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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Conflicting claims to custom: land and law in Central Province, Kenya, 1912-52 |
| Author: | Mackenzie, Fiona |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | Journal of African Law |
| Volume: | 40 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 62-77 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Kenya |
| Subjects: | Kikuyu customary law land law |
| Abstract: | The objective of this article is to trace how the visibility of use rights to land among the Kikuyu in Murang'a, Central Province, Kenya, was extinguished not just by the introduction of statutory law and the registration of title in the 1950s and 1960s, but as part and parcel of a struggle over who could define 'custom' within the colonial political economy. The struggle was initially one between African and European in the face of the massive alienation of fertile land to white settlers and the restriction of Africans to reserves. It took place in forums organized by the colonial State, the Committee on Native Land Tenure in Kikuyu Province of 1929 and the Kenya Land Commission 1932-1934. The struggle for racial equity masked a class struggle, as wealthier Kikuyu protagonists, individually or as representatives of 'mbari' (subclan) claims, presented 'customary' land rights, viz. rights to allocate land, the only rights recognized by English common law, to their strategic advantage. This guise of customary land law separated the allocative principle from that of use and thereby distanced the proprietary interests of women and others such as tenants from claims on 'custom'. Women were not without recourse to 'custom', but theirs was very much a discourse of resistance. Notes, ref. |