Abstract

Contemporary conceptualization of land in Kenya and, indeed, in Africa have looked at land primarily in the context of Western definitions of land as introduced by colonialism. These definitions have confined land within the narrow Eurocentric realms of English property law regimes and have conceived of land as a commodity and property that, like other commodities can be traded in the marketplace. These legal regimes were imported into the colonies (McAuslan, 2013) and have continued to inform how land is understood and how people relate to it. Also, most of the research is anchored in a post-colonial stance that fails to look at how colonialism has morphed into new neo-colonial formations through neo-liberalist theories of development and globalization. For example, despite literature showing the coloniality of English property law regimes as applied to land management and administration issues in Africa, these colonial legal regimes have been taken as status quo and interrogation of alternative frameworks for theorizing land has been limited. Consequently, enduring coloniality embedded in these systems continues unchallenged with even less attention given to their implications for Indigenous conceptions of and relationship with the land. This chapter argues that how land is taken up in contemporary discourses in Africa privileges Western theories of land and makes the case for centering Indigenous worldviews on land. Drawing examples from the land situation in Kenya and Gikuyu Indigenous land tenure system, the chapter argues that colonial and existing neo-liberal theories of the old and the new world order have resulted in land loss and dispossession and, further, that it is imperative to extricate discourses of land from this colonial stranglehold to center resistive anti-colonial theorizations of land rooted in Indigenous philosophies and worldview.