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Mau Mau Veterans And The Struggle For Autonomy In Mwea Rice Paddies

Musambayi Katumanga* and Karuti Kanyinga**

INTRODUCTION

Despite the end of the Mau Mau war, conflicts over land in Kenya continue unabated. Underlying these conflicts are different perceptions different groups have over land. For ordinary peasants, land plays multiple roles. For instance, it is around land that cultural identities and economic reproductios are constructed and sustained respectively. The ruling elite on their part use land as a source for capital accumulation. In seeking to exercise effective control, the latter also instrumentalize land. This logic explains the continued reluctance to access control of land to certain marginalized groups, such as Squatters. This political economy of dispossession has its roots in the colonial State.

This paper re-examines the construction and continuity of this logic rooted in the agrarian policies of post independence. It specifically focuses on the fate of the Mau Mau veterans in Mwea. It argues that their revolt is part of the ongoing land-based revolts against marginalization in the context of the politics of liberalization and privatisation.

The paper is organized in six parts. While Part One recapitulates on land based de-citizenization process, Part Two discusses marginalization engendered peasant revolts. Part Three analyses colonial responses seeking to discipline the revolting Mau Mau Peasants. Part Four examines the various forms of struggles for livelihood, rooted in the social existence of the veterans in Mwea, and discusses peasant’s struggles against repression and the resultant revolt against an establishment. Part Five examines the resultant co0nsequences of the revolt, and Part Six, by way of concluding, investigates the question of land, citizenship and economic liberalization.

1. Land Based De-citizenization Process

Appreciation of the salience of land as a basis for communal reproduction underlie the logic behind the pre-colonial land ownership model. Under this model, land was a collectively owned common public good. It was held in trust for those alive and for posterity. Community’s cultural, economic and political organizational frameworks were knotted around land. It was accessible to all mainly for purposes of socio-economic reproduction. It is this equal access that ensured equal rights while militating against systematized marginalization. It is this logic of communalised individual independence that the colonial system sought to deconstruct as a prelude to bringing about effective social control of Africans. But to understand the underlying logic, one needs to revisit Foucault’s bio-power paradigm. Accordingly, the sovereign power that pervaded western societies throughout the classical age revolved around the right to take life or let live (Foucault 1990, 136). Power was the right to get hold of life in order to suppress it (ibid., 136). The evolution of new modes of governing life in the 18th Century changed this order. This constituted what Foucault refers to as Bio-power. It involved new forms of Knowledge and techniques of government. An ensemble of techniques emerged with the objective of administering life at the level of human species, race and the phenomenon of population (Foucault 1990, 137).

Those who held power were no longer interested in taking life or letting live, but to foster life or disallow it; not to kill but to invest in it (Foucault 1990, 139). Two basic techniques linked together by a complex set of relations – the discipline of the body and regulation of population - evolved. Under the discipline of the body, there were anatomo-political practices, which aimed at disciplining the individual human body. Procedures were established that focussed on the body as a machine. This entailed its disciplining, optimisation of its capabilities, extortion of its forces, increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls (Foucault 1990, 139).

The second form, regulation of populations, revolved around a set of bio-political interventions and regulatory controls that focussed on the species’ body. It concerned itself with mechanism of life and biological processes of birth, mortality, and general health. Central to this technique were means for varying these biological processes (Ibid, 139). At the same time, combining disciplinary techniques with regulations of the body species (population) was critical to development of capitalism. If the system could no longer take life or let live, and instead foster life or disallow it, the system had to redesign citizens and subjects. The former could have their lives enhanced through investments. The latter had to sustain consequent costs of letting live the citizens.

The subjects were to be found in the inferior races obtaining in the colonies. Notably, disciplinary powers aiming at creating docile and productive bodies became sin qua non for the natives in the colonies. Extractions for sustaining capitalism in Europe would not work without controlled insertion of bodies into the colonial machinery of production. Bio-political techniques were also a critical precondition for adjusting the phenomena of population by economic processes (Foucault 1990, 145).

This could only be effected through forced de-citizenization engendered by land alienation. Land administration was integrated into the structures of indirect rule to flush out labour and to ensure political and economic security of the colonial administration and its ancillary (Neocosmos 1992; Kanyinga 1998). The colonial state was at the core of this process. It specifically sought to provide political and economic security to the settlers by creating the native reserves. This had the net effect of creating a dualised and segregated land use system: native reserves for occupation by resident ethnic groups, and ‘scheduled areas’ for the settler community. While the settler area was created through the ‘armed might of the state’, it was administered through sets of laws with one thing in common: expropriation to buttress the violent colonial mode of rule.

Naturally, this defined the nature of the African membership in the colonial State. Africans were subjects without any rights and control over their bodies. If marginalization had engendered contestations for citizenship in Western Europe between the rulers (who also dominated the means of production) and ordinary people, the same would happen to Africans in Kenya.

2. The Revolt of the Peasants

The Mau Mau revolt should be understood from this perspective i.e., an attempt to break out of a vicious cycle of colonial violence with the express objective of reconstructing the African logic of citizenship. Accordingly, land had to be repossessed and communal existence (favouring collective interests) reconstituted. The colonial state on its part perceived the Mau Mau peasant revolt as an attack on the sovereign’s will. Punishment took the form of public torture or execution in a bid to reconstitute this power.1 The ritual of this logic was manifested in public torture of Mau Mau peasants; the dispossession of their land by the Colonial State and its subsequent distribution to the loyalists - chiefs and headmen.

Focus of disciplinary machine was on the individual species they had arrested. The objective was that of disciplining it and rendering it obedient. This objective was enforced in detention and torture camps that later entailed complications for the colonial regime. Congestion and mistreatment led to death and subsequent embarrassing disclosures.

Consequently, detention as initially conceived could no longer be sustained, hence the need for an alternative system within which the spirit of resistance could be exorcised in order to guarantee state security, thus new form of imprisonment had to be evolved. This was meant to not only punish but also to discipline the "criminals" while conditionalizing them to accept subordination. However, the Mau Mau could not be officially and overtly killed. Neither could the colonial regime continue to pursue the logic of revenge if it wanted to legitimise the nascent African elite to whom it sought to entrust their interests. Hence the decision to rehabilitate and normalise the Mau Mau “criminals” in a bid to render them fit to re-enter the society of the ‘’law abiding and productive citizens’’. The state was not interested in taking life or letting life, but to foster life or to disallow it. It meant to invest in it through and through2. There were other dilemmas too. Any attempt to release the veterans into their old societies would have re-ignited fresh conflicts over land.

Thus, while the first wave of detentions focussed on the Mau Mau peasants as individuals, the second targeted them as a group. In the case of the first, they could be eliminated as individuals. Indeed thousands had their manhood destroyed in a bid to prevent reproduction on their part and to force them to recognise the might of the colonial state in ending procreation and existing life. In the case of the second wave, the colonial system sought to turn the rebels into a labour category. It sought to manage Mau Mau in a way that would make them effective and productive while disciplining and controlling them. Colonial discipline visualized the disciplining of the individual Mau Mau species they had arrested as a collectivity. Procedures that focussed on the body as a machine were evolved. This entailed its disciplining, optimisation of its capabilities, extortion of its forces, and the increase of its usefulness. The decision to open up the Mwea Irrigation Scheme as a camp for the second wave of detention should be understood from this perspective.

3. Disciplining the Peasant Rebels: The Mwea Irrigation Scheme

Located 60 miles from Nairobi, near the foothills of Mount Kenya in the Kirinyaga district, Mwea (literally desolate) was first set up as a pilot scheme for rice farming in Tebere in 1951. The area was largely unoccupied, desolate and full of the tse tse fly, scorpions, snakes and wild animals. It was characterised by low rainfalls when the first detainees were brought in.3 European settlers had, since 1911 and in the early 20s, sought to undertake farming activities in the upper Mwea. The irrigation scheme, as Alila (1987) observes, did not spring out of the felt need of the people themselves, but rather the objective of the colonial regime. It was the best option on which to occupy Mau Mau detainees. From 1952 to 1957, it became a dumping area to hold and contain detainees. The detainees were used to clear the land, dig the canals and provide cheap labour. One of these detainees captures the situation succinctly when he observes:

We built this entire scheme with our bare hands. No money was used. We were not paid anything. All we got was a little food, a little medicine in times of illness; very many people died of hunger and diseases. Very many died from hard labour and beating. About 400 died out of a dynamite explosion.4

There was a hierarchical and constant surveillance. This controlled the prisoners’ movements. They could not move beyond a certain distance. Good behaviour bought one a pass, facilitating movement beyond the confines of the scheme and certain rights within the camp. There ere sanctions too, such as additional labour, beating, and denial of food. There was the element of examination that led to registration. Files of detainees were maintained for the purpose of recording behaviour change, remorse and “moral progress”.

The Mwea rehabilitation project was a classic example of bio-power, bio-political interventions and regulatory controls. This focussed on the species body (Mau Mau population). There were clear rules that dealt with mechanisms of life and biological processes, such as the propagation of life and mortality, the level of health and life expectancy. There were clear rules that focussed on anatomo-political practices. This sought to discipline the Mau Mau’s body. They focused on disciplining and optimising its abilities with emphasis on extortion of its forces, increase of its usefulness, its docility and integration into the labour system. They were not allowed to have women until many years later. Indeed the process of having one was ritualised to serve the interests of engendering docility.

Only those who had “reformed” would be allowed to move to ‘shacks’’ and consequently own small plots. They would subsequently be allowed to get their wives to move in with them. A few returned to their home areas of origin to find that land demarcation had taken place and that they had been dispossessed of their land. Despite the hard labour and completion of the scheme, no land was forthcoming for them. Some were given smallholdings in adjoining areas. Others were kept in neighbouring districts as detainees to dig trenches that controlled movement of population outside the concentration camps.

The entire scheme was placed under the African District Council Ordinance chaired by the District Commissioner (Embu). It was perceived as a home for the landless Kikuyu displaced by British settlers. Under this ordinance, the ADC Mwea spelt out the laws setting the relationship between the management of the rice scheme and its tenants. This included the terms of growing, marketing, limitation of stock keeping and circumstances under which a tenancy could be revoked. The scheme was later placed under the National Irrigation Board (NIB) in 1966 in accordance to the irrigation Act. The Board adopted the By-laws of the ADC. Regulation number 4 of the irrigation Act granted approval on who was to leave the farm.

Under the laws of the National Irrigation Board (NIB), it was an offence to keep livestock unless authorised by the manager of the Board. Absence from the field for more than a week had to be approved by the manager, and a jail sentence of more than six months resulted in automatic dismissal of a tenant. Further, all crops grown on the scheme were under the control of the NIB manager; paddy had to be surrendered to the collection station designated by the manager and disposed as per his instructions. NIB remained the owner of the land; peasants were tenants of the Board - they were only licensees.

Only the NIB was allowed to market the rice, who was the real feudal owner of the land. Thus, despite having constructed the scheme with their sweat and blood, despite having lost their possessions, theses ex-detainees had no control over their own lives and labour. They were effective tools for production. National irrigation Board played the role of controlling peasants on behalf of the government. Any attempt to regress had to be contained by threats of deprivation of property and actual deprivation. Rigorous discipline ensured that Mwea irrigation scheme, as Chambers and Morris (1973) note, would be the most “successful’’ irrigation project in Kenya - And why not? After all, it was a prison camp.

The Scheme combined a highly centralized management with discipline to ensure high quality production. It was not strange that it was the only scheme generating a “surplus”. The government attributed this to the topography of the Mwea plains and the acceptance of discipline by the tenants (Development Plan 1966-1970). The plan notes that without strict discipline, the very heavy capital costs of irrigation development would collapse. Here, there was no room for inefficient producers. The scheme had to be in a position to expel tenants who failed to meet their obligations. Any idea of a freehold title could not be entertained. Effective control and discipline could only be ensured through insecurity of tenure. The farmers notably did not have titles for the land and operated on the basis of temporary annual occupational licence (Ruigu 1988).

The legal basis for the management of large-scale irrigation schemes is provided for under the Trust Land Irrigation Areas rules (Kenya 1962). It is these rules that provide for an extremely authoritarian style that gave managers control over the labour of the tenants and their families, a right to impose fines, confiscate property and engender imprisonment. According to NIB regulations, operations under Cap 347 of the laws of Kenya, farmers had to deliver all the harvest to the NIB. The latter decided the number of bags to give to each farmer (usually 12 bags for the whole year irrespective of family size).

Prior to the onset of the harvest, the NIB would post policemen to ensure no farmer would take home any grain of rice without permission. They were expected to feed on the 12 bags, generate money for school fees, clothing and other foodstuffs. The police would extend the search beyond the field into the houses after the twelve bags had been exhausted. This was meant to determine who was cooking rice stolen from the fields (KHRC 2000).

Farmers were not allowed to grow beans or maize or any other foodstuff to supplement rice growing. It was an offence to keep livestock unless authorised by the manager. In the event of reproduction, it had to be reported. This extended to the number of hatched chickens. The NIB bought rice at a price below the market. In addition, there were deductions that resulted in farmers getting little money. During land preparation, farmers were expected to clear and maintain the fields to the satisfaction of the managers. While the Board provided services such as land preparation, maintenance of canals, pumps, drainage and provision of seeds and fertilisers, the cost for these services was deducted from farmers’ gross earnings of the paddy.

The average yield of four acres was estimated at 80 bags of 80 kgs for Basmati rice. Those growing sindano produced an average of 200 bags; but again, the Board paid them at less than half the market price. Payments sometimes came eight months after planting the crop. Farmers had to mortgage their lives throughout the period. Welfare of the farmers was generally ignored. The Board hardly offered any health protection against diseases such as typhoid, bilharzia, cholera and malaria. Little environmental impact assessment was done to monitor possible adverse effect of chemicals used in the field. Indeed, local health centres note increases in diseases relating to this: at one time in the early 1990s, 20% of the tenants were diagnosed as suffering from diarrhoea-related diseases, while 70% suffered from amoebic fever, bilharzia and hookworms.

Land tenure system barred long term commitments between tenants and the Board. At the age of 18 the sons had to vacate the fields to look for alternative means of survival elsewhere. It was not, therefore, a wonder that most people resorted to heavy drinking, became unable to take their children to schools, hence frequent absenteeism and high rates of school dropouts. Little attempt was made by the Board to listen to complaints of the farmers or to encourage interest articulation.

4. Procuring Livelihood: Struggles within Struggles

There was also a myriad of other social issues that the rice farmers grappled with in their daily existence. For instance, there were the problems of lack of clean potable water, insecurity, and an irresponsive provincial administration in addition to exploitation by the National Irrigation Board. There is lack of basic social infrastructure a fact that effectively puts the lives of their younger generations in danger. Peasants lacked funds to take children to school and to find employment opportunities for those who had withdrawn from school because of lack of fees. Many expressed fear in raising these issues with the Board, dreading the consequences of being evicted from the scheme. More than anything else, this fear tended to engender disarticulation of interests and effective participation in social organisation. One respondent captures this better when he notes;

Here in this Settlement Scheme there has been no freedom. We could not express our opinions regarding farming and marketing of our rice. Although the Board convenes meetings to enable us air our views any time there is a problem, farmers always keep quiet. They did not express their grievances. We fear to lose our property and plots of land, if we raise issues that the Board dislike. Usually, critics of the Board are intimidated. The police arrest them and lock them up on false charges. We felt hopeless and helpless. We felt as slaves. We were enslaved in our own country which claims to be independent.

Frustrations over their inability to do anything about their problems led some people into drinking. Others turned to brewing local drinks as a means for alternative sources of income. Inability of the families to afford school fees also generated situations under which some parents were known to prefer taking boys to schools to discriminate against girls in accessing education. Children had to labour on their own to supplement family incomes. For many parents, poverty undermined family unit. Most of them were unable to educate their children beyond primary school level of education. These same children, in turn, expected to share the smallholdings with their parents.

One respondent succinctly highlighted these problems by noting "land holding at 4 acres per household is too small to sustain a family. A homestead of 40 by 30 meters merely engenders congestion”.5 These difficulties have in turn generated contradictions in the relations between families; familial rivalry and conflicts are now characteristic features of the area. Furthermore, children above 18 years of age are not allowed to stay in the holding. They have to move away from the fields and go elsewhere.

The parents tried to solve this problem by letting their sons cultivate a portion of the rice field so as to generate money for other basic needs. Others went as far as growing rice without permission by the Board. In other instances, parents shared the paddy with their sons' households even though they have little for themselves. Income from these holding however was always wanting. To cope with this myriad of problems, residents in the scheme tend to resort to their collective energies. Collective efforts by residents enabled them to address some of their own problems of insecurity, lack of basic services and unemployment. Here, self-help groups, recreation clubs and welfare associations at one level small savings groups and collective farming associations at another, were critical.

It is in this manner that, projects such as construction of schools and health posts, were undertaken. These efforts seem to be undertaken within the matrix of de-linking themselves from the Board. This was a case of the value of a civil society to which people fall back for comfort, collective security, and in search of self-love, which cannot be found in or provided by the state. In effect, life under the state, as manifested by the Board, was for many of them a harrowing experience of neglect. Theirs was a struggle against themselves, within themselves and against the Board. It was a struggle for economic rights, political rights for expression and participation, and indeed, a right to be citizens.

State control of the peasants through the National Irrigation Board (NIB) had been rationalized in two ways: advancing interests of the peasant farmers, and creating opportunities for the control of their produce. However, the decline in subsidies and stagnant producer prices occasioned contradictions in the relations between the farmers and the state’s local agent – the Board. Economic liberalisation measures that the government pursued at the urging of the World Bank and the IMF deepened the farmers’ problems in several ways. In the first place, the reforms weakened traditional mechanisms for social provisioning around which social citizenship was organised. Markets did not rush in to occupy space ceded by the retreating state.

The burden to provide services in the scheme increasingly fell on farmers as the predator logic of the state continued to increase. This laid the ground for political unrest. Yet, as the case of Mwea farmers shows, political unrest did not have to be against the state as the villain, (though that was initially the case), but also against the market forces. Liberalisation thus engendered chaos, threatened collapse of initially successful ventures and fostered citizenship. Secondly, liberalisation opened avenues for elites to accumulate more, this time using the market framework.

The beneficiaries included the elite located within and outside of the state. The struggle of the peasants therefore did not seek to target just only the state; they had also to pay attention to local exploitative structures that had developed using the context of economic liberalisation. Their struggles had one object: to reconstruct citizenship and the rights and responsibilities accompanying true citizenship. Some of the peasants believed they had been treated as slaves in their own land; and therefore, all they wanted was a form of recognition as complete [free] human beings. They needed to see actual returns of their labour.

The deepening of market liberalisation and increased appetite of the state to maintain control over the agricultural sector was the main trend throughout the 1990s. Political liberalisation also occasioned new opportunities for the peasants to demand rights in the management of the sector just as the government sought to maintain its grip. As already noted, the government responded to this development in two significant ways: repression and polarisation. The government continued to tighten its grip on the sector. Arresting peasants who led the struggles became a common feature of the government’s response to these demands. Where the government failed to deflate the farmers’ revolts, it responded by sponsoring a counter-grouping to wage war against the peasants' group.

In 1998, within the rice farming area of Mwea, farmers requested for dialogue in order to put on table their grievances and demands. In one of these attempts, the Board failed to listen to the farmers’ demands to be paid more for their produce. While the farmers complained about being paid far below the market prices, the Board argued that it provided services and facilities that the farmers’ needed to appreciate. Although the price was not increased, the farmers added to it another grievance: title deeds and security of tenure.

The farmers argued that they had lived in the scheme as tenants of the government and therefore wanted to have a secure tenure. Again the Board turned down this request. Instead, it demanded a minimum production of 60 bags of rice despite poor harvest. Eight hundred fifty farmers who failed to meet this new requirement were denied tilling services by the Board. Not only were they denied access to their holdings but they could not equally hire private services. Pressured by the youth, whose life in the scheme is more precarious, the farmers organised themselves to form their co-operative – Mwea Multipurpose Co-operative Society to purchase tractors as a way of starting to operate independent of the NIB and the government itself. They also decided not to have NIB market their rice.

The decision by farmers not to have NIB market their rice occasioned a conflict between the government and the farmers. In December 1998, using the police, the Board seized a lorry belonging to the farmers’ society. Some farmers were also arrested for preventing others from delivering paddy to the NIB. Farmers reacted by violently confronting the NIB officials. By end of January 1999, the farmers had already established a strong resistance against the NIB.

The peasants moved the locale of the struggle to the legal arena. They went to the courts in a bid to restrain the Board from expropriating their harvest and evicting them. The Board sought to obtain its own order, the objective of which was to block the farmers’ society from collecting and marketing the produce on behalf of the farmers (KHRC 2002). To the farmers, it was their rice. They had a right to take it wherever they wanted. A team of government officers, led by the Permanent secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, visited the scheme in an effort to resolve the dispute between the farmers and the Board. The farmers and their leaders were not keen to negotiate with the government. They instead violently confronted the government officers. The police stepped in and shot several people.6

In a follow up to this confrontation, the government sacked the entire Board. It equally conceded to mismanagement by the Board. Yet its attempts through the Ministry of Agriculture to intervene and cool down the confrontations failed. A subsequent meeting between 3000 farmers and their Member of Parliament (MP) led to further confrontations in which the police shot dead two people. On their part, the peasants burnt down the NIB stores.

It is noteworthy that demands for change in the Mwea Irrigation Scheme had been an on-going phenomenon throughout the post-colonial period. Transformation of the NIB and the giving of secure land rights to the farmers had been core demands of these peasants. Responding to these demands would certainly have facilitated for the citizenship rights at the level of participation and access to means of production. Farmers also complained of the poor prices paid for their produce, and demanded the right to independently market their rice and run the scheme. They lamented their squatter status despite the more than forty years of labour. With the support of the opposition activists, the MP and the officials of the Co-operative Society, peasants declined to deliver their paddy to the NIB stores. Instead, they constructed their own make-shift stores before withholding 100,000 bags of paddy worth about US$ 5 million.

The area MP and the society’s committee proceeded to looking for alternative markets in Nairobi. The Board on the other hand sought to block this by seeking recourse to the courts. The local MP was eventually arrested for incitement and preventing officers from maintaining law and order.

This revolt was their second since their detention. But more importantly, it also initiated other struggles. There were farmers who, even though opposed to the excesses of the Board, were willing to accept its re-structurization. They found themselves in direct confrontation with those who wanted the government out. In most cases, this resulted in violent clashes between revolting peasants and those willing to work with the Board. There were social sanctions set out against those who delivered paddy to the Board. Those who broke these had their houses burnt down. Customary norms and practices were re-activated and used as laws to govern the new social order. With the police and the Board paralyzed, statutory laws enforced by modern institutions were put in place. The true force of the new regime of rules and norms became manifest when Board-friendly farmers had their houses and fields razed to the ground. Buildings where loyalists stored their paddy were also set ablaze7.

Rice farmers perceived their relation with the Board as that of slaves and masters. They had no rights nor freedom of choice despite their manual labour. Asked why it took them so long to confront the Board, some of the peasants noted that they had been failed previously by their representatives who feared intimidation from the government during the one party set-up. In the 1980s for instance, the farmers demanded an increase in producer prices. The Board conceded to a discussion with the farmers in its Nairobi office. Afraid that this would put the farmers against the government, the MP declined to lead the farmers. He observed that he did not want to be “jailed over improvement of prices by a ten cent”.8

In the wake of political liberalisation, farmers’ demands were unattended to by the government, given the fact that their MP was in opposition9. As the second multiparty elections drew near, the opposition MP defected to KANU with promises that farmers in his area would be given secure title deeds and therefore land rights in the area. To some of the respondents, he had merely been patronised by the Board and rewarded with a low quality rice consisting chaff and seeds broken in the process of milling. “Chaff and broken rice silenced him”, they contended.

Patronage was another strategy used to silence maverick local leaders. Some were given contracts to supply certain items to the Board, and/or licensed to buy second grade rice at low prices, which they later resold at a profit. Most respondents noted that their local leaders tended to make noise only to keep quiet after being given “something” by the government or the Board. Others were simply bought out by the Board or had themselves incorporated in the patronage networks to “gag their mouth”. This way, they remained “tight lipped” on what took place in the settlement scheme. In other cases, they tended to form rival factions to undermine those formed by farmers to articulate their concerns. In essence, greed, selfishness and corruption among local leaders were cited as part of the reasons for disorganisation. They also noted that, among the local elite, “those who had made it through education and economic activities” did not look back to the scheme; they bought land and settled outside the area.10

The scheme was permeated with fear, intimidation and lack of external networks that could help articulate and facilitate organisation against local repression engendered by the Board. Here, the provincial administration played a key role in ensuring farmers' demands were met with repression. Any overt organisational process would be met with the response from the police. The general attitude of the administration was to see these manifestations as a function of incitement from outside the region, instead of seeking to initiate dialogue. To many farmers, political liberalisation provided space within which a new crop of leadership was able to emerge. They considered the election of an opposition MP as a bonus. In his calculation of costs of production per bag, the local MP pointed to the obvious exploitation of peasant farmers through extraction of surplus value. The provincial administration and officers in the Board frowned at these demands. They argued that increase in a payment would grind the irrigation scheme to a halt. To them, only subsidies from the government would sustain the Board if it conceded to the demands of the farmers. That the farmers could question the roles of the Board and the Provincial administration pointed to new forms of assertiveness on what the role of the government ought to be, especially with respect to farming activities.

As per their wishes, the riots put an end to many fears of NIB’s control of the Mwea rice farmers. Yet, the revolt did not usher in the economic benefits and rights that they had dreamt of. Whereas the local MP had arbitrarily set a new price of rice, and promised farmers a new organisational framework that would see them manage their affairs, the revolt and aftermath of liberalisation reproduced certain consequences that the peasants continue to grapple with.

5. From Revolt to Communal Polarisation

Having liberated themselves from the Board, the peasants had not thought through organisational questions, particularly on how they would replace services hitherto provided by the Board. The Board used to at least spray the field to contain malaria, bilharzia and typhoid, diseases that have become common. Health centres no longer have adequate medicine to treat these diseases.

Extreme poverty levels have led to alarmingly high number of school dropouts in Mwea scheme. Parents cannot afford to pay school fees and buy school necessities for their children to attend school. Worse still, they can hardly access credits as they used to. Corruption in their society has ensured that little capital is available for such activities. The cooperative has also remained incapable of supplying quality seeds to farmers. It is also unable to facilitate marketing. Every farmer now has to market his own rice. Liberalisation has also introduced the emergence of middlemen who brutally exploit farmers. Without a regulatory body to run the scheme’s infrastructure, not only have canals broken down due to lack of maintenance, but that violent struggles are also emerging over access to land and use of water. In the absence of the state, these are resolved by might. Notably, there are hundreds of farmers who have, to date, not been able to harvest any rice. This situation has been compounded by the emergence of unregulated informal rice farmers. These farmers have literally diverted the waters of the scheme to their farms. Given the poor maintenance of the canals, there isn’t enough to go around.

The local authorities are still immobilized. They are perceived as corrupt, dictatorial and unwilling to listen to grievances of farmers. There is rampant lawlessness, irresponsibility, corruption and inefficiency. The people are involved in drug abuse, excess brewing of illicit brew, and poor maintenance of infrastructure. Parents and children clash amongst themselves over land rights, which parents do not have. It is evident that the peasants cannot manage the scheme. Services such as farm inputs, canal, water and road maintenance, loan access, research, paddy security and marketing are not provided and cannot be effectively handled by the Co-operative. The farmers are divided on whether to go back to the NIB or stay in the co-operative. The season arrangement in relation to planting of paddy is clashing with existing climatic conditions in the area.

The Ministry of Agriculture has not done much to help the tenants out of their problems. The Ministry has in principle agreed to contract the NIB to rehabilitate roads. Some farmers feel that the move by their MP to hastily eject the NIB from managing the scheme was absurd. Most feel that this should have been gradual so as to facilitate capacity building. Others do not mind it, citing the exploitation by the Board. Those opposed to the MP feel he exploited their ignorance to wage wars against the government at one level and to benefit from their woes by purchasing his own mills that compete with the farmers’. As a result, those opposed to him have set up an alternative cooperative known as SACCO B, thus leading to further fragmentation of the community.

6. Liberalization and Citizenship

This paper has shown that struggles over control of rice paddies were actually struggles over economic rights, “inclusion” and participation. The argument here is that in agrarian societies citizenship is constructed predominantly around land. That farmers had been locked out of controlling the land they had protected with their blood and sweat meant that their capacity to effectively participate in decision- making and management of the settlement scheme was effectively constrained. More critical is the fact that they could not decide on sales of their produce. This situation had prevailed since the construction of the scheme in the pre-colonial days.

The post-independence State, like its predecessor, sought to dominate and to “discipline” the peasants. The dominant perception is that, the scheme was not meant to foster any rights but rather to negate them; it was meant to curtail lives and constrain the search for secure means of livelihood. Economic and political liberalisations in the 1990s added a new dimension to the struggles; they produced certain important contradictions that enabled the farmers to effectively organise against the state in order to lay a firm base for their social citizenship.

On account of the above one can argue that struggles over economic rights through ownership of land have been deepening in tandem with the implementation of economic liberalisation. Expansion of political space for citizens’ engagement has contributed to the deepening of these struggles by especially providing opportunities for peasants to voice their concerns. Important, however, is that economic liberalisation has had the effect of eroding the government’s domination of economic arena.

A point to note is that the state exerted its domination of the economic space using laws crafted during the colonial period. The deployment of legal instruments had the effect of eroding the basis of citizenship in general, and social citizenship in particular. To rice peasants, these instruments alienated them from the product of their labour. They had no control over how rice was sold – the rice ceased to be their property the moment they took it for milling and marketing. Secondly, the law contributed to their enslavement on the land that was not their own, yet that they had occupied since the pre-colonial period. By law, the farmers had neither rights to the land nor rights to their produce. They were tenants of the state. The state decided on even how much they should take home for subsistence.

The peasants organised against this form of domination but were violently confronted by the state. They nonetheless formed a marketing body to rival the state marketing board. The body they formed was meant to assist in reconstructing their economic basis for secure rights, and therefore, secure social citizenship. In order to guarantee a solid foundation for social citizenship, they evoked social sanctions for use against those who did not abide by their decisions. In spite of this the farmers continued to face more problems from local elites located outside of the state. Powerful local elites now became major obstacle to their struggle. This, ultimately, tended to limit the success of their struggle for social citizenship.

End notes

1. See Foucault’s (1997) Discipline and Punishment on this construction.

2. On the theory of bio-power, see Foucault F., The history of sexuality Vol. I, Introduction, New York: Vintage. 1990 p139

3. Interview with one of the detainees, September 2002. See also Chambers R., 1969.

4. Interview with a former detainee and first settler in the area, September 2002.

5. Interviewed in Wamumu (Mwea), October 2002

6. Interview with a cooperative official, August 2002.

7. Interviews with Bonniface Njenga and other farmers, October 2002. Njenga escaped death narrowly when he was attacked by revolting farmers. He and others slept in the bush for many days thereafter.

8. An interview with a school teacher in Kerugoya town, September 2002

Subsequent to the multiparty elections of 1992, government officers and state ruling party officials underlined that the government would not provide development to opposition areas unless they defected to the ruling party.

This position was reiterated by some of the respondents from this region

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