Peasants build castles in the air for over 100 years

A section of land owners from Kihiu Mwiri Farmers Company protest outside the Ministry of Lands offices.

The dual carriage gently meanders past Thika, before unceremoniously forking out like the tongue of a gigantic serpent. One prong heads to Saba Saba and the other to Makuyu, before labouring towards the Kambiti hills where ‘invisible powers’ watch over motorists with itchy fingers from appropriating the bags of charcoal left unattended by the roadside.

The road is fabled to have inspired one of Kenya’s greatest writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o to pen his unforgettable novel, The River Between which immortalised the two opposing ridges of Makuyu and Kameno, dissected by Honia River. The book aptly captured the dilemma confronting a colonised people’s struggles to adapt to the white man’s religion.

Rope and cradle

Back in the day when there were no conventional roads, Thika River was crossed using a rope and cradle crossing; natives competed with the beasts of burdens to ferry luggage for British explorers, a cattle track run parallel to the latter day highway.

Today, the colonial regime is long gone and its effects are just but vague cobwebs in the mind of millennials. However, the signposts of this era are still evident in the area where grinding poverty and baronial estates thrive side by side even as peasants pursue the dreams of their great great grandfathers, 110 years later.

At Kenol town, named after a solitary petrol station along the Great North Road, a dingy office originally meant to be a roadside shop, acts as a base for a bespectacled balding man with a sharp tongue. He makes a living from squeezing out money from land hungry speculators.

The man has everything for every one, even day dreamers. For Sh25,000, he promises a prospective client a piece of his ancestry and inheritance: the package on offer is three quarters of an acre for farming and another eighth of an acre (50 feet by 100 feet) for building a house.

The money, the shady salesman explains is to ensure those who pay are included in a list of his ancestors, former workers in a sisal estate who were uprooted from their ancestral land more than a century ago.

Deep in the interior past victims of similar schemes are still gnashing their teeth after investing their hard earned money to purchase tiny pieces of land but ended up burying their dreams and loved ones after their land in Kihiu Mwiri became the killing field where directors were violently ousted and a number murdered.

It is in this same locale, shareholders of a rogue savings and credit society are holding onto useless pieces of share certificates after the Sacco they had given their money went bankrupt a year ago.

There are as many conflicting accounts of how the script for this hunger for land was penned as there are claimants to this land. 

A peek into historical colonial records indicate that one of the first pioneers to own large swathes of land situated between Thika and Thara rivers offer some insights into the genesis of land ownership in the area dominated by two multinational companies, Delmonte Kenya Ltd and Kakuzi P Plc, which cover over 44,000 acres.

In the annals of history, we meet pioneer settler, CB Hausberg who came to Kenya in 1899 and proceeded from Mombasa to Nairobi using a truck previously established by long distant traders enroute to Uganda.

At the time of Hausberg’s journey around Mt Kenya, there was a devastating famine and the plains between Murang’a, then known as Fort Hall and Nairobi, were littered with bones of people who had succumbed to famine and tribal wars.

He would later explain that although he had passed the area after the skirmishes, he suspected there has been fighting between the Kamba and Kikuyu or Maasai and the Kamba.
 “The natives were all starving and there was a great deal of small pox too. The country was in absolutely dreadful condition right from the Coast up to Nairobi,” he said.

When Hausburg next visited the area in 1904, he said, “At Punda Milia there was nothing. It was absolutely bare of livestock, cultivation and everything else except large herds of game.”

He liked the place nevertheless and teamed up with three other settlers who later formed Swift Rutherfood and company and staked a claim on the land.

In those days, the land office did not exist according to Hausberg, who explained that all he did was draw a sketch plan of a river and a tree and whatever struck his fancy.

Drew a square

The pioneers then drew a square and sent the drawing to the government and were granted 4,000 acres around Punda Milia without any fuss. The investors later got an additional 6,000 acres in Thika and later followed it up with an additional 2,500 acres.

However, according to the Kakuzi Plc’s website, “The original site of the current Kakuzi originates from land acquired by Donald Seth-Smith in 1906. With his partner and principal backer, Lord Cranworth, some 10,117 hectares were acquired. The central location for this estate was christened Makuyu, the native name for fig tree, which to date remains at the head office.

It was in this expansive land that the four would jointly establish sisal growing, using water from Thara River. At first the sisal estate depended on workers from the other side of Thara River but things changed.
 While testifying during the Morris Carter commission, which wrote The Kenya Land Commission Report in 1932, Hausberg is quoted saying that natives from the area got rich and refused to work for them; they had to go to Kavirondo, today known as Nyanza to source for labour.

According to Hausberg, some of the land bought in Thika where sisal growing started was sold three years later.

By this time, all the land in the area had been alienated and dished out to white settlers while the locals were designated as squatters.

When residents started agitating for the return of their land which they claimed had been stolen by the settlers the government set up a commission where the natives were supposed to justify their claims.

During the hearings in various district headquarters across the country and in London in 1932, the settlers brushed off accusations of stealing land insisting they had found the land idle and unoccupied.

However, one of the pillars of the colonial establishment, Dr J W Arthur contradicted the settlers when he voiced support for Africans during a presentation to the commission on June 22, 1932.

Contrary to the settlers who were now lording over Africans in Makuyu and other parts of the White Highlands, Arthur, who was a pioneer clergyman said, “Every inch of land in Kikuyu is definitely owned and assertions that it was unoccupied were misplaced as idle land was meant for grazing”.

Johnstone Kenyatta, who was sent by Kikuyu Central Association to London told the commission that his people regarded the settlers as passersby who were supposed to drift back to wherever they had come from once they got tired of their visit.

The Kenya Land Commission Report was clinical in its rejection of the natives’ claim for the land insisting that “there was no evidence that before 1895, there was any permanent Kikuyu occupation of any land to the east of the present road between Saba Saba and Maragwa. Eighty seven years after this verdict, some of the leases for the land in Thika have expired following the lapse of the 99-year tenure, triggering a new wave of scramble for the land, which some residents and leaders feel the multinational companies ought to surrender part of their estates.

The Kiambu County government has already given the approval for extension for Delmonte Kenya’s lease for 8,000 acres. This was after the company surrendered 635 acres to the county but it is still facing some hurdles from Murang’a County government. 

Muranga is demanding that Delmonte surrenders 3,000 acres as a condition for the lease renewal leading to a stalemate, although County Assembly Speaker Leonard Nduati said that currently no lease has expired and that the first batch of leases will expire in 2022.

But even as the Kiambu and Murang’a county governments position themselves for a stake in Delmonte and Kakuzi companies land, some residents who claim their ancestors were disinherited by the settlers are also demanding back what they claim to be their ancestral land.