| dc.description.abstract | A New Scramble?
Historians of Africa refer to the late nineteenth century as the
time of the Scramble. The European imperial powers sent their "explorers"
into the savannahs and rain forests of Africa to claim lands that they
had not before known, but that they were wrong to call unknown. With
straight-edges on maps, they etched the borders that today seem to make
so little sense geographically, ethnically, linguistically.
Twentieth-century Africa is stuck with these borders, inventions from
another continent and another time.
Africanist social science today is witnessing a similar scramble in
the field of development as scholars from outside the continent and from
within vie for grounds on which to plant the flags of their mother
disciplines. There are political scientists who defend power and
presidencies as their protectorate. Economists cling to growth and
equity, or supply and demand, as subjects of what some of them have
called the queen of the social sciences. Anthropologists hold kinship
and custom, bridewealth and beliefs to be an important part of the study
of humankind. The geographers, Whose learned society in Britain
spearheaded that empire's thrust in the first scramble, are running with
the pack in the second.
If social scientists go about their studies of Africa with the same
possessiveness and insensitivity as their Victorian forebears, the marks --
they leave on African studies will one day look as ridiculous as the r>
straight line that now divides capitalist Kenya from socialist Tanzania,
dividing Luo from Luo, Maasai from Maasai. A lender will be the province
of one discipline, a borrower that of a second, the loan between them
that of a third. In development, if boundaries must be drawn at all, they
must be drawn in ways that recognize overlapping claims and the
complexities of local human relations. Disciplines that study the same v
problem in the same place must borrow and lend among themselves.
Anthropology has as much to contribute as any other single
discipline to the study of land rights and lending in Africa. But no
single discipline, as disciplines are defined today, will adequately
describe or explain the thought and behaviour that these subjects offer
for study. This study touches on the "micro" and the "macro", the
indigenous and the superimposed, the spontaneous and the directed. It is
about a specific theory, and about specific development projects; but
more broadly, it is about how rural people have adjusted, and failed to
adjust, to life at the edges of a state and of an international
agricultural order. Like a growing number of development studies, it
poaches in many fields: agronomy, agricultural economics, history,
geography. I hope this trespassing may at least open some questions for
common study.
Though cutting the thesis for a length limit has required editing
some citations from the text, references to some of the most useful
sources have been left in the bibliography.
Where Credit is Due
The people who have shared their lives with me in Kenya with such endless
care and cheer deserve my deep and lasting thanks. My wife Polly Steele
Shipton has made large sacrifices for this study, and she has enriched it
with her insightful contributions in the field, her skilled editorial
advice, and her strong moral support throughout. It is impossible to
mention all the many Kenyans who have been, at the same time, my hosts,
friends, and informants; and the nature of my topic unfortunately makes
it unwise to use full names. But special thanks are due to Messrs.
Athiambo, Obura, Ochieng, Okumu, Omondi, Owino, and Shijenje for their
assistance and companionship in their home neighbourhoods, and to their
families, who touchingly bent their genealogies to fit me in. These
people made my years in Kenya uniquely enjoyable and instructive; the
study is theirs as much as mine.
I am grateful to the Director and staff of the Institute of African
Studies, University of Nairobi, where I was a Research Associate
throughout my stay in Kenya, and to the Office of the President for
research clearance. Many officers of the World Bank, USAID, the Kenyan
Ministries of Agriculture and Co-operative Development, the local
administrations, the British-American Tobacco Company, the National
Museums of Kenya and the Institute of Development Studies in the
University of Nairobi generously lent their help.
In England too I have benefited from the help of many people. Dr.
R.G. Abrahams, my Supervisor at Cambridge, has given me balanced advice
and much needed practical support always. My understanding of family
farming, in particular, owes much to my discussions with him. Dr. John
Beattie, Professor Davydd Greenwood, and Professor Thomas Gregor, who
taught me before I began at Cambridge, have provided tireless
encouragement ever since. The substance of the study has been improved
also by the advice of Professor John Barnes, Dr. Eyal Ben-Ari, Dr. Roger
Blench, Dr. Keith Hart, Dr. John Lonsdale, Dr. Henry Okoth-Ogendo,
Professor David Parkin, Dr. Malcolm Ruel, Dr. A.F. Robertson. nr. Micbel
Verdon, and Dr. Henry West. Among countless others who have contributed
in their various ways are Mrs. Barbara Alloway, Mrs. Margaret Carr, Ms.
Kathleen Chamberlain, Dr. Peter Clarke, Mr. John and Mrs. Jennie Coope,
Miss Geraldine Cully, Dr. Frank Fitch, Fr. Joseph Fitzsimons, Mr. Abraham
Goldman, Ms. Eva Greger,-Ms. Kathleen Hanson, Mr. Mark Harris, Dr. M.
Jean Hay, Drs. Roger Kirkby and Anne Stroud, Ms. Antonia Lovelace, the
Rev. Andrew Macintosh, Dr.
Pegg, Dr. Richard Waller,
School. My colleagues at
David Nyamwaya, Dr. Joyce Olenja, Ms. Clancy
and the staff and students of Kagogo Primary
the Harvard Institute for International
Development and the Department of Anthropology there have given me kind
support during the final editing.
It remains to acknowledge those who made the study possible to begin
with. The main funding was provided, in generous measure, by St. John's
College, Cambridge, and its Warmington Bequest; and by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research. The Smuts Fund of Cambridge
University and the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Fund of the Royal
Anthropological Institute contributed helpful supplementary grants. The
text refers occasionally to information gathered in the course of a
previous research project funded by the Marshall Aid Commemoration
Commission of the United Kingdom. My sincere thanks to all these sources.
The thesis is dedicated to my parents, James and Elizabeth Shipton,
in gratitude for their long commitment to my education. | en |
