Introduction

In this chapter, I draw together the many questions I have raised and make some tentative suggestions about Kenya's prospects for a better – by which I mean a fairer – future in relation to land. In doing so, I also suggest how the Kenyan example provides us with important insights into African land questions and struggles for justice in the land domain. That future requires us to challenge the regular instrumentalisation of land as a tool of negative political mobilisation. It also requires an end to land's deployment to first create and then deepen ethnic schisms, leading far too often to violence and bloodshed. How might we encourage contestation about land matters such that the full range of possible options is made visible and so that citizens can deliberate on the sort of future they wish to see in the land domain? My aim is to draw out the wider lessons of this book for our understanding of African land issues. To do this, I return to the organising ideas set out in Chapter 1 that have run through the subsequent discussion in order to show how my analyses in this book have cast them in a new or different light. Following this, I suggest a possible agenda for future research on land, organising this around what I describe as the ‘not yet’ (Armah 1968) of land reform or ‘prefigurative’ land reform. I ask: in our research and teaching, what might we imagine land reform to be, in ways that might not be achievable in any foreseeable political future but that might enable us to prise open that which has so far been closed to us?

Last words

I have shown that the ideals of the rule of law in the land domain – of transparency and fairness in the administration of land and of a clear and fair legal and institutional framework governing land relations and land management – are far from being achieved. But more than this, law and legal processes have sometimes been used to obscure and obfuscate. We can see this in the way that the legal profession, far from upholding the rule of law, has been implicated in land grabbing, using professional knowledge, skills and networks to facilitate the illegal and irregular allocation of public land to powerful individuals.