THE ORIGINS OF THE KIKUYU LAND PROBLEM: LAND ALIENATION AND LAND USE

There were many issues relating to land alienation and resulting shortage: legal definitions, questions of occupancy, political constraints, and moral concerns. The origins of the Kikuyu land problem need further investigation, however, for they lie not simply in a blatant and bloody land grab, nor in the possession of vacant land by settlers and the colonial state. Rather, there was a complex mesh of haphazard appropriation, bureaucratic chaos, fitful economic growth (by settlers and Africans), economic co-operation and conflict, and frontier readjustment. This paper examines the dynamics of land alienation, land use and mounting land shortage in the Kiambu District of Kenya during the first twentyfive years of colonial rule. Kiambu was, and is, an area of transition (Figure 1).1 In an environmental sense it lies between the cool, fertile, densely populated and, formerly, thickly forested Kikuyu Uplands and the lower, warmer grassland of the south and east. Before 1900, the area also marked a fluid boundary between the pastoral Maasai and the predominantly agriculturalist Kikuyu. There was no firm frontier: trade in stock, grain and brides was important to both and their spheres of settlement and economic activity not only met but overlapped. The Maasai used much of the country as a through-route from the Athi Plains to the east to Kinangop in the west (Belfield to Harcourt, 13 June 1913; Ainsworth memo, 29 May 1913, CO 533/119). Kikuyu cultivation was largely confined to the forest margins but