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.
rural Working in different
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 of
the problem. It is even more difficult to distinguish impacts from
historical coincidence, or to separate ultimate from proximal causes. If
there is a general lesson to be learned, it is surely that the impact of
interventions like land reform is contingent upon the particular
circumstances of each case. Much as we'd like to think otherwise the
outcomes are not at a[ easy to predict, and there are always
unintended 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 on
the 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 are
maize 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 drawn
from 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 against her reading of the
conseguences
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 from
uThe 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_ggllq
Bank 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 we should be wary of adopting

same time 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:

L1
"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 his
kinsmen. As the secretary and principal shareholder of a wider clan
organisation he is in the prrcess of acquiring hundreds of acres of land
in different parts of Mbeere. The creation of clan committees and
organisations like this during the process of adjudication, and as a
means of claiming large tracts of land which are not claimed by
individual lineages, is the one certain way in which tradition has been
invented as a result of land reform.

Impacts Upon Gender RelaUons

Finally, let us turn to gender relations. rt may not have escaped

notice that land ownerstrip
appears to have been the sole prerogative of
men 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 formerly
guaranteed 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's

points 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 as
positive. 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 not
justify 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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