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Saturday 10 May 2008

Rural poor

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

Laikipia

Gabriel Barasa was a week dead and already trouble was brewing. I could tell that as I stood at his grave on the farmstead. In 1966, Kenya’s government allocated Gabriel 27 acres of land, subdivided from a farm previously owned by a colonial European. The Trans Nzoia soil was very fertile. Today Gabriel would have been regarded as well-off, but in those days land was still plentiful, Kenya’s population tiny.

Gabriel had married five wives, each of whom built her own hut on the farm. He fathered 22 children. Over the years, to pay for school fees and various debts, he sold off 16 acres. His children got an education but there were no jobs to be had, especially after IMF austerity reforms led to mass lay-offs. Kenya’s politicians never bothered to create jobs by attracting investment. They grabbed land for themselves and chased away businessmen. At election time, they redistributed more land, turning successful commercial farms into subsistence plots. When the big farms began to run out they excised forests, causing rivers to dry up and rain to become erratic. And all the time the population grew at a much faster rate than Kenya’s economy.

Most of Gabriel’s sons stayed on the smallholding, where they married, built more houses and produced 40 children. By the time Gabriel died last month there were more than 70 people living on 11 acres. What had been a richly productive farm was on its way to becoming a rural slum. Land once used for crops was being used for dwellings and now graves. Maize was the staple crop, with some sweet potatoes and beans. There were a couple of cows and a few sheep. All of this was the sole source of food for everybody in the extended family. I could see the kids were not getting enough to eat and looked malnourished. Gabriel’s first-born son Ernest had tried to improve things by starting a nursery of fruit trees. The indigenous forest had all been cut down and there was a problem with timber. The brook in the valley below their huts had dried to a trickle over the years, thanks to deforestation.

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