GSSC Seminar Series
17 December 2024
‘Dead capital’ and ‘dead ends’: agricultural decay, land sale and exhausted virtue on Kenya’s real-estate frontier
Peter Lockwood (University of Manchester)
12:00-13:00
On the northern fringes of Nairobi, the city’s approaching sprawl enters a peri-urban landscape of impoverished smallholder farmers, causing land prices to skyrocket. While Kenya’s economic commentators advocate selling ‘ancestral’ land - framed as ‘dead capital’ - as an antidote for rural poverty, men from the region claim virtue by avoiding sale and valorising wage-labour as a path to prosperity. But in a wider context of agrarian decay, where landholdings are meagre and livelihoods precarious, selling land is shown to offer a tempting and often necessary escape from destitution for a declining post-peasantry who have already reached the ‘dead end’ of limited land and wage-earning livelihoods. By drawing attention to contestation within the moral economy of landholding, this article argues that the urban frontier is driven forward not simply by the commodification of land but by a crisis of social reproduction and wage-labouring identities in central Kenya’s ‘post-agrarian’ landscape.
Peter Lockwood is a Hallsworth Early Career Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester. His book, Peasants to Paupers: Land, Class and Kinship in Central Kenya is forthcoming with the International African Library series at Cambridge University Press. His work explores the long-term consequences of colonial-era land expropriation in Kenya, the lives of unemployed youth coping with rural poverty, and the consequences of urban frontiers on the outskirts of Nairobi. His published work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Current Anthropology, Social Analysis, and Africa.