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The Kenyan Agrarian Debate: A Reappraisal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Stephen Orvis
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Kenya has served as a model of rural development, to be praised and lambasted, for three decades. As early as 1964 Clayton hailed it as an “agrarian revolution” (1964). As recently as 1989, Lofchie argued that it is an “agricultural ‘success story’” that has dramatically raised the real incomes of smallholder farmers while achieving one of the highest agricultural growth rates on the continent (1989, 15). Equally common are those condemning it as the archetypical example of capitalist development, impoverishing the rural poor to provide benefits to a small and internationally dependent bourgeoisie. Neither perspective is completely accurate; both need to be re-examined in light of Kenya's recent political unrest and shift to a multi-party political system. If a more open political system is sustained, rural political demands can only be understood and predicted if we understand the effects of Kenya's development model on the bulk of the population: Kenya's peasants.

The Kenyan agrarian debate has produced an unusually rich literature on the effects of capitalist development on an African peasantry. At its heart is the question of whether the emergence of a rural market economy preserves a relatively homogeneous peasantry or dissolves it into landed and landless classes. This article reappraises and contributes to the debate by arguing that directly examining the historical process of social transformation brought about by capitalist development, rather than deducing the process from cross-sectional data, suggests a single, uniform explanation of seemingly conflicting empirical material.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , December 1993 , pp. 23 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to acknowledge the support of a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Training Grant for funding the original research for this article, and Hamilton College for funding follow-up research. Numerous Kenyan officials, university faculty and farmers provided invaluable information on which this article is based.

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