In this blog, Mwangi Chege discusses his research on translocal farmers in Kenya and the impact of receiving an IJURR Foundation Studentship award in 2022.
In 2022, I was awarded the IJURR Foundation Studentship which enabled me to conduct the data collection for my dissertation research that same year and into 2023. Besides enabling me to meet the expenses involved in fieldwork, the award also gave me a sense of validation as a PhD student that I was undertaking meaningful research. Work by scholars from the Global South, especially those informed by southern sensibilities, may seem illegible or not meaningfully translate to Global North audiences who hold considerable power in directing processes of knowledge formation. I was grateful to receive news of the award as I would be speaking to and from a context where voices like mine – African scholars thinking with and through African experiences – are still too few. The IJURR Foundation’s continued commitment to funding work by scholars from the Global South remains urgent and necessary to address epistemic inequities.
My research focuses on medium-scale, urban-based farmers who are active in the rural areas of Nakuru and Narok counties in Kenya. Nairobi is Kenya’s capital city where many urban-based farmers (who I refer to as translocal farmers) have their residence. The rural expanses of Nakuru and Narok counties are areas where these translocal farmers are actively farming. This project was motivated by research which shows that urban residents in Kenya, and other African countries, are acquiring rural land and engaging in agricultural production with the aim of securing stable financial returns (Jayne et al., 2019) . My work examines how and whether these translocal farmers are shaping processes of agrarian change, that is, the development and entrenchment of commercial agriculture in rural areas. More broadly, my work speaks to the shifting dynamics around rural-urban relations in a contemporary African setting, examining how these dynamics are shaped by capital flows and financial speculations, as well as the different modes of mobilities including physical, virtual, communicative and imaginative that are bundled together to enable farming from afar. I will not speak directly to my research findings here, instead I will offer some thoughts and observations based on my experiences while collecting data.
“Farmland in rural Narok where translocal farmers are active” Photo: Mwangi Chege, 2023.
My fieldwork was multi-sited, encompassing Nairobi, Nakuru and Narok counties. I met numerous translocal farmers and also visited the rural sites where they were farming. I spent considerable amounts of time moving from one farm to another, sometimes with a county agricultural officer, other times on my own. Those months spent traversing rural Kenya were truly eye-opening for someone like me who has spent most of his life in cities. One striking reality was seeing how much agricultural land Kenya’s elites, who mostly live in urban areas, have acquired for themselves. This in turn has forced rural people to juggle different activities – some legal, others not – to secure their livelihoods, as they cannot make a good life for themselves by living off the land. I remember watching a couple of cyclists carrying bales of freshly harvested grass on the carriers at the back of their bicycles. The county official walking beside me explained that they had just left a nearby farm that belonged to a prominent Kenyan politician. Poor rural people would steal into the farm and harvest bales of grass which they would sell to small livestock farmers to feed their cattle, sheep and goats. Interestingly, the county official did not seem concerned about stopping the cyclists despite her suspicions about them. Sometimes they would get caught, other times not. For me, their actions were a reminder of Kenya’s still unresolved land question (Kanyinga, 2009) . Following independence from the British in 1963, Kenya instituted various land reform processes that were supposed to have redistributed land which the settler colonialists had hoarded for themselves, to rural poor communities who had been deprived of access to their ancestral lands. But these land reform processes largely benefitted the country’s elites who allocated land to themselves. Their actions further underscored the prescience of Fanon (1963) who wrote in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ about the betrayal of formerly colonized people by post-colonial elites. The struggles of Kenya’s rural poor are a reminder of the incomplete processes of decolonization that still play out to this day, as well as their material consequences in people’s everyday lives.
During my travels from one farm to another in Narok and Nakuru, I would introduce myself as a doctoral student. Because I was talking to people who were involved in farming, they often immediately thought I was studying for a PhD in an agricultural-related course and would ask for advice with their farming. One such person asked me for information about how much in maize yields she should be targeting for her farm. I had to disappoint her by saying that I was only studying for a Geography PhD. She looked at me quizzically, as if wondering why someone would do that. Many times, I did wonder about what I was doing. Would the information I was collecting and eventually write about be useful to anyone else besides myself and the few people in academia who would read my work? These questions linger, but I understand my research as following that rich lineage of work on rural-urban relations in African settings. Kenya’s long history of circulations and migration between city and countryside connects the struggles of the rural dispossessed to those of the urban poor. The Kenyan youth-led uprisings in June-July 2024 which were sparked by the actions of a callous government against a people reeling from the escalating cost of living can be linked to the wider historical and systemic inequalities that make it difficult for ordinary people in rural and urban areas to realize their aspirations for a dignified life for themselves and their communities.
Examining the evolving dynamics that conjoin and transform the rural and urban, as well as how these are mediated through land and agrarian relations is key to understanding contemporary Kenyan society and its future. This is what I am focusing on as I write my dissertation. I thank the IJURR Foundation for enabling me to undertake this work.
Mwangi Chege, PhD Candidate Clark University
References:
Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Jayne, T. S., Muyanga, M., Wineman, A., Ghebru, H., Stevens, C., Stickler, M., . . . Nyange, D. (2019). Are
medium‐scale farms driving agricultural transformation in sub‐Saharan Africa? Agricultural
Economics, 50(S1), 75-95. doi:10.1111/agec.12535
Kanyinga, K. (2009). Land Redistribution in Kenya. In H. P. Binswanger-Mkhize, C. Bourguignon, & R. v. d.
Brink (Eds.), Agricultural Land Redistribution: Toward Greater Consensus. Washington D.C.: The
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