What is it about?
This chapter explores the extensive land use changes that have shaped the socio-economic landscape in Naivasha following Kenya’s independence. It pays specific attention to the private land-buying companies and cooperatives that purchased plots of land around Lake Naivasha in the 1960s and 1970s. These factors played a pivotal role in the informal "Africanization" of land tenure in Naivasha, as in Kenya’s Rift Valley region in general. The members of these companies and cooperatives in majority settled themselves and the land was eventually subdivided. With the establishment of the flower industry at Lake Naivasha in the 1980s, the plot-owners started to rent out rooms to workers who migrated to Naivasha from elsewhere in Kenya. Their plots therefore developed into sprawling low-income settlements. The chapter focuses on two of these plots, Kihoto, next to Naivasha Town, and Karagita on the southern part of the Lake, as two examples that evolved from small private settlements to key locations in Naivasha's urban landscape.
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Photo by Tony Samuel Gachie on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The role of private land-buying companies and cooperatives in shaping land use and landscapes in Kenya, has received little attention, in contrast to the influence of, for instance, colonial settlers and of large-scale resettlement schemes in the period after Kenya gained independence. The chapter emphasizes that the area around Lake Naivasha would have looked quite different in the present-day if the members of the land-buying companies and cooperatives had not settled there in the 1960s. For instance, flower farms would in that case have needed to find other solutions for housing their workers, such as company compounds. The small-scale land owners, unintendedly, facilitated the establishment of the flower industry. As such, this chapter emphasizes the agency of stakeholders and reveals connections between Kenyan systems of land tenure, translocal migration, and the development of the global flower industry.
Perspectives
It was a pleasure to combine the insights of two different projects and to be able to highlight the relevance of small-scale landowners, who are often overlooked in discussions on land tenure in Kenya.
Gerda Kuiper
University of Cologne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Shifting Land Tenure Arrangements: Private Land-Buying Companies and the Shape of Naivasha’s Anthropogenic Landscape, June 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004695429_005.
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