Land and Living on Little in Kenya

Abstract

In these three volumes, Ambreena Manji, Barbara Thomas, and Julie Zollman detail how poor people in Kenya navigate everyday struggles against restrictive social, economic, and political constraints to build livelihoods through their individual and collective efforts in order to access basic social services, land, markets, and employment, and to participate in the social, economic and political arenas. In the latest edition of her book, Politics, Participation and Poverty: Development Through Self-Help in Kenya, first published in 1985, Thomas chronicles innovative ways in which the rural poor in six locations in Eastern, Central, and Rift Valley Provinces have exploited the complex competitive web of Kenya’s electoral patron-client linkages at local and national levels to access scarce resources for community development projects. The trend of unequal development based on region, class, gender, and ethnicity that informed development through self-help in the 1970s and 80s persist to date, as elaborated in Zollman’s Living on Little: Navigating Financial Scarcity in Modern Kenya. While Manji, in The Struggle for Land & Justice in Kenya, focuses on struggles over land and justice from the colonial era to the present, Thomas and Zollman highlight continuing struggles by people living on little to access scarce essential services and land in their quest for personal and community development. While these titles fit into distinct disciplinary fields and use diverse methodological approaches, they meticulously weave profound narratives of the resilience of ordinary Kenyans building livelihoods, families, and communities with little resources.