon their own households). As well as

coding all of the particular responses we also divided them into four

general categories: positive, negative, positive plus negative and the

remainder who gave neutral responses or did not recognise any effects

at all. The results were as follows. The vast majority of respondents,

84?, were either wholly positive or wholly negative. 46? referred only

to negative effects and 38? gave positive responses, while only LL?

mentioned both positive and negative effects and the remaining 68 gave

neutral responses.

Overall, then, there is a spli.t between those who feel that the

results of land reform have been positive and the slightly larger

proportion who think that they have been negative. At the same time

there is an interesting correlatjon between the sex of respondents and

the answers they gave: while 472 of men were positive and 38?

negative, the balance was reversed among women, 30? of whom were

wholly positive and 53? of whom were negative.

Nonetheless the number of people, v/omen as well as men, who think

that land reform has had positive impacts is quite significant. It can't

aff be bad - unless, of course, I let my bias run away with me and

entertain the suspicion that, rather like the electorate in Britain, the

people we polled don't necessarily know what's good or bad for them, at

least in the long run. As it happens I'm not alone in letting this kind

of bias skew my interpretations. The five enumerators who carried out

t_6

our survey clearly let their own prejudlces affect the elicitation and

recording of responses to this particular question. 808 of the

responses recorded by one enumerator, the son of an Assistant Chief,

were positive and only 68 negative. At the other extreme one of his

colleagues recorded 752 of responses as negative and only L4Z aspositive. The others., who also reorded more negatives than positlves,

fell somewhere between these two extremes.

The enumerator who recorded most negative responses is a young

man who I will call Silas. Silas had lost both his father and elder

brother in land disputes related to adjudication his father was

bludgeoned to death with a heavy stone on Christmas Day in 1987, and

his elder brother shot with a poisoned anow less than two years later,

leaving Silas to look after his mother, his younger brothers and

sisters, and his elder brother's wife and children. Trying,

unsuccessfully, to see his father's and brother's killers brought to book

had cost Silas and his family considerable expense, and his work for us

played a major part in ensuring family subsistence.

As you might extrrect from my declared bias, I can't help but

sympatlrise urith Silas (who is, I must add, one of the best research

assistants I've ever worked with). In some cases the end does notjustify the means. But then that's just my personal opinion. More

certain, I think, is the conclusion of this paper that in the case of land

reform, like any other kind of political or jural intervention, we can

never be sure exactly what the end itseE is going to be.

Acknowledgement

The research on which this paper is based is funded by ESCOR under

the title 'Rural Livelihood Systems and Farm/Non-farm Linkages in

Lower Embu, Kenya L972-4 to L992-3' (Research Scheme R4816).

L7

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