Nairobi's expansion is swallowing up rural land, new research on Kiambu reveals

Nairobi's transformation into a 'world-class city' is celebrated in Kenya's media, but a new book, 'Peasants to Paupers: Land, Class and Kinship in Central Kenya' by Peter Lockwood, examines how the city's expansion conceals profound social upheavals rooted in the country's colonial land history, The Conversation reports.

The research, based on fieldwork carried out in Kiambu county from 2017 to 2022, traces how smallholdings allocated to Kiambu farmers by the British in the 1950s - measuring up to two hectares on average - have been subdivided across generations into meagre plots, in some cases down to one hectare or less, through Kikuyu inheritance practices.

Lockwood argues that the encounter between skyrocketing land prices caused by Nairobi's sprawl and a terrain of land poverty dating to British colonial rule is reshaping family life. While senior men once preached the importance of holding onto 'ancestral' land, by 2022 many had begun selling, drawn by the opportunity to profit from land sales.

The book also documents gendered conflicts over land, in which male inheritors try to freeze out their sisters when parents die, and the predicament of young people like 'Mwaura', the son of the author's host family, who struggle to make good lives despite limited prospects for decently paid work. Lockwood argues that land sales are informed by a sense of abandon - a hopelessness among working-age men about the future of low, piecemeal wages.

The author calls for a renewed discussion about Kenya's immense inequalities in access to land and for state intervention, warning that the social tensions created by heating land markets on the periphery of a growing city carry wider consequences for the country.